Chapter 12

Nothing happened.

I think it almost did. I had my eyes closed, so I didn’t see anything, and I was breathing hard and that sort of blocked out all the sound, but everything else intensified. I could sense his lips hovering over mine, feel his warm breath against my face, the heat from his body encircling me, his thumb lightly rubbing my cheek.

And that was when Ella unlocked the recording studio door.

“Oh!” she said. I pulled back so fast I worried I might get whiplash. “Oh!” she said again, looking totally confused and embarrassed. “I came to let you out.”

“Thanks,” Jake said smoothly, getting to his feet. I stood up too, worried about my ability to stay upright. I leaned against the counter behind me for stability. I tried to catch my breath and gulped several times just to get enough fresh air. I noticed my hands were shaking, so I hid them inside the sleeves of Jake’s jacket.

“The staff in the front office said we have to go. We were supposed to be done half an hour ago,” Ella explained. “Maybe we can do it tomorrow morning before school?”

“Sure,” Jake replied. He didn’t seem weird or awkward or anything. I knew I’d never be able to contribute to this conversation because all I kept thinking was, Oh my Buddha, Jake Kingston almost kissed me! Kissed me!

“I’ll see you guys tomorrow, then,” Jake said as he picked his backpack up off the floor and slung it over one shoulder.

Ella said goodbye. I stood there like a French mime.

“Hey, before I forget, Mercedes gave this to me.” Jake opened his bag and pulled out my sketchbook.

My freaking sketchbook.

“I thought you’d probably like to have it back.”

The earlier panic attack had absolutely nothing on the full-fledged hysteria I now felt. My head started to spin, and I saw little stars in my peripheral vision. I couldn’t catch my breath.

My sketchbook full of Jake Kingston pictures. Jake had my sketchbook! I had never felt so completely humiliated and mortified in my entire life.

He was holding it out to me, and I finally realized how much time had passed and that I was making everything worse, so I took it from him. I held it against my chest, wrapping my arms around it, using it like a shield. As if it could protect me from what had just happened.

Maybe he hadn’t looked inside, I thought frantically. Maybe he recognized it from our poker game and was just being kind and wanted to return it to me.

“Your pictures are really good. I still think you should show them to your parents.”

Okay, so he had possibly already looked at the pictures. But maybe he wouldn’t say anything to me even if he had looked inside. Maybe we could just go on like none of this had happened and pretend like I wasn’t a completely psycho stalker. Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .

All the maybes went poof when he said, “I don’t think you got my nose right, though.” He was teasing me. I could hear it in his voice. I closed my eyes the way I had when I was a kid to pretend that if I couldn’t see anyone else, they couldn’t see me either. I wanted to disappear.

Utter, total, shattering humiliation.

My stomach churned with anxiety. I could only imagine what he thought of me. Too many horrifying scenarios ran through my mind. He just stood there, like he expected me to say something. Maybe he wanted me to explain myself. But in what reality could I say, “The thing is, Jake, that I’m in love with you and have been since we were nine years old and all this time I’ve spent with you has made me fall even more madly in love with you and so I draw lots of pictures of you because you’re beautiful and fun to draw and now I hope you’ll be cool about all this and that I didn’t scare you off or freak you out by drawing my secret pictures of you and we can go to the masquerade ball together and live happily ever after. What do you say?”

“So we have to get going. Mattie’s dad is expecting us at home.” I had never loved Ella more than I did in that moment. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the hallway.

I heard Jake say, “Later.”

I kept my head down and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Ella steered me into the nearest girls’ bathroom.

“What just happened? Why was Jake talking about getting his nose right?”

“The pictures,” was all I could say. Ella looked at my sketchbook and quickly figured out that her answers would be there. She tried to pull it out of my hands, but I had a full-on death grip.

“Tilly, let it go. Let me see.”

I shook my head. Ella started prying my fingers off, one at a time, and got the sketchbook free.

She opened it and gasped. She quickly flipped through the pictures until she got to the end of the Jake section.

“Oh, Tilly.” The sympathy in her eyes and voice was almost more than I could handle. I leaned against the bathroom wall and slid against it until I landed with a loud thump on the dirty floor. I didn’t even care. I put my head in my hands. I was getting a killer stress headache. My throat ached with unshed tears.

I thought of all the embarrassing things that had happened to me over the years. Freshman year my shoes slipped in the courtyard, and I landed flat on my butt in front of a hundred people. In eighth grade I really had to pee and didn’t quite make it to the bathroom. In sixth grade I accidentally and loudly passed gas in the middle of a test, when the room was dead silent. I had a long history of humiliating experiences, but every single one of them paled in comparison to the way I felt now.

“You have to see the bright side of this. I don’t think he cared.”

I looked up at her, but my eyes were so watery that I couldn’t see her. I had to blink several times to clear them up.

“He must think I’m a total nutjob.”

Ella sat down on the floor next to me, which was impressive given her strong aversion to germs and general dirtiness, and put her arm around my shoulder. My shoulders stiffened in response. I didn’t normally like being touched. Ella didn’t seem to notice. “If he thought you were a nutjob he wouldn’t have almost kissed you.”

“He didn’t almost . . .”

“Yes, he did.” Ella cut me off firmly. “I thought something like that might happen if you two could spend some time alone. That’s why I pretended not to have a working key.”

My mouth dropped open in shock. “You had a key the whole time? You did this on purpose?”

“Not the sketchbook part, but the rest of it, yes.”

Ella rested her head on my shoulder, and it felt nice to be comforted. I thought about what Jake had said, about how I rejected people before they could reject me. Ella wouldn’t reject me. She was here with me, caring about me. Even when I had resented her or felt jealous of her, she hadn’t changed. She still loved me and wanted a relationship with me. I let myself relax into her hug.

I had also started to doubt my own instincts because while it had seemed like Jake would kiss me, and despite what Ella thought, he hadn’t, and then my world had exploded with a nuclear mortification bomb.

“So any ideas about what we’re going to do with Mercedes?”

Jake had told me that Mercedes had given him the book. I had been so focused on the fact that he had the sketchbook that I’d completely blanked the part where that horrible wench had given it to him. She must have stolen it in study hall. Such a foul and heinous thing to do that I couldn’t even think of something that would make Mercedes understand how bad she had made me feel.

“I’m guessing breaking into her house and burning all of her clothes on the lawn is out of the question?”

Ella nodded and said, “Personally, I think you don’t have to worry about this. Mercedes has always wanted Jake. She’s only with Scott to be close to Jake.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Of course not. But I could tell. So the absolute best revenge you could have on her is to be with Jake. But in order for that to happen, you have to put this behind you. Pretend like it’s no big deal. Don’t bring it up, and if he does, just act like it’s nothing.”

She made sense. It was logical, even. But logic and I were not currently on speaking terms. I wasn’t sure I could do it. “I don’t think I can ever face him again. How can I get into a car with him tomorrow morning and not obsess about this?”

“That’s easy enough.” She pulled out her phone and typed something quickly before putting it back in her purse. “There. I texted Jake to tell him I’m borrowing your dad’s car and driving you tomorrow and we’d see him at school.”

“I’m going to see him eventually. I will have to talk to him. We’re not done with our project for English yet.” I held my arms straight out. “I’m still wearing his letterman’s jacket!”

She put both of her hands on my shoulders and turned me toward her. “You listen to me, Tilly Lowe. You are one of the strongest people I know. You will be fine. You will act like this is all just silly. And above all, you will never, ever let stupid Mercedes Bentley know how much this affected you. Got it?”

Wow, so much for the meek and demure Ella. “Got it.”

“Now you’re going to get up off this disgusting bathroom floor and come home with me and help me decide what to wear tonight because I have a kind-of-date with Trent.”

I had totally forgotten about her Pepperdine wannabe poetry reading with Trent. I had been so focused on my drama that I wasn’t being a very good sister to her despite all the things she kept doing for me.

And she was right. I was stronger than this. I would get up off that floor, and I would pretend none of this bothered me. I definitely didn’t want to give Mercedes the satisfaction of knowing she’d hurt me.

And things had been going so well with Jake. I couldn’t freak out and ignore him and give in to my girl drama. I would be confident and fine, no matter how I felt inside.

Starting now.

I gave Ella a smile. “Sounds good. Let’s go home and get you ready for that date.”

I figured at least one of us should be happy.

* * *

I lay on Ella’s bed. It looked like her closet had thrown up all over her room. Or like the local Forever 21 and Charlotte Russe stores had brought over their entire inventories and tossed them on Ella’s floor. Normally I would have been doodling in my sketchbook, but I couldn’t imagine doing that again in the foreseeable future. Instead I had my phone out and was playing Angry Birds.

I didn’t know why she wanted my opinion. Everything, and I mean everything, she put on looked amazing. Like she was about to walk the runway for Ralph Lauren. I told her that, but she didn’t believe me.

“Not this one either. Why is everything I own so hideous?”

I realized that Ella was nervous. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her nervous about anything before, and it was kind of ridiculous. I mean, it was just Trent.

I shook my head at her irrational behavior. Until the proverbial light bulb went off in my head and I saw what I had missed.

Ella liked Trent. Really liked him. I remembered our conversation from last week when she’d told me that she liked someone who was not Jake.

“Is Trent the guy you were interested in?”

She had been holding a dress up against herself in the mirror, and she froze, her reflection staring at me. Suddenly everything felt serious and ominous.

Finally she said, “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that?”

Ella let the dress fall to the floor with the others and came over to sit on the foot of her bed. She looked down at her hands while she fiddled with her charm bracelet. “I never said anything because I thought you guys were into each other, and I didn’t want to be that girl.” She sounded so earnest and so apologetic.

“The girl who’s interested in her stepsister’s boyfriend?” I asked her sarcastically before she started giggling about the irony of the entire thing.

Well, if nothing else, I guess it gave us something in common. “Even if Trent had been my boyfriend, I’m pretty sure I would have traded him for Jake in a New York minute.”

That made Ella laugh more and broke the uneasy tension. She jumped off the bed to go back to finding something to wear.

I started up a new game and said, “You know, Trent’s not going to care what you’re wearing. He’s not like that.”

Ella emerged from her closet with another potential outfit. “You’re right. That’s one of the things I think I like best about him. I always feel comfortable with him. I get to just be me and not have to worry about how I look or what I say. I am being so dumb.”

Without even looking in the mirror, Ella put on the pink pleated skirt she had in her hands and looked around for a matching top. I remembered that day in the family room when I had seen them together on the couch, how Ella had had her hair up in a bun with her glasses on and her pink Juicy sweats. I’d never seen her look that way when she spent time with Jake.

I had put a ban on all internal thoughts about Jake, but that one had just slid in. Which, predictably, led me to more thoughts of Jake. And how I’d never honestly worried about how I looked around him. I accepted the fact that I looked the way I looked, and while I might have stressed a little over my outfit for that first car ride, I’d never given it a second thought since. Jake had the same effect on me that Trent had on Ella.

I wanted it to mean something, even if it didn’t.

My dad called for Ella. She yelled back that she was coming.

“Did you hear the doorbell?” she asked in a panicked voice.

“Relax, you’ll be fine. He’s not here yet.”

Ella leaned against her closet door frame, staying there for a minute before she picked out her shoes. “I just really like him, you know?”

Yeah, I did know.

“I’d go with the glass slippers,” I said before heading off to the kitchen to find something to eat. My dad sat at the kitchen table holding an envelope in his hands.

“Where’s Ella?”

Before I could reply, Ella said in an out-of-breath voice, “I’m here. What’s up?” She went over to the fridge to pull out a bottle of water.

“I have something for you.” I saw the twinkle in my dad’s eye, heard the pride in his voice. Whatever it was, this was big. He held the envelope up in the air. “It’s from UCLA.”

That was Ella’s dream school. She grabbed the refrigerator handle so hard, her knuckles went white. “It’s a small envelope. That means no,” she said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

My dad pushed his chair back and walked over to her. “That’s just a myth. Open it.”

She kept staring at the envelope like he was offering her an eel or something. (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate eels? Slippery, slimy, scary-looking things.)

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“I’ll open it for you then.” My dad had like no boundaries. “Dear Ms. Christensen . . .”

I held my breath. Ella looked like she might faint. He just stood there, scanning the rest of the letter.

“Read it out loud!” I protested.

A big grin broke out on his face. “Congratulations! It is our pleasure to offer you admission to UCLA for the fall quarter.”

He didn’t get to finish the rest of the letter because Ella started shrieking and jumping up and down, and then I was screaming and jumping up and down while holding her hands, and for that moment everything was right in the world.

Then we hugged my dad, who neither jumped nor screamed.

“I am so proud of you,” he said as he hugged both of us. “So how much?”

Ella let go. “What?”

Dad tossed the letter and envelope on the table and went to get himself a celebratory drink. Which, because he was on some Hollywood juice cleanse, was some disgusting concoction of grass, carrots, bark, and a fruit I couldn’t even identify. “The tuition. I set up an account in your name for tuition, books, dorms, and whatever other incidentals you need. I just need to make certain we’ve got enough in there. It’s been a few years since I was at UCLA.”

“You don’t have to pay for my college, Bill. I am so grateful to you for taking me in, and I’ve tried my best to contribute, but you’re not responsible for me.”

“Of course I am,” he said in a tone that made it sound like she’d just said something insane. “You’re my daughter.”

“Stepdaughter,” she quietly responded.

He stopped putting the ingredients into the blender and turned to look at her. “Does that matter to you?”

Ella said nothing, but I could see the way she trembled, saw her blinking quickly. I knew what that meant. I went over and held her hand. She gripped me tightly. Dad walked over and took her other hand.

“Because it never mattered to me. You’re my daughter just as much as Tilly is. I’ve been your dad since you were two years old. That’s never going to change. I probably don’t tell you enough, but I love you. Because no matter how grown up you get, you’re always going to be my little girl.”

A flood of tears streamed down Ella’s face as he pulled her into a hug. He rocked her gently, trying to shush her crying. She said something, but she was crying so hard I couldn’t tell what it was. Feeling like an intruder, I tried to tiptoe out of the kitchen.

I felt guilty that I hadn’t said anything earlier to my dad about Ella’s crazy ideas involving cleaning the house and having a job and paying her own way, but in my defense, I was my father’s daughter and was sometimes easily distracted.

“I don’t think so,” my dad said as he tugged on my arm and pulled me to him. “I love you too, you know.”

Gah, he was such a sentimental sap.

But I let him hug me anyway.

The lovefest came to an end when the doorbell rang.

Ella snapped her head back. “That’s Trent! I must look like a mess!”

“I’ll answer the door and keep him company while you finish getting ready,” I told her.

She hugged me again, and I decided I was tired of getting hugged that day. My grouchiness lifted, though, when Ella whispered into my ear, “This is like the best day ever.”

And for once I didn’t envy her.

I let Trent in, and we hung out in the living room. He seemed nervous and distracted just like Ella had been. He obviously liked her back. He was having a hard time paying attention to what I said. I decided to mess with him.

“So once the aliens let me go, I decided to make a documentary about my abduction.”

“That’s great,” he said. “Wait, what?”

Before I could mock him, Ella entered the room. Trent jumped to his feet and grinned at her. “You look, uh, nice.”

She looked like a freaking model. Nice was kind of an understatement.

A small pang of jealousy crept up on me. They both looked so happy. They weren’t playing any games or pretending like anything else was going on. They just liked each other, and they were going to go out and probably have a fantastic time with those whiny college brats.

“Well, you two have fun.”

But Ella being Ella, she stopped me before I left the room. “Are you going to be okay?”

So selfless. “Tonight is about you. Don’t worry about me.” Trent had gone out to the hallway and opened the front door. “Promise me you won’t obsess about stupid Mercedes. I think the worst is over.”

I should have told her to knock on wood.