Did I Mention I Love You?

  “Um,” he mimics in a voice that sounds absolutely nothing like mine.

  “Um,” I say again.

  “I’m gonna grab a shower,” he tells me. “That’s if you’d get out of my way.”

  I step to the side of the staircase, and he barges past me, the same way he shoved past yesterday, like I’m merely an obstacle in his path. “Rude,” I mutter under my breath. In the forty-eight hours I’ve been here, he hasn’t said one nice word to me. He doesn’t appear to have any manners either. I’m thankful I won’t have to talk to him for at least five minutes.

  Bored already, I head for the living room and get comfortable on the couch. The truth is, when you’re new to a city and have zero friends, you end up spending your Saturday night alone in your stepfamily’s immaculate living room watching reruns of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, because the only thing to do when your life sucks is to watch someone else’s. Admittedly, Amelia would kill me if she knew I watched this show. It’s not that I actually like it or anything. Well, maybe a little, but I’d never tell her.

  During my time in front of the TV, I also bombard my mom with several texts containing nothing but complaints about Dad. She agrees with each one.

  I’m looking at my phone when a female voices calls “Hello?” from the hall. The front door clicks shut. I stop moving and pause the TV. Surely it’s not Ella. It’s only been thirty minutes and I doubt they’ve even eaten their appetizers yet.

  “Hello?” I call back.

  “Who the hell is that?” the voice explodes, startling me to the point where I retreat back into the couch. A figure swings open the living room door and enters with her lips pressed firmly together. It’s Tiffani. She breathes a sigh of relief when she sees me. “Sorry, I thought…”

  “You thought what?” I prompt as I stare back at her blankly.

  “Nothing,” she says quickly. “Where’s Tyler?”

  That is the moment when I become no longer interested. I turn back to the TV, taking it off pause and continuing with the episode. “I haven’t seen him since he went to take a shower.”

  “Thanks.” She leaves the living room, and I listen to the sound of her footsteps as she jogs up the staircase as though this were her own home. I slowly lower the volume of the TV and wait, admittedly attempting to eavesdrop.

  For a good three minutes I can’t hear anything, but then their voices grow louder as they head downstairs together. I press the back of my hand to my lips and stare at the door in curiosity.

  “Chill out,” Tyler says. “I was gonna head over in an hour, like you said.”

  “You could have at least answered my calls,” Tiffani says.

  “I couldn’t hear them over my music.” They both come to a halt in the hall, and I stare at them through the open door. Tyler notices. “Now what the hell is your problem?”

  “Jeez,” I say.

  Tiffani shakes her head disapprovingly at him. It makes me wonder how she puts up with him. “Shut up, Tyler.”

  “Whatever,” he mutters while turning his back to me, his face nothing but a rigid scowl. “Let’s just get outta here.”

  “Actually…” Tiffani’s voice tapers off and her bottom lip juts out as she glances up at him from beneath her eyelashes. Tyler doesn’t take her smug expression lightly.

  “What now?”

  Tiffani enters the living room and steps in front of the TV. I’d call her out on it, but I’m not quite yet in a comfortable enough position to be able to argue with these strangers.

  “New plan,” she says, and I notice how she begins glancing between both Tyler and me. I feel inclined to listen. Rightly so, because what she says next takes us both by surprise. “Austin’s throwing a last-minute party and we’re going. You too, Eden.” She fixes her eyes on me. “It’s Eden, right? You don’t really look like the partying type, but Rachael says I have to invite you along. So come.”

  “Back up a second,” Tyler orders, furrowing his eyebrows and marching over to her. In a hushed voice, he murmurs by her ear, “I thought we were going to your place. You know…” But it’s not hushed enough, and it’s clear what their intentions had been.

  “Reschedule that,” she whispers. Clasping her hands together, she steps around him and raises her voice again. “Okay, so you’re coming, Eden. And you too, Tyler. You’re coming and you’re not getting wasted for once.”

  “The fuck?”

  “Rachael and Megs are already at my place getting ready, so come on, let’s go!” She pulls a set of car keys from her back pocket and makes for the door, but I quickly call her back.

  “Wait, I need to get an outfit,” I blurt. I get to my feet and glance up at the ceiling. Maybe if I’m lucky it’ll collapse on me. “Give me five minutes to find something.” Right now I’m wondering why I keep finding myself in these awful situations, but for some reason, I just can’t seem to say no.

  Tiffani laughs, reaches for my arm, and pulls me toward her. When she talks again, her voice is laced with pity. “You can borrow something of mine. Now come on! We’re heading to the party in two hours.” Letting go of me, she twirls away and heads outside. Tyler shoves his way in front of me and also makes for the front door.

  “I thought you were grounded,” I say.

  Turning around, he stares back at me evenly, smirking in a way that is far from friendly. “And I thought you were sick.”

  That shuts me up.

  * * *

  The drive to Tiffani’s house is nothing but a journey full of anxiety. I can think about one thing and one thing only: I haven’t shaved my legs. This fact torments me for the entire ten minutes that I’m stuck in the sporty vehicle, crammed into the tiny backseat with my knees shoved into my chest because Tyler selfishly decides to push his chair as far back as it can go. Neither of them includes me in the conversation. Not that I care, anyway. They’re only talking about the latest drama and gossip in their high school. Apparently Evan Myers and Nicole Martinez broke up, whoever they are.

  Tiffani’s house is on the edge of the neighborhood on a large piece of land, and it’s made of the kind of marble that suggests she probably has a butler to wait on her. But when we pull up and get inside, there are no butlers and no servants. It’s just a regular house made of very expensive material.

  “Your mom’s still out, right?” Tyler asks. His previous intentions are even clearer now.

  “Yeah,” Tiffani says. “There’s beer in the kitchen. Kick back down here while we get ready, but take it easy.” She shoots him a warning glare. There’s music echoing loudly from upstairs. She grasps my hand and begins pulling me in the direction of it. We ascend the staircase—marble, of course. “We won’t be long!” Tiffani calls over the banister.

  “Tiff?” Rachael’s disembodied voice calls from the room at the end of the long hallway. The music dies at the same time. “Tiffani?”

  “I’m back!” Tiffani pushes open the closed door and waltzes in. I trail behind.

  “Eden!” Rachael immediately gets to her feet, despite being in the process of doing Meghan’s hair, waving the curling iron around in midair and grinning at me. “You came!”

  I didn’t really get the chance not to, I think. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to come?” I ask no one in particular.

  “I guess so,” Tiffani answers. It’s not very convincing. She heads over to her closet—which is merely an archway leading into a section of the room overflowing with clothing—and glances over her shoulder at me. “Rachael says you’re only here for the summer, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right, so you’ve got to make the best of it, I suppose.”

  “She’s right,” Meghan says from her position on the floor, draped in a silk dressing gown with her hair only three-quarters curled. “We’ll make sure your summer doesn’t suck.”

  Too late, I think. It already does.

  “Come pick a dress!” Tiffani squeals, but the enthusiasm sounds fake. “I say go for black. Black or red. You’d sui
t that. And tight. Yeah. Wait, Meghan, you’re wearing red, aren’t you? Okay, tight and black. Let’s go for that.” Despite just asking me to come pick a dress, she hands me one before I even get the chance to look at it, but then she immediately draws it back. “Actually, this one might be too tight on you,” she murmurs as her eyes run up and down my body, and I can feel myself shrinking beneath her scrutiny. Did she just imply I’m chubby?

  I’d like to believe it wasn’t intentional, that she didn’t mean it in such a way, but it still hurts. I try my hardest to let it bypass my mind, but it’s already too late. It repeats itself over and over again, endlessly and agonizingly, even while Tiffani is piling new dresses into my arms and bubbling with more of that same forced enthusiasm. I try to breathe in. I try to deceive myself into believing that she’s wrong.

  With a stack of outfit options in my hands, all black dresses, she leaves me to get ready, and I start by letting my hair down and borrowing her hot iron to straighten it. Meghan offers to do my makeup for me. Tiffani finds a pair of platform heels that match the dress she’s given me, because fortunately we share the same shoe size. And when the time comes for me to actually put the dress on, I confide in Rachael about my unshaven leg hair. After a brief moment of laughter, she sends me into Tiffani’s grand and glorious bathroom to fix myself up, giving me clear instructions on where to find the disposable razors.

  I’m just finishing up and slipping into the dress—the very, very tight dress, which only makes me feel worse—when I hear Tyler enter Tiffani’s room. I step back into the room to find that all of us are now dressed and ready to leave. But even though Tiffani, Rachael, and Meghan’s dresses all look as tight as mine, I still feel awfully inappropriate. I can feel it clinging to every inch of my body.

  “Alright, can we head over there now?” Tyler asks, quite blatantly bored. He’s been waiting around for two hours with beer as his only companion, and this is evident in his unsteady balance. “Dean and Jake are already there.”

  “Do I look good?” Tiffani asks, twirling around in a slow circle to ensure he gets a good look at her body. Her dress is white, and despite its tightness and shortness, it creates an aura of elegance.

  “Baby, you look fine,” he slurs. He takes one final swig from the beer in his hand before setting it down on the dresser and stepping forward. “Real hot.” He clasps her waist and pulls her body toward him. And as though there aren’t three other people in the room, he rams his lips against hers in a way that looks almost painful, one hand grazing her ass and the other pressing against the small of her back. She doesn’t pull away.

  I throw Rachael a disgusted glance and she rolls her eyes. All I can hear is that horrendous smacking sound again. Tyler and Tiffani: the world’s worst couple when it comes to PDA. “Are they always like this?” I mutter in a hushed voice, because interrupting their intimate moment for a second time isn’t exactly something I want to do.

  Rachael just shakes her head. I think it’s in commiseration. “All the time.”

  I glance back over to the pair. They don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, even when Meghan nudges them to the side so that she can step out into the hall. You’d think they hadn’t seen each other in three years. They’re that engaged in one another.

  And so Tyler may be irritating, and Tiffani may be obliviously rude, and I may be chubby. But at least my dress isn’t as clingy as those two.

  Chapter 6

  Just after 8:00 p.m., Meghan takes us all over to this party that I’m dreading beyond words. I’m dreading it so much I wish I’d gone out to the family meal with Dad and Ella. Surely forcing overpriced food down my throat would be better than the bitter taste of cheap liquor.

  We pile into the silver Toyota Corolla as the darkness begins to filter through the setting sun in such a beautiful way that I find myself gazing down the street toward the horizon before Rachael calls shotgun and nudges me to the side. I unwillingly get in the backseat with Tyler seated in the middle between Tiffani and me, beer in his lap and vodka by my feet. There’s an overwhelming combination of body spray and perfume and Tyler’s cologne, not to mention the music that’s increasing in volume with each passing second. The car rolls down the street at, thankfully, a safe speed. Meghan drives with her body rigid and huddled over the wheel, and she doesn’t say a word. It’s like she’s terrified of getting distracted, so while she concentrates hard on the road, Rachael and Tiffani do enough talking to make up for her silence.

  “If Molly Jefferson is at this party, I swear to God, I’m leaving,” Rachael states without glancing up from her phone. She’s texting extremely quickly, her fingers moving so fast that I just watch in amazement.

  “Why would that loser be there?” Tiffani lets out a laugh as she adjusts her hair¸ running her fingers through it until she’s pleased with the way it’s sitting. “Austin’s a total creep, but at least he has standards. No losers.” For a moment, she leans forward an inch to peer at me over Tyler, but then she smiles and gets comfy again.

  As we travel across the city, I steal a glance to my left. Tyler’s arms are folded across his chest and he doesn’t quite look comfortable, his eyes fixed on the hand brake, his face tight. He must notice my eyes on him, because he quickly glances sideways at me and then looks away just as fast. So I angle my body to the side and train my eyes on the passing buildings outside the window instead, but it does little to help how awkward I feel. Every few minutes I can sense Tyler’s eyes on me again, but each time I look back over to catch him in the act, he’s already looking in the opposite direction.

  “What about that Sabine girl? Sabine…?” Rachael glances up from her phone and presses a finger to her lips as she thinks for a moment. She twirls around in the seat and squints at Tiffani through the gap in the headrest. “You know the one I’m talking about, right? The German exchange student?”

  “The girl who stole my seat in Spanish class? Sabine Baumann.”

  “Yes!” Rachael shrieks as she slumps back in the seat. “I hope she’s not there either. She’s always staring at Trevor.”

  “And you, Tyler,” Tiffani adds. Beside me, I feel Tyler shrug, but it’s obvious this Sabine girl isn’t her friend. She presses her lips together and scoots closer to him.

  The two of them discuss other potential party guests, with the rest of us offering little input: Meghan because she’s too busy trying not to kill us all; Tyler because he’s focusing so hard on staring at nothing in particular; and me because I honestly couldn’t care.

  So fifteen minutes and a lot of hair adjustments and bitchy remarks later, we arrive at the party, which appears to be in full swing. There are several people loitering in the front yard and more arriving, the music loud and echoing as we step out of the car, which Meghan has managed to awkwardly squeeze into a spot between a beat-up truck and a convertible. We grab the booze, and I end up carrying in a pack of Twisted Tea and a bottle of vodka, and suddenly I feel like an alcoholic. I bet the neighbors are peeking through their blinds with the cops on speed dial. It’s so obvious that we’re all minors. I have no idea where Tiffani, Rachael, and Meghan got any of this from or how they managed to get it, but like every other teenager in this country, they must have their ways. There are always ways.

  “Hey, Tyler!” a voice yells across the lawn. A shorter guy with a buzz cut and a Budweiser in his hand approaches him, and they greet each other with a fist bump. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Yeah,” Tyler says. He nods to the case of Bud Light under his arm. “Kitchen?”

  “Yeah,” the guy says, jabbing a finger out toward the house. “Dump it and come join us.” Tyler disappears inside, greeting a number of people on the way, his steps uneven.

  “Hey, Austin!” Tiffani says to the same guy—the host of the party. I tag along behind her, with Rachael and Meghan by my side, and I can’t help but feel entirely out of place. I don’t know any of these people, yet here I am, turning up at a party and praying that no one will notice the stra
nger among them.

  “Enjoy yourselves, girls,” Austin says, and there is so much lechery underlying his tone that it makes him repulsively gross. “Nice dresses.”

  “I know,” Tiffani says. She rolls her eyes over her shoulder and down to her ass, biting her lip. But I notice. “By the way, Eden’s here too.”

  “Eden?” Austin’s eyes drift past her, darting from Rachael to Meghan and then finally to me. “Crashing my party, Eden?”

  Before I can drop dead right there and then, Tiffani steps forward and presses her hand flat against his chest. She leans in close by his side, murmurs, “Eden is Tyler’s stepsister,” and then leans back to fix him with a hard look. “And you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him, so…”

  Austin’s expression immediately falters, and he takes a step back, replacing the smirk on his face with a wide smile. “Welcome to the party! Turn up or go home.” He raises his beer to the sky, whistles for a moment, and then walks away.

  “You heard him,” Rachael says. She unscrews the cap of a bottle of vodka she’s holding in her hand and takes one huge gulp, drinking it straight without her features even shifting. She must do this a lot. “Turn the hell up!”

  The sky darkens, and Tiffani leads the way inside, and I’ve figured by now that she’s the alpha female of the trio. The trio of friends plus me, the tagalong from Portland. And with being the tagalong come anxiety and nerves and the awareness that I’m not welcome here.

  The house is pretty much packed from one wall to the other, be it with bodies or cases of beer, and it is very, very hot. The music is loud, and the alcohol doesn’t seem to be in short supply. The majority of the people here are already tipsy, if not wasted, and there are only a few who are still standing steady. By the time we weave our way through to the kitchen, Tyler is already gone. His box of beer is lying among the overflowing collection of alcohol that covers the table and every countertop. Used shot glasses decorate the floor, and I carefully step around them before sliding the pack of Twisted Tea and the vodka onto the edge of the table.