“It was nice meeting you, Tony.” She touches me on the shoulder, very lightly.
I feel that touch sink all the way to my balls.
“Nice meeting you too, Hayden,” I say, my voice even. I sound normal. I bet I even look normal.
Inside, I’m anything but. This girl is hot. Interesting. Confident. For the first time in a while, I’m intrigued.
I want more.
Two
Hayden
“I met a cute boy today,” I tell my sixteen-year-old sister, Palmer.
Yes, we come from a wealthy family and we have snobbish masculine-sounding names given to us by our snobbish parents. It’s such a cliché, but I can’t help who I’m born to, or what name they gave me. It’s also not our fault people see our names on a roster and automatically assume we’re dudes.
Thanks, Mom and Dad.
“Really?” Palmer’s sitting on her bed, foot planted on the mattress and knee bent, her chin practically resting on it as she paints her toenails a lurid green color. “What did he look like?”
“Tall.” I didn’t see him stand, but his legs were long so I’m assuming. “Black hair. Dark brown eyes. Full lips.”
Kissable lips.
“What’s his name?” Palmer asks, her gaze only for her feet as she continues painting her nails.
“Tony.” He was more than cute. He was drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful. Those eyes. The hair. The cheekbones. The jaw. The lips.
Oh God, the lips.
I was fully prepared and ready to ask him out, but then he mentioned he had plans, which reminded me I also have plans, and my entire mood was ruined.
“Tony what?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“Where did you meet him? Oh shit,” she whispers under her breath as she hurriedly sticks the brush back into the nail polish bottle and starts dabbing at her comforter. “I got polish on it.”
“Lauri is going to kill you.” That’s Dad’s girlfriend. Since she moved in a few months ago, she’s taken Palmer under her wing and bought her all sorts of new crap to get on her good side. It sort of works. Palmer will gladly allow Lauri to completely redecorate her room with all new stuff, but she’s still not a huge fan of her. We don’t trust her, not yet.
Well, Dad does, but he’s blinded by love or lust or whatever you want to call it.
“I know,” she practically wails as she jumps off the bed and heads for her connecting bathroom. I plop down in a white fur covered chair and scroll through my phone, wishing I would’ve gotten Tony’s social media info so I could look up his photos and stare at his face for a while.
Palmer rummages around in the bathroom before she comes back into her bedroom with a bottle of polish remover and a cotton ball clutched in her hand. “Hopefully this works,” she says.
I watch as she tries to take out the bright green stain on the pristine white comforter. I don’t know why she’d polish her nails on a white blanket, but when you’re sixteen and everything’s been handed to you your entire life, you don’t think about those sorts of things.
I know I didn’t. Not until I left for college and was living on my own. I still had an allowance, but I had to learn how to manage my money. At first it was hard. All I wanted to do was go out and spend it because that’s what I was used to.
Now, I’ve gotten better. I’m still a spoiled rich girl, I can’t deny it. Some people hate me solely for that reason, and there’s nothing I can do to change their minds. But this spoiled rich girl still wants to become a teacher, and someday make a difference. Even if her father laughs at her and tells her she’s wasting her time.
I love my dad, but sometimes he can be a real asshole.
“It’s not coming out,” Palmer says, her panicked gaze meeting mine. “Should I get more polish remover? Just dump it all over the stain?”
“I don’t know.” My sister and I look a lot alike. The only difference is I’m blonder—thanks to Rafael, my hairstylist—and she’s taller. Palmer is an excellent volleyball player who hopes to snag a scholarship for college. Not that she needs the money—she just wants the prestige and glory of state championships and earning that scholarship.
I can’t blame her. She’s really good at what she does. While I’m over here wanting to change the world by teaching first graders.
I’m my father’s biggest disgrace. Well, Palmer and I both are since we weren’t born with penises dangling between our legs, but that’s a whole other issue. He’s probably going to have more babies with Lauri. Since the moment I arrived last night, she was talking about the renovations she wants to do to the house, and how she wants a nursery.
Our dad is fifty-two. I don’t know how he feels about possibly being a father again, but I’m sure if she gives him boys, he won’t complain.
“Look it up on Google,” I suggest to my sister. She’s still frantically scrubbing at the polish. Looks to me like she’s not making any difference. She might be making it worse by just smearing it into the fabric even deeper.
She yanks the comforter off her bed, clutching the giant bundle to her chest. “I need to wash it.”
“I’m sure it’s dry clean only,” I remind her.
“I don’t care. I need to get this stain out.” She hurries out of her bedroom and I follow after her, pausing in the hallway while she runs down the stairs, her footsteps so heavy and loud she sounds like a herd of elephants.
I don’t bother stopping her or making another suggestion. Palmer will do whatever she wants because she’s just that way. Same as me. I’m stubborn. So is Palmer. So is our father. One lovely trait we got from him.
I wander into my bedroom and flop onto the bed, grateful for my old, fluffy comforter Dad got me when I turned sixteen. We didn’t go live with Mom in the divorce. She went back to New York, where she’s from, and Palmer and I both balked when she tried to get us to go with her. We didn’t want to leave our school, our friends. Dad hired a cutthroat attorney when they were fighting over us and money, and Mom didn’t stand a chance. We used to go visit her, but once I graduated high school, I stopped going. So did Palmer. She refused to go if I wouldn’t go with her.
Now we get Christmas and birthday cards in the mail, but that’s about it. She’s too busy traveling with her various lovers, spending my dad’s money.
This is why I said ‘love is for pussies’ to Tony. I still can’t believe those words dropped from my mouth to a guy I only just met. And I sort of felt bad for offending that woman sitting in the waiting area with us, but it was also incredibly liberating. To finally admit my feelings about love. Because that’s really how I feel.
Love sucks.
My best friend Gracie says this is why I can’t commit to guys. We’ve been in college for two years together, clicking right away when we were roommates in the dorms our freshman year. Talk about getting lucky. We’re also both liberal arts majors, and we have a lot of classes together. We joke how miserable we would be if we hated each other.
Because we so would be.
I know Gracie’s right. I don’t like serious relationships because I never believe it’ll work out. Look at my parents. The last three years they were together, they despised each other. The fighting was so out of control. Mom called the cops on Dad three times. Dad put Palmer and I into therapy. It was a mess.