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Is that what I’m going to have to do? Zora despaired. Pick a parent to live with? Sure, she was going to be eighteen in a few months, but she still depended on her mom and dad.
Bailey’s father was the West Knoll River chief of police, and Bailey had stayed with him when their mother went to find her new life. The only time Bailey even saw her mom was when she was visiting Carmen’s mom, which used to be every Friday but had become spottier and spottier as Joyce Quintar pulled away from her ex-husband and therefore her daughters. Or so Bailey had said when Zora questioned her.
Zora didn’t want any of that. Please, please, please. Please don’t let them divorce and sell the house and move away. Please . . .
Chapter 3
Ellie sat at the dinner table with her mother, stepfather, and two half brothers, the twins, Michael and Joey, and listened to Oliver Delaney go on about his latest case, a drunk-driving fatality in which the driver had killed himself and his date, and now the deceased date’s family was suing for millions, as said drunk driver had been wealthy. Said drunk driver also had nine children, and Oliver was representing them.
“Stop it,” Ellie’s mother said to the twins, slapping the air in their direction as the six-year-olds were squirreling around, laughing and knocking their chairs together. A glass of milk shivered and sloshed white liquid onto the table.
Ellie grabbed Joey’s hand to stop him. He tried to wrench himself free, and she hissed at him, “You want to go to your room?”
“Ellie, I’ll handle the boys,” Mom said as Oliver grabbed Michael’s hand and squeezed hard enough for the boy to yelp.
“Stop it.” This time, it was Ellie who snapped. And she snapped at Oliver, who never took having his behavior questioned well.
“I wasn’t hurting him,” Oliver said coldly.
Michael, suddenly realizing he had some power, held his wrist limply and whimpered, as if he were gravely wounded. Joey pushed him, not buying it at all. Michael immediately pushed Joey back, and the wrestling match was on again. Mom had to get up from her seat and take the two boys away, scolding them as they each howled that it was the other one’s fault. The bedroom door slammed, and in the relative quiet that followed, Ellie sat with her stepfather, whom she couldn’t stand.
“How was school today?” he asked her when the silence had stretched to uncomfortable limits. This particular question was about the extent of their entire interaction with one another.
“Fine.”
“About six weeks till graduation now.”
“Uh huh.”
“Your mother and I talked about the Forsythes’ overnight party. We both think it would be better if you didn’t attend.”
“Oh, I’m going,” Ellie said. Her father might be gone, taken by a heart attack when she was only eleven, but everyone said she’d inherited his stubborn spirit, and she wasn’t going to let Oliver Delaney dictate to her . . . ever.
His face flushed, and his dark eyes glittered. He hated her, she knew. What he didn’t know was that she hated him right back. Just like she hated pretty much all the boys in her class, except Tanner . . . and maybe Chris McCrae. Those two she lusted after. She was going to get one of them in bed before the end of the school year, hopefully Tanner. She couldn’t believe Amanda had jumped in ahead of her, kissing him, wrestling around on Zora’s pool table.
She thought of Delta, her dark good looks and vibrant smile. Ellie had wondered about the spell she’d cast on Tanner for the best part of high school, but now, at least, it looked as if that spell had been broken. If Tanner was with Amanda . . . no matter how minorly . . . then he was ripe for the picking.
Delta could just eat shit, as far as Ellie was concerned.
“You’re not going to that overnight party, and that’s final,” Oliver said, stabbing up a bloody bite of steak with his fork.
Ellie simply got up from the table, put her half-eaten plate in the sink, and followed after her mother and brothers. She’d been working as a server at the Commons, an independent-living adult-care center, for the better part of the last two years and had been saving up for college. All senior year, she’d been taking courses at the local community college, and she planned to go to the University of Oregon, where Tanner had a scholarship for football.
“Where are you going?” Oliver boomed after her.
To my room, asshole. Normally she was at her job during these hours, but she had Fridays off, and without anything to do, she’d come home and gotten a jump on her homework, though unfortunately that meant she was around for dinner and therefore Oliver’s tyranny.
She closed the door to her room, which would also piss Oliver off. “No closed doors” was his policy. He lived in terror that she would do drugs. Not that he cared a whit about her welfare, but it wouldn’t look good.
Also, though she knew he would never admit it and her mother would never believe it, she had felt Oliver’s lustful eyes on her a time or two and not in a fatherly way. If she was bolder, and he wasn’t such a toad, she might take him up on it. Maybe that would wake Mom up. Except there were the twins, and as much as they drove Ellie insane, they were her brothers, and she loved them, sort of, and she couldn’t be the reason her mom and Oliver broke up. Why Mom stuck with him and supported him, maybe even loved him, was an enigma Ellie had tried to understand the last eight years since their marriage, but it was as unsolvable now as it had been in the beginning. No, the best thing she could do was make it through the summer and then hightail it down to Eugene, find a roommate, and go to college. She didn’t think Delta would be following Tanner. First, because Delta didn’t have the money, and second, because this Amanda thing had really put the kibosh on their romance . . . hopefully.
But Amanda? With Tanner?
The thought of that icy blond robot with Tanner irked Ellie deep down. And wasn’t Amanda supposed to be Delta’s best friend or something? Not that Ellie could stand either one of them.
She flung herself on her bed, then rolled over and stared up at the ceiling.
Once upon a time, she’d been the third of their group of three: Amanda, Delta, and Ellie. Third grade and into fourth. She still had the pictures of that time, when the three of them were inseparable. They’d all styled their hair in chin-length bobs. They got the same black ankle boots. They each had a bracelet with their name engraved in scrolled letters, and they swapped them around. Sometimes Ellie would have Delta’s, sometimes she would have Amanda’s. At some point in that year, she ended up with her own back, and Bailey and Carmen moved into the school—not at the same time, but it felt like it somehow—and they joined their group. Ellie had protested, had given both Bailey and Carmen the cold shoulder for the last half of sixth grade and that summer and into seventh, and suddenly Ellie was out, and Zora DeMarco, whose businessman father broke into the cell phone business when it was really starting up and suddenly had money coming out his ears, was brought in. And then Ellie’s dad died, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass about her fair-weather friends, and then . . . she was no longer one of the Five Firsts, she was an ex-First.
