The Secrets of Boys (6 page)

She grabbed her car keys off the hook labeled CASSIDY in the front hall and drove to Larissa’s house.

“Hey, babe!” Larissa was already running out the front door. “Ready for some back-to-school shopping?”

Larissa slid into the passenger seat and plugged her iPod into the stereo system. The new Gwen Stefani song came blasting through the speakers.

“You mean back-to-
summer
-school,” Cassidy corrected her.

“Whatever. Shopping’s shopping.”

In an unprecedented gesture of generosity, Larissa agreed to hit Cassidy’s favorite stores first. But after a couple of hours at Theory, Banana Republic, and Kenneth Cole, Cassidy could tell Larissa was starting to get antsy.

“Can we
please
go somewhere where they’ve heard of colors other than khaki and black?” she begged, unwrapping a Twizzler outside Zara. “I’m going crazy here. You’d think we were shopping for preppy nuns or something.”

“Fine,” Cassidy agreed. She was already lugging around three huge bags, and the fluorescent lighting in the stores was starting to give her a headache. “Where do you want to go?”

“Well, actually,” Larissa said, a naughty look in her eye, “they have some really cute stuff at Seersucker.”

“Larissa,” Cassidy said. “You know that stuff is too trendy for me.”

“No way, dude. Some of it would look great on you!

Like, there’s this one skirt that I
think
is long enough for you to get away with wearing to school. And it’s really
mostly
gray, except for these cute little green lizards.

Come on, Cass, you’ll totally love it.”

“Fine,” Cassidy agreed begrudgingly. “Although there’s no way I’m wearing something that makes me look like I have reptiles crawling up my legs.”

“It won’t,” Larissa assured her as they left the mall and headed toward the hip Malibu neighborhood where she’d be spending her summer days. She was already bounding out of the car as Cassidy struggled to parallel-park down the street.

“Larissa!” the girl at the counter cried when they entered Seersucker. She ran around the case holding faux-antique glass brooches and blew tiny air kisses on both Larissa’s cheeks. She had to stand on her toes to do it. Fumiko was Japanese, with shaggy black hair swept to the side and long bangs. She wore a tank top with a
Knight Rider
logo on the front, a long skirt made from white gauze, denim, and netting, and a pair of those Indian-style shoes with complicated gold embroidery on the pointed toes.

“Larissa’s here?” There was a clacking sound and a wooden-beaded curtain parted to reveal Dina, the other owner of the store. She had long brown hair dreadlocked and pulled back in a messy ponytail and was wearing a vintage brown-and-white polka-dotted dress with cream-colored stiletto heels. There was a tattoo of the Wonder Woman insignia on her calf. “Hey, girl, how goes?”

“Great,” Larissa said. “I can’t wait to start working here. Oh, and I have some super ideas for the fashion show we’re putting on this summer.”

“Fab,” Dina said.

“We’d love to hear them,” Fumiko agreed.

As Larissa launched into a lengthy description of the faux fur they could use to line that season’s blazers, Cassidy stood staring at her best friend in disbelief.

Fumiko and Dina were acting like she wasn’t even in the store, and Larissa hadn’t bothered to introduce her. It was true that Larissa could be out of it at times, but it was unlike her to be downright rude.

Cassidy stood so that her shoulder was nearly touching Larissa’s, hoping sheer physical proximity would be a big enough hint. But Larissa was so engrossed in her conversation that Cassidy could have blown in both her ears and she probably wouldn’t have noticed. Cassidy felt her face go red with anger as the three of them chatted away about the fashion show. Had the blue-beaded necklace she’d just bought at Theory rendered her invisible or something? She was beginning to feel like an idiot—or even worse, a third wheel. Even though there were four of them in the store.

Well, if they were just going to ignore her, maybe she’d do some shopping after all. She wandered away from Larissa and toward the back of the store, occasionally checking out a price tag or stopping to roll a piece of fabric between her fingers. Normally if someone did that in a boutique, the staff would come running to see if you needed any help, but Fumiko and Dina just continued their endless conversation with her friend—the one that she, apparently, wasn’t good enough to join.

She found the skirt with the lizards that Larissa had been talking about and picked it up, holding it against her body. The lizards were huge and bright green. No way would she ever wear something like that. What had Larissa been thinking? Didn’t she know Cassidy’s taste better?

After a while, Cassidy got bored with looking at clothes she would never wear and wandered over to where Larissa was leaning against the counter, still chat-tering away with her bosses about the fall line. If there was one thing Cassidy hated, it was interrupting people’s conversations. The pacing seemed impossible—

waiting for a break and then hopping in with whatever you had to say, like playing double Dutch on the play-ground but a million times more nerve-racking. She stared at the brooches in the glass case. Some of them were actually kind of pretty, not that she was really the big-jewelry-wearing type.

“Can I help you with something?” Dina asked finally, clearly not recognizing her from when they had first walked into the store to ask for jobs.

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry!” Larissa gasped. “I didn’t even introduce you guys. Fumiko, Dina, this is Cassidy. She was supposed to work here with me this summer, but now she has to go to summer school instead.”

“You must be crushed,” Fumiko said stoically. “I bet you would have much rather worked here.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Cassidy said. Half an hour ago, she would have agreed wholeheartedly, but all of a sudden she wasn’t so sure. Would she really want to work with people who made Larissa momentarily forget she existed? Or was she just overreacting because she was upset about summer school?

“We’re sorry we can’t get you too, but at least we have Larissa,” Dina said. “She has so much energy and such cool ideas. We’re both psyched she’s working here.”

Cassidy decided she was definitely overreacting as Larissa beamed at the compliment, her eyes glowing like the brooches in the case below her. Cassidy tried to suppress the surge of envy and unhappiness that shot through her stomach.

“You should be,” she said, hoping none of the heav-iness in her heart had crept into her voice. “Larissa’s a lot of fun.”

* * *

Cassidy pulled her mom’s old Volvo into the student parking lot in front of the Seaver Academics complex at the Pepperdine campus and took a deep breath. The bright California sun was ricocheting off her Kenneth Cole shades and giving her a slight headache. Then again, perhaps the throbbing in her temples was due to stress and not the strength of UV rays.

Here goes,
she thought.
The beginning of the end.
She grabbed the black DKNY book bag she’d filled that morning with a notebook, pens and, of course, her sketchbook and sighed deeply as she tried to prepare herself for the first day of what she’d already begun to think of as the Worst Summer Since ’N Sync Broke Up.

Her fears were confirmed the moment she walked in the door. The room was half full of students who looked like they just couldn’t
wait
to crack their
Français
Maintenant
textbooks. A girl up front in a neatly pressed polo shirt and khakis smiled perkily at Cassidy as she brushed past to find a seat near the back, over by the window, where she could stare out at the lush green lawn and long for four thirty to come.

When she sat down, a husky guy with black hair spiked up in the middle of his head like a Kewpie doll and thick, round glasses entered, looked around, and made a beeline for the seat next to hers.

“Hi there,” he said, sitting down with a grunt. He extended his hand. It was large and slightly sweaty when she shook it. “I’m Benjy. Benjy Kahn. Or, I guess,
je
m’appelle
Benjy Kahn or whatever, since this is French and all.”

“I’m Cassidy,” she replied. No way she was going to start blathering away in a foreign language until she was forced to.

“Guess you’re not into the whole ‘speaking French unprovoked’ thing, are you?” Benjy said, making air quotes with his fingers.

“Not really.”

“Me either.” He shrugged. “So are you trying to beef up your transcript or something? Because just between you and me, I think ninety percent of our fellow students are only in this for the extra credit.”

“Are you?” Cassidy asked.

Benjy laughed. “I guess you could say that. Either that, or I’m seriously into taking French in the summer-time, volunteering with the fire department, bringing cookies to the elderly, learning astronomy on Thursday nights, and managing the varsity fencing team. But when Harvard gets my application, guess who’s gonna look well rounded?”

“Harvard, huh?” Cassidy pulled out her notebook and a pen, glancing at the color-coded Post-it notes and thinking how Benjy and her mom would be BFFs. If they ever met, she would spend the rest of her life having to hear about how
integrated
and
achievement-oriented
he was.

“Only school worth going to,” Benjy said. Cassidy ignored him and was in the middle of turning off the ringer on her cell when the door banged open and a woman in her fifties with wispy hair, a slightly out-of-style business suit, and a small run in her stockings rushed into the room.

“
Ah,
bonjour, bonjour
!” she said, slightly out of breath.

“Je m’appelle Madame Briand
.
Bienvenue à la course
française!”

“Bonjour!”
the girl up front in the polo shirt chirped.

Madame Briand’s head jerked up and her eyes registered a startled look before she broke into a huge smile. Benjy glanced at Cassidy and rolled his eyes.

Madame Briand set a leather satchel on her chair, removed a large stack of photocopied papers, and set them down on her desk with a smack.

“I’m so happy that you’ve all decided to enroll in this course,” she continued in an accent that Cassidy couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t French, but it was close. “This will be a summer of learning and exploration, of hard study, intensive research and, dare I say, a bit of fun.”

Fun didn’t sound so bad, but the rest of it Cassidy could do without.

“You see,” Madame Briand continued, “I’ve devel-oped a unique method for the study of language, and I am pleased to be passing it along to you. I believe that one does not learn a language merely by reading a textbook.
Non!
” She picked up the
Français Maintenant
textbook and flung it on the floor. The entire class gasped.

“There is more to the beautiful French language than what you find in a book,” Madame Briand continued.

“It is a language of intrigue, mystery, and romance. After all, it is a Romance language. And so we will learn French by
speaking
French and by
experiencing
French culture with our eyes and ears, our lips and tongues, our hearts and souls.”

She pressed her hand to her chest and took a deep breath before plunging back into a torrent of speech.

Cassidy couldn’t believe a woman as frumpy-looking as Madame Briand could talk so much and so quickly.

“We’ll be visiting institutions where the French language and culture are still alive and well, conversing with one another in French, drinking in the French atmosphere like a fine glass of Pernod.”

Well, that sounded good at least. Cassidy didn’t know what Pernod was, but it sounded delicious and highly alcoholic.

“However,” Madame Briand added, “one must also study the intricacies of the language, the grammar and vocabulary, usage and syntax.” She stooped to pick the textbook off the floor, blew the dust from its cover, then wiped it across the front of her skirt for good measure, smiling sheepishly at her antics. “And so we will be using the textbook after all. Sorry to disappoint you.”

Cassidy immediately slumped in her chair and began thinking of what Eric was doing at this very moment.

Probably running around on the sand in his tropical-print board shorts or greasing up his supple skin with some coconut-smelling lotion. She thought about how great he looked with his shirt off and how excellent it felt every time she pressed up against him. Then her mouth began to water.

Being here is worse than getting two Brazilian waxes in a
row,
she thought. (Not that she knew what getting even one felt like—she’d just heard from Larissa that it was very painful.)

“And now we will take a look at the curriculum,”

Madame Briand continued. She began passing out the photocopied pages. “As you can see, the focus will be on conversation and experiential education, but you will also have weekly quizzes on vocabulary and grammar.

These will be on Mondays, so you’ll have the weekend to study.”

Didn’t she mean the weekend to
worry
? Cassidy always spent the day before a test in a cold sweat. As if going to class all week wasn’t bad enough, now she had to spend her weekends cramming too?

Make that three Brazilian waxes.

“And at the end of the eight weeks, you will have a final exam,” Madame Briand said. “This will be a ten-minute oral presentation in which you speak in front of the class about a French cultural subject of your choice.”

Cassidy felt the blood freeze in her veins.
An oral presentation in front of the whole class?
That was like her worst nightmare! She couldn’t even have a ten-second conversation with the mailman without stuttering, let alone blab away for ten whole minutes in front of thirty people.

“À maintenant,”
Madame Briand said. “A bit about me. You see, I am from Montréal” (she pronounced it
Mohn-ray-ahl
), “where French is an official, government-sanctioned language.” She smiled and pressed her hand to her heart, as if there were a tiny piece of
Mohn-ray-ahl
still lodged there.