We said good-bye to her and headed out the door and toward his car. “Since when have you had a Porsche?” I asked.
“Three—almost four—hours.”
“Seriously?”
“Dad made a deal with me that if I got over a certain number on my SATs, I could get one.”
“We only got our scores yesterday. You move fast.”
“Yeah, I was desperate—I’ve been driving their minivan. Do you know how hard it is to look cool behind the wheel of a minivan?”
“If anyone could manage it, it would be you.”
“True enough.” We got into the car and he said, “So . . . that place on Sawtelle? Whose name I can never remember? Or the one in Westwood?”
We settled on the Sawtelle place, and I sat back in my seat as he peeled out through the gate and onto the street. “You know what’s weird?” I said. “I smell new-car smell but I also smell perfume.”
He sniffed. “Oh yeah. Eau de Evil Stepmother. Crystal made me drive her to the market before I came over here—she was almost out of the blood of virgins to bathe in. Which reminds me: What are you going to be for Halloween? You’re coming to our party, right?”
“Yes! We’re all going.” Michael threw a big annual Halloween party that my family always went to.
Aaron proposed coordinating our costumes, so we spent the rest of the evening discussing what we’d go as, finally settling on the two kids from Moonrise Kingdom.
He dropped me off at home around ten. I gave him a quick peck on the cheek and then jumped out of the car. I didn’t want a long good-bye—these things can get weird, and Aaron and I were definitely in uncertain territory. We were old family friends—theoretically, at least, since we’d never spent all that much time together—so it made sense that we’d want to get together to complain about our families and just hang out.
But . . . this evening wasn’t exactly not a date either. I mean, he texted me, picked me up, and took me out to a quiet place where we sat and talked alone for a couple of hours. He even paid for my tea. (It cost a whopping three bucks—and his father was richer than the entire universe—but still. He paid.) We got along incredibly well. We were practically the same person: we both had to deal with having ridiculously famous fathers, and we’d also both spent a lot of our lives alone with our unfamous mothers. We both considered ourselves Californians, but had lived in other states. We both had these much-younger half siblings who were equally adorable and annoying.
Our personalities were similar, too. We were both outgoing and quick and impatient and greedy. We got each other.
So in a lot of ways you could say we were soul mates. Which maybe meant we were destined to be a couple.
But I wasn’t feeling it. Friends, yes. But nothing more. Yet.
seventeen
I flung open the front door. “Heather’s coming,” I told George, who had appeared, at my mother’s request, to help me with my college essay. “Only not for another hour, so you can focus on me first. But then you have to focus on her.”
“Okay. Where do you want to work?”
“Where do we always work?” I led him to the kitchen and he sat down and took his laptop out of his bag.
“Your mother said you’d send me your essay ahead of time but I never got it.”
“I forgot.” Which wasn’t entirely true—I had remembered a couple of times (mostly because Mom kept reminding me) but never when I felt like running to the computer and actually doing anything about it. “Hold on.” I located the document: a rough draft that I had written during a summer essay workshop at school. It was about a trip I took to Haiti a year or so ago—the show had arranged for Luke and Michael to do a PSA calling attention to the need for adequate housing there and I’d gone with them because Luke and Mom had felt it would be educational for me.
My college counselor had said the essay was “good but needed work.” I hadn’t looked at it since then.
“It’s possible it sucks,” I said as I opened the document on my laptop and swiveled it around for George to see.
“I’ll leave myself open to the possibility,” he said, and then read silently. I watched his face for signs of approval or disapproval, but he kept it studiously blank.
“Well?” I said when he finally looked up.
“It’s a little too long. You need to cut it by about thirty percent.”
“I know. But is it good?”
He leaned back and regarded me. “Here’s the thing. It’s fine. It’s well-written and takes you on the right sort of journey. There’s nothing wrong with it exactly—”
“Wow,” I said. “Stop all the gushing. It’s going right to my head.”
He ignored that. “If you want to use this, you certainly can.”
“But—?”
“It’s just . . . It feels a little generic. Tons of students write essays about being exposed to poverty and having some kind of an epiphany because of it—as if third world countries only exist to expand our rich American minds.”
I flushed, embarrassed because he was right and annoyed at him for the same reason.
“Also,” he said, “how much did that experience really change your life?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you actually volunteer more now? Watch the news and stay on top of global events? Donate to groups like Doctors Without Borders? What did you take home with you other than a, um . . .” He glanced down at the screen and read, “‘A sense that we draw boundaries and turn our backs to keep ourselves from feeling the pain of people whose only separation from us is geographic’?”
I squirmed at hearing my own stupid words. “Okay, that may have been over-the-top.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I would definitely rewrite it. But that’s not my point. My point is, how did that trip really affect you?”
“I think about it a lot.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”