Everyone Else's Girl

  “What’s going on with you?” Jeannie flicked me a look and flipped a few chicken breasts on the grill. Her flip was tentative. I figured she was just winging it with the whole Goddess of the Grill routine. “Christian has been insane all week about the whole Scotty Sheridan thing. What was that all about?”

  I flinched—and looked at the grass again for burn marks—but then remembered. They couldn’t possibly know what had happened a week ago. They meant the dinner they’d walked out on, the one we had all pretended hadn’t happened when Christian called to announce they were coming to hang out for the weekend.

  “A better question is why the two of you stormed off into the night like two gigantic babies,” I said. Because a good offense is always the best defense. “What was that all about?”

  “Are you kidding?” Jeannie pointed her spatula at me. “You invited Scotty Sheridan over for dinner and then were surprised when Christian didn’t think it was appropriate to have a stranger sitting in on a family discussion?”

  I really hated that tone. Complete with audible italics and the assumption that whoever she was speaking to was a total idiot. I’d hated it in elementary school and I hated it now.

  “That’s funny,” I retorted with a definite edge in my voice. “I don’t remember any discussion, I just remember Christian having a tantrum and then ranting and raving some more when it turned out there were witnesses.”

  I took a sip of my beer, as if I was unconcerned, to disguise the fact that I was trembling slightly. I hated that I was such a coward. That I couldn’t even defend myself to her without practically breaking into a rash. I didn’t think of myself as such a fragile thing, so when had that happened? Why did she have such power over me?

  “Is the food going to be ready before I die?” Hope drawled, stepping through the door and saving me from a panicked contemplation of the fact that I couldn’t seem to escape my adolescence.

  She had on her sultry nighttime eyes, and a pair of jeans about a thread away from obscenity, they were so low. Hope was about the only person, aside from Britney Spears, who actually looked good in low-riders. It was unfair that a real person could be in possession of a body that good. I reminded myself that Hope was twenty-two. She had yet to become acquainted with gravity.

  “Careful.” Jeannie smirked at Hope. “Inhale and you’ll be cited for public indecency.”

  “By who?” Hope asked sharply, her eyes raking Jeannie from head to toe. Jeannie pursed her lips and returned her attention to the grill.

  “Anyway,” Hope continued in a smoother tone. “Everything’s ready in here. Whenever you are.”

  She flounced back inside.

  “I can’t believe she’s actually helping with any part of dinner,” Jeannie said when she was gone. “What did you do? Hypnotize her? You bribed her, didn’t you?”

  “Hope and I reached an understanding.”

  I took another swig from my beer. A longer, deeper swig.

  “About what?” Jeannie asked caustically. “How much she needs to get over herself?”

  “I’ll carry that platter in,” I said. I slid a deliberate look her way, and took a deep breath. “And she’s not the only one around here who could stand to get over herself, Jeannie.”

  Dinner was a strained affair.

  Dad eyed Hope across a bowl of salad. “Is it Halloween?” he asked her. Being Hope, she was completely unfazed.

  “It’s actually Estee Lauder,” she replied, fluttering her extra-long lashes at him. “I almost went for glitter, but decided that was too much of a statement for suburban New Jersey.”

  “I don’t think anyone was complimenting you,” Christian tossed at her.

  “I don’t think anyone was even talking to you,” Hope retorted.

  “More vegetables, Dad?” I asked sweetly.

  “The zucchini is hardly going to draw my attention away from my twenty-something children squabbling like toddlers,” Dad said, shooting me a look.

  And so on.

  For once, Christian had the pleasure of helping the patient back up the stairs with the cast and the cursing and the “I can do it myself” nonsense. The rest of us did the dishes and then sat in the family room.

  “That was ridiculous,” Christian said with a sigh when he returned. “I was about to leave him on the landing.”

  “You should have,” Hope said carelessly. “Maybe that would make him reconsider his charming attitude about the stairs.”

  She wandered over to the mirror on the family room wall and turned from side to side.

  “You’re still gorgeous,” Jeannie said dryly. “As I’m sure you know.”

  “I was checking my ass,” Hope murmured. She arched her brows. “And not because I think it’s fat.”

  “Of course not,” Jeannie said with a laugh. Christian just sighed again.

  “So what are we supposed to do about Mom?” he asked abruptly. “Are we supposed to run after her and beg her to come home? Or just hope she decides to show up before he completely falls apart?”

  “I choose door number two,” Hope said. She shrugged when we all looked at her. “Oh, come on. Like it’s not better around here without her daily crucifixion routine. You guys aren’t fooling anyone.”

  “She and Aunt Beth have been planning this trip for years,” I said, throwing out the party line. It sounded pretty convincing, if I did say so myself. Most things did after you repeated them a million times—funny how that worked. “I’m here to take care of Dad. It’s not as if we’re in some dire situation.” I looked at Christian. “You can call and tell her how depressed he is if you want, but I don’t think that’s going to get her home any sooner.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to call her myself. Not after our most recent conversation, in which she had made more completely unsolicited and dire predictions about my relationship with Travis. Which was exactly the last thing I needed to hear after the Scott episode.

  “Don’t look at me,” Christian replied. “I’m not getting involved in their marital stuff. I was just curious about whether or not we think we should be involved.”

  “You guys talk about it as if your mom is deliberately not coming home and it’s like she’s flipping your dad the giant bird from Rome,” Jeannie pointed out. “Do you actually know that? Or do you guys just think that?”

  We all sort of looked around at each other.

  “I don’t know what we know,” I said, finally.

  “I’m pretty clear on what I know,” Christian contradicted me. “It would be one thing if she was actually doing something important, but hello—she’s on vacation.”

  “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime foreign vacation,” I argued. “It’s not like she went down to the Shore and refuses to drive back up.”

  “No, she just doesn’t care enough about her husband to cut short her trip,” Christian said, disgusted. “I love this family.”

  “I do love this family!” Jeannie said, and flushed when we all looked her way. “Well, I do,” she said defensively. “I know you guys have issues with your parents, but I wish you could see what you have from my perspective.” Her shoulders hunched up around her neck. “I don’t know, they kind of fit. They work.”

  “They don’t work,” Christian said, staring at her. “My father has to breed fish as friends and my mother has more interest in eating pasta at the source than in the fact Dad had a car accident. How does that work, exactly?”

  “I know,” Jeannie said helplessly. “But as upset as you guys are right now, you don’t know what a really bad family is. No one’s wasted drunk here. No one’s getting whaled on, no one’s throwing dinner plates around or calling the cops. This is just a weird situation, not a lifetime of therapy.”

  I thought, then, of all the hours Jeannie and I had spent when we were kids, holed up in my room talking through our dreams about the world. Jeannie had wanted to be safe and secure more than anything. She wanted her own house, her own family. I had pretended to want the same things, but when she w
ould drift off to sleep I would dream instead of being free, flying away to some exotic place and being someone completely different. Jeannie had never really discussed what went on in her house, but I’d known then it was bad. We’d always known.

  Christian rubbed at her shoulders to ease the tension.

  Hope perched herself on the edge of the couch.

  “Well, I’m definitely not calling her,” she said matter-of-factly, as if there’d been no silence. I doubted she could deal with reminders of Jeannie’s truly nasty family any more than I could. “I don’t think anyone should butt into their marital problems. Christian’s right.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear . . . ?” But Christian was grinning. Next to him, Jeannie smiled.

  “Don’t get used to it,” Hope warned. “I very much doubt you’ll be right again. I’m going out,” she announced abruptly. She turned to me. “Want to come?”

  There was a small, shocked silence. Everyone was suddenly looking at me.

  “Yes,” I said, surprising everyone in the room. Including myself.

  “Cool,” Hope said, but swept a critical glance over me. “But you definitely have to change.” That clearly troubled her. “In fact, let me go pick something out.” She charged away.

  “Are you kidding?” Christian gaped at me. “Why the hell would you go anywhere with her?”

  “I’m tired of being in this house,” I said, very simply. “You and Jeannie are here if Dad needs something, so I feel like going out. And why not with Hope? I get the feeling she has more fun than I ever did at her age.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Christian was nonplussed. “I thought we were going to hang out.”

  “I hang out here every single day, all day,” I pointed out as lightly as I could. “If you came over more, we could hang out more.”

  “I’m really sorry I have a job, Meredith!” Christian retorted, immediately on the defensive. Maybe he felt guilty. But for once, I decided I didn’t care.

  “I don’t feel like having this conversation,” I announced evenly, and stood up. “I have to go make myself look hot enough so as not to embarrass Hope.”

  Which meant submitting to Hope’s beauty regime and clothing selections. After a few of my protests were shot down, I surrendered to the process. Worst-case scenario: I looked like an ass. Hardly a new look for me this summer.

  Hope even did my makeup. I had been going with the same quick and efficient slick of mascara and lipstick for years now, but this suggestion was met with only a cold stare from my sister.

  “I’ve been wanting to do your makeup ever since I discovered what mascara was for,” she told me, wielding the tiny brush with accomplished ease. “Your eyes are amazing, and you should showcase them more.”

  “My eyes are brown.”

  My head was tilted at an unnatural angle, which made my voice sound funny. Hope stood between my legs and held her face close to mine as she worked. It was a strangely intimate thing, I reflected, to be that close to someone else. Just one more example of the casual intimacy women took for granted. What did men have? Football tackles?

  “Your eyes are brown, yeah, but with this whole gold thing going on,” Hope said, sounding distracted. “Plus, you have to stop dressing like a middle-aged matron.”

  “I do not!” I was outraged.

  “You do,” Hope replied easily. “You’re not a member of the royal family, Meredith. You’re hot. You need to show it off.”

  “Sure.” I couldn’t quite hide my disbelief. “Tonight we’ll show it off, and you’ll apologize to me in the morning for inflicting me on your social life. That’s fine. It’s all in the name of family.”

  “This is another thing I’m really good at.” Hope’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I know you guys think I’m tacky because I show a lot of skin, but I’m not. I just can show a lot of skin. There’s a fine line. Most people are on the wrong side of it. I know what works and what doesn’t.” She stepped back and scrutinized her handiwork. She showed me her dimples. “It’s not taking a risk if you know you’ll look good.”

  “I don’t know I’ll look good,” I pointed out patiently. “I know that you think it’s fun to dress up your elderly sister in silly, teenage clothing.”

  “‘Elderly’? Jesus Christ.” Hope sighed. “You’re twenty-eight.”

  She towed me over to the full-length mirror that graced the back of the closet door. We both stared at the creature she had created.

  I was no longer the well-coordinated, conservatively cute Atlanta girl. I was someone else entirely. Someone with tousled and sexy hair. Someone in skintight jeans and a flirty little halter top that made me look more like Jessica Simpson than the Meredith McKay I carried around in my head and expected to see in the mirror. My eyes were smoky and glowed like old gold coins. My lips were practically a banquet. And the wicked heels on my feet could do serious damage.

  “Wow,” I breathed. “Check her out!”

  “Wow!” Jeannie echoed as I catwalked through the family room on our way out. “You look . . .” She ground to a halt, evidently at a loss.

  “Like Hope,” Christian said with significantly less enthusiasm. Jeannie smacked him on the leg, and I felt a sudden, small pang of guilt.

  I chose to ignore it, and followed Hope out into the night. I felt the way I remembered feeling a million years ago when I was a freshman in college. When I thought anything might happen before morning, and it often did.

  “I’ll drive,” Hope said.

  I was more than happy to recline in her passenger seat and let her take control. All the thinking I couldn’t seem to keep from doing wasn’t getting me anywhere anyway, so why not turn it off? Why not set it all aside for the night?

  I couldn’t change the increasingly awkward conversations I had with Travis on the phone, the ones that were all my fault, the ones I had to pretend weren’t awkward at all when he asked. I might have realized that I couldn’t lay all my guilt on him, that it was my betrayal and therefore my cross to bear. But that didn’t mean I was any good at it.

  Hope, I imagined, would never have such problems.

  My little sister was something of a celebrity, I realized, as the people in the local bars scrambled to greet her, to buy her drinks, to bask in her circle. The bars were all the same, I noticed, despite my extended absence. The same people, more or less. The sad regulars, who tended to be former high school luminaries with landscaping businesses. The usual girlfriends and buddies, and then the latest crop of young ones. Of these last, Hope was queen.

  Hope had that elusive quality that some people spent their lives trying to achieve. It was innate, and I had never seen it shine so brightly before. It wasn’t just that she was lovely—she exuded something else, something all her own and marvelous, that made all the men flock to her and all the women want to be her confidante. It was a certain form of power, and Hope was so comfortable with it that she didn’t even bother to flex it. She just basked in it.

  And I got the reflected glory, because I was with her. It didn’t matter that there were years separating us, or the fact that I was a stranger to Hope’s legion of friends. Everything was loud and raucous and men looked at me as if I was an extension of Hope: vibrant and sexy and halfway to celestial. It was almost as intoxicating as the margaritas I let myself have in celebration.

  The place we settled in had a bustling restaurant section, which overlapped into the noisy bar area. I took myself off to the bathrooms, which were typically revolting, and was navigating my way back to the table in my killer heels when I came face-to-face with Scott.

  He was exiting the restaurant portion of the place with three other men, all in business suits. He stopped dead, and we stared at each other, as if we were the only two people in the bar.

  “I’ll catch you all later,” he told his companions, but never took his eyes off of me. I had the impression of some laughter from them, but I was too trapped in Scott’s gaze to really notice, much less care.

  “Hi,??
? I said. I smirked. “Or am I supposed to say something else, being exorcised and all.”

  “I never said I wasn’t an asshole,” Scott replied in that low, husky voice of his. “I just said your family was first.”

  I searched his face, but it was the same one I saw in my head. The picture of little Scotty Sheridan, all elbows and geekiness, was forever burned away. What I saw now when I thought of him started and ended with sleek muscles and that look in his eyes.

  “Look at you.” He sounded delighted. “You look edible.”

  “I’m not on the menu,” I retorted.

  “And with a new personality to match,” he said, completely unfazed. “I like it.”

  “That was, of course, my goal.”

  “Sarcastic too. Be still my heart.”

  “Your what? That’s funny, I thought you said ‘heart.’”

  “That approached humor, Atlanta. The total transformation is almost too much for me to take. Was there a body-snatching?”

  “You know what I can’t figure out?” I glared at him. “I get the whole hate-fuck concept.”

  “You do.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Sure, and congratulations by the way. You’ve been building up to that since the fourth grade, so it must have been a big night for you.” I treated him to my best placid smile. “I just want to let you know that I forgive you.”

  He blinked. He didn’t like that. “You do?”

  “Of course,” I said, smile widening, dripping sincerity as only southern girls could. Even transplanted ones. “I think it’s sweet that you spent all those years—”

  “Fuck that,” Scott said, and his hand wrapped around my arm. When I didn’t jerk away he towed me out the front door and started down the empty sidewalk.

  “Where are we going?” I asked calmly, at odds with the riot going on inside my head. The riot I was choosing to ignore.

  “Shut up,” Scott said in the same tone.

  He maneuvered me down the alley behind the restaurant, and then farther along, until I was confused about where exactly we were in relation to the street.