“And cool and handsome. And wonderful.”
“You said wonderful three times,” he pointed out, and then caught me against his chest and covered my mouth so I couldn’t say anything else for a while.
Spring came. Heather got into five of the seven colleges she’d applied to and freaked out over having so many choices. I pointed out that that was a good thing, but she still spent days agonizing and calling me constantly to discuss their different merits.
In the end, she didn’t pick the one in Connecticut, near where I’d be. She kept apologizing to me, explaining over and over again that her dad really wanted her to go to Steventon and it actually looked perfect and she felt less guilty making him pay for a college he was enthusiastic about, and repeatedly assuring me that it had been a tough decision, because she wanted to be near me. I told her it was totally fine. At this point I was just relieved and happy that she seemed excited about going off to school in the fall.
I had already met a bunch of my future classmates online and had found a few I really liked, including two who wanted to room together. They only knew me as Ellie Withers and had no idea Luke Weston was my stepfather, so their enthusiasm and interest seemed genuine, and I was feeling pretty optimistic about having a more normal social life in college than I’d had in high school.
Mom kept tweaking Jacob’s therapies, increasing his time with the ones she liked and pulling away from the ones she didn’t, and he was doing great, saying a ton more words and getting frustrated much less.
We were hanging out in the family room one day when he called out, “Mom. Look!” and we both jumped to our feet—it was the first time he’d ever said her name just to get her attention.
He pointed to the floor, where he’d been busily arranging some plastic letters. Most of them were in a long row.
“What’s a jacobellie?” Mom said, studying it. Then, with a delighted laugh: “Oh, it’s his name and yours put together!”
“Did you know he could spell?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“I had no idea.”
“He’s a total genius!”
“There’s definitely a lot more going on in that little head than we realize.” She called Luke to tell him and I could hear him shouting with excitement at the other end of the line.
Thanks to Luke and Michael, in May, George finally landed a job—as the assistant to the vice president of development at a TV studio. It wasn’t the writing job he’d hoped for, but he had reached a point where he was just happy to have full-time work. His hours were long, and he always had scripts to read on the weekends. I complained that he wasn’t paying me enough attention, and he came up with a solution: that I stop complaining.
We’ll Make You a Star had gone on hiatus in April, so Luke was desperately trying to write and record a new batch of songs for the album he wanted to release the following fall. It kept him busy, but the Luke who was being creative was always happier than the one who was the TV star. He didn’t love that job, but it paid the bills and—he would have been the first to admit—gave him the leverage and power to put out the kind of music he wanted to.
My grandmother started dating some senior citizen and informed me soon after that their relationship had become “physically intimate.” I jokingly reminded her to use condoms, and she said seriously, “Well, of course pregnancy isn’t an issue for me, but STDs are. You know what those are, right? STDs?” I told her I did and got off the phone quickly, before she could give me more information about that than I wanted, which was really any information at all.
I didn’t want George to go with me to my prom. “You’re too old,” I explained. “It would be incredibly awkward for you to be around all those high school kids, and I’d feel guilty dragging you around, making you meet people who just want to see who Luke Weston’s stepdaughter is dating. You’d hate it. Aaron’s up for it and he’s used to all the fame-whore weirdness.”
“I’m all in favor of not going,” he said, “but couldn’t you not go, too? Especially not with him?”
“It’s the only high school prom I’ll ever have. And who would you rather I went with? You know you don’t have to worry about Aaron.”
“Can’t you go with a gay friend?”
“The gay guys in my grade all have dates,” I said. “All the girls who don’t have boyfriends were fighting over them. Anyway, I’ve already asked Aaron and he’s already said yes.”
“Fine,” he said. “Just come over to my place after. No flying around all night on Aladdin’s magic carpet.”
I promised. Mom knew I was planning to be out all night anyway—everyone stayed up on prom night.
She and Luke took a ridiculous number of photos of us when Aaron came to pick me up for prom. As we posed, his arm around my shoulder, he reminded me that he was going to put me through all of this again in a week, at his school’s prom.
He clutched me a little too tightly during the last dance of the night, so I pulled away and said, “Let’s sit this one out.”
The limousine dropped us off at my house and I walked him to his car. He leaned against it and said, “Sometimes I think I made a mistake, missing my chance with you.”
And I said cheerfully, “You never had one.”
I don’t think he believed me, but I didn’t care. I quickly pecked him on the cheek and ran inside to get my stuff.
It was past midnight by the time I got to George’s apartment.