One Night That Changes Everything (16 page)

I take a deep breath and then head into Kate’s room, hoping I can find a bathing suit of hers that fits me. I finally find an old bikini shoved way in the back of one of her drawers that might work. It’s black (very slimming!), with a crisscross top and a bottom that’s high-cut on the side.

I just hope that I can fit into it. I take my clothes off, reminding myself that it doesn’t matter what I look like, that I just need to post the pictures and get my notebook back. Then I can delete it and no one will ever see it again. Well. Unless someone decides to right-click and save it, but if that happens, there’s really nothing I can do about it.

I step into the bottom of the suit, and it seems to fit, but
the top is giving me a hard time. I can’t figure out how to tie the straps behind my head, because they’re crisscross and very skinny, and my hands are shaking, which isn’t helping.

“Eliza?” I hear Cooper call my name from the top of the stairs. The top of the stairs, as in, he’s right outside my sister’s bedroom. I freeze. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine, just please don’t—”

The bedroom door opens then, and Cooper’s standing there. And he sees me. With the bikini bottom on and the top of the bikini hanging off me. I turn around quickly so he can’t see anything else.

“Get out!” I yell.

“Okay, okay!” he says, and shuts the door. “Sorry!”

I take a deep breath and try to still my beating heart. Then I reach around and start trying to tie the top again, but it’s not working. And when I finally do get it tied, I look in the mirror and see that it’s all weird, with everything kind of smushed together. Definitely not a flattering look. And for once, it’s not my body that’s the culprit.

Dilemma: Do I leave it like it is, and deal with the smushed boobs, or untie it and try to get it right?

Cooper knocks softly on the door. “You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” I say. I grab a T-shirt out of one of my sister’s drawers, pull it over my head, and open the door. I decide to pretend that moment never happened, the one where Cooper almost saw me topless. “I told you to wait downstairs.” But I say it all happy and pleasant, so that he doesn’t know I’m rattled.

“I know. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” His hands are in his pockets, and he looks sincere. For a second, I remember how nice it was when he was rubbing my back a little while ago, and I’m tempted to break down again, to tell him no, I’m
not
okay, that this whole thing sucks. But instead I force myself to push past him.

“I’m fine,” I say, heading into my room across the hall so that I can get my digital camera.

“Did you take the pictures?” Cooper asks.

“Not yet,” I say. “I’m going to take them by the hot tub.”

“Oh.” But he says it kind of … strangely. Like it’s a big effort for him to get the word out.

I leave Cooper back in the living room, then head outside to the backyard and turn the hot tub jets on. I’ve decided to pose by the hot tub not because it’s super-sexy (that’s just an added bonus), but because I figure it will be a good way to cover up my body. If I can just take a picture of myself where half of my body is out of the water, I won’t have to worry about everyone seeing my bottom half. Genius, right?

But when I get into the water, it soon becomes pretty clear my plan is not going to work. Every time I try to take a picture of myself, all you can see is my head. And when I angle the camera down, it looks like I’m trying to take a pic right down the front of my bathing suit.

You can also totally tell that I’m taking the pics myself, which make them seem all “Look at me, I’m taking a sexy pic of myself” instead of an “Oh, look, someone just happened to
take a pic of me in the hot tub while we were all hanging out and I just happened to look very sexy.” Not to mention the whole, uh, boob-smushing issue. And, yeah, I don’t plan on keeping these pics up for that long, but still. Do I really want to give the 318s something else to laugh at me about?

I take a deep breath. “Cooper?” I yell. “Can, um, you come out here?”

Cooper’s on his cell phone when he comes outside, and he puts a finger to his lips.

“Sick,” he says. “Are you serious? … Yeah, totally, dude.”

He must be on the phone with Tyler. I reach for my phone, which is sitting on the side of the tub, and check to see if Marissa or Clarice have texted me, but they haven’t. So I lean back in the tub and close my eyes, letting the hot frothy water slide over me, and hope that it somehow calms me down.

“Yeah, I’m just on my way back to Isabella’s, had to go on a beer run,” he says. “See you soon.” He shuts the phone.

“I have about an hour before I have to be back to Izzy’s,” he says. “Tyler wanted to know where I was. I can stall him a little bit, but …” Ewww. Izzy? I have never heard anyone call Isabella “Izzy” before, which means it’s some kind of dumb nickname that he dreamed up for her. I want to kill him, and instead I have to allow him to take pictures of me in a bikini, which I will then have to post on the internet for my whole school and possibly the world to see. Talk about your nightmare scenarios.

“Izzy?” I say. “You call her Izzy?”

“Well, not all the time,” he says. “Just, you know, sometimes.”

“That’s really stupid,” I tell him. “And, just so you know, I don’t need you out here anymore, so go away.”

“How are you going to take a picture of yourself, then?” he asks. “It looks like you’re having some trouble.”

“No, I’m not,” I lie. The steam from the hot tub is now fogging up the lens of the camera, and I try to wipe it off, but my hands are all wet and I end up just smearing the condensation around. The camera gets all slippery and I almost drop it into the water, and so finally Cooper comes over and takes it out of my hands.

“I got it,” he says. When his fingers brush mine, my stomach flips, and I hate, hate, hate that he can still have that effect on me after everything he’s done.

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.” I make sure the bubbles are covering up pretty much everything and give a smile.

Cooper lowers the camera and frowns. “That’s your big sexy pose?”

“Yes,” I say, nodding. “I’m wet, I’m in a hot tub, I’m wearing a bikini.” I check all the things off. “Those are three very sexy things.”

“Yes,” Cooper says. “Those are three very sexy things, but, um, we can’t see your bikini.”

“I’ve decided that maybe we should leave some things to the imagination,”
I say. “Like less is more.” This is contradictory to what I said before, about not wanting to incur Tyler’s wrath by cheating, but that was before Cooper got involved in the actual picture-taking part of this whole process.

Cooper looks a little uncertain. “I guess,” he says. He takes another picture of me and then comes over and shows me the pic in the view screen. Even I’m surprised at how lame it is. I look like I’m on a family vacation or something, and that if you panned out, you’d see a bunch of old people around me, like maybe I went to go visit my grandma at her retirement home or something and ended up in the hot tub with her and her friends. Totally lame and not sexy at all. You can’t even see the bathing suit.

“Good pics,” I say in a strangled voice.

Cooper raises his eyebrows.

“Fine,” I say. “A little more cleavage.” I take a deep breath. “But could you, uh, could you retie my strings?”

I turn my back to him and lift myself out of the water, then reach up and untie my strings. I lean over and hold the front of the bikini top close to my chest. Cooper has no trouble tying the strings the right way (Maybe he does it for “Izzy”?), and his fingers brush against my wet skin, making me shiver.

When he’s done, he goes back to the front of the hot tub. I slide back into the water and take another deep breath, then lean back and look up at the sky, letting the warm night air pass over my face. Then I sit back up very, very slowly until the very top of my bikini is showing. Cooper snaps a picture, and his face is totally blank, so I stand up just a tiny bit more,
so that my boobs are totally out of the water, and you can see the top of my stomach. That should be fine, right? And not too crazy. It just looks like I was relaxing in the hot tub and now I’m getting out, and someone just
happened
to snap a pic of me while I was doing so. The water’s still covering a lot, but you can clearly tell I’m wearing a bikini.

And then Cooper’s eyes get wide. Like, really, really wide.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, quickly sliding back into the water. “Was it really horrible?” I wonder if I can Photoshop. Not that I’ve ever used Photoshop. But I know it can work miracles. Whenever they show those pics in magazines of how celebrities get their pictures retouched, you can totally tell the difference.

“No,” Cooper says. “It was, uh, it was good.” He seems flustered.

“Let me see,” I demand.

He brings the camera over to me, and I look at the preview screen. Wow. I actually don’t look that bad. I’m leaning over the water, and you can see the top of my bathing suit. Since it’s Kate’s, it’s of course a little tight, and so my cleavage looks amazing. My hair is all wet, and I look a little nervous, but kind of in an alluring way. “Wow,” I say.

“Yeah,” Cooper says. He puts the camera down and looks at me. Is he … Is Cooper … Oh. My. God. Cooper thinks I look hot! Cooper Marriatti is actually enjoying taking pictures of me. Ugh. Typical guy. Of course, now that I know that, I might as well have a little bit of fun with it.

“I don’t know if it’s sexy enough,” I say suddenly. “I think I need to do a few more. Maybe one like this.” I pull myself almost completely out of the hot tub and lean my head back, letting the water from my hair slide down my back.

“I think I got enough,” Cooper squeaks. He comes over and hands me back the camera, and this time, when our hands touch, it feels like a hot current is passing between us.

“Are you sure?” I ask innocently. “I was showing off my chest, I know, but I thought we could do some more, like where I could let the rest of my body be—”

“I’m sure,” he says.

I click through the pictures, deleting all the earlier ones off my camera, so that I’m left with the one that just shows me standing up in the water.

“So now what?” Cooper asks.

“Now we head up to my room and post this online,” I say. I pull myself out of the hot bubbly water, and the cool night air moves over my skin, making me shiver. Cooper grabs a towel off the chair next to the tub and wraps it around my shoulders.

“Thanks,” I say. He doesn’t move his hands right away, and I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but I feel like he pulls the towel tighter than he needs to for a second, like maybe he doesn’t want to let me go. But just like that, the moment’s gone, and my phone is ringing.

Marissa. “Oh, thank God,” I say when I answer it. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “I think they just wanted to scare me
a little bit, they called my parents, and they had to, um, come down to pick me up.”

“Were they pissed?” I asked.

“What do you think?” she asks. “Anyway, they’re taking me to come and get my car. Where are you guys?”

Uh-oh. “Um, well, I’m at my house,” I say. “With Cooper.”

“They’re at Eliza’s,” I hear her say to her parents.

“But Clarice isn’t here,” I say. “She took your car and went to help her cousin Jamie with something.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line. Obviously Marissa is trying to figure out just how to tell her parents that Clarice has her car, and that she has no idea where she’s gone.

Finally she just says, “Oh, Clarice will just bring my car home for me? So that my parents don’t even have to go and get it? That is so-o-o-o nice of her, make sure you thank her for me. Okay, byyye!” And then she clicks off.

“Her parents picked her up,” I say, a little dazed. “She’s in trouble, I think, but I’m not sure if—”

My phone vibrates in my hand. One new text. Marissa. “
CALL ME WHEN U MEET BACK UP W/ CLARICE, AND THEN COME AND GET ME!
”

I text back, “
AREN’T U IN TROUBLE FOR UR IMPENDING DRUG POSSESSION CHARGES
?”

“
WILL SNEAK OUT, CALL ME
,” comes the rapid reply.

I sigh and rub my temples. Okay. Time to focus.

1:47 a.m.

Cooper follows me into my room and pulls up a chair next to my computer, uninvited. I don’t say anything, but when I go to log on to my Lanesboro Losers account, I glance over at him. “Don’t look,” I instruct. “I don’t want you to see my password.” This is mostly because my password is
Cooper143
which means “Cooper I love you” in text speak. In my defense, I totally made that password like ages ago, and I just, you know, haven’t gotten around to changing it. I’m very lazy like that.

“I’m not looking,” Cooper says, plugging the digital camera into the back of my laptop. “You know, this would be a lot easier if Lanesboro Losers had the ability to get uploads right from people’s phones, then we wouldn’t have to—” He breaks off as he see me staring at him incredulously.

“You’re giving me advice on how to make Lanesboro Losers better?” I ask. I mean, yeah, I know Cooper’s into some of that techy geek stuff, but still. Now’s kind of a weird time to start talking website features. Especially for a website that is kind of a big part of the weird mess we’re in right now. I mean, that
I’m
in.

He frowns. “Well, no, not you. Your sister. She’s the one in charge of it, right? Or at least makes the decisions on what new features to add and stuff?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I say. “I mean, she still has control over all of it, even though she’s not really actively involved with it anymore.”

“Okay, so then why wouldn’t I tell you how I think it could be better?”

“Well, because from what you’ve told me, this site is pretty much responsible for not only ruining my night, but possibly my life. Also, it ruined yours. So it doesn’t make any sense that you would be all for improving it.”

Cooper shrugs. “It didn’t really ruin my life.” He looks at me, his green eyes serious. “I didn’t really want to go to Brown, you know that.” I nod. He doesn’t. Want to go to Brown, I mean. And I do know it, not because he’s ever said it, but because I could just tell from the way he talked about it. Kind of … passionless.