Rival (8 page)

I CAN'T REACH DAD
.

First I try the apartment in New York. Nobody answers. So I call L.A. No answer there, either. He must have started the San Francisco job already. I dial up his cell phone. It rings and rings. Finally, I leave a message on voice mail: “Hey, Daddy, it's Brooke. Could you call me as soon as you can? I've got that big contest coming up. The Blackmore. It's November fifteenth, and I need some help. You can call me back anytime you want. I'll be up late.”

I practice for an hour, then add on another half just to give him time to call back. The phone stays quiet. I check the ringer: on. Texts? None. Just to be safe, I open my laptop. His name doesn't show up on my IM screen, so I get myself some water to sip while I write him an email. It ends up being longer than I'd planned. I go back through and delete more than half. I'll tell him all
the details when we talk.

Then I wait. For more than fourteen hours.

“Hey, Brooke.”

A plate of pad thai comes into focus in front of me. Somehow I managed to sleepwalk through the entire next morning at school, plus the walk to the Chinese restaurant where everybody hangs out over lunch. I have a vague memory of Chloe jabbering about Homecoming. But I must have lost track somewhere between “parade floats” and “spa treatments for the entire court.”

I shove some cold, rubbery noodles into my mouth, trying not to elbow Dina in the process. Our table is packed and she's pretty much sitting right on top of me while Chloe's knees play bumper cars with mine from across the table.

“I'm eating,” I say to Chloe. It's an all-purpose response that's supposed to buy time while I figure out what topic we're on now. But Chloe just looks at me weird.

“I didn't say anything,” she says. “It was your visitor here.”

She points over my shoulder and I turn to see Laura Lindner standing there, hugging her purse and looking nervous as hell.

“Hey, Brooke,” Laura repeats.

“Hey…” I swallow and stare. I have no idea what she's doing here. She looks like she's still figuring it out, too.

“So I've never been to this place,” Laura says with a choked-sounding laugh. “Which is weird since it's so close to school. Everybody says such great things about the food, though. I thought I'd give it a try….”

I decide to put her out of her misery. Everybody knows the food here sucks.

“Do you want to sit with us?”

“Really?” She hugs her purse tighter. A few feet over, John Moorehouse slides up a chair along with Bud Dawes and two other football players. He catches my eye and waves. Laura looks like she's about to pee her pants. Meanwhile Chloe is squinting at me over her Diet Coke like,
What the hell?

“Hey, Chlo,” I say. “This is Laura. We're in choir together.”

“You and I were in the same Spanish class last year,” Laura tells Chloe. “We did that skit about ordering dinner at the world's worst restaurant? Tim McNamara pretended like he was throwing up and dumped a jar of salsa all over the table.”

“Oh right.” Chloe stirs her drink with her straw and smiles. “I knew you reminded me of something.”

“And how flattering,” adds Dina. “It's vomit.”

The whole table goes quiet. Laura's smile starts to wobble, and I feel Chloe kick Dina under the table. “Don't mind Dina,” Chloe says. “She's a little bit challenged in
the good manners department.”

“Don't you want to get your food?” I ask.

And I have to hand it to Laura, she recovers quick. “Right!” she says, smiling full-on again. “Be right back.”

Laura hurries over to the food counter. Chloe looks over at Dina, and they both start giggling. “Oh dear…,” says Chloe, as if what just happened is the most tragic thing she's ever seen.

“Don't,” I tell her.

“What?” she says.

“Seriously,” I hiss. I glance around the table at Dina, Angela, Jenna, and Madison, and I whisper, “Be nice.”

“Oh whatever, Brooke. I'm not going to bite her.”

When Laura returns to the table with a plate of fried rice, we scoot our chairs over to make room. Then Chloe turns with a fascinated expression that manages to look almost genuine.

“So! Laura! You've got to tell us: Who's hot and who's not over in the music wing?”

 

On our way back to school, John catches up with me.

“I saw your Homecoming posters,” he says. “Dress a needy choirgirl. That's a good one.”

“Thanks.” My heart starts thudding, so hard I'm afraid I'll puke up my pad thai. “I actually thought it up myself.”

I walk a little straighter, peeking around to see if anybody is looking. But Chloe and Dina and Laura are up ahead, and Laura's giving Chloe a run for her money in the marathon talking department.

As we get up to the building, we can hear the first bell ringing. John runs to the door and holds it open for me. Inside, the hallway is crowded so we have to press in close. Even though we're pushing it on time, I slow down and switch my backpack to my other shoulder so he can get even closer.

“Where you headed?” he asks.

“Choir.”

“Mind if I walk you?”

This is it!
I shake my head. My heart does an extra-hard thump.

“So I wanted to ask you something.”

I was right. He's going to ask me to Homecoming. But the final bell is ringing. And as we turn into the music wing, I see the door to the choir room shut. Crap. Anderson hates it when people are late.

And
I
am hating myself right now. If I weren't so paranoid about what my choir director thinks, I'd be savoring every detail of this moment. I stop walking and turn my back to the door.

There. I can focus now.

“What's up?”

“I'm trying for a football scholarship at U of M,” he says. “Going up there in a month, and I needed someplace to stay. Do you think Bill and Brice would let me shack up with them for a day or two?”

“Um…,” I say while my brain rushes to process the disconnect between what I thought he was going to say and what he's actually said.
Crap,
goes the little voice inside my brain.

But then another little voice tells me maybe it's not that bad. It isn't very romantic asking somebody to Homecoming when you're rushing to get to class on time. John's probably waiting for a more private opportunity.

“I don't think they'll care,” I say. “I'll call tonight and ask.”

“Great,” he says, flashing those amazing green eyes. “We'll talk later?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Later.”

He takes off and I rush into the choir room. “Nice of you to join us, Brooke,” Anderson shouts while I run up the risers to my spot.

I take a second to get myself into singing mode. Try to forget about John and concentrate on my voice. I open my mouth for the first scale and nothing comes out. I clear my throat. Try again. Better, but it's still hard to get any volume. I must be getting hoarse.

Great.

Kathryn, on the other hand, sounds really good. And suddenly I've got a whole new reason to be pissed at myself. What am I doing worrying about Homecoming when I should be focusing on the Blackmore? I've got to quit wasting energy on things that don't matter and practice more. After everything that's happened between us, I can't let Kathryn win. If I have to watch somebody else take first place, I could almost stand it. Almost. As long as that other person isn't her.

BEFORE JUNIOR YEAR, I ALWAYS
assumed that the Cinderella stories were a fantasy. Nobody in the real world ever woke up one morning to find themselves part of the most powerful crowd at school. The fabulous people were born to their fabulous lives; mousy nobodies like me had their place, and though the two worlds might sometimes overlap, crossing over was pretty much impossible.

Yet that's what I'd managed to do, and it didn't take a magic spell or even much of an effort on my part; all it took was one night at Bud Dawes's house. Before Bud's party, it was as if I only really existed as a shadow, visible to a handful of people. Then Chloe and Dina turned on a light and suddenly everyone could see me; most amazing of all was that they seemed to like what they saw. People started saying hello to me in the hallways and in class, and I had friends—more than
I'd ever had before.

I also had a boyfriend—sort of.

“Lucky girl,” purred Dina as we watched Miles Monaghan's backside move away from us across the commons. The ten-minute break between second and third hour had just started, and Miles had grabbed me as I headed to my locker after Intermediate French. Dina and Chloe came up just as he was asking me to the movies for Saturday.

“Ugh, you're
so
lucky,” said Chloe. She motioned for me to sit next to her on the bench that, I now knew, was reserved for A-listers. “And I happen to know Miles is on the Senior Keg organizing team. Do you think you could get us an invite?”

I couldn't believe it; was Chloe Romelli really asking
me
for social favors? Miles and I had been dating for two weeks, ever since the party, and I'd found that seeing him definitely had its perks. He was handsome and smart, plus he treated me like I was the only person in the room. The only problem was that he also had a habit of treating other people like
they
were the only ones in the room, right in front of me. During our first date, a beautiful Asian girl came up behind him in the restaurant and rested her hands on his shoulders. He put his hands over hers and pulled her toward our table so that her cheek came to rest against his.

“Mei,” he murmured. “Where have you been? You don't call me anymore.”

The girl gave me the kind of glance I imagined one would give the eight-year-old child of a parent's coworker. “Fall break, silly,” she replied. “I've been in Maryland. Plus, you know, I have a life.”

Miles tugged on one of the girl's arms, coaxing her around so that she had to crouch beside him. “Don't disappear like that again,” he said, gazing deep into her eyes. “You'll break my heart.”

“I'd worry about it,” she said, “if I thought you actually had a heart.” And then she slinked back to a table of sophisticated-looking older girls.

“That was Mei,” Miles told me as he tucked back into his pasta. “She's a first-year at Baldwin. I met her at the park. We were both feeding the ducks.”

“She looks…” I searched for the appropriate word. “Nice.”

He nodded, leaned across the table, and fixed me with one of his
it's only you and me here
gazes. “She
is
nice,” he said. “She's pretty incredible, actually.”

So were we together, or were we just going on a few dates? I needed to talk about it with somebody, but Brooke had been getting to choir late and ducking out early so we couldn't talk, and rushing off the phone with a “sorry, gotta go,” whenever I called. When I tried
to catch up with her after school she was always holed up in a practice room until, finally, I gave up and went home by myself.

Matt, meanwhile, told me point-blank that he wouldn't be giving advice. “Miles Monaghan is a player,” he'd said. “If you want to mess with a guy like that, you're on your own.”

That didn't stop him from checking up on me, though.

“Don't look now,” Chloe said after Miles had been swallowed up by the midmorning crush. “I think you're being stalked.”

I turned to see what she meant and there was Matt, standing across the commons, watching us. I motioned for him to come over; he shook his head.

“That's Matt McWalter,” I said. “You should meet him.”

Dina wrinkled her nose. “I think I know him. He's in my Civics class.”

“Right!” I said. “He's got Civics fourth period.”

“He's a total geek. Seriously. One time he went off on this whole long rant about how the United States is like that eyeball guy from
Lord of the Rings
and how all the oppressed people are going to rise up and take away our power someday.”

I cringed, able to imagine just what Matt had sounded like. I prayed he hadn't spoken Elvish in front of Dina.

“Lord of the Rings?”
laughed Chloe. “Somebody actually
likes Lord of the Rings
? I only sat through it for the hot guys.” My confidence started to crumble as she peered closer at Matt, as if studying a strange mole on somebody's skin. “Are you guys friends?” she said. “Really?”

“No.” My cheeks burned; it was awful but I didn't want Chloe to think I was weird, too. “We're not
friends
friends. We live in the same neighborhood. Our parents used to make us play together. That's all.”

Matt appeared to change his mind just then, deciding he would come over after all. As he started toward us, Chloe closed her fingers around my arm, and with one smooth, amazingly discreet motion, she pulled me off the bench and whisked me away down the hall.

“Don't take this the wrong way,” she said, “but I think you've outgrown the Hobbit.”

I looked back over my shoulder as we went around the corner, just in time to see Matt standing in the middle of the commons, alone.

 

That night I went to his house, bringing my mother's famous black forest brownies as a peace offering, and instead of sharing the frosting like we usually would, we had what felt oddly like a breakup.

“I get it,” he told me as he put the plate of uneaten
sweets into the refrigerator. “I don't like it, but I get it.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Not really. But…do you want the truth here?”

“Of course,” I replied.

“I could have told you it would end up like this. I pretty much saw it coming the first time you ever mentioned Brooke Dempsey to me.”

Brooke. Her friendship was the spark for everything that had happened, yet I saw less and less of her as the days went by. On Friday, Miles didn't meet me in the commons, and when I tracked him down at lunch to ask whether he'd been able to get Chloe and Dina on the Senior Keg guest list, he told me he'd have to call me about it in the kind of voice that lets a person know their plans might be falling through. Suddenly, I felt unsure of everything. So I planted myself outside of Brooke's locker after school.

Five minutes stretched into fifteen before I finally saw her. She saw me, too, and for a split second it looked as if she was considering going the other direction.

“Hey,” I said when she finally walked up and started her combination. “What are you doing?”

“Opening my locker,” she replied, twisting the dial so violently that it spun past her target and she had to begin again.

“I mean what are you doing today?” I pressed. “After
you open your locker?”

“Going home to practice. I'm late for my ride.”

“Do you want to go for coffee instead?”

“Don't you have plans with Miles?”

I let out a sharp breath; the sting of his brush-off was still fresh.

“I'm not with Miles,” I told her. “At least I don't think I am.”

She didn't answer. She tossed a notebook into her locker and pulled out her jacket, scanning the hallway as she put it on.

“Besides,” I went on, “we're supposed to memorize that Poulenc piece for State. I thought we could do it together.”

To my relief, she softened when I brought up music. “I heard you screw it up today,” she said. “Anderson'll kill you if you do it again.”

“See, I'm admitting I need help. Help!” I clasped my hands together and worked my face into a desperate frown.

She slammed her locker door shut. “Fine. We'll work on it at my place.”

Brooke's house was cold and still when we arrived, just like it always was when I went over there. Even though I'd been home with her dozens of times, I still found the place amazing, with the foyer so big it actually
echoed and the rooms filled with antiques and fine art. As we went up the front staircase to her room, I peered over the banister to see her brother Bill grab a basket of mail off the foyer table.

“Anything good?” Brooke shouted down to him.

“Doesn't look like it,” he shouted back.

We were sitting side by side at her piano, working out Poulenc's difficult rhythms, when he snuck in behind us to drop an envelope onto the music stand. It was addressed to Brooke.

“When were you going to give this to me?” she said, snatching it up.

“It got stuck to the Beer of the Month Club catalog,” Bill said. “Sue me.”

She waited for him to leave before opening the envelope. “It's from my dad,” she told me, and handed me the card inside. It was gorgeous, printed on handmade paper with a spare Japanese theme. Folded into it were snapshots of two men on a tropical beach.

“See, here he is,” Brooke said, pointing to the taller man—the one who had her nose. The man standing next to him was suntanned with a big, toothy smile; I had the strange sense that I'd seen him someplace before.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I remembered the movie Matt and I had rented a month earlier. “Is that…?”

“Yeah,” she replied.

“Your dad is with him? Really?”

“Yeah.”

I looked more closely at the picture, at the crow's-feet around Jake Jaspers's eyes and the graying temples I'd never noticed in paparazzi shots. “I thought he was with Alexis McCoy.”

“That's just an arrangement,” said Brooke. “Alexis is a coke fiend and a kleptomaniac. She needs to keep her image clean, so she goes to premieres with Jake. His publicist is a real cobra. If reporters ask too many questions they get cut off from him
and
all the rest of her clients. So everybody just takes everything at face value. Jake and Alexis are together. Nobody says anything different, and everybody stays happy.”

I thought about Matt, about what he would say if he knew. The movie we had rented was called
Mephistopheles
, and it starred Jake Jaspers as a futuristic fallen angel who could grant people's deepest wishes. Matt had liked it so much he'd raced online to get more information, a sure sign he was about to join a new fandom.

“Have you met him?” I asked.

“Of course,” Brooke said. “Jake and Dad have been together for, like, ten years now.”

“What's he like?”

“Totally different from how he acts in public. At premieres and stuff he's this big action hero type. When
you see him in person he's this totally quiet househusband.”

I squinted at the photograph, trying to picture it. “Does he ever come here—to Lake Champion?”

“Not much. Can you imagine?”

I couldn't. That Jake Jaspers had ever been in our town was unfathomable to me; that Brooke actually knew somebody like him was even more amazing. As if to prove her connection, she moved to her desk, opened a photo file on her laptop, and started clicking through the slide show. There were photos of Jake and her dad in London, photos of them relaxing in what appeared to be a posh apartment, photos of them looking like any other couple walking their dogs on a chilly Saturday in the park.

“Hm…,” I said as the images went by. “He looks heavier than in his movies.”

“He uses a body double most of the time.”

Another tropical picture came up. In this one, Jake Jaspers and her dad looked like they were standing at the edge of a giant volcano.

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“I think the Bahamas. Dad just closed a show, and they start shooting the
Mephistopheles
sequel in Romania next month. They wanted a break before they have to go out there.”

“He didn't come visit you?”

“No.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Yeah, but we talk all the time.” She put her hand to the pendant around her neck, the one she never seemed to take off. “He used to call me his Little Star. Pretty stupid, huh?”

“No, it's sweet,” I told her. “Your dad seems really cool.”

She went back to the pictures, her face glowing in the light of the computer screen.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, clicking. “It's funny, but I was going to say the same thing about your dad.”

“You're kidding,” I groaned. “My dad sits around the house doing Sudoku and updating his résumé. His biggest thrill is when I get my name in the paper for being on the honor roll. ‘Cool' is the last word I would ever use to describe my dad.”

The slide show of her father and Jake ended, giving way to images of Brooke and her friends from parties past. Click, click, click…the photos went by but Brooke stayed silent—for so long that I finally said, “Are you sure you're okay? Do you feel sick or something?”

“No,” she murmured. “Maybe just a little lonely.”

I let out a tiny laugh; I couldn't help it. “How can you
be lonely when so many people love you?”

She shrugged, and in the light of the screen I thought she looked sad, but I still didn't believe her. Sitting there in her big, beautiful house watching her beautiful life click by, I felt like I would gladly trade everything I had for just a fraction of what Brooke possessed—loneliness and all.