“You’re the luckiest girl in school,” Luisa said to me, throwing herself on my bed. “Sleeping this close to Kane Weeks every night.”
I stuck out my tongue as though I wanted to vomit as I tried to apply eyeliner to my upper eyelid for the fortieth time.
“Are you crazy, Hail?” She threw a pillow at me. Good thing it missed, or I probably would’ve stabbed my eye with the pencil. “I mean, he’s flawless. He must be some alien being, he’s so perfect.”
“He’s not that perfect,” I mumbled. “He has a birthmark.”
Luisa got this professional cosmetics trunk for her fifteenth birthday, and it was filled with all these goodies. She’d been trying to give me a tutorial on making cat’s eyes. The closest I’d achieved was a raccoon after a hard night of drinking. She rolled over to pick through the trunk and looked up. “No, he doesn’t. Where?”
“On his butt or something. I saw it when we were kids,” I said vaguely. I pulled away from the mirror and blinked. “How’s this?”
She inspected my work and winced. “Uh…”
I swiped the wet washcloth off my dresser and swabbed at my eyes. “This is hopeless.”
“Oh, no it’s not,” she said, batting her cat eyelashes at me and making me rue the day I ever thought I’d be able to do anything half as well as Luisa could. Luisa didn’t need makeup, truthfully. We’d had countless sleepovers, and even after a night when we’d gotten a collective two hours of sleep, she’d wake up ready for a camera. She didn’t get crud in the corners of her eyes or drool on her pillow like I did, and all she had to do was shake her head, and her blond hairs would fall dutifully into place. “So what’s the stepbrother like?”
“His name is Declan. He’s…kind of different.”
She studied me. “Different, meaning hot?”
Well, yes, definitely—but I wasn’t about to admit it. “Kane said that Declan’s father was a mix of, like, six different ethnicities. Hawaiian, Japanese, and…I forget. He was an officer in the navy.”
“Black?” she asked, surprised.
“Maybe. What difference does it make?”
“None. I mean, that’s cool. I can’t wait to meet him. I can’t believe Kane’s dad would just go off and do that,” she said, shaking her head. “No wonder Kane is pissed.”
“He told you?” I asked, confused. Sophomore year had only started a couple days earlier. I didn’t think Kane had had any contact with anyone but me during the summer. I thought I was the one he complained to. The only one. The idea of him confiding in someone else made me a little queasy.
“No. It’s hot gossip, though. Everyone knows.” She’d slid into the glitter skirt I’d had to beg my mom for, since it was dangerously short, and a lace camisole that showed off the boobs she’d been growing. I couldn’t wear that camisole unless I wore a shirt over it, because I had nothing to show off, but Luisa, as usual, showed me how my clothes were supposed to look. She whirled in front of the full-length mirror and said, “We should go over there.”
I finished wiping my eyes. We’d been friends since kindergarten, but gradually, I’d been getting the feeling Luisa had just been putting up with me—that she had a much different reason for wanting to spend time at my house. After all, my house wasn’t exactly a wonderland of fun. My parents circled each other like sharks, occasionally going in for bites, and I didn’t have a big-screen TV or a pool or video games.
My house’s one attribute was its proximity to Kane and Declan Weeks, and I guess that was enough.
“It’s nearly eleven. What do you want to do? Pull a Romeo outside his window?”
She tapped her blood-red lips with her finger. “Maybe.” Then she looked at herself in the mirror and said, “We look so hot. It’s a shame to waste this.”
Right. I was wearing my pajamas, and my eyes looked like I’d gone ten rounds in a prizefight. She’d done my lips nice, though, and put my hair up in this spunky, curly do on the top of my head. I grabbed my phone. “If you want to see them, I can text Kane.”
“Oh my God, no!” she said, grabbing the phone from me. “That’d be desperate. Let’s… I don’t know. Walk around the court. Like we’re minding our own business. Please.”
“All right.”
So that was how we ended up parading ourselves around and around the cul-de-sac at not quite midnight on a Saturday. Still, it worked. Kane had a radar for girls. After our second time around the circle, he threw open the window in Declan’s room, which was in the front of the house, and said, “You guys out for a stroll?”
I snorted. We were wearing our dress pumps. If that wasn’t desperate, the twelve new blisters crying out for mercy from my toes and heels definitely were. But Luisa had that innocent way about her—even when she was up to no good, she still reeked of sunshine. I yawned, glad that he was finally here. Luisa and Kane could say hey, share a few flirts, and then we could haul ass to bed.
He pushed up the window and slid out on the roof, then climbed down the rain gutter and trellis to the front porch. Luisa watched this feat in amazement. “He’s gonna kill himself.”
“It’s not that hard,” I told her. “I’ve climbed up there a million times.”
Her eyes shifted to me and narrowed a little. This was clearly not news she’d wanted to hear.
“The best view of the fireworks in Trum is from his rooftop,” I added in explanation.
Bounding over to us, Kane said, “What is this? A party I wasn’t invited to?”
Luisa giggled. She could not stop giggling when Kane was concerned. I had to tell her boys like you a hell of a lot more when you pretend they don’t exist. “Oh, you’re definitely invited!” she gushed.
Somehow the decision was made to go to the woods out back, with the ancient broken-down tree house and a fire pit that must’ve been built by the house’s previous occupants. Such a decision was not made with my consent, but by that time, I didn’t even exist to register a vote. Kane and Luisa were already in their own impenetrable, perfect Kane-and-Luisa bubble. So I yawned some more and told her I’d leave the back door unlocked.
She didn’t come back inside until after three. She refused to say much about what they were doing, but she mentioned that Kane’s dad had finally sent Declan to fetch them. “They’re both gorgeous, Hail! Why didn’t you tell me?” she’d said that morning. “You are more than the luckiest girl in school. I’d kill to live where you do.”