CHAPTER FIVE

My dad requested that I do the dishes after dinner. Something about it building character, which was the kind of thing parents said when they wanted you to do housework for free. Why even bother paying our housekeeper if he was going to make me do everything? I tried not to take my frustration out on the plates. It wasn’t their fault my father was in one of his “improve the children” moods or that Jake had snapped at me the way that he had.

I decided to concentrate on my plans for tomorrow. I was going to see Kenyetta, my tutee. It had (obviously) been Ella’s idea for me to volunteer as a tutor. Supposedly for my college applications, but mostly to try and become a better person. “You have no idea how good it feels to be selfless!” had been her sales pitch, and I’d done it just to humor her.

I’d thought I would hate it, but I didn’t. It also turned out that I wasn’t as noble and selfless as Ella had hoped for. I decided I was somewhat selfish because I loved the high I got from helping others.

Not to mention that it so often made my other problems fade away. They seemed so much smaller when I focused on somebody else who needed me.

I hoped that was still true.

“What’s going on with you?” Ella entered the kitchen and stopped short when she saw the expression on my face.

“Other than the illegal child labor currently taking place? My boyfriend told me the prom isn’t that big of a deal. Just a dance.” I pushed a couple of buttons on the dishwasher, not sure which one made it run. I decided on the Start button and slammed the door shut.

Ella let out a gasp. “It’s the pinnacle of your student presidential career!”

At least someone got it. “Exactly. Thank you!”

“What is wrong with guys? Why don’t they get this? And you have to add detergent.”

Holy Buddha. I found one of the little rectangle detergents thingies under the sink and added it to the dishwasher, throwing it in the bottom. I didn’t know if it went there or not, but now it wasn’t my problem.

“You’re supposed to take the wrapper off,” she told me.

I shrugged. The dishwasher could figure it out. It was one of those smart kinds, right?

Ella lifted up a stack of papers my dad had left on the table.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I can’t find my phone.”

I pulled my own phone out of my pocket. Where I had no missed calls or texts from Jake. “Want me to call it?”

“It must be dead because I tried that already. Which is weird because it was fully charged this morning and should still have some juice.”

“Did you turn it off?”

She made an expression liked I’d just asked her if she tortured sick puppies in her spare time. “I never turn it off. My entire life is on there. My course schedule for next year, my calendar, all my prom to-dos, my homework assignments, everything.”

“When’s the last time you remember having it?”

Ella opened the fridge and peered between Jennifer’s health food. I couldn’t blame her for looking in such a weird spot. When Dad was distracted, as he usually was, he tended to do strange things. Like stick cell phones next to kombucha.

“I know I didn’t have it at cheer practice because I wanted to film London doing her backflips to show her how she twists to one side, and I couldn’t find it.”

“Cheer practice?” I echoed. “Aren’t you done with that?”

“I was helping to run the clinic for the girls who want to try out for next year’s team.”

Of course she was.

Ella grabbed her purse and dumped the entire contents onto the kitchen table.

“See? Doesn’t that feel better? Making a mess?” I asked, but Ella ignored me. I was always trying to get her to come over to the noncleaning side, but she loved things being spotless. She sifted through the dumped out contents, but it was plain that her phone wasn’t in her purse.

“Maybe I left it at school. I’ll check with the office tomorrow to see if anyone’s turned it in.” She let out a sigh of defeat and sat down. “Now what?”

I shrugged one shoulder. “We could watch a movie.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all the movies.” Her grumpy demeanor was so unlike her.

“All the movies?”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m very industrious.”

It couldn’t have been too bad if Ella could still joke with me. “We could sit and talk about how much our boyfriends suck.”

She shook her head. “A movie. Something to make me forget about”—she waved her hand around—“all this other stuff. We can even watch a John Hughes one.”

“Seriously?” Ella loved horror movies and almost never watched rom-coms with me. “You are the best, you know that?”

“Sometimes. And you should take this as proof of how much I love you that I’m going to watch another one of your uber-romantic movies. Again.” She stood up and linked her arm through mine. “Which one do you want to watch?”

“Not Pretty in Pink.” That was mostly about going to the prom. “And definitely not Sixteen Candles.”

“Agreed.”

I did not need the reminder of Jake’s former romantic gestures.

The next day I sat in my US history class, wanting to stab out my eardrums so that I could no longer listen to the inane presentation on the Revolutionary War by Scott and Mercedes. They made it so boring I wished the British had won just so that this presentation would never have happened.

I watched the clock, and I swear the second hand was going backward.

Then finally, finally, finally they finished, and I let out a long sigh of relief. Ms. Robinson stood up and said, “Er, thank you, Scott and Mercedes, for that . . . for that presentation. We have about fifteen minutes left, so we’re going to break up into our small groups to work on the finishing touches for your presentations. If you’ve already presented, you can spend the rest of class reading quietly in your seat.”

Ella and I hadn’t gone yet, and she pulled a desk next to me so that we could talk about Pearl Harbor.

We’d been assigned our topic, and the irony of the name of the Japanese invasion during World War II having the same name as my mom was not lost on me.

That prickly neck feeling was back, and I looked up to see Mercedes with a malicious look in her eyes. I mean, more so than normal. She gave me a weird grin, again like she knew something I didn’t and was enjoying the evilness of whatever she’d done.

It made me nervous.

Which was probably the whole point. To psych me out and upset me. Determined not to let her do it, I looked at the notebook Ella had pulled out of her backpack, filled with our notes about the battle.

Despite my resolution, the uneasy feeling remained.

“Why are you fidgeting like that?”

I gestured toward Mercedes. “Just wondering when she’s going to unhinge her jaw and finish us off.”

As if she had eyes in the back of her horns, Mercedes again turned around to stare. Only this time she got up and walked toward us. At the last second, she veered off to the right to sharpen her pencil.

“Nice outfit, Mattie.”

Buddha give me strength. Past experience taught me that she didn’t actually mean what she’d just said. I glanced down at what I was wearing. Dark jeans and a black T-shirt because it was casual Friday and I didn’t have to wear that stupid uniform. And it wasn’t like she had room to talk. She wore a tight, red leather miniskirt and a practically see-through sheer white top. At least my clothes did what they were supposed to do. Clothe me.

Her nasal tone interrupted my thoughts. “Whose funeral are you going to?”

Was that all she had? “Haven’t decided yet. Don’t worry, though. You’re still at the top of the list.”

She continued to grind her pencil. “You know, I haven’t seen Jake’s promposal. Is there trouble in paradise?”

“If there is, it’s because the snake just entered the garden.” My chill retort did not reflect the turmoil raging just below the surface. Of course she would point out my lack of a promposal. How did she know exactly where to twist her knife?

That made Mercedes stop sharpening. “So in this scenario, I’m the devil?”

“If the cloven hoof fits.”

She let out a little laugh, shaking her long blonde hair from one side to the other. She removed her pencil from the device, now worn down to a little nub. “Do you know what I hate?”

“Since you’re Lord of the Underworld? Probably kittens. And laughter. All that is goodness and light. Maybe that there’s a black gaping maw where your soul should be.”

Mercedes cut me off before I could continue. “People who think they can get whatever they want. When it’s not true. You can’t get whatever you want.”

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been trying to figure out what she was so mad about. I mean, I had Jake. I did get what I wanted. That wasn’t really open for discussion.

And why was she glaring at Ella, too?

It was one thing to come after me, but I wasn’t about to let her start in on my doelike sister. “Okay, Mercedes, we’re done. I can’t pretend to have a conversation with someone who puts the u in stupid.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” she snapped, “there’s an i in stupid, too.”

I stayed quiet until realization dawned on her face, and then she stomped back to her seat. She made it all too easy sometimes.

“What did you do to make her mad?” I asked my sister.

Ella shrugged. “I don’t know. Be related to you?”

Technically, Ella was my stepsister. A point I used to bring up all the time. But since our relationship had changed and so dramatically improved, we both basically forgot the fact that we weren’t actually sisters. Because it felt like we were.

The bell rang, and we headed out into the hallway, toward the cafeteria. “Does it seem like Mercedes has been acting strangely?” At my raised eyebrows, she went on, “I mean, more than usual?”

“I guess she hasn’t been the same since that house fell on her sister. Or maybe it’s the daylight weakening her.”

Ella frowned slightly. “Even her fight with you felt . . . weird.”

“That wasn’t a fight. More of a personality conflict. Which I win by default, since she doesn’t have one. “

She laughed. “I’m going to run by the office to see if my phone’s turned up. Save me a seat?”

“Yep.” I nodded and she left. I guessed that she would probably ask Dad for a new one soon as she was going into withdrawals without her cell. She kept grasping at air in our classes, like she was reaching for her phone only to be surprised each time that it wasn’t there.

I tried to go down the main hallway, but it was blocked off by a tired and oh-so-predictable flash mob dancing to what was presumably the couple’s favorite song. I wanted to cut through the gym, but the school was hosting a career day for the juniors. Which I totally didn’t get since in ten years most of the current student body would be spending their days drinking and blowing through their trust funds at an alarming rate.

It forced me to turn and go down a hall I didn’t normally use. It was quiet, practically deserted as everyone else was watching the dancing. I stopped short when I saw Trent sitting in an alcove, reading. His black hair stuck up in short spikes down the middle of his shaved scalp. He wore more eyeliner than Mercedes and had on a black T-shirt and black jeans, which reminded me why we’d become friends in the first place. Because on the surface we had seemed so similar.

Part of me wanted to just walk by him, to give him the same silent treatment he’d been giving the rest of us.

But he needed to be hit in the head with a clue-by-four and brought back to reality. The one where he had the world’s most perfect girlfriend that he totally didn’t deserve.

As I got closer, I saw the title of the book he was holding. “The Sound and the Fury? Aren’t we reading the CliffsNotes for that in English?”

“Some of us prefer to read the actual book.”

Same snark, same kinds of jokes, but they felt flat. Devoid of any warmth or friendliness. Like . . . he didn’t want to talk to me and hoped I would go away. Things had been this way between us since he had announced that his father was leaving his mother for some twenty-two-year-old.

Awkward and uncomfortable.

“So . . . what have you been up to?” I was this close to asking for his opinion on the weather.

“Well, I have that fantasy football league, and it’s eating up most of my time.”

He was being sarcastic, and it might have even been a jab at Jake. Because Jake actually participated in a fantasy football league. Which I kept trying to convince him wasn’t a real thing and just something invented by men to waste time and allow them to talk about sports past the designated season.

I decided to give Trent the benefit of the doubt. “So . . . prom.”

Not my most graceful of transitions.

“The ultimate four-letter word,” Trent agreed, not even looking up from his book.

Might as well cut to the chase. “Do you have a promposal? For Ella?”

That finally got me his full attention. He blinked at me several times, as if I were some figment of his imagination.

It made me feel dumb. I pointed toward the main hallway, where I could still hear the flash mob’s music. “You know, like what everybody around you is doing? Asking their girlfriends to the dance?”

“How very peer-pressurey of you,” he said, closing his book and standing up. “No, I’m not going to prom.”

Panic clawed at my throat. This was wrong. All wrong. Had I done this? Messed it up somehow? “Does Ella know?”

He shrugged his shoulders and looked like he couldn’t care less that he’d just lobbed a weapon of prom destruction straight at me. “You can tell her.”

Without another word, he walked off, leaving me to stare after him, my mouth hanging open, my palms sweaty.

Was he serious?

Because there was no way I was telling my sister that she’d lost her phone and her prom date all in the same day.

And that I might possibly be to blame for half of it.