Something Borrowed
Read Something Borrowed Online
Authors: Catherine Hapka
Something Borrowed
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Dancing Queen
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Major Crush
BY JENNIFER ECHOLS
Do-Over
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Love Undercover
BY JO EDWARDS
Prom Crashers
BY ERIN DOWNING
Gettin' Lucky
BY MICOL OSTOW
The Boys Next Door
BY JENNIFER ECHOLS
In the Stars
BY STACIA DEUTSCH AND RHODY COHON
Crush du Jour
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The Secret Life of a Teenage Siren
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Love, Hollywood Style
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Available from Simon Pulse
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2008 by Catherine Hapka
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Ann Zeak
The text of this book was set in Garamond 3.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Simon Pulse edition April 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number 2007931605
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-5441-5
ISBN-10: 1-4169-5441-4
eISBN-13: 978-1-41659-691-2
One
I hate pink.
Pink is the color of chewed-up bubble gum. Of scar tissue. Of Pepto-Bismol. Totally gagworthy.
Not to mention that it totally clashes with my skin tone and somehow makes my strawberry-blond hair, which I usually love, look bright orange. As a bonus, it also brings out the mud in my hazel eyes.
“It's really not that bad, Ava,” my best friend, Teresa Sanchez, said. She sounded neither convinced nor convincing. In fact, I was pretty sure she'd been averting her eyes ever since I'd wriggled into the Pink Monstrosity.
I was standing in front of the mirror at Olde Main Line Bridal, staring at the
baby-butt-pink, puffy-skirted satin blob my older sister, Camille, was inflicting on me for her wedding. I was Camille's maid of honor, probably due to two key facts: (1) I'm her only sister, and (2) most of her friends realized she'd drive them crazy within seconds of launching Operation Perfect Wedding. Having lived with Camille for all of my seventeen and three-quarters years, I was completely aware of both facts. I'd also figured it was pretty much a given that Camille, who was always a bit on the needy side, would morph into the Bridezilla to end all Bridezillas.
However, the pink thing had taken me by surprise. After all, Camille had known
me
for those seventeen-plus years too. You'd think in all that time she would have noticed that while pink worked just fine on her, with her blond hair and blue eyes, it was a Hindenburg-level disaster on me.
Then again, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by Camille's complete lack of taste, considering that she had chosen Boring Bob as her husband-to-be. In fact she had dated Bob and only Bob since the dawn of time, aka middle school. Even back then, though I was just eight years old myself, I'd been
thoroughly unimpressed. The thirteen-year-old Bob had been one of those kids who got out of gym a lot because of his asthma and paid a more musically hip kid to make a cool mix CD for him to give to Camille on Valentine's Day. Now, some ten years later, Bob had grown up into a total suburban metrosexual, too busy perfecting his hair-gel technique in front of the mirror to actually go out and do anything. Well, unless you counted pasta at the Olive Garden as doing something. Which I certainly didn't.
Anyway, I didn't see the appeal. But I wouldn't expect Clueless Camille to understand. Despite being sisters, the two of us had never had much in common.
I twirled in front of the mirror, trying to convince myself that Teresa was right and the dress wasn't that bad. On the plus side, it did make me look much more hourglassy than I really was, thanks to the enormous pouffy sleeves and bubble-butt skirt. Maybe my cute face and outgoing personality would be enough to pull off the look. . . .
But no. The Pink Horror was just too strong. It was even starting to overcome my natural sense of optimism and
joie de vivre
.
“Did I ever mention that I hate pink?” I mumbled with a defeated sigh.
Teresa got up and came over to stand next to me. Her reflection in the mirror looked refreshingly nonpink. Her thick dark hair was pulled back from her gorgeous-without-a-speck-of-makeup (not even concealerâtalk about unfair!) high-cheekboned face. She was wearing denim cutoffs and a white fitted T-shirt with the faintest hint of faded green horse slobber on the sleeve. Even though I was standing on that little platform they always have in bridal shops, Teresa was still a bit taller than me.
“Look, Ava,” she said in her best listen-up voice. She'd developed it over her years of dealing with horses, and it worked pretty well on people, too. “Unless you decide to run away from home in the next two weeks, you're going to have to show up at that wedding in this dress. So you might as well suck it up and deal.”
That was just like Teresa. Despite her sultry foreign-film-star looks, she was definitely the no-nonsense, pragmatic type. I'd always appreciated that about her, especially since I tended toward the happy-go-lucky
and giddily impractical myself. Or so Teresa had always told me. And she was almost always right.
That didn't mean I always had to admit it. “You're just saying that because you won't have to witness my fashion catastrophe in person,” I pointed out. “I still don't know how you managed to make that happen.”
She smiled serenely. “Don't be silly. I signed up for that internship way before I found out Camille's wedding date.”
“Whatever. You're just going to have to deal with the fact that you're missing the social event of the season. People from Ardmore to Malvern are going to be talking about this wedding for eons, and you're going to miss it just for the chance to help a bunch of foreign horses improve their sex lives.”
Teresa kept smiling. She didn't seem too broken up about the idea of missing the wedding. In less than two weeks she would be leaving for a monthlong internship on a horse-breeding farm in Germany. I'd been kind of bummed when I'd first heard about the trip. Teresa was a year older than me and had just finished her first year at the University of Pennsylvania. Even though
Penn was just a few miles up the road in Philadelphia, it had been a big change to go from seeing her every day to only on the occasional weekend. I'd imagined us making up for lost time over the summer: lots of days hanging out together by my family's pool, at her barn, at the mall; lots of evenings double-dating with our respective boyfriends.
Not that I'd been particularly looking forward to spending more time with Teresa's boyfriend. Teresa and Jason had met at a college party, and I'd disapproved practically from the moment I'd met him six months ago. I still had no idea what she saw in him. I mean, sure, he was cute. Very cute, as a matter of fact: tall, sort of tousley brown hair, great butt. Plus he was smart, with a killer smile and a quick wit. For a second when I'd first met him, I'd been almost envious.
Almost.
See, it hadn't taken me long to realize that despite those surface charms, Jason was almost as Boring Bob-like as Bob himself, what with the perfect hair and the perfectly preppy clothes and that smug little smirk of his that always made me suspect he was secretly laughing at me. I wasn't
sure of his feelings toward the Olive Garden, but then again I wasn't sure about his feelings about much of anything. He barely talked about himself at all and seemed to have no particular interests other than watching basketball on TV and messing around with his computer. Like I said, boring.
Despite all that, I'd been more than willing to tolerate his dullness if it meant spending more time with Teresa this summer. Of course, now we had a month less than I'd planned thanks to that internship. When I realized she would be hopping the plane for Munich exactly one day before Camille's Big Day, my wistful disappointment changed to sheer envy. Unfortunately, it was far too late by then to sign up for that internship myselfânot to mention the fact that horses made me a little nervous, and they mostly seemed to feel the same way about me.