“Well, there are easier ways.” He shrugged, unlacing his own shoes and sliding his feet into his Vans. He tickled the bottom of Tinsley’s foot lightly.
“Yeah? How would you know?” She’d meant the question as a flirty tease, just another in a long afternoon of flirty teases. But it came out with a hint of jealous suspicion she hadn’t expected.
“I’ve got a little experience in that area,” he confessed, touching his hemp necklace.
Tinsley pulled her foot away from Julian’s tickling fingers and leaned over to grab her own shoes, letting her dark, smooth hair fall in front of her face, hiding it from his view. “Experience doing what?” She kept her voice cool, but she felt anything but. Was Julian trying to say he’d slept with someone before? He was fifteen—that wasn’t even legal in most civilized states.
Tinsley looked up and into Julian’s wide brown eyes, which suddenly weren’t as innocent as she’d previously thought. A shy smile played on his lips, but for once, Tinsley was unmoved by his dimple. “Experience doing exactly what I’d like to do with you someday.”
Tinsley flicked her long hair over her shoulder. Instead of exciting her, Julian’s words sent a chill down her spine.
“You’ll have better luck sticking with bowling,” she said calmly, getting to her feet and flouncing to the front counter, bowling shoes in hand. But her flesh was on fire. When the hell had Julian lost his virginity?
And, more important, whom had he lost it to?
* * *
Owl Net
Email Inbox
* * *
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Date: Wednesday, December 4, 7:28 A.M.
Subject: Important assignment
Dear Brett,
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving break and are ready to finish off the semester!
Would you mind stopping by my office this morning or afternoon? As our junior class prefect, I’ve got a special project for you to spearhead. Don’t worry, it’s not a typical assignment, and I have a feeling you’ll find it very rewarding.
Best,
G. W.
* * *
4
A WAVERLY OWL KNOWS THAT THE TRUTH IS SOMETIMES HARDER TO BELIEVE THAN A LIE.
Brandon Buchanan strode across the Waverly Academy dining hall on Wednesday afternoon with a tray full of food, feeling more confident than he had in weeks— months, even. All he could think about since he’d hooked up with Helga Dunderdorf over Thanksgiving break, was, well, Helga Dunderdorf. Or, rather, Hellie Dunderdorf. That first night, when Brandon was tracing his finger across her flat, milky-white stomach, Hellie murmured, “Call me Hellie. All my friends do. Helga makes me sound like a Viking.”
Hellie was one of Professor Dunderdorf’s gorgeous and brilliant twin daughters. She and her sister went to the exclusive Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland but had been home for the break. Heath Ferro, Brandon’s shamelessly horny roommate, had managed to procure an invite to Professor Dunderdorf’s Thanksgiving dinner, having heard of the sisters’ legendary hotness. Brandon and Hellie had hit it off immediately, and they’d wound up kissing in her bed on Thanksgiving night. Then on Friday night, Brandon managed to climb a ladder into Hellie’s attic room—barely dirtying his Brooks Brothers chinos in the process—for another intense night together. It was insane. The whole weekend had passed by in a blur of very un-Brandon-Buchanan-like activity. Only now, three days after kissing Hellie goodbye, was he starting to come down from his cloud. But he was coming down as a changed man.
The dining hall buzzed with lunchtime activity, and Brandon spotted Lon Baruzza, Alan St. Girard, Ryan Reynolds, and Heath crowded around the round table smack in the center of the room. They claimed it offered the best girl-watching positions, and indeed, as Brandon strode up to the table, the boys’ eyes were glued to Trisha Reikken’s obscenely short plaid mini-skirt as she leaned over the salad bar. Brandon set his tray down next to Lon. “Shove over, will you?”
Lon glanced up at Brandon in surprise before shifting over to make room. The dark-haired senior scholarship kid had an oversize nose, which somehow served, for the Waverly girls, as evidence of his other oversized body parts. Brandon suspected that Lon had started the rumor himself.
“Lamest Thanksgiving ever,” Teague Williams interrupted as he gracelessly dropped his tray onto the table, sending splashes of orange Gatorade across everyone’s plates. Teague was a tall redheaded senior on the swim team who always smelled like he just got out of the pool. “My sister was going to set me up with her roommate at Smith, but she turned out to be a total dog. I spent most of the weekend hiding in my room with my Wii.”
“Dude.” Heath soaked a piece of French bread in his plateful of overcooked spaghetti and popped the whole thing in his mouth. “You know those Smith chicks are all pent-up nymphos. You should have hit that!”
“Right?” Ryan ran his hand across the sorry-looking thatch of stubble that had appeared on his chin over break. Combined with his ill-conceived platinum eyebrow stud, the stubble made him look like some kind of low-budget pimp. “Just keep the lights off.”
Everyone laughed. Brandon normally would have added some scathing criticism to their blatantly moronic chatter, but he was in too good a mood. He bit into his tomato and mozzarella sandwich, careful to avoid leaking pesto onto his pressed Burberry flat-front trousers. Hellie had gone back to Switzerland on Sunday, but she’d been texting him pictures of her school world—the medieval château at the center of campus where she took her Latin classes, her sunny, slope-ceilinged dorm room with a poster of a Botticelli painting on the wall, the dance studio where she took ballet three times a week. She’d even taken a picture of herself, looking unbearably sexy, in the faded gray T-shirt with a Le Rosey crest and the boxer shorts she wore to sleep. Which only made Brandon wish even more that she were sleeping next to him.
“Dude, I would have come back to Waverly before I let some ugly Smith chick push me around,” Lon declared.
“Yeah, like I was going to spend Thanksgiving on campus,” Teague snorted, flicking a crumb off his black button-down. It would have looked good if it had ever seen an iron. “And what? Play spin the bottle with the international students? Eat me.”
“You guys don’t know what you missed,” Brandon offered between bites, waiting for the others to ask him about Hellie. Although he normally wasn’t a bragger, he was kind of excited to have, for once, something to brag about.
“You bring back any Thanksgiving leftovers?” Ryan asked Alan. He pinched his thumb and forefinger together and brought them to his lips, inhaling. Alan’s parents were infamous around campus for running their own marijuana farm in the backwoods of New Hampshire—for medicinal purposes, of course.
Alan stroked the brown scruff under his chin and smiled dolefully. “Enough to keep me stuffed for a month. Maybe more.”
“Righteous.” Ryan nodded. He pushed his dirty lunch tray to the center of the table. He had an annoying habit of “forgetting” to take his tray to the tray return, instead leaving it on the table for the overworked dining services staff to take care of.
“Heath and I stayed back, didn’t he tell you?” Brandon asked the table in a moment of silence while everyone stuffed their faces with food.
Lon and Ryan exchanged glances. “Yeah, heard about the, uh… Swedish model.” Lon leaned back in his chair and popped a couple of grapes into his mouth.
“She’s Swiss, actually,” Brandon corrected Lon. He munched on a couple of chips while the rest of the table waited for him to regale them with Tales of the Sauna. He anticipated their congratulations as eagerly as he did Hellie’s next pic. “And she’s not a model… although she could be.”
“Swiss model, right,” Ryan said, thumping the heel of his hand into his forehead. “We stand corrected.” Alan St. Girard chuckled, then crammed a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth to hide it.
Teague covered his mouth
and coughed, “Bullshit.”
Brandon set down his fork. What the fuck? “Dude, trust me. She was totally hot.” He glanced up for backup from Heath, but he’d disappeared to refill his Sprite glass.
“If by ‘hooking up with a Swedish model’ you mean you ‘beat it to pics from Victoria’s Secret all weekend,’ then…” Ryan trailed off, smirking.
“Dude, she’s Swiss,” Teague corrected him, shoveling a forkful of salad into his mouth.
“Oh, right. My mistake.” Ryan leered at Brandon and the others chuckled at the joke.
“You don’t believe me?” Brandon asked, suddenly getting that these guys weren’t teasing him because they were jealous—but because they thought he was making it all up. His face flushed and he tugged at the collar of his Ben Sherman shirt. “Ask Heath.”
“You’re asking us to believe a guy who claims he sat next to Miley Cyrus on a flight to L.A. and she let him feel her up in the bathroom?” Ryan snorted loudly, and Brandon thought about how satisfying it would be to give him a black eye. “Just please tell me that you didn’t share the same catalog.”
Lon coughed up the last of his Diet Coke and Alan slapped him on the back a couple of times. “Take it easy, baby.”
Brandon considered whipping out his cell to show him the scrapbook of flesh-baring photos quickly filling up the memory in his Nokia, but he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. After all, why should these douchebags get to partake in Hellie’s heavenly beauty simply for doubting and mocking him? No way.
“If you’re going to Switzerland over Christmas, will you get me one of the cuckoo clocks with the little dude who comes out and hits something with a hammer?” Teague asked, his lazy green eyes amused. “I think that would look good in my room.”
Brandon grabbed his tray, his knuckles white with rage. The conversation had devolved into an argument about whether or not Miley Cyrus was actually a virgin. None of them noticed as Brandon slunk away, his forehead burning with frustration. As he returned the tray to the kitchen, he caught sight of Heath sitting at a table with Brett Messerschmidt and Sage Francis, his arms waving in the air and his mouth wide open. For a second, Brandon thought he must be talking up Brandon’s artful seduction of the Swiss sexpot in front of Sage, Brandon’s ex-girlfriend. It was about time Heath did something for him.
But then he saw that Heath was just trying to look down Brett’s shirt, and he realized he was going to have to fight his own battles.
5
A WAVERLY OWL KNOWS THAT THERE ARE PLENTY OF FISH IN THE SEA—YOU JUST HAVE TO KEEP THROWING BACK THE LOSERS.
On Wednesday afternoon, Callie Vernon dropped her pale blue pleated Tocca peacoat onto one of the coat pegs that lined the foyer of the dining hall. She took a deep breath and strode into the crowded lunchroom, scanning the crowd for familiar faces. Even though Easy Walsh hadn’t been at Waverly since he had been expelled more than a month ago, she couldn’t help looking for his face whenever she walked into a room. It was a reflex.
When she’d been dating Easy, it had seemed like there were practically hundreds of hot, available Waverly boys eyeing her from the fringes, waiting until she was single again. Now it was time to pick one. In her new gray wool Alice + Olivia minidress and fringed suede Roberto Cavalli boots, she knew that finding a new boy shouldn’t be too hard.
She spotted Brett, sitting at a crowded table by one of the enormous stained glass windows next to Benny Cunningham and Sage Francis. Benny’s green cowl-neck sweater made her look like a leprechaun, and Sage, since she’d dumped Brandon Buchanan, had reverted back to wearing far too much makeup. Neither of them was much competition. Callie grabbed a tray, still warm from the dishwasher, and tossed her wavy strawberry blond hair over her shoulder as she halfheartedly passed through the food line.
A tall, borderline-cute sophomore boy narrowly avoided running into her with a tray piled high with grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries. “Watch where you’re going, chica,” the sophomore muttered rudely under his breath. Callie blinked. Since when were unattractive underlings rude to her? Maybe she’d underestimated the difficulty of finding a datable Waverly boy.
She threw some mesclun greens onto her plate and sprinkled some chunks of feta on top. But as she plopped a couple of plump cherry tomatoes onto her salad, a strange image flashed before her eyes: Easy Walsh, maybe fifteen years from now, still with his stunningly crooked smile but with laugh lines and broader shoulders, living happily on a Kentucky horse farm. The vision was complete with racehorses and a down-to-earth Kentucky girl with long, light-brown hair and hands that weren’t afraid of getting dirty. She saw him popping fresh garden tomatoes into the girl’s mouth—skank!—and the two of them rocking together on the front porch while the sun set behind a giant maple tree.
“Is something wrong with the tomatoes?” Emmy Rosenblum asked, wrinkling her nose and looking at the tiny cherry tomatoes Callie had unconsciously picked from her salad and left sitting on the edge of the salad bar.
“I, uh, thought I saw a bug on one,” Callie muttered, grabbing her tray and heading for the soda machine. She filled a plastic cup with ice water and tried to calm her beating heart.
Why was she acting like such a freak? How hard could it be to find a guy, really? Waverly was fifty-two percent male, according to the statistics on the Web site, so the odds were in her favor. Callie filled another glass with Diet Coke and surveyed the room for the best-looking guys. Immediately, her eyes lit on Brandon Buchanan carrying his tray to the tray return. Yes, Brandon was gorgeous, in an overly put-together, ironed-his-underwear kind of way, but he was Brandon. She’d been down that road and just couldn’t be with someone who used more beauty products than she did. She needed someone who was as good-looking as Brandon but with an edge.
Her eyes rested on Alan St. Girard, sitting at the table Brandon had just vacated. She briefly considered him: he was kind of cute, and he hung out with the right people. He’d dated Alison Quentin, the pretty Korean girl on her floor in Dumbarton, for a few months, so he had decent taste in girls. The scruff would have to go immediately, of course, but all that would take was a razor. She fantasized that underneath the layers of long-sleeve thermal shirts and the fog of stale pot smoke, he was a gold mine.
Except, Callie remembered miserably, he’d been Easy’s roommate. Which meant whenever she sneaked into his room, she’d be faced with Easy’s empty bed and would think of Easy, and the look on his face atop the Empire State Building.
As Callie fumbled to pick a fork and knife from the silverware tubs, her hazel eyes narrowed in on Parker Dubois. He sat alone at a small table with a book open in front of him. He was the impossibly hot senior that everyone pretended was from Belgium, though she knew he was really American with a French dad. There was even a rumor that he was descended from European royalty. She watched as Parker ran his fingers through his golden brown hair and turned a page in his book. Suddenly Callie realized she’d never, not once, seen him flirting with a girl. He had to be gay.
Heath Ferro, who’d planted himself next to Brett, stood up and called, “Princess! Over here!” Callie fought a surge of irritation—like she needed him to wave her over to Brett’s table. At that exact moment, a beam of sunlight shot through the stained glass window and struck Heath’s jawline. He looked handsome, standing there in a navy blue crew-neck sweater fitted around his toned soccer body.
But ew. Did she really want to end up on YouTube in some homemade porno made with a handheld device hidden in Heath’s closet? Heath would do for an emergency make-out session if she got really desperate, but he was far from boyfriend material.
Callie dropped her tray onto the heavy oak table and slid into the empty chair next to Brett. “Hey,” she greeted everyone glumly.
Benny nudged Callie’s tray with a long, unpolished fingernail. Callie’s plate of lime Jell-O cubes jiggled. “How can you eat that stuff, Cal? It’s made of gelatin, which is, you know, made from the jelly in pigs’ hooves.”
/> Heath reached over and stabbed one of Callie’s Jell-O cubes with his fork. He popped it in his mouth defiantly. “Mmm, pig hooves.”
Callie focused her eyes on her salad, but her mind wandered. Maybe she’d have to date a teacher… or a townie, she thought despairingly. Her parents had been high school sweethearts, and her mother was always reminding her that Waverly was the perfect place to find a husband. Soul mate, she nauseatingly called it. For the longest time, she’d been convinced that Easy was the one… but she’d clearly been wrong about that. The whole thing made tears of frustration spring to her eyes, but she pressed her eyelids together to keep them from smudging her olive green Benefit eyeliner.
When her eyes opened again, they focused on the door to the dining hall—and the gorgeous guy with floppy black hair and chiseled features coming through it at that exact moment, as if by fate. Her eyes scanned the well-built athletic body, hidden under a pair of dark, pressed khakis and a navy blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt.
Who. Was. That?
“Who is that?” Callie whispered under her breath, trying to disguise the urgency of her question by nibbling on a sliced cucumber. She felt faint. This was exactly how it happened in movies. Just when the heroine was at her most desperate, in walked her savior.
The tone in Callie’s voice made Brett immediately put down her tuna sandwich. “Who?” She whirled around to see who Callie was talking about. Standing beside a table of seniors, Sebastian reached out and grabbed a french fry off Celine Colista’s plate. In his polo and khakis—which he must have run out and bought immediately after their conversation yesterday—he might have looked like any other athletic Waverly guy. But with his dark, thick hair totally devoid of gel and falling lazily across his forehead, highlighting his dark brown eyes, he looked… totally transformed. And amazingly… gorgeous.