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“Why do you assume I’m some kind of study cop?” he said. “I actually think you should just relax and go to sleep early.”
“Oh. Well, Mom wanted me to pound the books. So why are you here?”
“I brought you some stuff.” He handed me the bag. “Nothing big. I just wanted to say good luck and let you know I’m rooting for you. Even if you haven’t always been the most cooperative student.”
“Let’s not start with the postmortem. Mom still wants you to help me with my applications, you know.”
“Terrific,” he said. “Lots more opportunities to get on each other’s nerves!”
“And I’ll take advantage of every one of them.”
“I’m sure you will.” He started to turn and stopped. “Oh, can you do me a favor and text me Heather’s address? I have a bag for her, too.”
“You know she lives in the Valley, right?”
“That’s okay. It’s a nice night for a drive.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said eagerly. “I’m going crazy stuck at home and it’s hard to find her house.” The second half was sort of a lie, but the first half couldn’t have been truer.
He hesitated. “Your mother—”
I cut him off. “She’s going to be out late. She’ll never even know I left. She and Luke went out and left me here alone the night before the SATs. How mean is that?”
“I’m calling social services.”
“You should.” I clasped my hands. “Please, George? I’ll bring my notes in the car. I’ll read them out loud and we’ll discuss anything I don’t understand. That will be better than studying by myself—my attention drifts when I’m alone. You’ll help me concentrate. Anyway, you just said I shouldn’t study anymore and I should relax!”
He laughed. “How can you make arguments that contradict each other in the same breath?”
“It takes skill. Wait here!” Before he could say no, I ran away from the front door and shoved my feet into flip-flops.
“This is such a good idea,” I said when I rejoined George at the door. I grabbed his elbow and pulled him down the steps toward his Prius, which was parked in the half circle of gravel in front of our house. “Heather needs me. She was freaking out last time I talked to her. She’s probably chewed off all of her fingernails by now. Plus her fingertips.”
He held the passenger door open for me. “She’d be less nervous if you stopped talking about how you both have to get into Elton College.”
I slid inside and waited until he was settled in the driver’s seat to respond. “She’s always nervous—she panics when she takes a Cosmo quiz. And I have faith that we’ll both get in. So don’t sound all doubty when you see her, okay? That won’t help.”
He raised his eyebrows as he backed up. “Just to be clear, if doubty shows up as a vocabulary choice tomorrow, don’t pick it. And speaking of vocabulary, where are those notes of yours?”
“I forgot them. It’s too dark anyway.”
“All right then.” He drove onto the street. “Define effervescent.”
“Bubbly and delightful, like me.” It was too dark for me actually to see him rolling his eyes, but I knew he was.
He continued to test my vocabulary the entire way. Couldn’t stump me though.
I texted Heather when we were close to her house, and she was waiting out front when we pulled up at the curb. “Please come inside,” she begged us as soon as we got out. “Just for a few minutes. My mother’s been quizzing me, and I keep getting everything wrong, and we’re both freaking out.”
“You’re going to do fine,” George said. “You’ve got this.”
I texted the word hypocrite to his cell phone. He glanced down when it buzzed, shot me an a
“That’s so sweet!” Heather said.
“I forgot to open mine,” I said as we walked up the path to her house.
“You can look at it when you get home,” George said. “It’s not that exciting.”
“What’s that?” her mother asked as soon as she spotted the bag in Heather’s hand. She’d been standing inside the front doorway, watching us walk up, and greeted me now with a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hello, Ellie. Who’s your friend?”
I explained who George was.
“And you’re here . . . why exactly?” she asked with a smile that showed her teeth and made me feel sorry for George.
“I made the girls care packages,” he explained. “For good luck.”
“How nice,” she said icily. For some reason, she always seemed to think that every man she met was on the prowl for teenage girls. Especially blond, pretty ones like her precious baby daughter. “Heather, say thank you.”
If my mother ever tried to prompt me to say thank you . . . We were high school seniors, for God’s sake.
But Heather obediently repeated, “Thank you,” as she unrolled the top of the bag and peeked inside. “Oh, fun!” she exclaimed.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
Heather started pulling stuff out of the bag: a couple of brand-new number two pencils—
“With good erasers,” George said. “I tested them myself.”
“You need to get a life,” I said.
—and several different kinds of protein bars—
“For your snack break,” he told Heather.
—and a bunch of other snacks (candy and crackers) and a little stuffed rabbit—
“For good luck,” he said.
“Isn’t that supposed to be a rabbit’s foot?” Heather asked.
“With a whole rabbit, you get two feet,” George said. “That has to be even luckier, right?”
“Especially for the rabbit,” I said. “What else do you have in there?”
“An eye mask,” she said, pulling out a soft black cloth one.
“Won’t that make it hard to read the questions?” I asked George.
Heather giggled, and he said, “Very fu
Mrs. Smith said, “I keep telling Heather that she absolutely has to get a good night’s sleep or she’ll regret it for the rest of her life. Speaking of which, I’m sure your mother wants you home early, Ellie. She does know you’re out with this young man, right?”
“He’s my tutor,” I reminded her. “This is basically an extended study session.”
But we took the hint and said our good-byes. A forlorn-looking Heather watched us from the doorway, her mother’s bony arm draped protectively across her shoulders.
“Heather’s mother is . . . interesting,” George said once we were safely back in his car.
“Yeah, you could say that. Here’s all you need to know about her: Once Heather and I went for a long bike ride. By the time we got back, Heather’s mom had already alerted the neighborhood security. She thought we must have been kidnapped because we were fifteen minutes late and Heather hadn’t answered her texts.”
“Oof,” he said.
“Right?”
“So what one story describes your mother?”
I thought for a second, staring out through the windshield at the headlights coming toward us. “From before or after?”
“Before or after what?”
“Marrying Luke.” I circled my hands through the air. “Things changed so much for us once she met him. I mean, here’s the story I would have told you about my mom back before: There was this kid who was being a jerk to me at school. She told the other kids I smelled bad and that I wore the same shirt over and over again without washing it. That kind of thing. Anyway, I told Mom, and she said to me that we should do some role-playing—she’d be me and I’d be the girl—and she’d help me figure out how to respond. So I would say the meanest thing I could think of to her and she would do something every time that would make me crack up—either say something fu