CONTENTS
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Excerpt from Epic Fail
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Claire LaZebnik
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
DEDICATION
I am exceptionally fortunate in the niece and
nephew department. I love and admire not only those
I’m related to by blood, but those I was lucky enough
to acquire through marriage (both mine and theirs).
For Maren, Eric and Cori, Adam and Molly,
Emma and Hal, David, Jack, Teddy, Marie,
Libby, Ben, Rudy, Dexter, and Freddy
one
It was my idea for Mom and Luke to make a big deal out of their fifth wedding anniversary. And it wasn’t just because I was hoping to get a tropical vacation out of it—although, of course, I was. It was also because I had been there for their wedding and knew that they deserved a do-over. A ten-minute-long Vegas ceremony didn’t seem weighty enough to maintain a lifelong marriage, and I didn’t ever want to see them get divorced.
First I needed to get Luke on board—the proposal had to come from him, not me. It was hard to catch him when he was actually home and Mom wasn’t within earshot, but I finally found my chance when he was pushing my two-year-old half brother on the swing.
Jacob liked swinging. A lot. You started pushing Jacob in the swing, you were stuck there for a solid half hour because he’d cry if you tried to take him off. After half an hour, he’d still cry but your arms would be so tired and you’d be so bored and annoyed that you’d let him.
Anyway, I glanced out my window and spotted the two of them at the swing set and instantly flew down the stairs and out the back door and across the lawn to join them.
“Oh, good,” Luke said when he saw me. “You ready to take a turn? He won’t let me stop.”
“I actually came out to talk to you. I have an idea.”
“Of course you do,” he said with a smile.
“Your fifth anniversary’s coming up in just a couple of weeks. You need to take Mom out to dinner and tell her you love her more than ever. . . .” I stopped and peered up at him. “You do, right?”
“Eh, she’ll do,” he said. “Since I’m stuck with her and all.”
I shoved his arm. Sometimes Luke felt more like an older brother than he did a stepdad. “Be romantic for once. Tell her that this anniversary should be a bigger deal than your wedding was because you love her even more now than you did then and that you want to take her somewhere amazing to celebrate. Somewhere like Hawaii.”
“Ah,” he said. “Now I see where this is going. And we bring you along, right?”
“If you insist.” I grinned. “Come on, Luke! You guys need this so badly. You know you do. You’ve been so busy lately, and she’s been stressed out, and you had such a crappy wedding the first time. . . .”
He stopped pushing long enough to hold his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay! I’m totally up for this. But only if your mom likes the idea.”
“I’ll make her like it.”
He shook his head and gave the swing an extra-big push. “I can’t wait for the day when you figure out how to use your powers of persuasion for something worthwhile.”
“This is worthwhile!” I said. “I’m saving your marriage. You know what? Don’t wait until you go out for dinner. Something always comes up when we try to plan things ahead of time. Go ask her right now. I’ll push Jakie.”
“You just know I’ll agree to anything to get you to take over.” He stepped aside and I took his place behind the swing. But he lingered a moment longer. “You don’t really think our marriage is in trouble, do you?”
“Do you?” I said, a little alarmed by the seriousness of his tone.
“Of course not. I just wish she’d stop worrying so much about—” He gestured toward Jacob’s back. “So he’s a late talker. Lots of kids are. But she gets herself so worked up about it. She’s going to take him to see a speech therapist, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said. At Jacob’s last checkup, the doctor had given Mom the name of a speech therapist to take him to. But Luke said the pediatrician was being a typical alarmist Westside doctor, and I kind of agreed with him. There was nothing wrong with Jacob—he was just still really little.
“The speech person is just going to say he needs lots of therapy,” Luke said. “It’s how they make money. And that’s not going to help your mother’s anxiety.”
“And that’s why she needs to go to Hawaii!” I said. “So she can relax!”
He laughed. “Right. Hawaii. I’ll go talk to her.”
“Or Tahiti,” I called after him as he moved across the yard. “I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti!”
And then I had to push Jacob for about three million more hours. Every time I’d stop, he would arch his back and kick and cry. I eventually had to drag him off the swing. He sobbed and grabbed on to the chains, and I said, “Stop now or I’ll never push you again,” and he said . . .
Nothing. Jacob never said anything except “Yes,” “No,” and sometimes the very last word you said. Like if you said, “You want to watch Pajanimals?” he would say, “Pah-mulls,” or something like that. Sometimes. But that was pretty much it.
He probably didn’t even understand my threat, which was fine, since I didn’t really mean it.
I carried him back to the house. He calmed down on the way, burrowing his head into my shoulder and cuddling close, and I couldn’t stay mad at him. It helped that he was so cute, with his big brown eyes, narrow chin, and wavy light brown hair.
My face was heart-shaped, too, and my eyes were also large and dark—we both looked a lot like Mom—but I had crazy curly dark hair, thanks to my biological father’s genes.
When Jacob was born, I wasn’t sure how I felt about sharing Mom with this little squishy stranger. There had already been a lot of adjusting in my life. She and I had been alone together for so many years, and then Luke came along and they were always going out without me. And then she had a baby, and I felt like here was someone needy and cute who was going to take even more of her time and attention away from me. But she kept urging me to hold him, and the more I did, the more I loved the way he smelled and his weight in my arms and the little noises he made, and finally one day I said to Mom, only half joking, “He can be mine, too, right?” and she said, “He already is.”
two
I was twelve years old and safely at home with my grandma the night Luke Weston met my mom in a Philadelphia alleyway. (It’s not as skanky as it sounds, I swear.) At that time, Luke was a singer/songwriter/guitar player who had so far scored only one moderate and esoteric hit, which played occasionally on a few alternate-rock stations and
was loved by a very small handful of music geeks. That song had gotten him some early afternoon small-tent gigs at music festivals and the occasional booking as the opening act for better-known musicians.
That’s what he was doing in Philadelphia that summer—opening for a Portland band that had a lot more fans than he did. He had finished his set and was wandering out back into the alley to smoke a cigarette when he spotted a pretty, petite young woman with chin-length black-brown hair squinting down at her phone a few feet away. He assumed she was a fan, since she had chosen to duck out after he had left the stage, so he approached her with a cocky grin.
“Like the set?” he asked.
She stared at him blankly. “The set?” She was simply on a break from her job slicing onions and mushrooms at the hibachi restaurant next door.
A little sheepishly, Luke explained that he’d just been performing at the club, and she said, “Oh, I heard a little through the walls! That was you?” Later, when she told me the story, she admitted she hadn’t heard a thing, but she thought he was cute, so she figured it was worth pretending.
Luke found himself trying to prolong his conversation with the tiny, delicate woman with the surprisingly deep laugh and large, lively eyes. And I can’t imagine Mom wasn’t equally interested in spending the rest of her break with the thin, long-limbed, wavy-haired musician who had appeared out of nowhere. Still, they’d been flirting for only a few minutes when she spun her phone in her hand and casually mentioned that she had been in the middle of texting her twelve-year-old daughter. The defiant dare in her eyes and the lift to her chin both said, If you have a problem with that, don’t waste my time or yours.
He didn’t have a problem with it.
They talked until she had to go back inside, and by then they’d agreed to meet up after the restaurant closed.
He lingered in Philadelphia as long as he could, days after his gig had ended, meeting Mom for after-work dates and before-work lunches at our apartment, where he entertained us both with silly songs on his guitar. Eventually he had to return to LA, where he lived and performed semiregularly at a few small clubs, but he and Mom continued to talk and text and video-chat every day, and he flew her west a month or so later to come see him headline at his biggest venue so far, a club on the Sunset Strip.
That was the night that a hit-making music producer named Michael Marquand signed Luke to his label.
It was also the night Luke promised to quit smoking forever if Mom would agree to marry him. (Technically it was the next morning when he proposed, but they hadn’t gone to sleep, so it counted as that night.)
My grandmother and I flew to the West Coast in time to join Mom and Luke at a ridiculous little chapel tucked in between two huge casinos in downtown Las Vegas.
“Tell me I haven’t made a huge mistake,” my mother whispered to me as she pulled off the veil Luke had bought her in the gift shop and gulped at the air as if the veil had been made out of lead instead of lace.
“You definitely haven’t,” I said. Not that I was a reliable adviser: I was as caught up in the excitement of the sudden wedding as she was, and totally in love with the idea of having this handsome rocker with the mildly devilish smile for my dad.
Mom and I moved into Luke’s rental house in LA (small as it was, it was still twice as big as the studio apartment we’d been living in, and I had my own room, which was tiny and miraculous), and Grandma went back alone to Philadelphia, where she worked as a nurse. Her last words to Mom were, “He’s got to be better than that last one.”
She was referring to my father, a wildly romantic and brilliant older man who had said to the teenage Cassandra, “I love you madly and want to be with you forever.” His sincerity and enthusiasm rang true, and Mom had no training in identifying a manic episode. By the time he came crashing down, she was pregnant.
I was born shortly after he had gone missing, but Mom used his last name on my birth certificate, so I was named—and remained—Ellie Withers.
She thought he’d come back. He never did. Total disappearing act. No paper trail, no way for even the child support system to track him down.
Luke was definitely better. For one thing, he stayed. For another, he worked hard. The first album he made for Michael Marquand generated two decently successful singles. They became good friends during the process, and Michael arranged for Luke to be featured on songs with a couple of major rock stars, which bumped him into a higher level of fame and exponentially increased his gigs.
It was around then that Michael decided to move into television producing. The show he cocreated, We’ll Make You a Star, combined a singing contest with an image makeover. While Michael planned to appear on the show as a mentor and judge, he didn’t want to commit to a full-time television job. He needed someone else to work with the contestants on-screen every week. Someone with real musical talent, who could also bring a little sex appeal to the show. Someone likable, but not TV slick. Someone with a hit or two to prove his music credentials but not so huge he was unaffordable. Someone teenage girls could drool over, but who wouldn’t drool back.
And Michael knew just the guy.
Luke agonized for a while over the decision. It meant he’d have a lot less time to write and record music, and that his life would be far more tightly scheduled than he was used to.
On the other hand, he and Mom wanted to have a baby, and Mom was eager for me to go to a private high school. The money would come in handy. Mom was uncertain, but I was totally in favor of his being on TV. (I was thirteen—of course I was.) And what were the odds the show would actually be a hit? Next to nothing, he and Mom assured each other. He’d probably end up working just a few short months for a fair chunk of change. Then life would go back to normal.
So he said yes. And life never went back to normal.
Luke went from mildly respected musician to A-list TV star in less than a year. He started to be recognized everywhere we went, and audiences packed his concerts, which became a lot less frequent—taping We’ll Make You a Star took up a lot of time, as did the ten million events a week the show’s publicist wanted him to make an appearance at.
We’ll Make You a Star was a huge hit, and his agent renegotiated his contract for A Lot of Money.
We moved into our current, much bigger, house the year after that.
“I didn’t sign on for this,” Mom said one night, after she and Luke had gone out for a quiet dinner and emerged from the restaurant to find a mob of screaming teenage girls gathered there, desperate for a glimpse of him. Some of them were sobbing.
“Believe me, I didn’t either,” he said.
The loss of privacy was hard to adjust to.
We got used to the money and the perks much more easily.
Being rich was a big change for all of us. Mom and Luke had both had tough childhoods. In the neighborhood Mom was from, having a baby at seventeen—like she had done—was virtually a rite of passage. But she was smart and scrappy and wanted something better for her daughter, so she had gotten us a tiny apartment in a neighborhood with a good school system, even though it meant she had to share a bed with me every night and had no room of her own.
The only thing Luke ever said about his childhood was that it had been rough, and he didn’t like to think or talk about it. Which was pretty typical of Luke—he preferred to keep things cheerful, even if it meant actively avoiding certain thoughts and subjects. His father was in the military and had moved his family around from army base to army base. Music was Luke’s salvation: alone with his guitar, he could create his own beauty, his own world.
So while we all now lived in an enormous house behind a tall gate and could hire people to wait on us and had closets full of beautiful clothing, well, both Mom and Luke had paid their dues.
And that’s why they deserved a really nice five-year anniversary celebration to make up for that off-the-rack Vegas wedding.
three
Mom said she loved the idea of an anniversary trip, but cou
ldn’t even begin to figure out how to plan it.
“Why don’t you ask George to do it?” Luke suggested. “He’d probably love the extra hours of work.”
George Nussbaum was my mother’s assistant. Sort of. He was also my SAT tutor. Sort of. Basically he did whatever our family asked him to at an hourly rate, while he waited for a better job to come along.
George’s older brother Jonathan worked for Luke—originally as his personal assistant but now as the head of his new TV production company (the last time Luke’s agent negotiated his contract with the show, he scored him a development deal). Jonathan was the oldest of a big family; George was the youngest and, according to Jonathan, the smartest: he was only twenty and had already graduated from Harvard.
At some point over the summer Jonathan had mentioned to Mom that his brother was looking for temporary work to pay the rent while he wrote a TV spec script and tried to get an agent. Jonathan had already bragged about how his brother had gotten perfect SAT scores and gone to Harvard so Mom jumped at the chance to get all that brain power into my life—part of her your life is going to be better than mine plan was for me to go to an Ivy.
Once George started showing up at our house with SAT books, my mom kept discovering other odds and ends he could do for her. I don’t know how much she paid him, but I bet it was pretty generous—her own minimum wage days weren’t that far behind her and now she had plenty of cash to throw around. Because she had once been a waitress, she left ridiculous tips at restaurants: forty, sometimes fifty percent of the bill.
The Nussbaum brothers looked a lot alike: they were both slightly above-average height and thin, with gray-green eyes and brown hair. George had a lot more of that though; Jonathan’s was thinning at the crown, even though he was only in his late twenties. Fortunately for him, he already had a fiancée.
Jonathan was mellow and good-natured, but George was less sunny. He sighed with impatience and rolled his eyes a lot. Of course, it’s possible I brought that out in him: I wasn’t in the mood to be studying over the summer, and I refused to take any of the tutoring seriously.