Good Luck (10 page)

“And wouldn’t it be fabulous to have my wedding at Pine Gardens? It’s one of the nicest country clubs in the state.” Emma burbled along enthusiastically. “There’s just one problem.”

“What?” I asked wearily.

“Owen Forrester.”

I felt a spasm in the region of my stomach. Just hearing the name of Matt Forrester’s father shook me. The money made me feel like I had a bull’s-eye taped to my forehead. What if the Forresters did decide to sue me? Or, even worse, have me criminally prosecuted?

“What about him?”

“He’s a member at Pine Gardens. In fact, he’s the president of the board. I’m worried that he’ll try to stop us from holding the reception there.”

“He probably would,” I said.

“If he finds out we’re sisters.”

There was something about Emma’s tone—an offhand affectation that she always adopted when she was attempting to be sly—that caught my attention.

“If? Wait—are you saying you want me to pretend that I’m not related to you?”

“No, no, of course not!” Emma said in a way that made it perfectly clear this was exactly what she’d been contemplating. “I just wanted to find out what you thought I should do. But never mind.” She scrambled to change the subject, although unfortunately not away from the wedding altogether. “Oh! I know what else I wanted to tell you. I had an
amazing
idea: I want to have a huge fireworks display at the reception! Doesn’t that sound incredible? Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes did it at their wedding, and it was supposed to have been fabulous. But as it turns out, we need, like, ten different kinds of permits and a professional pyrotechnic. I found a guy, and he said he’s going to need a deposit of five thousand as soon as possible.”

“Emma, I’ve already told you. I’d be happy to pay for your wedding extravaganza, but I’m not going behind Dad’s back. You need to work this out with him first,” I said in my sternest teacher’s voice.

This, of course, set Emma off on a hissing rant about how unfair and unreasonable Dad was being. I didn’t disagree with her—I couldn’t figure out why Dad was being so insistent that he pay for the wedding. He seemed to think that letting me pay for it would be taking advantage of me. But what was the point of having all this money if I couldn’t help out my family with these sorts of unwieldy expenses?

By the time I finally got Emma off the phone, I thought that if I ever heard the word
wedding
again it would be too soon. Likewise,
fondant frosting, platinum eternity band, and darling little sterling-silver picture frames to hand out as favors
. As it was, my headache had returned, so I went off in search of the aspirin bottle and forgot to unplug the phone.

When it rang, I ignored it, assuming it was either yet another reporter or Emma calling back to torture me with more wedding talk. Maybe she now wanted to give each guest a live peacock to take home as a wedding favor. Or maybe she wanted to arrive at the wedding ceremony in a gilded horse-drawn carriage.

But it wasn’t Emma. The voice on my answering machine was lower and huskier than my sister’s:

“Hey, Lulu, it’s Hayden. Are you there? Or are you too busy seducing hot young boys to answer your phone? I just saw a story about you on Fox fucking News, and I damned near had a stroke. Pick up the phone right this minute and tell me what in the name of holy fuck is going on.”

Eight

         
HAYDEN BLAIR WAS MY SECOND-OLDEST FRIEND. WE
met our freshman year at Bates. She lived in the dorm room next to mine, and the first time I saw her she was sitting in the common room, her bare feet tucked up underneath her, while she watched a
Real World
marathon on MTV. I liked her instantly. She had sleek dark hair that fell halfway down her back, chic bangs, and wore dark-red lipstick without looking ridiculous. Her family was insanely rich, although for as long as I’d known her, Hayden had distanced herself from the silver-spoon lifestyle. She never hung out with the trust-fund brats at Bates, bought most of her clothes at thrift stores—although somehow still managed to look incredibly glamorous in everything she wore—and whenever the subject of her family’s money came up, Hayden shrugged it off.

“Old money,” she’d say, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It’s not like my parents earned it.”

Hayden was the third of three daughters and not on great terms with the rest of her family.

“I’m my parents’ Great Disappointment,” Hayden had confided to me that night, the first of many late nights we would spend sprawled out on the indestructible dorm couches. “My oldest sister, Evelyn, went to Wharton for her MBA, and Jezzy is going to law school next year after she graduates from fucking Harvard. I’m the only one who didn’t go Ivy. My parents are still pissed about it.”

“Bates is a good school,” I said, feeling stung.

Hayden looked at me pityingly. “Yeah, well, it’s not Harvard. And that’s all my parents care about. I haven’t broken it to them yet that I’m going to major in drama.”

“Are you an actress?” I asked, impressed.

“Not yet,” Hayden said, a small smile playing at her lips. “But I will be.”

Neither of us was all that into the party scene at school—I was too shy, Hayden, a wild child who’d started clubbing at the age of thirteen, was too jaded—and so when the other girls on our floor left in a pack for the latest off-campus party, smelling of shampoo and floral perfume and wearing body-suits and skintight jeans tucked into cowboy boots, Hayden and I would watch old movies and talk late into the night. Overnight, it seemed, we became the closest of friends.

“I’ve never really been friends with a girl before,” Hayden had told me during one of our late night chatfests. “Girls don’t usually like me.”

I could see why some women would find Hayden threatening. With her strong features—the fierce tilt of her green eyes, the too-long nose, the almost masculine cut of her jaw—Hayden wasn’t classically beautiful. But she was certainly very arresting; I got used to eyes following us when we went to dinner at the dining hall or walked across campus to class together. Men were particularly fascinated with her. It wasn’t at all unusual for guys she didn’t know to walk right up to Hayden and boldly ask her out. She never seemed surprised by the attention or even all that interested. She’d just smile and thank them politely but say no, she wasn’t interested in dating anyone right now.

“Why aren’t you interested in dating?” I asked her once.

I certainly was. Unfortunately, no one—neither random guys we met walking across campus nor anyone else—asked me out. The closest I’d gotten to a date was at the freshman mixer I’d attended on the first night at school, when a guy named Adam had staggered up to me and slurred that I was the most beautiful girl at the party. I knew that this declaration had probably been largely influenced by the amount of beer he’d downed at happy hour prior to coming to the mixer, but even so, I’d half-wondered if Adam and I might end up together. It would be a great story to tell our kids someday.

I met your mom on our very first night at college. She was so beautiful, she took my breath away. I just knew this was the woman I was meant to marry,
he’d say, wrapping an affectionate arm around my waist and leaning down to kiss me on the cheek, while our children groaned at how sappy their parents were.

Taken with this image of domestic perfection, I’d let Adam walk me back to my dorm, where we engaged in a protracted kiss-and-grope session just outside the front door to Smith Hall. This included—at his insistence—an over-the-pants hand job, which was unfortunately witnessed by several of my new dormmates upon their return from the mixer and earned me the reputation of Dorm Slut on our very first night at school. I wrote down my phone number for Adam; he promised to call but never did. And for the next four years, whenever I saw Adam on campus—which happened with annoying frequency—he’d turn bright red and look away, making me feel as worthless and discarded as a used condom.

“What’s the point?” Hayden said. “No one really dates here. We’re in the middle of buttfuck Maine. There’s nowhere to go. So when a guy asks you out, what he means is that he wants to hang out in your room or, even
worse,
his room.”

“Why would his room be worse?”

“Have you ever been in a guy’s dorm room?
Blech
. They smell disgusting: a combination of body odor and stinky feet.”

I desperately hoped that I’d have the chance to smell that aroma at some point.

“And what’s there to do in a dorm room but fuck? So all a guy is really doing when he asks you out is asking if he can fuck you,” Hayden continued. She shrugged dismissively. “It’s not like I’m anti-fucking—I’m extremely
pro
-fucking—just not on a narrow dorm bed with REM playing in the background and foreplay that consists of
you
giving
him
a blow job. No, thanks.”

Hayden and I remained close during our four years at Bates and were roommates for the last three of those years. Despite Hayden’s cautionary words, I eventually did visit my fair share of male dorm rooms, usually when I’d had too much to drink, and learned the hard way that Hayden was, for the most part, correct. College guys didn’t have a whole lot of finesse in the bedroom; they came on strong and finished quickly. But I felt devastatingly sophisticated racking up some experience for the first time in my life, eventually even losing my virginity to Cole Willis after we’d been “dating” for three weeks.

Despite her wild teenage years—Hayden had endless stories about dropping acid at all-night raves and dating guys ten years her senior—she wasn’t as impervious to romance as she pretended to be. During our sophomore year she fell pretty hard for Jason Downey, a senior with jet-black hair and smoldering dark eyes, who announced he was in love with her on their second date. That relationship lasted three whole months before Hayden broke things off. After Jason, there was a string of short, intense affairs, some with guys from our school, some with guys she knew from back home. All of these love interests shared a few things in common: The men were all incredibly good-looking and they were all madly in love with Hayden. And they were, every last one, devastated when she grew bored and broke things off.

I mostly observed Hayden’s revolving door of eligible men with an amused yet detached interest. However, there was inevitably some overlap in Hayden’s and my interests. Usually it was pretty simple: I would notice a guy—in class, in the dining hall, at a party—and would experience that small hormonal explosion of interest. We’d engage in some meaningful eye contact. And then he’d notice Hayden sitting beside me, with her elegant posture, glossy hair, and red, red lips, and,
poof,
just like that, I’d cease to exist.

A lot of girls would thrive on this sort of attention. I’d certainly known quite a few like that in high school, the sort who were never happier than when they were flirting with someone else’s boyfriend. But not Hayden. She had so few girlfriends that she viewed our friendship as something worth protecting. If a guy she knew I was interested in went after her instead, all he would get for his trouble would be a contemptuous glare and a sarcastic comment from Hayden.

“Asshole,” she’d say, tossing her hair back.

“Asshole,” I’d confirm. And then we’d go outside, where I would keep her company while she smoked a Marlboro Light.

It was hard not to feel a little jealous. But Hayden’s unwavering loyalty made it impossible to hold her popularity against her. There was only one time when my resentment boiled up and truly threatened my friendship with Hayden. And that wasn’t even her fault.

“I met a guy,” I sang out one night as I walked into the tiny living room of the off-campus apartment we shared. Hayden’s mom had offered us her decorator to do the place up, but Hayden had flatly refused. So our apartment was kitted out like every other college apartment, featuring banged-up and mismatched furniture we’d scavenged from graduating seniors and Goodwill.

“At the library?” Hayden asked. She’d been lying stomach-down on a scratchy brown plaid sofa with sagging cushions and was marking pages in her psych textbook with a fat yellow highlighter pen. But upon my arrival, she turned over and bent up her knees to give me room to sit.

“At the library,” I confirmed, as lit up inside as a Christmas tree. “He was in the reading room. I noticed him right away; there was something about him that I just instantly liked. But I didn’t think he noticed me. I mean, why would he?” I added with a laugh.

“Don’t do that. Don’t put yourself down,” Hayden said, frowning at me. “I don’t know why you won’t believe how pretty you are.”

I snorted. “Maybe because it’s a load of horseshit?”

“I’d kill to have your skin, not to mention your hair.”

She reached up and pulled back on one of my long corkscrew curls and then released it, so it sprang back in place.

“You’re more than welcome to it,” I said. I had tried before to convince Hayden that curly hair was not a blessing but a particularly evil curse that I did battle with every day. She never believed me.

“And your boobs—you have the best boobs,” Hayden said, looking down sadly at her own flat chest.

“Yeah, except you can wear whatever you want and always look like a fashion model. I can’t put on a tank top without looking trashy,” I said moodily. I could feel my inner Christmas tree turning brown and dropping its needles.

“Finish your story,” Hayden said. “About Library Guy.”

“Library Guy. That makes him sound like a superhero,” I said, with a snort of laughter. I deepened my voice. “He can read faster than a speeding train and chases down patrons with overdue fines—he’s Library Guy!”

Hayden laughed but nudged me with one sock-covered foot. “Come on, tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened,” I said, grinning and hugging my arms around myself.

“Why do I not believe you?”

“Okay, something happened,” I conceded. “But it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“Just tell me already!”

“I’m trying! After I’d been there for about an hour, I went outside to get a coffee at Mo’s.” Mo’s was a food-service van parked more or less permanently outside the library, ever ready to cater to students in need of cheese fries and caffeinated beverages. “The guy I’d noticed earlier came out too. He was standing in line right behind me. And we started talking—”

“How?” Hayden asked, clutching a pillow to her chest.

“He noticed the poli-sci textbook I was holding and asked me if I was in Kaplan’s class. I said yes, and he said he was too.”

“You’d never noticed him there?”

“No, but it’s a pretty big class, and he said he sits in the back.”

“Okay.” Hayden made a rolling gesture with her hand, encouraging me to continue the story.

“We talked a bit about the class and both said we liked it. I got my coffee and he got his, and he asked if I wanted to sit down. So we sat on a bench, and we talked for a really long time. And it was…well, it was great. It was the first time in a really long time that a guy just wanted to talk to me. To get to know me.”

“And?”

“And that’s it. Then we went back inside, and I went to my reading table and he went to his.”

Hayden pouted disappointedly. “I thought this was going somewhere good,” she said.

“It was good. I think he really liked me,” I said, remembering the warm brown eyes, the pink flush of his cheeks, the broad shoulders in the J. Crew barn coat. He was definitely sexy but not conventionally handsome. Which meant maybe I had a chance with him. “He asked if I was going to be at the library tomorrow night and suggested that we study for our poli-sci exam together.”

“What’s his name?”

“John.”

“John what?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” I frowned. “Do you think that’s a bad sign?”

“No, I don’t. I think it all sounds very promising.”

Promising
. I liked the sound of that. And after a few study sessions at the library with John, I’d started to think that maybe Hayden was right. Maybe it—whatever
it
was we were doing—was promising. Because while John wasn’t coming on hot and heavy, he also wasn’t plying me with cheap beer and telling me I looked
just
like Julia Roberts only
prettier
(a line, I’m sad to say, worked on me one night after a few too many tequila shots). We’d study at the same table, take coffee breaks together, and gradually got to know each other. I learned that he was planning to go to medical school after he graduated. That his father and mother were both tax lawyers and were in practice together in Boston. That he’d spent his childhood summers on Nantucket. That he had dated his high school sweetheart for four years but that they’d grown apart after going to different colleges and eventually broke up the summer after sophomore year.