Once Every Never (2 page)

“You should totally apply for an internship, Allie,” Milo was saying. “I could give you a reference and you’d be a shoo-in no problem …”

While the two cousins chatted, catching up, Clare sat in the back of the car surreptitiously analyzing Milo’s profile and trying to reconcile it with her memories of him as a boy. It wasn’t easy. Actually, it was impossible. Nothing about him fit that picture—not the wavy, wheat-gold hair or the broad shoulders or the lean-muscled, lightly tanned arms, not the strong square fingers lightly gripping the steering wheel or the long legs in the faded, fitted jeans that stretched out under the dashboard …

“Clare?” Milo half-turned around and Clare got the impression he’d already said her name more than once.

“Hm?” She sat up, startled.

“I said ‘How about you?’” Milo turned back but Clare noticed that he kept glancing at her in the rear-view mirror. Probably trying to decide if she was ignoring him or just not that bright. “What are your plans for after graduation?”

Plans? What plans? The very thought of life post–high school made her blood run cold. “Oh, you know …” She shrugged. “I’m sort of weighing my options at the moment …”

“Cool.” Milo nodded as if he understood. He’d probably been buried under the weight of his options, whereas—not that she was going to tell him this—Clare’s were feather-light. “Hey. Do you ladies want to do a little sightseeing tomorrow?” he asked. “I can take a bit of time off and show you around if you want.”

Clare’s heart leapt for a brief instant … and then plummeted off a cliff into free-fall. That just wasn’t going to happen. At least, not until she’d convinced Maggie through a few weeks of intensely good behaviour that she was worthy of an un-supervised day pass. “I …”

“Thanks for the offer, Mi,” Al interjected. “But Clare’s kinda under house arrest while we’re here.”

“Excuse me?” Milo said, one dark gold eyebrow raised.

Al proceeded to explain—in Technicolor—about the house party debacle that had led to Clare’s exile: the now-legendary disastrous weekend when word of a two-day parental absence at the Reid household had leaked out on Facebook. Al regaled Milo with party highlight anecdotes while Clare sank deeper into the BMW’s leather bucket seat and wished she were dead. “And then some guy I’ve only ever seen while walking past detention hall threw up in the front hall closet. And on the dog. And then—get this—somehow he manages to throw up in Clare’s mom’s baby grand piano!”

And that, on top of everything else, was the unforgivable act that sealed Clare’s fate. Never mind the dog.

Al glanced back over her shoulder at Clare’s face and tried to stifle her giggles. “Sorry, pal. But you have to admit … it was fairly epic.”

Milo was laughing, although Clare was fairly certain it was polite laughter. In the rear-view mirror his blue eyes flicked up and his reflected gaze met hers. “So,” he said wryly. “Party girl, huh?”

“Oh. Yeah … nonstop.” Clare lowered her gaze so that she wouldn’t have to actually see the look of superiority she
knew
would be there in his eyes. Maybe, back home in Toronto anyway, a guy who looked like Milo wouldn’t necessarily have been out of Clare’s league: she’d generated occasional passing interest from one or two of the school hotties. But a guy who
thought
like Milo? Forget league, it wasn’t even the same sport.

“Hey,” he said, “nothing wrong with that. Go crazy. Live a little before you die, right?”

Right. Before she died of embarrassment. Or, if her aunt had anything to say about it, boredom.
See?
Clare thought.
There are at least two options for you to weigh. Go crazy
. Well, it was going to be a long summer. She just might.

2

S
hopping at Harrods. The Millennium Wheel. Shopping on Kensington High Street. A river cruise on the Thames. Shopping in Soho. A picnic in Hyde Park. Hell—she’d even have settled for snapping pictures with the unsmiling guards outside Buckingham Palace and shopping at a tacky souvenir stand. But no. Clare’s first day in Swingin’ London Town and here she was … at the museum. Al had been dead on.

Nothing interesting was ever going to happen in Clare’s life ever again.

“So. Bog bodies?”

“You’re kidding.” She turned and glared balefully at Al. “Are you still fixating on that?”

“According to the guide it’s the first time the exhibit has been made public. It’s a recent archaeological find and it was hugely significant—thirteen perfectly preserved corpses discovered in a peat bog in Norfolk. They’ve never found a mass sacrificial site like this before anywhere!” Al bounced on the balls of her sneakered feet. “C’mon. It’ll be interesting!”

Clare amended her prognosis: nothing
she
considered interesting was ever going to happen in her life ever again. She didn’t have her cell phone—she’d forgotten it back at Maggie’s—and so couldn’t even distract herself with a game of BubbleXplode (all social media platforms having been locked out by her parents after the Facebook debacle). She leaned against the base of a marble statue, staring with unseeing eyes at the grandeur of the British Museum’s Great Court.

“You’ve got me there, Al,” she sighed, pushing a hand through the tumbled waves of her light golden-brown hair. “Nothing more fun than spending an afternoon hanging out with swamp remains.”

“Bring on the bog zombies!” Al cheered.

“This is why we don’t get dates, y’know.”

“Is
that
why?”

Clare knotted her arms across her chest. “I can’t believe you never told me about Milo.”

“Are you still fixating on
that
?”

“You were totally holding out on me.”

“I was not!” Al protested. “I
told
you he was cool.”

“Yeah, but you never told me he was
hot
,” Clare muttered. “So. Very. Hot.”

Al laughed out loud at the look on her best friend’s face, her voice echoing through the vast, majestic court like bird-song. Clare pushed away from the statue and began to wander aimlessly, scuffing her feet on the polished floor as she went. Sunshine poured down through the vaulted ceiling of glass and steel latticework, illuminating the marble statuary and the gleaming stone curves of the Reading Room.

Clare remained determinedly unimpressed by the spectacle. She’d been there before on visits with her aunt, and for all the dent it made in her attention the museum might as well have been a Walmart back home in Canada. Except that a Walmart would have had makeup counters and a magazine rack. And would therefore have been an
infinitely
better waste of time, in Clare’s humble opinion.

She felt a stab of homesickness.

Already? Bad sign
…

A whole two months away from home was already starting to look like an unending purgatory of waiting around in elegant marble foyers for Maggie to take care of Matters Intellectual. Spending summer vacation in London hadn’t been Clare’s idea, but then again her choices
were
rather limited as far as that went. Fending for herself had
not
been presented as an option: she could either spend two months under the ever-watchful eye of her aunt or she could accompany her parents on tour. Which would have meant spending all her time in concert halls and hotel lobbies. Both Clare and her parents had viewed
that
prospect with almost exactly the same bleak level of enthusiasm.

Stupid Facebook party
…

At least the London deal had been sweetened by the fact that Al had convinced
her
mom to allow her to spend the summer with her nice, responsible, reliable cousin in England, too—thereby effectively accompanying Clare into exile. Unlike Clare, Al had actually jumped at the idea of spending the summer in Jolly Olde.
She
, certainly, could use a break from her home life, which mostly consisted of getting endlessly picked on by a gaggle of older brothers or blithely ignored by her elegantly eccentric mother, who spent most of the time in her art gallery (gin martini clutched tightly in one fist, latest in a series of avant-garde “artiste” boyfriends clutched tightly in the other).

Of course, having now renewed her acquaintance with the aforesaid “nice, responsible, reliable”
scorching-hot
cousin, Clare was rethinking her prospects. She wished Milo had been a little more persistent about the sightseeing idea, but apparently he was honouring her house-arrest situation, and so Al had turned up at Maggie’s townhouse solo that morning. Of course, Maggie had gotten frothy at the mouth with the merest suggestion of letting the girls loose on their first day anyway, hence the museum foray. When she wasn’t doing fieldwork, Maggie worked on contract for the institution and had for years. Clare’s mom had once joked that Maggie spent so much time at the museum they should just set up a cot and a hotplate for her in one of the unused display cases.

Clare turned on her heel and continued to wander aimlessly.

Al tripped along beside her, the fringe of her midnight-black bangs bobbing above her wide-set blue-grey eyes. “Back to our present dilemma. We’re stuck here until Mags is done. So we might as well go in search of something horrifying to keep us occupied.” She dug through her bag for the illustrated guide. “According to this, that means either a touring exhibit of ancient South American fertility idols, or the bog dudes. Your choice. Or”—she jerked a thumb over her shoulder at where Maggie was standing heads-together with a tall, sharp-featured woman in a crisp white lab coat—“we can tag along with your aunt and the freaky curator lady for some really gripping chat on pottery shards and radio-carbon dating. Whaddya say? Maybe it will inspire you to follow the Perfesser into the old family trade.”

Clare shuddered at the thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t have a deep fondness for “the Perfesser,” as Al called her. But she dreaded the thought of becoming anything the least bit like her. Or like the head of British Antiquities, Dr. Ceciley Jenkins, the “freaky curator lady.” It was Dr. Jenkins who’d scheduled the meeting with Clare’s aunt that afternoon.

“Girls!” Maggie barked from across the hall. “Come meet Dr. Jenkins.”

Dr. Jenkins, as far as Clare could tell, seemed to have been produced by the very same Lady Archaeologist 3000 machine that had spat out her aunt. She’d camouflaged her potentially attractive features with an almost identical starchy-updo, no-makeup, lab-coat fashion sense.

“We went to the same school together, once upon a time,” Maggie said. “Can you believe it?”

“I
really
can,” Clare murmured under her breath.

At her side, Al stifled a giggling fit. Barely.

“Dr. Jenkins recently became a full-fledged curator!” Maggie beamed benevolently and prodded the girls forward. “Say hello, now.”

Clare waggled the fingers of one hand in wan greeting. Al choked out a “hiya.”

“Er—hello …” Dr. Jenkins said, eyeing them as if they were a couple of soda cans unearthed at a Mesopotamian dig site. The curator’s manner was stiff and formal, and she smiled as though profoundly unused to the gesture. The result was sort of evil-clown grotesque. It was painfully obvious that Dr. Jenkins was deeply ill at ease in the presence of anyone too young to have qualified for a doctorate. “It’s, uh, it’s very nice to meet you … Alice, Clarinet.”

Clare rolled an eye at her aunt.
“Clare,”
she muttered. Maggie knew better than to give out her full stupid name.
Stupid musician parents
…

“Urm … we might be a while, Maggie,” said Dr. Jenkins. “I need your opinion on several aspects of the new exhibit installations …”

Casting her eye around the Great Court, Maggie spotted a group of teenagers milling about in front of two tour guides. “Girls, why don’t you go and join the Summer School Enrichment Tour,” she suggested, the tone of her voice conveying the misguided notion that this activity was to be considered “cool.”

Proudly defiant in her uncoolness, Al brightened up immediately.

Clare, on the other hand, tried to silently indicate to her aunt that she’d rather spend an hour or two in the museum gift shop jamming unsharpened souvenir pencils up her nose.

Somehow, Maggie didn’t get the hint. “Ceciley, would that be all right?” she asked the curator.

“Oh! Oh, of course it would!” the good doctor exclaimed with ill-concealed relief. She turned to Clare and said, in the kind of tone usually reserved for new puppies and the bribery of misbehaving eight-year-olds, “It’s the Ancient Europe Tour, Clarinet, and there’s a display of
bog
bodies as an added bonus!”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Nothing more fun than bog people!”

With that, Al doubled over in uncontrollable laughter only partly disguised as a coughing fit. Clare gave her aunt a peck on the cheek—whispering that Maggie owed her one,
big
time—and resigned herself to her fate.

THE TOUR GROUP
shuffled like a many-sneakered millipede from room to room, display case to display case, peering at coins and pottery shards, beads and rusted blades, broken glass bottles and gap-toothed ivory hair combs—all that remained of long-ago daily lives. Now priceless artifacts.