Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later (35 page)

At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!

The over the top!

EPILOGUE

For All Sweet Valley Fans of Old

They all came, from far and wide, to the Wakefield wedding, people who hadn’t seen each other since high school at least ten years earlier. There were all kinds of whoops of delight, shrieks, hugs, and kisses along with some silent snubs, glares, and outright snaps.

Of course, it was at the Wakefields’ country club, whose rooms were transformed into gardens of orchids, roses, peonies, and long branches of nascent cherry blossoms, all in blush tones with barely a hint of pink. The tables were draped in blanc cassé–colored soft voile with borders of tiny live roses. The cocktail room was done in deep pink and light pink peonies interrupted only by tall, fragrant eucalyptus branches, their silver leaves shimmering in the candlelight.

The procession started with two little flower girls, Todd’s six-year-old cousins, flinging petals to the tune of “Sing” from
Sesame
Street
. They were followed by bridesmaids in soft cream-colored gowns. Elizabeth, the maid of honor, dressed in deep blush and carrying matching flowers, was escorted by Bruce Patman, a last-minute (only this morning) usher addition. Both looked radiant. They walked to a mélange of Beatles’ music. Next the bride’s mother, also in shades of cream highlighted with subtle threads of beige, followed by Todd, the groom, with his father in an electric blue tuxedo and his mother in a matching blue gown. Just a reminder that even in the most perfect wedding, there’s aggravation.

And for the pièce de résistance, Ned Wakefield with his daughter Jessica, the bride, on his arm. She was dressed in a strapless sequined gown. Together they walked to the strains of “All I Ask of You” from
The Phantom of the Opera
.

Jessica said she’d had enough with “Here Comes the Bride” the last time around.

It was a fun wedding. Not a whole lot different from any Sweet Valley High dance, which, as everyone knows, is not a whole lot different from real life.

Plus ça change, plus ça change pas
.

*   *   *

Bill Chase
drove up from San Diego. He’s still great-looking, with his signature long blond hair and blue eyes, very handsome in his tuxedo. In Sweet Valley High, he dated Dee Dee Gordon, but that ended when she went off to college in Maryland.

As a teenager Bill was an incredible swimmer and surfer. He broke all the records at Sweet Valley and went on to win All-State medals. Three years ago when he was competing in a triathlon in Australia he was attacked by a shark and lost his right leg below the knee. Today, he teaches surfing to handicapped teenagers and is involved in the Special Olympics. He married his longtime girlfriend, Lianne Kane, an almost six-foot-tall Sweet Valley basketball star whom he wooed away from Jim Regis.

After college Lianne played briefly in the national woman’s basketball league, but gave it up to travel with her husband, a sacrifice she has never let Bill forget.

Lianne spent too much of the wedding ogling the bridegroom, Todd, the ex-basketball player she always had a crush on, and flirting with her ex-boyfriend Jim. It turned out to be too much for Bill. They left before the cake.

Roger Collins,
known only as Mr. Collins the Robert Redford double, was there. Elizabeth was delighted to see her favorite high school English teacher and faculty adviser for
The Oracle,
the high school newspaper.

While he was teaching at Sweet Valley, he had a near-disastrous experience with Suzanne Devlin, who had been a houseguest of the Wakefields, and had accused him of sexual molestation. He was completely innocent.

After that incident, he felt too uncomfortable being a teacher, and he left to become a nonfiction writer. After four biographies, his latest effort is a memoir called
Lies,
about his teaching experiences. It’s his most successful book so far, hitting the bestseller list and staying there for fourteen weeks.

Mr. Collins hasn’t remarried and has lived with the same woman for the last eight years. He met her when she was a senior at Sweet Valley High, though not in his class. His son, Sam, now nineteen, is finishing his junior year at UCLA.

Of course,
Aaron Dallas
was there. He’s never going to love Jessica, but since she might be his sister-in-law (California laws permitting), he has settled into a fairly comfortable, if distant (a room’s length is usually best, but a table length will do) relationship with her.

All of his former classmates who still live in Sweet Valley are well aware of his new life, but the out-of-towners were knocked out when they learned he and Steven Wakefield have been living together for almost a year. They couldn’t stop talking about it. Indeed, word spread so fast through the seated audience that some of them forgot to look at the bride—and don’t think Jessica didn’t notice.

Lila Fowler,
still Jessica’s best friend (and sometimes worst enemy), looked fabulous despite the bridesmaid gown. She wore her blond-streaked brunette hair loose with a center part separating the cascading waves that framed her lovely face. Of course, she still had brown eyes, but now they were disguised as green thanks to new contacts. She and Ken Matthews have been separated (a most unusual separation that changes as the wind blows) for almost six months, and her date for the wedding was Jeffrey French.

Jeffrey French
moved to Sweet Valley from Oregon with his father and attended Sweet Valley High in his junior year. Lila and Enid Rollins competed for him, but it was Elizabeth who won. Lila’s not really wild about Jeffrey, but having lost him to Elizabeth all those years ago, coming with him to the wedding made things a little spicier. Added to that, flirting with Ken, her ex-husband, made it even more spicy. Just like all the high school proms.

Somewhere after the soup course, Lila lost interest in Jeffrey. Still unmarried and unattached and now a practicing dentist, Jeffrey had a grand time dancing with Dee Dee Gordon and showing her around the grounds for a good forty-five minutes. Her fiancé had to work that night.

Dee Dee Gordon,
as cute and petite as ever, and a talented working artist, dated Bill Chase in high school and still has a bit of a thing for him. She was able to sublimate it nicely with Jeffrey.

Charlie Markus,
a truly nice guy, came with his wife, Annie Whitman, aka Easy Annie, the girl he saved in high school by teaching her to have self-respect. Charlie writes for an automobile magazine and hates it. His ambition is to publish a novel. He’s written four, but so far he’s had no luck in selling them. He just finished his latest novel with Annie as the protagonist. She’s okay with it except for the title—
Easy Annie
.

Betsey Martin,
dear, good Tricia Martin’s older sister, was the traditional bad girl, a high school dropout who took drugs and slept around. She’s off drugs, has switched to alcohol, and can’t be counted on for anything important after five in the afternoon. She’s still sleeping around, but thanks to the martinis, most of the time she doesn’t remember with whom. Of course, she had a great time at the wedding, an inordinate amount of which she spent in the cloakroom.

Ken Matthews,
Todd’s best man, was captain and star quarterback of Sweet Valley High’s football team, the Gladiators. He’s still a football player, now for the NFL, but he hasn’t played this season due to a knee injury. He’s a local celebrity and in his off time, the host of a popular sports program. Even at the wedding he had fans bugging him for his autograph, another unwelcome distraction from the bride.

About two years ago he married Lila Fowler; six months ago, they separated. For no reason anyone can understand, he still likes her. A lot. Caroline Pearce, gossip supreme, says he has proposed to Lila again.

A. J. Morgan
was another of the bad boys from high school. Why are bad boys always so gorgeous? After high school he was in college for about a week, but decided it wasn’t for him and drifted. He’s ended up selling sneakers at the Nike store in the mall. Caroline Pearce has outrageous gossip about him and Dr. Enid Rollins that everyone finds hard to believe. But, of course, they do. Especially since Enid went out of her way to ignore A.J. at the wedding.

Roger Barrett Patman,
Bruce’s late-found cousin, is the illegitimate son of Bruce’s uncle. Not nearly as handsome as Bruce, Roger was a champion runner in high school and hasn’t gained a pound since. He looks pretty much today as he did then, boyish, with friendly gray eyes somewhat obscured by thick-framed glasses that keep slipping down his nose. He was so poor in high school that he couldn’t afford to take the regular bus. There were no school buses in his neighborhood. He had to walk—except he didn’t, he ran. That’s how he became a track star. At twenty-one, he inherited part of the Patman fortune. He now works as a producer in Hollywood and has had a few minor hits.

He brought his wife,
Zoe Jones,
a talented rock singer just starting her career. It promises to be a big one. She was the second celebrity at the wedding. All important parties need at least one, and the Wakefield wedding had two.

At one point, Zoe did a number from her new album that Jessica managed to miss, not being in the mood for that kind of competition.

Bruce Patman
was, as always, Bruce Patman, except today he was the happiest Bruce Patman anyone had ever seen. He could barely stop smiling. Even during the most serious part of the ceremony, he couldn’t keep the smile down.

He never left Elizabeth’s side and she didn’t leave his, either. Though they didn’t tell anyone, with a little help from Caroline Pearce, everyone knew that they were the hot new couple.

Most people were delighted because they loved Elizabeth and were thrilled to see her happy again. In the last few years they’d learned to love Bruce, too. He’d changed that much. Now they understood why.

Caroline Pearce
has put on a few pounds but essentially looks the same as she did in high school: nosy. Unfortunately, Caroline has had to battle cancer. She underwent a year of chemo and radiation and has been in remission for a while now. As the star real estate agent of Sweet Valley Heights, she has keys to everyone’s home. She uses them too often, but because she has so much information on everyone—and a potentially terminal illness—everyone tolerates her uninvited visits.

This was a wedding she was not about to miss, despite Jessica’s attack at Lila’s the week before. She needed the wedding for her gossip blog, which she puts out six days a week to the tune of five hundred hits a day. Tomorrow’s blog might be more fun than the wedding.

Enid Rollins
was Elizabeth’s best friend from grade school, but hasn’t been so for a long time. Enid looked cute as always (she hated that description) with her curly shoulder-length brown hair, green eyes, and a Betsey Johnson dress. She was always very intelligent and put those smarts to good use. The teenage years were a little hard on her. Too much drinking led to a dependency, but she licked that and became a doctor, a gynecologist. She keeps an office in downtown Sweet Valley right across from the very same Nike store in the mall where A.J. works, when he works.

One would think her background might have made her more understanding of vulnerability, but unfortunately, it hasn’t. In fact, Enid has turned arrogant and extremely right-wing. She is totally enthralled with her own accomplishments and has great plans for herself.

Except for the tiny problem of the affair with A. J. Morgan, sneaker salesman supreme. It’s secret because Enid is planning to run for city council, and an unsuccessful shoe salesman is not what she would consider the right partner. But she can’t keep away from him.

She refused to come to the wedding with A.J. and made him sit at another table—where he ended up having a great time with an adorable cousin of Todd’s from L.A.

Enid was beyond pissed off.

Nicky Shepard
was wild in high school. He drove an old Mustang and hung out at the Shady Lady. He was always pretty much a loner, smoking cigarettes before anyone else and into alcohol and drugs. Jessica, during one of her wild periods, considered running away to San Francisco with him.

About two years ago, he bottomed out. Now he lives in Utah teaching at an AA recovery center. Skinny as he was in high school, mostly from drugs, he’s close to roly-poly now, clean and content. He brought a date who is also a recovering alcoholic three years clean. They spent the wedding proselytizing anyone with a drink in hand. Everyone tried to escape.

Cara Walker,
ex-wife of Steven, came. A cheerleader at Sweet Valley High, she still has the figure, but she looks different now, more serious. Actually, she looks more like what she is now, a math student supporting herself by baking her way to a master’s degree.

Recently she began dating an accountant and CFO of a chain of diet centers, whom she brought to the wedding. She and Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield are on good terms. She forgave Steven and even speaks to Jessica now.