“Oh, aren’t you so happy it worked out that way?” Melissa asked.
“No,” Spencer said flatly. She’d run for the spot last spring but had been beaten out and had to take the VP slot. She hated losing at anything.
Melissa shook her head. “You don’t understand, Spence—it’s soooooo much work. When I was president, I barely had time for anything else!”
“You do have quite a few activities, Spencer,” Mrs. Hastings murmured. “There’s yearbook, and all those hockey games….”
“Besides, Spence, you’ll take over if the president, you know…dies.” Melissa winked at her as if they were sharing this joke, which they weren’t.
Melissa turned back to her parents. “Mom. I just got the best idea. What if Wren and I stayed in the barn? Then we’d be out of your hair.”
Spencer felt as if someone had just kicked her in the ovaries. The barn?
Mrs. Hastings put her French-manicured finger to her perfectly lipsticked mouth. “Hmm,” she started. She turned tentatively to Spencer. “Would you be able to wait a few months, honey? Then the barn will be all yours.”
“Oh!” Melissa laid down her fork. “I didn’t know you were going to move in there, Spence! I don’t want to cause problems—”
“It’s fine,” Spencer interrupted, grabbing her glass of ice water and taking a hearty swallow. She willed herself not to throw a tantrum in front of her parents and Perfect Melissa. “I can wait.”
“Seriously?” Melissa asked. “That’s so sweet of you!”
Her mother pressed her cold, thin hand against Spencer’s and beamed. “I knew you’d understand.”
“Can you excuse me?” Spencer dizzily shoved her seat back from the table and stood up. “I’ll be right back.” She walked across the boat’s wooden floor, down the carpeted main stairs, and out the front entrance. She needed to get to dry land.
Out on the Penn’s Landing walkway, the Philadelphia skyline glittered. Spencer sat down on a bench and breathed yoga fire breaths. Then she pulled out her wallet and started to organize her money. She turned all the ones, fives, and twenties in the same direction and alphabetized them according to the long letter-number combination printed in green in the corners. Doing this always made her feel better. When she finished, she gazed up at the ship’s dining deck. Her parents faced the river, so they couldn’t see her. She dug through her tan Hogan bag for her emergency pack of Marlboros and lit one.
She took drag after angry drag. Stealing the barn was evil enough, but doing it in such a polite way was just Melissa’s style—Melissa had always been outwardly nice but inwardly horrid. And no one could see it but Spencer.
She’d gotten revenge on Melissa just once, a few weeks before the end of seventh grade. One evening, Melissa and her then-boyfriend, Ian Thomas, were studying for finals. When Ian left, Spencer cornered him outside by his SUV, which he’d parked behind her family’s row of pine trees. She’d merely wanted to flirt—Ian was wasting all his hotness on her plain vanilla, goody-two-shoes sister—so she gave Ian a peck good-bye on the cheek. But when he pressed her up against his passenger door, she didn’t try to run away. They only stopped kissing when his car alarm started to blare.
When Spencer told Alison about it, Ali said it was a pretty foul thing to do and that she should confess to Melissa. Spencer suspected Ali was just pissed because they’d had a running competition all year over who could hook up with the most older boys, and kissing Ian put Spencer in the lead.
Spencer inhaled sharply. She hated being reminded of that period of her life. But the DiLaurentises’ old house was right next door to hers, and one of Ali’s bedroom windows faced one of Spencer’s—it was like Ali haunted her 24/7. All Spencer had to do was look out her window and there was seventh-grade Ali, hanging her JV hockey uniform right where Spencer could see it or strolling around her bedroom gossiping into her cell phone.
Spencer wanted to think she’d changed a lot since seventh grade. They’d all been so mean—especially Alison—but not just Alison. And the worst memory of all was the thing…The Jenna Thing. Thinking of that made Spencer feel so horrible, she wished she could erase it from her brain like they did in that movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
“You shouldn’t be smoking, you know.”
She turned, and there was Wren, standing right next to her. Spencer looked at him, surprised. “What are you doing down here?”
“They were…” He opened and closed his hands at each other, like mouths yapping. “And I have a page.” He pulled out a BlackBerry.
“Oh,” Spencer said. “Is that from the hospital? I hear you’re a big-time doctor.”
“Well, no, actually, I’m only a first-year med student,” Wren said, and then pointed at her cigarette. “You mind if I have a bit of that?”
Spencer twisted the corners of her mouth up wryly. “You just told me not to smoke,” she said, handing it over to him.
“Yeah, well.” Wren took a deep drag off the cigarette. “You all right?”
“Whatever.” Spencer wasn’t about to talk things over with her sister’s new live-in boyfriend who’d just stolen her barn. “So where are you from?”
“North London. My Dad’s Korean, though. He moved to England to go to Oxford and ended up staying. Everyone asks.”
“Oh. I wasn’t going to,” Spencer replied, even though she had thought about it. “How’d you and my sister meet?”