The Third Twin (3 page)

The confusion starts to lift from his face as he puts the pieces together. “Oh! You must be one of her … sisters.” Now he just looks embarrassed. “I met Alicia at a show in Leucadia a couple of months ago.… We went out a few times. I um … had to do some things up north and just got back into town.” He hesitates. “How is she?”

“Fine.”

“Good,” he says with a slightly uncomfortable smile. “That’s good.”

I nod, silently urging him to move along. Nothing to see here. I’m not the one you’re looking for. When they realize it’s just me, guys usually vanish.

Instead, he puts one hand on the empty chair across from me at the table. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

“Um.” I look around, trying to come up with something other than a flat, bitchy “Yes,” but there’s something in his blue eyes that makes me hesitate. The café patio has filled up since I sat down. I’ve had my face so buried in my laptop, I didn’t even notice.

The guy follows my glance. “It’s just that it’s packed out here.” He nods toward my laptop. “I won’t say a word. I promise.”

I shrug and kick the chair toward him. All he wants is a place to sit. “It’s fine.”

He sets his drink and little plastic restaurant number on the table. “Thanks.”

I turn pointedly back to my laptop, but it’s impossible to concentrate with him sitting across from me, even though he’s not doing anything I can pinpoint as irritating. Just distracting.

He drapes his jacket over the back of the chair and squints across the sidewalk toward the beach, where the sun is starting to break through the midmorning fog. “Gonna get hot soon.”

I don’t look up. “Yep.” Sweat is starting to trickle down my back, but I can’t take the sweatshirt off because the T-shirt I’m wearing is in even worse shape.

After settling in, he pulls an actual book out of his bag, so I slowly let my eyes wander past the laptop screen to see what he’s reading.
Pride and Prejudice.
Seriously? I watch his eyes
to see if he’s just holding the book for effect, but it looks like he’s actually reading it.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, until Cheryl brings his burger and fries to our table. She winks at me as she sets the plate down, and I smile, praying with all my might that she won’t start some random conversation. Everyone around here knows we’re twins, not triplets, and I’m too far into this to have to explain it now. I relax a little after she walks away without a word, and he slides the plate toward me. “Fry?”

I don’t look up. “No. Thanks.”

“It’s only fair. You share your table with me. I share my fries with you.”

The salty smell hits me, and I look over at my empty glass. That latte is the only thing I’ve had in the two hours I’ve been sitting here. “Okay,” I say, reaching for the plate. “Just a couple. Thanks.”

One of the fries barely grazes the floor before a watchful seagull dives from the railing and scoops it up in a blur of feathers and squawking. I laugh as the guy jumps back in his seat, obviously not familiar with the vultures masquerading as harmless seabirds that are the real overlords of this place. It makes sense that he’s not from around here. Ava would never pull an Alicia this close to home. Alicia is strictly for guys we’d never bump into in real life. We hope.

“You’d better hold on to those fries. The seagulls are ruthless,” I say.

“Duly noted.”

My phone buzzes, and I jump, just like I’ve done every
time for the past few weeks—the waiting is killing me. I click on my email, but it’s only junk. Nothing from Stanford. Not yet.

The guy grabs a couple of fries and gestures toward my phone. “Expecting something?”

I turn back toward my laptop and type a few words. It almost feels like I’ve been caught doing something embarrassing. “I thought we agreed no talking.”

“
I
thought we were on a break.” He smiles, revealing prominent canine teeth, a defect that I secretly love.

“I wouldn’t want to keep you from your heavy reading,” I say, nodding at the book.

He turns it over and looks at the front like he’s just noticing it for the first time. “Yeah. I thought I should see what all the fuss is about.”

“Let me know when you figure it out,” I say, glancing at the book. I can’t stand Jane Austen, with all the preening and dancing and girls who are interested in a guy only when they realize he has money.

He looks right into my eyes, a piercing gaze that makes my stomach flip. “Not an Austen fan,” he says quietly. “Good to know.”

I look down at my hands and shake my head. What am I doing? This is one of Ava’s rejects, and I’m sitting here stealing fries and talking about Jane Austen when I should be studying for that statistics test on Monday. After the catastrophic end to last night’s date, I need to keep my focus. Eyes on the prize, as Dad always says. I seriously don’t have time for this.

He peers over the top of the screen. “What’s so important
that you’re hunkered down here typing away on such a beautiful day?”

“ ‘Hunkered’? I don’t hunker.” Who under the age of sixty uses words like that?

Without even looking up, I can tell he’s smiling. “I don’t know. You look pretty hunkered to me, and one little text got you all twitchy. I stand by my word choice.”

“I’m just waiting for an email.” He doesn’t comment, so I go on. “From college. Admissions acceptances are due this week.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Sounds important. Where did you apply?”

“Stanford.”

There’s a beat of silence as he waits for more. “That’s it? Just Stanford?”

I put my hands in my lap and look at him. It’s obvious he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. “No, that’s not it, but it might as well be. The first thing I ever wore was a Stanford onesie. My father’s had the Stanford Dad bumper sticker ready for his car since I was nine. Stanford’s the only place that matters.” It doesn’t help that I applied for early action and got deferred. Deferred. As in a definite maybe. My life feels like it’s been on hold the past few months.

“But why?”

I stare at him, amazed that anyone can be so oblivious. “Um, because it’s the best?”

The guy shrugs and gives me a little grin. “The best for what? The best for meeting your very own Mr. Darcy?”

I turn back to my laptop, irritation bubbling up inside
me. Why am I even bothering trying to explain myself to this nouveau-grunge
P & P
–toting hipster? Not like this conversation is ever going to matter. “Only the best university on the West Coast. For everything,” I say into my keyboard.

“Prelaw?”

“No.” I hate the smug look on his face. “Business.”

The look of derision in his eyes isn’t subtle at all. “Hmm. Serious.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice, but I can’t help it.

“Nothing. Lots of kids want to grow up to be CEOs.”

I try to tell myself to shut up, but I rarely listen to my own advice. “I’m going to be a partner in my dad’s company,” I say before I can stop myself.

“What kind of company?”

I hesitate. I usually hate telling people what Dad does, but this guy looks expectant, so what the hell? Not like I’m ever going to see him again. “They make Andy Bars.”

“Your dad is
that
Andy?” The guy’s eyes are wide.

I smile tightly. His actual name is Alvaro, but Dad thought “Andy” was catchier, back in the days when he started making his nutrition bars in small batches in the kitchen of his restaurant. Now that he’s practically famous, it’s too late to change it. “Yep.” I wait for the next question, which is always “Can you get me some?”

But he just seems surprised. “Interesting. Is that what you’ve always wanted to do?”

I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, like my family is
all entitled or something. “My dad’s family came here from Guatemala when he was five. His father was a custodian at a high school. Dad put himself through college by bussing tables and got his MBA from Stanford. He does a lot of charity work through his corporation.” Not to mention being the only parent to his adopted twin daughters after his blond trophy wife bailed on him. Okay, maybe she wasn’t blond—I don’t know because Dad got rid of all of the pictures of her—and not exactly a trophy wife, because they didn’t have a lot of money back then, but that’s what I imagine when I think about the woman he was married to once upon a time.

Dad saved the newspaper article from almost seventeen years ago. It’s on the front page of our baby book. I love the headline:
FOUNDLING TWINS LEFT ON RESTAURANT STEPS
. When I was little, I thought a foundling was something out of Harry Potter, some mythical creature with tiny shimmering wings and secret magical powers, not that it was just a nice word for an abandoned baby. Dad decided that the fact that we’d been left at his restaurant was a sign that he’d been chosen just for us. They spent months working on our adoption, only to have his wife decide before we were two years old that maybe the whole parenting thing wasn’t for her. But he stuck around.

“So you feel like you have to do the same thing in order to measure up?”

Yes. “No. It’s just what I’ve always wanted to do. If he was a doctor, I’d probably want to do that. He’s one of the best people I know.”

“I see,” he says quietly, and I can’t tell if he’s mocking me or not.

I glance at him. That turned into a lot more of a moment than I’d meant it to be. “So, what did you want to be?”

He stares at the sky. “At first, I wanted to be Superman, but then I realized that leaping tall buildings and bending steel is not exactly a skill set you can learn. So then I wanted to be a rock star.”

“And you’re studying Jane Austen because it will help you at rock star school?”

“Something like that.” The guy smiles, revealing those big, square teeth. “Right now the school of life is a better choice than Stanford for me.” He leans back in his chair. “Okay, future CEO, what about Harvard? Yale? Dartmouth?”

I glance out at the bicycles on the path in front of the sand, their riders in shorts and flip-flops despite the fact that winter is barely behind us. “I don’t believe in snow.”

He lets out a sharp laugh. “You don’t
believe
in snow? How can you not believe in it? It exists. I’ve seen it myself.”

“I believe in it for other people, just not for me. I hate it. And all the other Ivy League schools have snow, so it’s Stanford or nothing.”

“Obviously.” He leans back in his chair so that the front legs lift off the ground. “Now that you’ve explained it to me, I totally see your point.”

He goes back to eating, and I try to focus on the statistics problem in front of me, although my mind is whirling and I’m having a hard time concentrating. I have no idea why I just told him all that.

“So, Lexi? Alicia told me that your other sister is Ava. Ava, Alicia, and
Lexi?
”

I pointedly take my hands off my keyboard and put them in my lap. “Alexa,” I say. “Lexi is short for it. Ava, Alicia, and
Alexa.
”

He laughs a little and nods. “I see what they did there. Why do people always name twins and triplets things that rhyme?”

I don’t even remember how we came up with the name for the third twin, but once we started calling her Alicia, it just seemed to fit. “Technically they don’t rhyme. But honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t exactly have a say in it.”

He waves to a bunch of guys as they take over an empty table in the corner.

“Let me guess,” I say, looking at the group. It’s full of way too much hair, visible tattoos, and those ear gauges that make a person look like an escapee from
National Geographic.
“Your band?”

He grins. “Is it that obvious?”

I look from the table of guys back to him. He fits in perfectly. I’d bet money he’s the lead singer. “Yep. It is.”

“So much for conformity in individuality.” He thumps his chair onto the deck as he leans forward, and I feel the heat from his body as he closes the space between us. I wonder what Ava wore the night she met him at the show, if she put her hair up in a ponytail like she does sometimes when it’s hot, if she wore the shorts Dad hates because her ass plays peekaboo when she walks. I wonder what she said to him over the loud music at the club, if she leaned in close in the
steamy air, her lips brushing his ear as she shouted her answers. If she smiled in that annoying way she has when she gave him the fake name to go along with the fake personality.

He tilts his head, and for a split second I wish I was wearing Alicia’s pendant. Instead of sitting here going on about Stanford and the joys of business school, Alicia would probably put her hand on his arm, brush the soft skin of his wrist with her finger. She’d look straight into his eyes with a gaze that would leave no doubt about how she felt, a look that would leave him grasping for words. Alicia can get a guy to do anything she wants.

“Maybe I’ll see you around sometime,” he says, pushing himself away from the table and shooting me a smile.

“Right,” I mumble, my eyes on the wooden tabletop, embarrassed, as if he could read my mind.

He pauses as he turns to go. “Must be fun having other people who look just like you,” he says, studying me. “I bet you could have a great time with it, you know? Sitting in each other’s classes, taking each other’s tests—fooling people into thinking you’re the other sister.”

I watch him as he wanders over to the crowded table across the deck, pulls out an empty chair, and flips it around before sitting down with his friends.

“You poor dumb bastard,” I say into my keyboard, trying to get his face out of my head. “You really have no clue.”

“What are you muttering about?” Zane Romero asks, pulling the chair out and flopping into it. Despite the fact that it’s still freezing at the end of March, he must have gone out surfing, because the ends of his curly blond hair are still
wet and his hands are red. Zane cups his hot chocolate in both hands and takes a big swig, his brown eyes on me.

“Nothing,” I say, staring at my keyboard. Whenever I see Zane now, I miss him. Not this six-foot surfer version of Zane, but the little kid with the unruly hair and killer train set complete with hills and tunnels and little tiny people placed carefully in the painted landscape. Before his mom and dad got divorced, we lived next door to each other and spent hours playing with the train set that took over his entire garage. Until his parents decided it was weird for a ten-year-old boy to hang around with a ten-year-old girl all the time and they started finding other things for him to do. Soon after, Zane discovered surfing and I discovered studying—eventually, when we saw each other in school, we didn’t have much to talk about anymore. This year he ended up in my Spanish class, and it’s been nice having him back, even a little bit.