George looked up from his keyboard; he was back to researching anniversary celebration venues. He said idly, “So . . . is Skyler a girl or a guy?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah. I could be walking down the street and someone could yell, ‘Skyler’s getting away!’ and I wouldn’t know who to look for.”

“Probably a dog,” I said. “In that scenario.”

“Yes, but a boy or girl dog?”

“You’d have to look between its legs to figure that out.”

“Sounds risky.” He beckoned to me and lowered his voice. “Listen, Ellie, Heather’s really sweet but you might want to study with someone who can keep up with you.”

“I like helping her.”

“Very noble,” he said. “But if she’s slowing you down—”

“I’m back,” Heather announced from the doorway.

I said, “Let’s go. Skyler texted that she’s already there.”

“Aha!” said George. “She’s a girl.”

“Shes usually are,” I said.

five

We saw the movie and then ate and shopped. Heather had to leave early; she checked her phone right after the movie to discover that her mother was freaking out because Heather hadn’t returned her six calls and five texts. “My phone was off,” I heard her explain. “I told you I was going to a movie.” Then after a long listening silence: “I didn’t mean to worry you. Okay, fine, I’m on my way.”

Skyler and Riley pretended to be sorry Heather had to go, but they only hung out with her because of me. The two of them were best friends and I guess I was sort of their third Musketeer, since I ate lunch with them every day at school and sometimes saw them on the weekends, but deep down I didn’t feel that close to them. They were perfectly fine high school friends, but I doubted we’d stay in touch once we left for college.

Riley was probably going to be our class valedictorian. She took all honors courses and was the top student in most of them. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and studied incredibly hard during the week, and then let her hair down both literally and figuratively on the weekends, when she liked to go to parties where she got so drunk she usually threw up and passed out on the floor. It didn’t appeal to me much as a lifestyle, but she seemed committed to it.

Skyler was more mellow about school, partially because she could be. She’d already been recruited by Brown for volleyball. She had red hair and green eyes and was over six feet tall. She and Riley had both been going to Coral Tree since kindergarten and had been best friends the whole time.

They were both smart and entertaining and quick to laugh, which made them fine to spend an afternoon with, but I could never shake the feeling that my greatest appeal for them was the fact that Luke Weston was my stepfather. Maybe it was unfair of me—God knows I could be paranoid about that kind of thing—but still . . . there were moments. Like even that afternoon: we passed a poster advertising the upcoming season premiere of We’ll Make You a Star, and Riley instantly stopped and pointed to it. “It must be so weird for you to see Luke’s picture everywhere you go,” she said to me a little too loudly, like she wanted people to overhear our conversation. “Doesn’t it freak you out? I mean, you live with him.”

“I’m used to it,” I said, and moved away.

Heather flashed me a sympathetic eye roll. I’d confided in her how much I hated how famous Luke had become and the way it made people act. I couldn’t complain to him and my mom about it—they couldn’t change anything and they would just feel bad—and I couldn’t complain to people I didn’t trust, so I only complained to Heather, who had loved me for me right from the start, and who kept any secret I asked her to.

So even though Skyler and Riley were my closest friends at school, I didn’t feel relaxed around them. They were always inventing reasons to come over to my house, where their eyes would flicker around hopefully at every noise, like they were just waiting for Luke to come through the door and fall in love with one of them. You’d think the fact that he was my mother’s husband would make them a little less obvious about their crushes, but apparently his fame made him some kind of acceptable universal object of lust. I just tried to avoid having them over, which is why I usually met them at places like the mall.

When I got home, I found Mom and Luke lying on their bed, Jacob between them, curled up on his side, staring at some animated show on TV. Luke was reading a script (he read a lot of scripts now that he had his own production company), and Mom a glossy magazine. She never cared much about fashion before Luke got famous, but now they were always going to dressy events, and she felt like she had to keep up.

“There you are!” she said, putting her magazine down. “How was the movie?”

“Moderately not-awful,” I said. “But only moderately.”

“And the SAT tutoring?”

“About as thrilling as you’d expect.”

“Just be grateful we didn’t make you get a job this summer,” she said. “A few hours of studying won’t kill you. Is George a good tutor?”

“Yeah, he’s fine.” I came over and sat down on the edge of their bed. “Speaking of George, I wanted to ask you something. Could we go to Tahiti for your anniversary party?”

“Tahiti? We were leaning toward Hawaii.”

“But I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti. Plus . . . you know . . . Gauguin.”

My mother laughed. With no makeup on and her hair a little rumpled, she looked the way I liked her best: like my mom. When she was all glammed up for going out with lots of eye makeup and curled hair, she looked Hollywood-wife generic. “So it would be educational? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Totally. I’d read up on Gauguin before we went and become a total expert on him, I swear.”

“How can I say no to that?”

“Cool.” I slid off the bed and stood up. “I’ll tell George.”

I may have sounded a tiny bit smug when I told George that he should start looking at resorts in Tahiti.

His eyes narrowed. “Just because you want to go there?”

“I convinced Mom. I always get my way, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I see that. Kind of like Veruca Salt.”

“Don’t be a bad loser.”

Except he didn’t lose. Somehow, once he had done the research and presented all the options to my mother and Luke, and the final decision was made, they went with Hawaii after all.

I complained, but Mom said it just made more sense, because we only had four days, and Hawaii was a lot closer. “Only four days?” I repeated. I’d been picturing a real end-of-summer blowout, days and days of beaches and walks and lazy meals and long naps in hammocks before having to get back to fall semester and college applications and all that stuff. But now Mom said the show was taping and Luke couldn’t take more time off than that.

Luke’s schedule ruled our household and was the one thing impervious to my coaxing and begging, so there wasn’t much I could do about it except whine to George later that we’d be spending more time flying than actually lying on a beach.

“Yeah, it’s rough,” he said. “You don’t get to go on a tropical vacation for as long as you’d hoped. Complain about it to everyone you meet and bask in the sympathy.”

He was coming with us—my mother told him they’d pay for his airfare so long as he shared a hotel room with his brother, who was already coming as Luke’s guest. She claimed she needed George to deal with the logistics once we were there, which seemed more kind than true. When I pressed her about it, she admitted she just wanted to give him a vacation. “I felt bad that he was spending all this time looking at pictures of Hawaii and not getting to go. He’s never been. A trip like that would have meant so much to me at his age.”