This choice: Go to a party with friends • Go Back...Chapter #52Best Laid Plans, and Other Kinds by: Seuzz   It's closing on 5:30 when you finally head to your new home. You found a text from Brianna's mom—your mom, now—on her phone, telling you to eat with friends or dig into the leftovers for supper, for she and her husband would be late getting home.
Typical: Brian and Anna Kirschke don't get along and so spend as much time as possible at the two pastry shops they jointly own. (That would be La Patisserie and Cherry Brook Bread and Cakes.) So when you get home you reheat a wedge of spinach and veal lasagna from Ristorante Locarno. Thank God for the special, off-the-books deals whereby the Kirschkes and certain select Saratoga Falls restaurants barter discounted food and meals amongst themselves! It's really delicious, and it's not just Brianna that thinks so. Ristorante Locarno is the most expensive eatery in town, and your parents have never taken you there. So here's another dividend to your new impersonation.
As you munch on the expensive (but discounted!) lasagna, you pour over the texts that have come floating in since the last time Brianna checked her phone. She and her friends have been planning to go to Maggie Crenshaw's party, but Eric Murphy (you know) is going to be there, and your enthusiasm for dealing with Eric has cooled since switching into Brianna. It must have something to do with the personalities inside the masks. Of course you had a lot of fun being Eric, for Eric is totally in love with himself—an opinion you wouldn't dispute even though you know it is mostly Brianna's judgment. But now that you're Brianna—who hates Eric's guts over what he did to Melanie—you have a lot less enthusiasm for dealing with your former alias.
So when Susie Lekuawehe texts something about going to the Warehouse after Maggie's, you text back: How about instead of?
A few more texts come in—from Danielle Davis, wondering if you've eaten yet; from Philippa Hosford, asking if you have any IHOP coupons; from Mackenzie Fuller, asking if anyone can give her a ride out to Maggie's—before Susie replies to your suggestion: what do till 11?
That is an issue: things don't start happening at the Warehouse until eleven o'clock, at least, and some people say that it's not until two or even three in the morning before things get really fun. (Those would be the people you should stay away from.) But you persist with Susie, telling her that there's some people you know who will be showing up at Maggie's that you don't want to meet. You tell Genesis Lee and Hermione Gilbert the same thing.
But you don't have a lot of luck leveraging a change in plans until Leah Simmons invites you to hang out with Wendy Terrill and a couple of other people from the school's Trivial Pursuit Club at the Koffee Kauldron for an old-fashioned night of board games. You leap at the idea, and try to rope Hermione and Philippa in, and after that things evolve rapidly. Back and forth the texts shoot over the next hour, with groups and plans forming and evolving and dissolving and reviving. It would give you a terrific headache and a raging case of the fuckits if you were in your own skin. But as Brianna you are in your element.
* * * * *
It is seven-thirty when you park under the blazing mercury lamps of the Monte Viso Mini-Golf and Go-Kart complex. The rains that plagued the afternoon have lifted, and the clouds are breaking up. But temperatures are in the upper fifties as you step out of your car, so your jeans and windbreaker and ball cap are enough.
"Batting cages are inside," Jack Li snarks as you approach. He flicks the brim of your cap.
You step onto his feet and glare up brightly into his face. "What do you know about baseball?"
"Just enough to stay away from our school team," he drawls back. He pushes you gently off his feet. "You're late, so you have to be in my group."
"We're in groups?"
"Too many of us for one group." He leads you inside and up to the register. "We're in two foursomes, plus extras. First foursome's already on the second hole."
"Nice of them to wait."
"Nice of Aaron to leave Naomi to play mini golf with us," Jack retorts. "She was his date, but he's out on the speedway with Daniel." There's a note of sarcasm in his use of the word "speedway."
"No! He left his date?"
Jack smirks under lifted eyebrows. "Sure. Daniel said he wanted to do the go-karts, so Aaron ran off with him. Gonna be awkward for those boys when they go on their honeymoons, and they turn out to be threesomes."
"So where's Parker and Kristin?"
"There's following a train of thought," Jack murmurs.
You slap him in the chest. "That's not what I meant. Are they coming?"
"No. I didn't ask where they were going or what they were doing, though, just told them to keep it off of Snapchat. Oh, speaking of Snapchat, can you go keep Genesis out of trouble? She's waiting for the rest of us, and I think she was logging onto x2z when I came back in to wait for you."
"I'd rather wait with you."
He smiles tightly. "I'm waiting for Susie."
"Then we'll be here till Christmas," you sigh. Susie Lekuawehe, to quote Jack himself, believes in deadlines the way atheists believe in the flying spaghetti monster.
You watch as he saunters back out the front door. Jack Li is on the marching band color guard. He is tall and slim, with a cocky grin and jet-black hair that is cut long on top and short on the sides and back. He is loyal, clever, sympathetic, and stylish.
Also gay.
Lonely, too, except for his many girlfriends, which are no substitute for a nice boy. But he also dislikes what gay scene there is at Westside, for he cordially detests Charles Hartlein and his many hangers-on.
Genesis Lee is sitting on a bench outside, and as Jack had warned you she's got her cell phone out. She only glances up briefly at you before returning to her phone.
So you wave at the four girls at the second hole—Leah Simmons, Hermione Gilbert, Naomi Batson and Wendy Terrill—then take out your phone and send Genesis a text. What's up?
You feel her stiffen, but she replies by text too. Chcking whouse stream
Whos playing tnite?
Ian patton
"He's not in a band," you say aloud.
"Later tonight, in the bar," Genesis replies. "After things mellow out."
Like things ever mellow out at the Warehouse. But you suppose they must, because Ian Patton fancies himself a solo indie artist, and he's got a reputation, and the Warehouse is where high school musicians go to get a reputation in Saratoga Falls. "So what's this schedule you're checking out?" you ask her.
Genesis gives you a look.
It's a look Brianna might give people and probably has, for she and Genesis look so much alike they've been mistaken for cousins or even sisters. Like Brianna, Genesis wears black-framed glasses. She also has a mane of brunette hair, which she lets fly freely, and the kind of ample figure that suggests fertility rather than sex play. Brianna likes to tease her because she's a lot shyer around boys than her friends; but she's also a lot freer with the gutter talk and the fantasies when she's gossiping with them.
So you're not shocked when admits that she's checking out who'll be staffing security at the Warehouse. "Blake's on duty," she sighs, and she clasps her phone to her bosom, which is even larger than yours. "Let's get there early."
"He won't have time for you," you point out. "And what if he's outside, parking cars?"
"I'll stand outside, smoking and watching him."
"You don't smoke."
"I'll start." She groans and puts her head back. "And they start going off duty, you know, at around four."
"That's when you'll talk to him?"
She looks shocked. "I'm not going to go talk to him!"
"So when are you finally going to talk to him?"
"When he finally asks me out."
You smile to yourself and say nothing. This is at least the seventh guy Genesis has gotten a heart-stopping, tongue-tied crush on in the last two years. All summer long it was Justin Roth—she saw him at a pool party in June with his shirt off—and the spring of your junior year it was Scott Frazier, who at the time was a nice kid who hadn't yet joined the basketball squad. At the start of your junior year she was briefly hooked on that AP snot Martin Gardinhire, of all people, before settling in to worship the football-playing Marcus Johnston from afar. (Blake O'Brien also plays football, so it's in crushing on him it's like Genesis has lapped herself.) You don't remember who was before that, except that one of them was Kevin Wyatt (Stephanie Wyatt's since-graduated older brother), and that they were all of them seniors she shared a class with.
They had something else in common. Genesis, so far as you know, suffered her crushes in absolute silence, never saying a word to them or hearing one back.
So you're feeling really smug, until Genesis opens her eyes and with one sharp question knocks the smile off your face:
"So, was Philip at those guys' video place? Did you talk to him?"
How does she know that Philip was going to be at the storage complex? You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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