Grayson’s phone made a sound directly behind me. He probably had a message from a girl he wasn’t blackmailing.
Alec made a comment occasionally. Unlike Grayson, he knew how not to be rude. But when we were halfway to Molly’s, even he was running out of words. He reached forward and turned up the volume on the car radio, which was tuned to a country station.
Soon we reached the nice end of the beach. I’d been here before, mostly eating at the café with Molly or crashing at her house for a few hours. I hadn’t gotten used to it. It looked like beach towns on TV, not real life. If I hadn’t just ridden in the car for twenty minutes, I would have thought we’d arrived in a different country. The palms were the same species, but spaced out, aligned, planted on purpose. The buildings weren’t made of corrugated metal. They were rock and stucco with thick foundations, built to withstand hurricanes. There was grass and it was green. The sprinklers were on at several condo complexes we passed. The sprinkler streams weren’t always directed correctly. Water sprayed across the wide sidewalks and into the street.
The sound of water beating on the hood startled Grayson. A thunk sounded behind Alec’s seat. Grayson bent over, his T-shirt riding up his tanned back, feeling around for his phone.
“Is that your friend?” Alec asked me as he pulled into the parking lot of Molly’s café. Her long, sleek hair was not as long and sleek as mine. But her dress was low-cut and obviously expensive. It’s hard to explain the look of expensive, but there was something about the way the fabric fell exactly right. She wasn’t model pretty, but she looked like a model in her glam dress, standing outside the expensive new café built to resemble an old beach shack. At least, she looked like a model while she wore a pensive expression, shading her eyes to gaze down the road for us. Then she recognized me in the car, and she waved frantically, like I might not see her standing there. Her boobs jiggled.
I didn’t dare glance behind me to see whether Grayson was a witness to this.
“In the flesh,” I told Alec dryly.
He got the joke, I guessed, and he laughed.
She skittered over to the driver’s side in her high heels and knocked on Alec’s window until he opened it. “Hi! I’m Molly!” She shook his hand.
“I’m Alec,” I heard him say. I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded like he was grinning, and she certainly was grinning back at him.
Then she opened the back door and bounced onto the seat. “Hi! I’m Molly!” She held out her hand to Grayson.
I didn’t want to see this, so I faced forward as Alec pulled back onto the road. But I listened as Grayson said, “Nice to meet you, Molly. I’m Grayson.” He sounded like he was smiling too.
“The boss man!” she exclaimed.
Grayson chuckled. It was the first time I’d heard that sound in months.
“Hi! I’m Molly!” she said again. Something punched me in the shoulder. I realized she was talking to me.
“So I heard,” I said, shaking her hand over the seat. But I smiled at her and tried to telegraph to her, I’m glad you’re here.
“You must be Rapunzel. My God, girl, your hair is longer than Francie’s!”
I took my hand back. She’d inadvertently insulted me, linking me with her rich friend who hated me most. I wasn’t so proud of my hair achievement anymore.
Oblivious, Molly turned to Grayson again. “You know this club has a dress code. No unwashed pilots.”
Grayson and Alec both burst into laughter. It was amazing how alike they sounded when they laughed.
“Do I smell that bad?” Grayson asked.
“You don’t smell,” Molly said, “but you look like you’ve spent the past week outdoors.”
“Do I look like I just hosed off my head?” Alec asked, watching her in the rearview mirror. I wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the road, but I just grinned along with their good times.
“Mebbe,” Molly said in a funny voice that was an imitation of something.
“We’re headed to shower and change, if that makes you feel better,” Alec called.
“You’re showering for me,” Molly said, “but you weren’t going to shower for Leah? I guess everybody knows what a dirty girl she is.”
Behind me, Grayson cleared his throat.
Alec looked over at me and smiled. “Really?”
I shook my head and opened and closed my hand like Molly’s yapping mouth. In truth, I was so happy to have her yapping, comparing me to her friend Francie, even making jokes at my expense. It beat country radio and silence.
“And here we are.” Alec parked the car at a beautiful condo, white stucco and Mexican tile surrounded by bright green grass and palm trees. “It’ll only take me a sec to shower and change.” He asked me, “Do you want to come up?”
“Is this…” I faltered.
“Where my dad lived,” Alec said, confirming what I was thinking.
And where he’d died. I couldn’t go in there. But I didn’t want to be rude to Alec, or make Grayson think I wasn’t following instructions. “I’ll just wait for you,” I said with a big smile.
Alec frowned, but all he said was, “I’ll be right back.” He left the engine and the air conditioner running as he hopped out of the car and jogged up to the building.
“What’s up with that?” Grayson asked me from the backseat. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been here before.”
nine
I looked over my shoulder at him and had absolutely nothing to say to that.
Molly peeked at me from behind Alec’s seat. “God, Grayson, what’s that supposed to mean? She hasn’t looked at me that way since she and I first met two years ago. And when we first met it was not good.”
I almost laughed, but I couldn’t. Grayson’s words weighed my face down, my whole brain.
Finally he said, “While we’re waiting, I guess I might as well go ahead and change too. I’m just across the street.” He opened his door.
“What do you mean, you’re across the street?” Molly asked. “There’s nothing over there but beach and shacks.”
He grinned at her. “I’m in a shack.”
“You are?” Molly yelled. “I want to see!”
“Okay, come on.”
He and Molly both got out of the car. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to go with them or wait for Alec. Grayson might get mad at me if I didn’t wait. He might lob another insult at me. But I wanted to go. It seemed a little too easy right at that moment for Grayson and Molly to pair off and have private time at his shack of some kind. The thought of this made my stomach hurt worse than the thought of kissing Alec.
Molly peered through the windshield at me and motioned with her head for me to follow her.
At the same time, Grayson startled me by opening my door. “Come on, Leah. Alec will know where we are. Get the key.”
Carefully I turned off the ignition—I figured this worked the same in a car as in a plane—and slid out after them.
We started across the street, but Molly stopped dead on the center stripe and gaped up at the sky. “Wow, look at that sunset!”
It wasn’t a pretty sunset. The colors were as expected: violet clouds, bright orange and pink underneath, against the pale blue sky. But the clouds were high cirrus, wispy, and crossed with the contrails of F-16s, a colorful glowing mess. I said, “It looks like God barfed a rainbow.”
“So sentimental,” Grayson said under his breath.
Molly shrieked laughter. “Charming.” She swung her glam purse on its long strap and whacked me in the ass. “So, Grayson, why do you have a condo and a shack?”
“This property has been in my family a long time,” he said. “The highway follows the original Native American trail.” He pointed north, where the road disappeared under wide-branching water oaks. “Right here it runs so close to the ocean that you’re not allowed to build a house on the beach side, but you can build a shack. My grandparents moved here from Pennsylvania when beachfront property was a lot cheaper. They owned a shack plus a house. Later they sold the house, which was demolished to build condos. They kept one condo unit, and they kept the shack.”
“Sweet!” Molly said. “You must be loaded.”
I couldn’t believe the comments Molly got away with sometimes. Maybe it was her matter-of-fact delivery. Or maybe, in this case, Grayson liked her.
Whatever the reason, he just smiled at her, almost shyly in the streetlights. “Not anymore. My dad sank most of that money into the business. Banner towing doesn’t pay all that great.”
“If your family is from here,” Molly said, “did you live here before your parents got divorced?”
I cringed. I guessed, sometime in the two years Molly and I had been friends and I’d crushed on the boys, that I’d told her about their family situation. I didn’t want Grayson to know this.
He didn’t seem to notice, though. Again, Molly got away with that nosey question. “Yes,” he said, “we lived here.”
“You must know a lot of people at our high school,” Molly said. “We’ll probably run into them when we’re out partying this week. It will be so weird, like a class reunion!”
I was still puzzling through the idea that all of us were going to be partying together all week—or maybe Molly just meant herself and Grayson—when he laughed. “I didn’t know you until today.”
“I just moved here two years ago,” Molly said. “My purpose in life is to keep mean girls away from Leah.”
“Mean girls don’t like Leah?” Grayson asked, looking around at me.
“I think it’s the hair,” I said.
“You always think it’s the hair,” Molly said.
“It’s all I’ve got.”
Grayson looked at me again. This time his gaze traveled from my hair down, and he let me see that he was looking. What he meant by this was that he thought I was beautiful, it was not just my miraculous hair, and we shouldn’t get distracted from our true love by the pesky detail that he was blackmailing me into dating his brother.
Right. I hung back and let him and Molly walk together up the wooden ramp to the shack. I’d never had a chance with Grayson anyway. All I wanted to do was fly. I needed to remember that or I was going to get myself in even more trouble.
The shack was so tiny that I was thinking Molly and I should stay outside while Grayson showered. But Molly followed him right through the door, exclaiming, “This is so cool! You can hear the ocean. When you wake up in the morning, it’s right there.” She must have thought I was going to hang outside myself, because she stood in the doorway, put her hand behind her back, and wiggled her fingers at me, coaxing me in. I didn’t want to cause a scene or seem weird, so I stepped into the shack behind her.
“It’s pretty cool,” Grayson agreed, looking around. The shack was made of weathered, smoothed boards on the ceiling, walls, and floor. A futon took up one wall, a surfboard leaned against another, and a mountain bike hung from hooks in the ceiling. An air conditioner took up half of one window, but it was off, and the sound of the ocean filled the tiny room.
“I guess the condo has stuff you’re missing here,” Molly said. “Like a kitchen. Why did one of you take one place and one of you take the other? It seems like you guys would want to be together, whichever place you chose. You’re not getting along?”
“You could say that.” Grayson opened his hands. “You know, our dad died recently.” This time he didn’t hesitate as he said it.
Molly nodded, oblivious to what a touchy subject this still was. She sounded like she was consoling an elderly neighbor on the death of his even more elderly father, a natural and expected ending, as she said, “Leah told me. I’m sorry.”
“And our older brother died,” Grayson said. “We’ve been through bad times before, but never without our brother. He was…” Grayson splayed his fingers and looked through the wooden ceiling toward heaven for an explanation. “… the leader. The peacekeeper. Alec and I didn’t realize that until we talked about running this business together. We have no idea how to get along. We can’t even order a pizza without being at each other’s throats.”
Grayson changed as he said this, from an angry, bullying boy into a kind young man with a horrible problem. He looked taller in the small room. The bare bulb cast dark shadows under his eyes.
Molly had been the one to draw these feelings and this truth out of him. I’d known him three and a half years. Molly had known him five minutes.
She made a joke of it. “Good thing you and Alec are living apart this week, then. And I in my infinite wisdom insisted that we should go out together.”
“It’s okay.” He dismissed the problem with a wave designed to make her feel better, something he would never have done for me. He told her, “We don’t have Jake, but at least we have someone to run interference so we don’t need to talk to each other. We have you. And you.” He finally looked at me.
His expression turned uneasy as he read my face. I don’t know what he saw there—my stupid jealousy of Molly, maybe, or my sense that he’d betrayed me in confiding all this to her instead of me, when he and I had never been friends in the first place.
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll just be a minute. Make yourselves comfortable. Or try.” He disappeared into a bathroom carved into the corner.
“Come on.” Claustrophobic in the shrinking room, I pushed Molly all the way through the shack to another door that opened onto a porch.