Just Flirt (10 page)

I can’t believe Blaine.

I can’t believe he doesn’t see
anything wrong
with his being here. When Mom and I drove in earlier, there he was, leaning against the fender of his Mercedes with his ankles crossed and his elbows on its hood as though we were meeting at the mall and not at his ex-girlfriend’s.

“Hey, lady, can I sing this song, huh?”

The girl pulls at my shorts, pleading, with grape Kool-Aid stains around her lips. Ugh, it’s going to be a long night. I snatch the slip from her and read it. “‘Shake That’ by Eminem? Did your mommy give you permission to sing this?”

“Uh-huh, honest.”

The little liar. I crumple her request. “Oh, no, that song is for grownups.”

“Sabrina, honey, that’s not how we talk to our guests,” Mom says, clicking over in her high-heeled cowboy boots, silver concho belt, and matching earrings that could double as drink coasters. She plugs in a speaker wire and gives the girl a toothy grin. “Sweetie, you can sing whatever your little heart desires!”

“Mom,” I hiss before following her to the Trooper. “She can’t sing that! It’s not appropriate for someone her age.”

“Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy, Sabrina, it’s just a song.” Mom leans over to check her reflection in the side mirror, wiping cherry red lipstick from the corners of her mouth and smoothing her flat-ironed hair. “Oh, why did I straighten my hair tonight? I should have worn it curly. I always do better when I’m curly.”

Come to think of it, she does do better when she’s curly. But instead of mentioning this, I grab a speaker and motion to her low-cut shirt. “Yeah, and maybe you’ll do better if you button up, too. We’re not at Chuck’s, remember?”

This place is different—more traditional, more like a campground instead of an outdoor nightclub, so Mom’s cleavage may not go over as well. She sighs and fastens two buttons. “There, happy now? Lord, you
are
a fuddy-duddy, Sabrina.”

Blaine pulls the last of the equipment from the Trooper and gives me an amused wink. “Yeah, Sabbie, don’t be a fuddy-duddy.”

I fight off the urge to smack him. It’s one thing for him to show up here, but it is quite another to take my mother’s side. You just don’t
do
that. Mom, of course, loves it. She pinches his cheek and says, “Oh, you sweet boy! And what do you think, Blaine, is my hair okay straight? Or should I have done it curly?”

“You look wonderful either way, Ms. Mona.”

“Aw, such a charmer, just like your father!” She waggles a Billy Joel at him and then nudges my arm. “Better hold on to this one, Sabrina. And be a dearie and get your momma a soda, will ya? Might help calm my nerves. Tonight’s an important night and I’m as nervous as a pig at a livestock auction!”

She walks away before I can tell her that caffeine isn’t exactly a good relaxer, but I’ve been fuddy-duddied enough. Instead, I go to the back of the Trooper and open the cooler. Blaine wraps his arms around my waist, his breath hot on my ear as he says, “You heard the woman. You better hold on to me.”

I concentrate on pouring Mom’s drink into the tumbler she always uses with a straw to keep her Crest White-Strip teeth from staining and say nothing, not trusting myself to speak. Blaine kisses my neck, causing electric shivers to run up my arm. “Hey, is that the only kind of soda your mom has, generic?”

Yes, it is, because we’re on a budget and generic is just fine.

“Eh, no big deal, I’ll get my own later.” Blaine squeezes me. He must feel my body stiffen, though, from the way he asks, “Sabbie, are you mad at me?”

Don’t start a fight, don’t start a fight
.

The last thing a girl should do when her boyfriend happens to show up at his ex-girlfriend’s place is start a fight. But despite my best efforts, I can’t help but blurt out, “No, I’m not mad, but it’s real funny how once you found out we were working here, lo and behold, those plans with your father changed.”

His arms become rigid. He steps back, the spot on my neck where he kissed me turning cold as he gives me a wounded look. “Babe, I canceled my plans
before
your mom told me because I knew you wanted to spend time with me. But now I’m not so sure.”

“Blaine, I never said that—” I stop myself from reassuring him that
of course
I want to be with him. Blaine is so good at this, turning my words around to make me feel like the guilty one. “Look. It’s just … well, wouldn’t you be upset if I wanted to spend the evening at an ex-boyfriend’s?”

“No, I wouldn’t.” Blaine shoves his hands deep into his pockets. “But I trust you. So maybe I should leave if you’re going to be like this all night.”

Panic shoots up my spine as he takes a step away.

Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut?
For the past month, I’ve done nothing but push him away. “Blaine, no, don’t. I’m sorry—I’m being way too sensitive.”

He wraps his arms around me once more, the scent of his lemony Armani cologne almost as comforting as Dad’s Old Spice. “Okay. Only if
you
promise to trust me.”

For some reason, I think about how Mom struggled to quit smoking years ago. Sometimes she’d go for weeks without a cigarette, sometimes only an hour. But then she watched the movie
Dead Again
where Robin Williams played a psychologist who said, “Someone is either a smoker or a nonsmoker. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that.” Mom kept rewinding and playing that line over and over until she decided: she was a nonsmoker. And she hasn’t had a cigarette since. It’s time for me to do the same. Either I’m going to trust Blaine once and for all and stop nagging him or I’m going to lose him.

I choose trust.

“Of course, sweetheart,” I say, pressing my body against his and giving him a lingering kiss. “I’m glad you’re here. You’ll make it fun.”

Blaine’s lips tickle when he nuzzles my ear. “It’d be more fun if we got out of here early. Dad’s out on a date so we could have the entire place to ourselves.”

It’s as though the heavens sent me a sign. I made the right decision. Blaine
does
want to be with me. I long to kiss him hard, but Mom calls me over to the pavilion. She thanks me for the soda and then gestures toward a grassy knoll overlooking the common area where two skinny twin brothers wearing fake sheriff’s badges and belted toy guns are picking teams for kickball. “Sabrina, honey, you see that girl sitting by herself ? Be a sweetie and take a song book over and introduce yourself. Poor thing must be bored.”

I follow her gaze to a lone girl with short-cropped red hair and a hideous outfit straight out of a Tomboys ’R Us catalog. Haven’t I seen her before? Oh, yeah, at the house being built beside Blaine’s. She looked like a whiny pouter back then and she looks even more whiny now. “Uh, Mom, I don’t think she’s going to be interested in karaoke.”

“Now, honey, you can’t assume that.” Mom places a song book in my hands. She spins me around to face the girl and gives me a nudge. “Go on, it’s not nice to make people feel like outsiders.”

Please, it’s their
choice
to be outsiders. People like her are so annoying, the ones who mope from the sidelines rather than make an effort to fit in. I’m not from a wealthy family nor do I have the right pedigree, but I’m among the most popular at school
and
I was Prom Queen. Things like that don’t happen from luck. You have to work for it and, yes, sometimes put up with a little crap. But I guess it is decent of Mom to want her to be included, so I force myself to walk over.

“Hey, I’m Sabrina. Do you, like, want a song book?”

“Hey,
like
, I’m Roxanne and no,
like
, I don’t.”

Well, if she isn’t quite the charmer.

Mom is still watching, though, so I say, “Fine, then,
Roxanne
, if you change your mind, you know what to do.”

She lets out a condescending snort. “What, did your mommy send you over?”

Okay, maybe so.

But does she really think she’s intimidating me? Not hardly. She’s a minnow compared to the sharks I’m used to swimming with. Before I can tell her that yes, my mother was nice enough to want to include her—stupid, right?—a blur of blond catches my attention. It’s Dee, walking past us to join an older woman by the main lodge. She looks different than she does at school. She looks like … like
summer
, in her pink shorts and white shirt that shows off her golden tan.

Roxanne’s face darkens.

Well, well, perhaps I’m not the only one who doesn’t have much love for Dee Barton. Part of me wants to get far, far away from this toxic tomboy, but a bigger part of me wants to find out as much information about Dee as possible.

Know thy enemy.

“So, I take it you know her?” I ask.

Stupid question. Dee lives here, so of course Roxanne knows her. But she doesn’t call me on it. Instead, she sneers at Dee and says, “Yeah, I know the Super Slut. I know all about her, now.”

What? Super Slut, are we talking about the same person? Dee might have been a total stalker but I didn’t think she slept around, or has even
dated
anyone since Blaine. Unless this girl knows something I don’t.

Obviously, she does. The corners of her mouth turn up. “Oh, man. Let me guess. You’re Mercedes’s evil girlfriend.”

Mercedes’s evil girlfriend?

“Who are you talking about, Blaine, my Blaine?” I demand, anger swelling like hot lava in my stomach. “That’s his name,
not
Mercedes, and how dare you call me evil? Or, wait … did
Dee
call me that?”

Roxanne catches the ball when a boy kicks it out of bounds and holds it against her chest instead of throwing it back. “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but hey, I do have some free advice for you
if
you want it.”

One of the twins yells for the ball.

Roxanne ignores him.

Oh my gosh.

The last thing I want to do is humor this horrible person any more, but before I can stop myself, the words “Yeah? And what’s that?” come tumbling out.

Roxanne tosses the ball in the air a few times before drop-kicking it over the twin’s head. She nods toward the pavilion where Blaine is sitting beside my mother, nursing a soda with—what?—his eyes focused on Dee.

“My advice,” she says while walking away, “is to watch your man.”

7
Dee

I’ve had bad dreams before, especially right after Dad died. The worst one was when I dreamed I was a steak—yes, a steak, a T-bone to be exact—sitting on a white plate with a bunch of campers hunched over me with knives and forks. Natalie said it came from feeling vulnerable without my dad, but as horrible as that dream was, it can’t compare with the nightmare of having Sabrina, Blaine,
and
Madeline here at the same time.

“Well, there’s what’s-his-name, Brent? Blake? Booger?” Ivy says, even though she knows perfectly well what his name is.

“Blaine. Can you believe he had the nerve to show up?”

We both glance at him sitting at a picnic table beside Mona Owens, oblivious to the fact that he no longer belongs here. Ivy hollers at a kid for riding his bike on the sidewalk and then says, “Well, unfortunately, toots, there’s no law keeping him from coming here. But I never did like that turd of a boy.”

I almost choke on my own spit. “Ivy! You can’t say that.”

“Why, is there a rule that old people are supposed to like all kids?” Ivy asks, her purple tunic billowing in the breeze. She pushes a lock of gray hair behind her ears. “I do believe the Bible says
Thou shalt love thy neighbor
, but nothing about
liking
him.”

I can’t blame Ivy for feeling this way. While Blaine wasn’t exactly rude to her, he wasn’t polite either.

“And although I don’t condone the way you’re always chatting with different fellows,” Ivy says, pausing long enough to take in my outfit and makeup, “it’s better than being with him. He’s not good enough for you, kid, so it wasn’t necessary to get all gussied up.”

“What? I’m not gussied.”

Ivy raises her eyebrow. Okay, so I am a
little
gussied.

After we got back from dinner thirty minutes ago and I saw Blaine waiting for Sabrina by his Mercedes, my first reaction was to stay in my bedroom—all night long. Natalie, however, disagreed. When she saw me in bed with my face shoved in a pillow, she struck a determined pose that would have made Beyoncé proud and said, “Oh, no, we are
not
having this.”

“I’m not going out there and you can’t make me.”

Natalie ignored me and opened my closet, pulling out my favorite yellow capri pants. She tossed them aside and said, “Nope, these won’t do.” Natalie then yanked out red shorts, only to throw them on the floor. “Too long.” She pulled out a short, pleated skirt next. “No, too
trying-too-hard
.” When she found my pink shorts with a cute pink and green belt—my favorite colors—she nodded. “Yes, perfect. And please tell me your new white shirt is clean, the one that makes your arms look super muscular?”

“Natalie, what part of
I’m not going
don’t you understand?”