Tall Cool One (17 page)

“Oh, man, this is gonna be so sweet.”

Cammie turned and saw a short guy to her left; he couldn’t have been more than five-foot two, with stringy dark hair and a rodent-like overbite that screamed for an orthodontist’s intervention. Cammie towered over him, even more so because of her high-heel boots.

“I love the Donnas,” the guy told Cammie. “They’re so bitchin’. You?”

Cammie shrugged. “My boyfriend’s a big fan.”

“Oh yeah. Big fan,” Adam repeated back, joining the conversation.

“My man.” The short guy shared a fist bump with Adam. “I dream about those chicks for real. I figured this might be my only chance to see them, but how the hell was I gonna see ’em over the crowd, you know? My friend offered to lend me these platform goth queen boots, but I don’t see how you chicks walk in those puppies.”

The guy reeled slightly; Cammie could see his red-rimmed eyes. Clearly he was stoned out of his mind.

“Been hitting the Thai stick, dude?” Cammie asked smoothly.

He shook his head. “Nah. White Russian bongs before the show with some of Mendocino’s finest. Bitchin’.”

Bitchin’? Cammie thought. No one said “bitchin’” anymore. In fact, no one did White Russian bongs anymore. They weren’t old enough to be retro or new enough to be hip. Everyone she knew in Beverly Hills had taken up old-fashioned hookahs. Like fashion, illegal drug consumption had a shelf life. Whatever. She’d just ignore the little weasel.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a guy onstage bellowed into the microphone. “Put your hands together for . . . the Donnas!”

The crowd roared; Cammie edged to her left in an effort to see the girls as they strutted onto the stage. They looked just like the picture that Cammie had seen on the Internet. In fact, they were wearing the exact same clothes: four girls in their early twenties with long straight hair, doing variations on the Avril Lavigne theme.

Meanwhile Cammie saw Rodent Boy pull something out of his pocket. A folded paper, which he hastily unfolded. What was it? Some Medocino green he’d saved for the occasion? A couple of tabs of E? She leaned over to check it out. None of the above. In fact, it was an eight-by-ten publicity photograph of the Donnas.

Cammie cracked up as she figured it out. The short guy had accurately anticipated being dwarfed by the crowd, so he’d brought a photograph of the band so he could pretend he was watching them while they played. Cammie nudged Adam so that he’d take in the guy and his photo.

“Great, man,” Adam told the short guy, chucking him on the shoulder. “Way to plan ahead.”

“I fucking love you girls!” Rodent Boy yelled, never once looking up from the photo.

Adam and Cammie cracked up. As different as they were, they shared a sense of humor and an acknowledgment of the absurdity of life. Knowing that made Cammie fall for him all over again. He stood behind her, arms around her waist, and they shimmied to the music together. The truly weird thing was, the more Cammie heard, the better it sounded. Those girls could really rock. It wasn’t that she was ready to run out and buy their CD. No goddamn way. But that Adam had introduced her to their music and to an experience like this and that she wasn’t ready to insist they leave immediately . . . Well, it was something.

After the Donnas came the Flaming Lips and then the Foo Fighters, both bands Cammie actually knew. She was enjoying herself, getting into the vibe of being part of a mass of people that had a power and an energy of its own. It wasn’t as good as sitting at a table twenty feet from Jakob Dylan and sipping a bourbon Manhattan straight up, but it was still fun in its own proletarian way.

Cammie wound her arms around Adam’s neck during a break in the music and kissed him softly. “Thanks for bringing me. This is great.”

“You’re welcome.” He kissed her back. The kiss escalated until they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

“We have such sucky timing,” Adam joked, leaning his forehead against Cammie’s.

“Why isn’t there a bedroom here?” Cammie asked.

But there wasn’t. All they could do was enjoy the concert. Which they did, until the Cure closed the show sometime after midnight.

Tired but exhilarated, they straggled out of the stadium with everyone else as the sound system played some old Mothers of Invention songs and found their car in the lot. With five thoroughly drunk guys partying on it and around it. One stood on the hood, unzipping to pee.

“Get off, man,” Adam ordered.

“Hey, man, your girlfriend is fucking Paris Hilton!” The guy pointed at Cammie.

Cammie rolled her eyes. Men could be so blind. She’d occasionally heard the comparison before when she’d flat-ironed her hair. But everyone knew that Cammie was better looking. For one thing, Paris was built like a boy. Once upon a time, Cammie’s bounty had been less than overflowing, too. But that was before she purchased a perfect, perky pair of D-cup implants on her fifteen birthday.

“Hey, dudes!” The pisser called to his friends. “Fucking Paris Hilton!”

“Wow, you recognized me,” Cammie replied. “Cool.”

“Yo, where’s Tinkerbell? That rat dog of yours?” jeered another drunken guy.

“Please don’t let this get around,” Cammie told them, lowering her voice confidentially. “But I just went on the South Beach Diet and ate him for dinner. Fried.”

“Righteous, man!” The pisser jumped off the hood and weaved away with his friends, leaving Adam and Cammie grinning at each other.

She slid into Adam’s arms, pressed against the steady beating of his heart. She felt safe there, so calm and happy. The moment of lust they’d shared inside the stadium had passed, but she didn’t care. Nor did the prospect of the long drive back to Los Angeles faze her. When Adam kissed her temple and tenderly stroked her hair, Cammie decided this was the best kind of bliss. Because while she’d known the sexual kind many times, she had never really known the tender kind.

Perfection

S
am twirled in front of the floor-length mirror. “Okay, am I insane or does this actually look cute on me?”

She and Anna were visiting one of the boutiques in the Mexican village at Las Casitas, a shop that had stayed open late so that guests could wear authentic Mexican clothes to the street party that night. There was one rack of colorful hand-embroidered dresses, another of brightly colored peasant blouses and full skirts. Mexican jewelry in heavy turquoise and silver lay on black velvet in a glass display case. Sam had selected a heavily embroidered white off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and a wide black skirt that fell to her calves. She’d traded in her usual designer heels for hand-tooled Mexican sandals.

Anna, meanwhile, had purchased sandals that laced around her ankles, along with a yellow embroidered shift that brought out the golden blond in her hair.

“Muy bonita,”
the lovely woman behind the counter told Sam. Then she handed each girl a passion flower. “You put this behind your right ear if you are single and your left ear if you are taken.”

Sam and Anna looked at each other. “Right ear!” they declared at the same moment, then signed their sales slips and skipped out the door.

The street party was already in full swing at the Las Casitas authentic village, at the east end of the resort, about ten minutes’ walk from the main pool. More Disneyland than authentic, it was still charming. Two cobblestone streets crossed at a town square that was circled by craftspeople. They wove baskets, made jewelry, and cooked mouthwatering food on open-air grills. It seemed like every guest at Las Casitas was there, too—the spacious resort, which seemed so empty so much of the time, was rollicking. Waiters passed through the crowd carrying empty salt-rimmed glasses. Hosts directed the guests to a fountain in the center of the town square that sprayed mixed margaritas instead of water. Right by the fountain, a mariachi band played traditional Mexican music.

Sam and Anna worked their way to the one end of the square, where a drop-dead handsome man in his late twenties was teaching the crowd to cha-cha in preparation for a dance contest. As he ran through his lesson, the mariachi band quit, and the resort house band tuned up behind him.

“We should learn,” Sam said, following the man’s feet as he demonstrated the steps. “I’ve always wanted to.”

“I know how,” Anna replied. “It’s fun.”

Sam shot her a look. “Who taught you?”

“In fourth and fifth grade, I was sent to Cotillion.”

“What the hell is Cotillion?”

“Essentially, it’s training in how to be polite, know all the basic dance steps, the proper way to bow to royalty—”

“Wait. You’re trained in how to bow to royalty?” Sam repeated. “And you’re telling me this with a straight face?”

“Believe it or not, the knowledge has come in handy.”

“Jeez. The only kings we have in Hollywood are named Weinstein and Spielberg.” Sam moved her feet in imitation of the dance instructor’s steps. “Step-step cha-cha-cha,” she muttered. “This isn’t so hard.”

The band started to play, and the resort’s evening social motivators—employees whose only job was to start the party and keep it going—moved among the guests, teasing and cajoling people to dance, introducing them to one another. One of them, a beautiful guy with a waterfall of inky hair, urged Sam toward a potbellied thirtyish guy in a Mexican wedding shirt and thoroughly American golf shorts. When he saw Sam, he reached out a beefy hand.

“Cliff Reese. Grand Rapids, Michigan. I won a sales contest, and they sent me here. Can you believe it?” If he hadn’t told Sam he was in sales, the strength of his grip would have.

“Mary Poppins. London, England,” Sam replied. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Anna being paired up with a skinny man who was old enough to be her father. The man wore a gaudy Hawaiian shirt.

“Did you say Mary Poppins?” Cliff asked. “That’s not your real name, right?”

Sam lowered her voice. “Don’t let it get around, but it used to be Poopins. After my parents passed away, I changed it.”

Cliff furrowed his brow.

“Okay, Cliff, ya got me,” Sam went on, making it up as she went along. “My great-grandfather’s last name was Popinakov, but they changed it at Ellis Island to Poopins. Then my grandfather stayed in London after the war, but my dad came to America when I was three. That’s why I don’t have an accent. But I still have a British passport. Tallyho.”

“Okay, men, take your partners in your arms!” the dance instructor called. Cliff’s arm slid around Sam’s waist.

“I’m kind of new at this,” Sam explained.

“No prob,” Cliff replied.

The music began in earnest. It turned out that Cliff was an excellent dancer. He made the cha-cha easy, and soon Sam was weaving and twirling with the best of them, a huge smile plastered on her face as her feet flew over the cobblestone street, skirt twirling around her as she spun. Sam wondered if maybe she should go on being Mary Poppins. Because Mary was a happier girl than Sam Sharpe had ever been.

“Here.” Anna grinned, handing Sam a mud slide. “You look like you could use this.”

“Definitely,” Sam agreed, taking the drink and draining it. “That schmuck was such a good dancer. Then he had to try to stick his tongue down my throat.”

“Bad manners,” Anna joked. “Evidently his parents didn’t make him go to Cotillion.”

“Ha.” Sam blotted her lips with a napkin. “Much better.”

It was an hour later. The street party was in full swing, but Anna and Sam had escaped to one of the open-air cafés and were watching the action from a couple of wicker chairs that faced the square.

“God, why couldn’t that social director have paired us up with two cute guys?” Sam asked.

“Cute” made Anna think of Ben.

“And one of them would look like, say, Ben Birnbaum.” For once, she didn’t edit her thoughts.

Sam looked surprised. “I thought you guys were history.”

“I don’t know what we are.” Anna took a sip of her drink—a coconut-and-rum concoction that was a Las Casitas specialty. “I still think about him, Sam. I know he thinks about me, too, because he called and left this long message.”

Sam raised a hand to shut Anna up. “Stop right there. This is a no-Ben zone,” she decreed. “Besides, aren’t you hooking up with that surfer guy?”

“Kai? We didn’t make plans.” She gazed around. “I don’t see him out there.”

“Do you care?”

Anna shrugged. “I do like him, but . . . I’m making a concerted effort to live in the moment. And evidently, this is a moment he’s not in.”

The band on the square stopped playing. But off in the distance, they heard a pounding bass line.

“Where’s that coming from?” Sam asked. “I thought we were the only party in town.”

“I don’t know. . . . Oh yes, I do.” Anna recalled Kai’s very thorough tour of the grounds her first day at Las Casitas and grinned. “At least I
think
I know. Follow me.”

Five minutes’ walk past the spa and gym brought them to a sloping path, where the music they’d heard in the distance grew louder.

“Let me guess,” Sam ventured. “It’s a special party for people who hate mariachi and cha-cha and can’t stand Mexican food.”

“Not exactly.” They reached an illuminated white sign in English, Spanish, and French. Literally. Anna gestured to it. “Behold.”

LAS CASITAS AU NATUREL.

ROPAS
OPTIONAL.

AGE EIGHTEEN AND ABOVE,
SOLAMENTE!

“Get out!” Sam laughed. “Does ‘
ropas
optional’ mean ‘Chubbies are invited to keep their clothes on’?”

“Stop,” Anna chided her. “Anyway, neither of us is eighteen.”

“Like anyone cares,” Sam scoffed. “Let’s go. We can keep our clothes on and ogle.”

Beyond a copse of trees, the path opened up into a swimming area; instead of a concrete pool, it was an artificial lagoon lit by giant torches. Naked people of every size and shape—a few of them in swimsuits, most without—cavorted in the water or hung out on chaise lounges. The lagoon-side bar was just as crowded, with people boogeying to a DJ’s music on a jammed dance floor. There was a one guy in particular they couldn’t miss, dancing with manic energy at their end of the dance floor, doing his best imitation of a dying gyroscope.