He actually said it way worse than that, and she’d been relieved. She’d heard her stepmother call her “that weird little monster.”
But Lief got furious that her father not only didn’t want her full-time but didn’t even want visits, so she got it—no one wanted her. Oh, Lief said he did, but he didn’t. If he did, he would have been happy with her father for giving her back, but he was not happy. There was a huge fight; her two dads were yelling and got real close to hitting and she wished they’d just beat each other to death.
She didn’t hear from her father again after that blowout. That had been months ago. The whole back-and-forth thing ending with Lief had started in seventh grade. And that was when she started calling him Lief.
She blew on her nails and checked them. They were dry. She applied the lipstick and gloss.
She had stopped growing then. She used to be a chubby little girl, and now she was a skinny short girl with a couple of bumps on her chest that were supposed to pass as boobs. Her Goth, biker-chick look meant no one would expect her to be all giggly.
She started looking up suicide clubs on the internet until Lief had caught her and taken her to a counselor who told her she was angry. Duh. She had to sit with that lame counselor every week, and on top of that, they did some stupid grief counseling with all grown-ups. She almost got back to liking Lief after he said he thought the counselor was lame, too, and that a grief group for adults was no place for her and refused to take her. She liked him for that.
They might still be in L.A. where she was born and had lived right up to ninth grade, if she hadn’t gotten in some trouble, and she might not have gotten in trouble if her friends hadn’t all disappeared on her. First it was because they couldn’t stand her feeling sorry for herself, then she wasn’t like them anymore with her black clothes and weird hair. So she found herself a few new friends who did things like get into their parents’ medicine chests, score a little pot sometimes, lift money from their moms’ purses and dads’ wallets—for the pot, of course—and, about the only thing she found any fun at all, snuck out after the folks were asleep. They didn’t really do anything; they hung out where they wouldn’t get hassled, smoked some cigarettes sometimes. Bitched about the rules. Courtney wasn’t into the pills and pot; she just experimented a little. She felt weird and bad enough; she didn’t like not knowing how she was going to feel. She pretended, mostly. She had to. She couldn’t stand the thought of being all alone again. If the good kids dumped her and the bad kids dumped her, who was left?
So Lief said, “This isn’t working, this city. You find too much trouble and I’m sick of the noise and traffic. We’re getting out of here. I’m going to find us something sane. I’d like if we could get back to at least being friends, like we used to be. And you could use a chance to start over. Maybe on the right side of the law?”
Now, Courtney had not wanted to move. Period. Even though she’d lost her old friends and didn’t like her new ones. There was something about boxing up her life and putting it on a truck, moving away from where she’d been with her mom that just freaked her out, even though she knew her mom wasn’t coming back.
She liked the idea of getting back to being friends with Lief, though she didn’t believe he meant that. She figured he meant getting back to her looking more like she used to. But the big problem was, this wasn’t going to work—rather than getting back to one hair color, she was thinking about many piercings and a few tattoos…. How long before he just gave up? How long before he just turned her in, told the cops she wasn’t his daughter anyway, go ahead and take her, find a place for her? Because she figured he was only doing this out of some promise he’d made to her mom. And she also figured that he’d get over it and have the locks changed or something. Every time he looked at her, he winced. He hated the multicolored hair, the jagged cut, the black clothes, and for some reason she couldn’t really understand herself, they couldn’t pass ten words without getting into it.
She looked in the mirror—her hair was wild and crazy, her eyes dark and scary. Perfect as far as she was concerned.
So. They’d had another argument. This one was about homework. She told him it was done; he said, “Let me see it.” She said, “No.” He said, “You’re getting a D in both math and English and you have a high IQ—I have to see the homework.” She told him he’d have to trust her and he’d laughed, said she’d have to earn that. She said she’d tear it up before she’d turn it over. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Finally, struggling with his temper, he decided to drive around for a while, maybe go to one of the coast towns and walk around, cool off, and when he got back in a couple of hours, she’d better be ready to share the homework.
Ha! Fat chance, she thought.
When he said a couple of hours, he meant three or four. She knew his drill—he’d give her plenty of time to actually do her homework and himself plenty of time to feel like he could tolerate her again. He left at five-thirty. She was good till nine.
She hadn’t made any real friends, but a couple of guys who looked a lot like her had picked up on her willingness to take a few chances, if only to have some company. Once Lief was gone, she picked up the phone and called B.A., which was short for either Bruce Arnold or Bad Ass. He was a junior who should be a senior, seventeen.
“Hey, my dad went out,” she said. She called him Lief to his face but around school he was “her dad,” just because she didn’t want to explain anything. “Wanna come over for a couple of hours?”
“What for?”
“Hang out?”
“I could …”
“Could you bring beer? Because he doesn’t keep any here.”
“I could bring a few. My old man would never miss it. How do I get there?”
She gave him some directions and it took him about twenty minutes. When he got to the house, he looked around at the rich interior, whistled and said, “Hot damn!”
Three
While Lief drove Kelly to the big Victorian in which her sister lived, Kelly was semi-passed out. But she mumbled and muttered the whole way.
He had certainly understood everything she said right up until she put her head down on the bar. Sounded like she’d had a fling with a guy she thought was available but who turned out to be very married. Oh, such an ordinary tale. Men told that story all the time. Why men stayed married to women they wanted to cheat on, Lief had no idea. Up until he’d met Lana, he’d never been in a serious relationship; he always had a woman around, was playing the field, having a little fun, but hadn’t been engaged or married. When he met her he had instantly known two things—she was the one, and he’d never want another one. In fact, here he was, widowed a little over two years, and he hadn’t been tempted even once. Of course, he had Courtney. Hard to think about anything but getting through another day.
But this lovely Kelly had gotten his attention the second she’d walked into the bar. He’d felt a little zing just looking at her. She was pretty, very fresh and lush. And nothing like Lana, which came as a relief. He wasn’t sure he could ever feel the slightest response to any woman after losing Lana. Lana had been small, dark-haired with dark eyes. Kelly was blonde, blue-eyed, had a round, full figure, and his first thought had been what it would feel like to get his hands on her, to hold her body up against his. That soft, rich, luxurious body. She didn’t have one of those Hollywood bodies—too thin with fake perky boobs. She had a real woman’s body—something to hold on to. And that mouth—full pink lips. The second he’d seen her
