No Strings Attached (8 page)

Mandy was hyperventilating. She could feel Mitch's disapproving look behind her back, as well as Joss's bemused one. She didn't care. “Really? Have you met any of his … like, other celebrities?”

Ali cocked her head. “I'm the worst person to ask. I hardly pay attention to TV, so I might not recognize anyone. But Jeremy and some of the others on our crew worked at a bunch of celebrity homes last year and got friendly with a lot of people in that business.”

Joss added, “Looks like Cove Landscaping is Cape Cod A-list. Turns out they made their reputation working for the Kennedys. Get this: Ali had to audition for the job by designing a mock topiary garden—shaped shrubs, the whole thing. Pretty cool, huh?”

Mitch couldn't restrain himself. “Hmmm, maybe you should have thought about growing vegetable canapés instead of passing them, Mandy.”

Mandy didn't hear him. She hadn't gotten beyond “TV star” and “Kennedys.” No matter how much blubber girl and her pet rat revolted her, Mandy made a resolution: She was about to become Alefiya's new best friend.

“Knock, knock. Anyone home?”

Mitch jumped, and was halfway out the kitchen before anyone could react. They heard him bolt through the living room and fling open the front screen door. “Leonora? Sweetheart! What a surprise!”

Joss knew this would be a good moment to make himself scarce. Mitch never let an opportunity pass when he could squeeze in an anecdote about Leonora. What were the odds he wasn't going to trot her in here, display her like some kind of trophy? Kind of like his own father paraded whatever number wife or girlfriend he was with, whenever he had an audience. Joss had no stomach for it. But he'd only managed a stride toward the archway leading to the living room when Mitch returned, beaming like a klieg light.

“Hey, everyone, this is Leonora, my girlfriend.”

The chick on his arm was a photocopy of every debutante Joss had ever seen. Tall, thin, pale, bleached-white teeth, every golden hair in place. He noted the diamond tennis bracelet, the pearl necklace and matching stud earrings, and
the Ralph Lauren outfit. Uh-huh. This one was no poseur. Mitch had found himself the real old-money deal, but could he hope to keep up with her?

Leonora was seriously uncomfortable. Her body language—arms folded over her chest, pasted-on smile, pleading eyes—all shouted, “Get me out of here.” She had not come to meet the housemates—that much, even Joss knew.

“Ah, the famous Leonora,” Mandy said, dripping with phony interest and extending her hand, “we meet at last. Mitch talks about you all the time. And I'm not exaggerating when I say ‘All. The. Time.'”

Leonora tossed her head slightly. “My sympathies. I can imagine how boring that must be.”

“You said it, sister. Anyway, I'm Mandy, and this is my friend Ali.” Joss shook his shaggy head. Mandy was a piece of work, all right. She'd done the fastest 180 he'd ever seen.

Ali advanced on Leonora and enveloped the startled girl in a bear hug, nearly crushing the bony thing. “I feel like we know you already! Mitch has the nicest things to say about you.”

Leonora extracted herself quickly, smoothing out her blouse and stifling the look of alarm. She stuttered, “That's, uh … so sweet. Thanks.”

“Would you like some coffee? Or bagels? There's a Cinnabon left too. Your boyfriend is the sweetest. He brought breakfast for all of us.” Ali motioned toward the spread on the kitchen counter.

“That's lovely,” Leonora said, “but I really can't stay. I just stopped by to talk to Mitch and—”

“This is Joss.” Mitch acted as if he hadn't heard his girlfriend at all. “Because of him, I'm not totally surrounded by gorgeous women. You should thank him.”

Leonora managed a tight little smile. That's when Joss knew for sure something Mitch didn't. Something was askew in lovey-dovey land. He felt a pang and hoped that whatever was wrong with Miss Debutante wouldn't result in hurting Mitch. He was proudly shuttling “Lee” into the living room, insisting she meet Harper and Katie.

Joss eyed the two girls left in the kitchen with him. Mandy was street-smart and, he'd bet, had the same instincts as he did about Leonora. Ali? Nah. He sighed. It was time to do something he'd never done in his entire life.

Clean a bathroom.

Harper was psyched that she'd brought her bike, since Cape
Cod was made for cyclists. Miles of paths, flat and hilly, laced the landscape, offering radically breathtaking scenery. She'd grown up on city streets, where the only nature was Central Park, if you didn't count the odd sprouts of weeds popping up between cracks in the sidewalk. Strange, but she found riding past the windswept sandy beaches and over grassy meadows a balm for her raw wounds.

She'd read somewhere that if you allow yourself to just empty your head, surrender to the grandeur of Mother Nature, your own problems seem smaller, your pain less intense.

Still waitin' to feel that way, she conceded.

Her aunt, twice widowed, believed in the opposite: that being frenetically busy, darting from one adventure to another,
helped, “Because pain can't hit a moving target,” she'd counseled.

Harper hunkered down and pedaled faster.

When she'd fled Boston for the summer, she hadn't been consciously thinking about anything beyond survival. 'Cause if she so much as glimpsed Luke, with or without his new squeeze, she would not be able to breathe. So she'd grabbed on to the first lifeboat she'd found: the Web posting that had led her here.

In a perverse way, Harper almost welcomed the bickering of the housemates, the carping of her campers; didn't even mind Katie as much as she made out. All the noise helped keep her mind off Luke. And where her mind went, maybe her heart would learn to follow.

Late Saturday afternoon, Harper was riding along one of her favorite daffodil-lined back roads into town. Her cell phone rang, and her stomach twisted. No way would it be Luke, she scolded herself. She had to stop hoping.

The caller ID read
MOM
.

Harper could swear her mother was a mind reader: Susan could see Harper and know what she was thinking, no matter how far apart they were.

“Where'd I catch you?” Susan asked. “On the beach somewhere?”

“Close. I'm biking into town to buy some stuff.” Her list included orange juice, to make up for the half gallon that Ali
had unintentionally taken from Katie. And the locksmith, so Mitch wouldn't find out that Ali had lost her keys—again.

Her mother wasn't big on small talk, anyway. Just a few minutes into the conversation, Susan launched into the real reason she'd called: Harper's heartbreak. “Keeping all that hurt bottled up inside won't help,” said her mom, “and running away won't solve it.”

Harper sighed. “So what will help, Mom? You're the expert.”

Her mother didn't flinch. “Opening up, talking about how you feel. And time. Getting over him will take time.”

How much time? Harper wanted to ask. How much time had it taken her mother to forgive her father, who'd said, “See ya” before Harper had been born?

When she'd first realized that all her friends had dads—even dads who didn't live with them—Harper had pleaded with her mom to get her one. For years, Susan had managed to change the subject artfully, to divert her attention, citing all the loving friends and relatives they did have.

Had her mother forgiven her father by that time?

Years later, when Harper was old enough to realize what any onlooker knew in an instant—that the sight of her with blond, blue-eyed Susan meant her father was likely African-American—she pushed harder to know the truth: “Who is he? Why can't I meet him?”

Reluctantly, Susan agreed to make contact. Days, weeks, then months went by—Harper had counted—with no reply, no news. Suspecting her mom hadn't made the call at all, Harper demanded to know her dad's identity.

When she was twelve, Susan told her his name.

Which only made Harper want to meet him more. He was famous! That made her important! And she, a street-smart New York kid, could do this without her mom's help. But Susan dissuaded her. “He was never a father to you,” she'd said sadly. “I think of him as a sperm donor, that's all. I'm glad I got you out of it.”

That's how she knew her mother, for all the time that had gone by, had never forgiven her father for walking out.

The following year, having bulked up on after-school specials and weepy TV movies, Harper had demanded, “Does he even know about me?”

Susan conceded that he did.

“Did he ever try to contact me?” Harper had probed, hoping maybe her father had wanted to but Susan had prevented him.

Susan had taken a deep breath. “Here's the thing, honey. At first, he tried to send money to help support you—which I'm sure his lawyer put him up to—but I refused it. I signed a waiver promising I'd never ask for anything, and never make it public. Because a scandal is exactly what he would've wanted—it would've given his bad-boy image some street cred. But I
wasn't playing. I was no one's victim, and you were no one's pawn. You were mine.”

Harper had learned all this just when her friends were beginning to date, just when boys at school had begun to notice her. It was a lucky crossroads. She, unlike so many of her teary, brokenhearted friends, knew from the jump not to trust boys, never to be vulnerable, never to open yourself up to that much hurt. She practiced what she believed.

Until Luke Clearwater came along.

“Guess what?” Harper said as she swung into the room she shared with Katie.

Her roommate was at the mirror—how new!—applying lip gloss. “Mmwhat?” Katie said while smushing her lips closed.

“You can float away on OJ. There's a ton in the fridge with your name.”

Not taking her eyes off the mirror, Katie frowned. “You're not helping her by cleaning up her messes. Even I stopped tossing away the half-eaten, fly-ridden fruit. I put them in her room instead.”

“How thoughtful,” Harper deadpanned. “I'm sure she appreciates that.”

“That's not the point. Alefiya's never going to learn to be responsible for herself unless something impacts her directly.”

This amused Harper. “Speaking of learning, how long do you think it'll take our Rebel Grllz to figure out your game?”

Katie bristled. “Since you've got it down, wanna clue me in?”

“That you could care less about them. That you're using them for their proximity to rich guys—and access to their parents' wallets.” Harper hopped onto her bed.

“Your point?” Katie shrugged, continuing to separate and lengthen her lashes with her NARS mascara.

“It's not right, it's not moral. The only thing you're teaching them is how to shop and be manipulative.”

“Who died and made you Oprah? The campers love me, and I'm not hurting anyone, so what's your issue?”

Seriously, Harper gave herself a mental jab: What
was
her issue? What did she care what Queen Katie did? It was true the campers worshipped Katie-The-Kick, from her silky platinum tresses to her cutesy designer sundresses. Katie was teaching them exactly what they wanted to learn, what most girls who came into contact with Katie wanted to know: how to be her.

As opposed to Harper's group, who were learning how to create the perfect protest poster, memorizing the ode to Barbie by Nerissa Nields (“If she were mortal, she would be/six foot five and a hundred and three,”) and learning classic songs like “War, What Is It Good For?” and John Lennon's “Revolution.”

Back to Katie, she mused. Why did the pocket-size princess need the money so badly? And why was she flinging herself at these random rich guys to get it? Didn't she have enough of both at home? This was the girl who, to Harper's amusement-slash-horror,
had brought her own toilet paper to the share house!
Like the community rolls weren't good enough to wipe her pampered butt. Katie tore from her own zillion-ply stash!

Harper sighed. Katie was crowding her head. She wandered out to the kitchen for a snack, where, unsurprisingly, more bickering was going on. Mitch was royally pissed at Ali, who apparently had left some chicken out to defrost—and had forgotten about it until the odor had stunk up the room. In related piss-off-iness, he was also questioning the number of guests she'd brought into the house. “What did you even know about that guy who was here last night? He looked homeless.”

Ali shrugged. “He needed a place to crash.”

“But this isn't a crash pad,” Mitch reminded her. “It's our home for the summer.”

“Exactly,” Joss had tossed in, though no one had asked him, “
our
home. Ali's one of us. She has rights too.”

Mitch looked betrayed. He was about to say something, but never got the chance. An eardrum-piercing, roof-raising series of shrieks shook the house. Mandy. She'd been on the toilet, apparently, when Clarence the ferret pushed the door
open with his nose and leaped into her bare lap. Now she was running to her room, screeching at the top of her lungs. Her capris were down around her ankles and, Harper envisioned, pee was running down her thigh.

It was time for a “moment of Zen.”

Armed with her journal and a big bath towel, Harper headed out. The narrow ribbon of sand backing onto the share house could barely be called a beach. It was grassy, and full of weeds. Harper came here often, especially at times like now, at dusk, when she had it all to herself.

She could hear the splashes of birds ducking and fishing in the surf, the rhythm of the waves lapping onto the shore. If the night happened to be clear, she could write by moonlight. That wouldn't be the case tonight. The sky had been tinny all day, the air thick with humidity. It'd rain soon. The gloom matched her mood.