Stolen Secrets Page 7

  I skimmed through the details about the boys’ first game, their new pet wallaby named Bob, who hopped around the backyard and had the life-span of a small dog, and Maggie’s booming business making jewelry from recycled wine corks. I cut to the end.

  How about an Australian getaway over winter break? You’ll like summer in December.

  As if it all came down to sunshine.

  I was about to close the e-mail when I saw that he’d brought up my address by hitting reply to an old one I’d written him years ago.

  Hi Dad,

  Did you know that over 75% of people who marry their affair partners end up divorced? That’s a fact.

  Dear Livvy,

  All the statistics in the world can’t touch true love. So, when do you want to visit?

  This particular e-mail had come three weeks before Dad threatened to sue for partial custody if Mom didn’t put me on a plane to Perth. I spent my summer—their winter—avoiding my father and stepmother by playing Twister with my half-siblings.

  Dear Dad, I wrote now, I’m thinking of auditioning for the school play. That means rehearsals in December and January. Mom’s bugging me to do chores. Later—

  Lunch was almost over, but there was still something I had to do. I punched in Mom’s cell number, holding my breath as it rang.

  “Did you call Tom yet?” I blurted out when she answered. I’d called him myself yesterday morning, but I hadn’t told her. He suggested I give her a few days to phone him on her own. It’s better if she takes initiative, he’d said. No one can make her stay sober.

  I hoped he was wrong. I was going to try, anyway.

  “Yes, I did,” Mom said, her voice a half octave too high. “It helped, thanks.”

  So she hadn’t called him. I said good-bye and went back to school.

  In debate class, Franklin D. dropped a note on my desk.

  I’m sure you are unaware of the fine dining opportunity you missed this afternoon. All our seats are booked months in advance. Please know that we have a twelve-hour cancellation policy. However, we are willing to extend the offer one more time (for now): tomorrow, at 1:30. Please nod your head once to confirm acceptance of this most auspicious invitation.

  —Franklin D. Schiller

  I fought back a smile, knowing his eyes were on me, and tucked the letter inside my school planner.

  After class I sensed him nearby. I turned around, and he walked right into me. “That was exciting,” he said, taking my elbow to steady us.

  “Listen,” I began. “I can tell you’re a nice person, but I have to be honest with you. I’m happy on my own. I have a lot of friends in Vermont, and I’m really not lonely.”

  He tilted his head. “You call that being honest?”

  Blissfully my cell phone chirped, saving me from an answer. I whipped it out like a druggie looking for a fix. Sean! I knew he was going to say that it was me, always had been. Well, for the seven weeks we’d been together, anyway.

  Livvy sorry I haven’t answered your texts. Christ this is too damn hard. Maybe we should see other people … think about it. It’s only fair. Hope you are having fun in SF

  What?! I felt my insides curdle up like milk left out overnight.

  “Bad news?” Franklin D. asked.

  “My boyfriend,” I whispered. “He just … he just … he just said he loved me.”

  “Oh.” He took a second to recover. “It’s good to be loved.”

  I hadn’t meant to lie, but I didn’t feel like sharing a humiliating breakup-by-bytes.

  The rejection barely slowed him down. “With all due respect, I think you need friends on this coast. Therefore, the offer to join our illustrious lunch table still stands. Tomorrow?”

  I shoved the phone in my pocket, my thoughts consumed with Sean. “I don’t think you get it,” I said, arriving at my locker. “My boyfriend won’t like it if I’m hanging out with another guy.” I focused on my combination, unable to face his reaction.

  “Livvy,” he said, cheerful as ever. “I feel the whole male-female thing has gotten in our way. You see, I truly am interested in getting to know you. But not as a boyfriend. It pains me to tell you that you’re not my type.” He gave me an appraising look. “You do think that men and women can be friends, don’t you?”

  I took in his placid smile. “Of course,” I said. “We can get bumper stickers made: ‘Friends always stalk friends.’”

  He laughed. “Oh, yeah, my bad. I have social OCD.”

  I wanted to go home, to mope in the blissful darkness of my walk-in closet. It wasn’t like I was delusional or anything. Sean hadn’t stayed in touch since I’d left, but I’d told myself that he’d never been into social media.

  I once read in Psychology Today that it was impossible to swallow and cry at the same time, so I made a beeline for the water fountain.

  “You’re a very interesting woman, Olivia Newman,” Franklin D. said as we headed outside. I was surprised to see that the trees lining the parking lot had softened to a seashell pink. They weren’t the brilliant hues of the ones back home, but at least they looked different. Franklin D. kept talking. “I feel like you have more important things on your mind than the usual high school drama. Like real life, to be exact.”

  Sadly that was true. Real life did get in the way of fun.

  “I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to be your friend. I do. I get that you have a boyfriend, and that you’re madly in love with him and blah, blah, blah, so, like, that’s cool as a cucumber, okay?”

  My heart gave an unexpected thump at the vulnerable look on his face. “Well, now that I know you won’t turn into some kind of lovesick stalker type, it does take the pressure off,” I allowed.

  Franklin D.’s shoulders slumped with a dramatic exhale.

  “Okay, I’ll eat lunch at your table tomorrow.” Crap, that sounded alarmingly like a commitment.

  His grin dwindled as he glanced down at the pocket watch in his hand, chain and all. “Holy Christ and Batmobile, my archery lesson starts in twenty.” He rode the handrail to the street.

  When he was gone, I shook my head and smiled. Franklin D. was growing on me. Kind of like a wart, but whatever.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  I SAT AT FRANKLIN D.’S LUNCH TABLE ALL WEEK, surrounded by his eclectic friends. The first person I met was Elizabeth. She spent her extracurricular hours making fund-raising calls for Greenpeace. She moved through the cafeteria like a bride at a reception, chatting up people, gathering trash from the tables, and sorting it into the proper receptacles.

  “You know what’s strange about this place?” I asked Franklin D. while watching Elizabeth collect a Coke bottle from a cheerleader, offer a perky thank-you, and glide to the next table.

  “What?”

  “This place lacks cliques. Where are the jocks, the geeks, the drama freaks, the brains, the slackers?” I still wasn’t used to the kids at Grant High and how they seemed to march to their own drummers in a dissonant marching band.

  He shrugged. “They’re here, if you feel compelled to categorize.”

  “But they blend,” I went on. “They talk to each other like it doesn’t matter.”

  “Everyone is who they are. We accept each other as is. Like one big bargain-basement clearance sale.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “That doesn’t seem natural.”

  Franklin D. scratched his head, thinking. He leaned forward, placing both palms on the table. “Picture a pot on the stove, filled with meat, beans, vegetables, tomato sauce, whatever. When you take a bite, you don’t taste every single ingredient, right? They meld together, creating a mouthwatering, delectable chili.”

  Just then, this guy slunk by, greasy hair, orange Converse boots—yes, orange—with black laces and a plaid shirt. Franklin D. and I watched him approach a table of girls and snag a French fry off one of their trays.

  “Not all ingredients are as fresh as others,” Franklin D. commented.

  “Evidently.” I turned ba
ck to him. “Let’s take you, for example. It seems you take pride in your … unusual personality.”

  “Don’t you?”

  I started to laugh but realized he was serious. “It’s hard to connect with people when you’re different,” I said.

  “We’re all different. We can’t help it. Why deny the one thing we have in common with everyone else … our uniqueness?”

  I crossed my eyes. “Huh?”

  My friends back home would have summed Franklin D. up with one word: weird—a default adjective used to describe anyone they didn’t understand. I remembered how our English teacher never let us use the word in our papers because it was too vague.

  Alex, another one of Franklin D.’s lunch buddies, walked up to the table, his tray loaded with an extra apple and a package of Twinkies. He was as short as a middle schooler, with rust-colored hair that he tried to hide with a buzz cut. I watched as he scanned the cafeteria, lingering on every female who strolled by.

  “What if I told them they were the hottest girls on the planet?” he asked Franklin D. out of the blue.

  “Hmmm, Jenna Cortez, Sydney Gellini, and possibly Cheryl Vanderhoff, on the right day,” Franklin D. responded.

  “What if we were all drunk?”

  I winced at the casual reference.

  “Robin Smith, Liz Barney, and Rebecca Reilly. That was easy,” Franklin D. rolled off.

  “I don’t get it,” I whispered, though Alex could hear me fine.

  “He wants to know which girls would sleep with him under specific and varying circumstances,” Franklin D. explained. “I try to be as generous as possible with my answers.”

  “How about you, Livvy?” Alex asked me. “’Cause I think you’re the hottest girl on the entire planet.”

  “Livvy’s mine,” Franklin D. said. I gave him a look, which he ignored. He smiled kindly at Alex. “If she weren’t pining after me, she’d be all over you, dude.”

  The bell rang and we stood up. A tall blond in a girls’ wrestling team shirt strutted over to our table. “Hey, Liz, you know where the Mathletes meeting is today?”

  Elizabeth told her and the girl left.

  “See? That’s a perfect example,” I whispered to Franklin D. “A jock in Mathletes. My God, what’s this world coming to?”

  He patted my hand. We inched with the crowd toward the stairwell. “Since we’re now buds and all, will you be my partner in debate?” he asked.

  I hesitated. I’d be giving up an easy A if I joined forces with him. Ms. Thurmond failed to see Franklin D.’s passion for exploration. She rarely called on him in class, even though his hand whipped in the air like a flag in a tropical storm. He didn’t seem to notice. The next day, it would creep up the flagpole again.

  “What’s your GPA?” I asked as we took our seats. I figured teacher payback would manifest itself in substandard grades.

  “3.87, unweighted. No one’s perfect.” He smiled, holding my gaze for a moment. “My test scores are nothing short of impeccable. Harvard’s sending me swag already.”

  “I’m surprised they’d bother mailing anything, since their acceptance rate was only 5.4 percent this year.”

  He gave me an approving look. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a walking trivia master? Twenty-seven grams of fat in a Big Mac … 5.4 percent admission rate for Harvard.”

  “Twenty-eight,” I corrected. “Twenty-eight grams of fat in a Big Mac.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I like to research things,” I said. God, what was I doing? I didn’t want to reveal my obsession. “Forget it.”

  “’Fess up,” he said.

  “No, it’s weird.”

  “Livvy, a little weirdness will only add to my esteemed perception of you.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll tell you something about me that’s bizarre,” he said. “You know what my favorite snack food is?”

  “Jalapeño pretzels?”

  “Silken Berry Tofu shakes. Bayside Café makes decent ones—however, I’ve deconstructed the recipe and have vastly improved on it.”

  Yeah, that was pretty strange. “Okay, fine, so I like to look up statistics and stuff. It’s, like, a hobby.” I didn’t tell him how facts imprinted themselves on my brain. How they didn’t fade away over time the way they did for other people.

  “Statistics and stuff, huh? That’s sexy … If you were my kind, which you’re not.” He stopped outside the debate room. “Throw one my way, and make it good.”

  Over by the lockers, a girl buried her nose in a yellow bouquet that probably came from the guy sneaking a peek down her shirt. My mind wandered to last year, when Sean asked me to help him out with his math homework. He said it would free up time for us to be together. I’d been skeptical, because I wasn’t born yesterday, but he kept his promise, and we talked for an extra hour on the phone after baseball practice every day. Each time he got an A, he brought me a rose from his mom’s garden. It was sweet, really.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

  “Did you know that the average person spent over a hundred dollars on Valentine’s Day last year, according to the National Retail Federation?” I said. It was $133.91, to be exact, but I decided to keep the amount to myself.

  Franklin D. followed me into the classroom, nodding his head as we took our seats. “Impressive. You even knew the source.”

  “But do you know the change in divorce lawyer requests right after Valentine’s Day?”

  “I assume it drops, due to the chocolate-flavored truffles and chemically preserved floral arrangements.”

  “Wrong! It goes up.” I held back the exact number: 40 percent.

  He cranked an eyebrow. “Aha! From all the suckers who forgot to buy chocolate-flavored truffles and chemically preserved floral arrangements.”

  “Exactly.” We slapped each other five, which was a totally dorky thing to do. I looked around, relieved no one had noticed.

  Ms. Thurmond reviewed the rubric for the first debate, explaining how our classmates’ assessments would be worth 50 percent of our grade. I wondered if maybe I could be Franklin D.’s partner without risking complete failure.

  After class we stopped at his locker. I waited as he loaded up his backpack. A minute later, we made our escape into the Real World. It was a gorgeous day. I was sweating beneath my blue pullover, which I’d worn because of the bone-chilling temperature this morning.

  Franklin D. ran his fingernails down the railing. “You never told me if you’d be my debate partner.”

  Oh, what the heck? “Sure. Why not?”

  He tipped his invisible top hat at me. I curtsied before dropping onto the bench to wait for the city bus.

  When Mom opened Adelle’s door, I leaned in to kiss her, inhaling the scent of her skin. She smelled sober. “How was your day?” I asked.

  She reached for her purse, which hung on the coatrack next to the door. “It’s after four now, so it’s about to get a whole lot better.”

  “Who’s there?” Adelle called out.

  “Just me,” I said, stepping out of Mom’s shadow. “Livvy.”

  I’d been doing a lot of research on Alzheimer’s. The disease was a ticking time bomb. Who knew how long my grandmother had left? It felt wrong to turn my back on her, at a time when she needed me the most.

  When I told Mom how I felt, she’d muttered under her breath, “Your funeral.”

  “Livvy’s going to stay with you while I make a clean getaway,” Mom said now to Adelle.

  “Where’s Vickie?” I asked. “Isn’t it time for her shift?”

  “Right here!” came a cheerful voice. Vickie waltzed by, drew Adelle to her, and planted a kiss on her nose. “How’s my old girl?” She turned to Mom. “Oh, Gretchen, you won’t believe what I found last night. In a Kleenex box, of all places.” She pulled a gold bracelet out of her pocket.

  “I was wondering where that went,” Mom said. “One moment she was wearing it, the next it was gone.”

&
nbsp; “They stole it!” Adelle cried, making us all jump.

  “No one stole anything, dear.” Vickie slipped the bracelet on Adelle’s wrist. She didn’t even need to unclasp it. “It’s right here, you see? You need to stop hiding your jewelry.”

  “Has she lost weight?” I asked. “Maybe it slipped off.”

  Vickie shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I started working here the same time as your mother.” She turned to Adelle. “Guess we’ll have to fatten you up, won’t we?”

  Mom grimaced. “Oh, darn, I forgot her three o’clock snack.”

  “I’ve got it covered,” Vickie assured her. “Though I’m not as good a cook as you, Gretchen.”

  Mom thanked her. To me, she said, “Happy bonding,” and left.

  “I’d like to make your grandmother a shake, but we’re out of milk,” Vickie announced. “Would you mind watching her for a minute while I go to the corner store?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  When we were alone, Adelle limped down the hallway to the kitchen. Judge Judy was on the tiny TV that Vickie had brought over from her apartment.

  “What kind of tea do you want?” I asked.

  “The hot kind,” she said.

  I moved her to a chair in front of the TV, wondering if it had been on all day. Did she get any exercise? I turned it off, relieved when she didn’t object.

  “Do you know how to do a jumping jack?” I demonstrated, and then helped Adelle to her feet.

  She couldn’t move her arms with any kind of synchronicity. Her body wasn’t functioning much better than her mind. I watered down the routine to standing jacks, waving my hands overhead like I was hailing a cab. Adelle tried, then hunched over her knees, panting. I turned the TV back on and waited for her to recover.

  When Judge Judy asked about a photograph, I had an idea. Family albums. They had to be somewhere, right? Adelle was happily humming commercial jingles, so I snuck off. I started in the library—looking on bookshelves, in desk drawers, in the sitting room across the hallway, and the formal living room … but I couldn’t find any. Not one.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Judge Judy was declaring her verdict. I filled the teapot and put it on the stove.