Lies I Told (17 page)

By Thanksgiving, I was starting to breathe easier. Parker had been less confrontational, and while he was never overjoyed to see me with Logan, he was civil. He had even apologized, offering to pay for the damage to Logan's car. It wasn't necessary—Logan had told his parents he'd been a victim of random vandalism—but he had appreciated the offer. They'd shaken hands and that had been that.

We had a quiet Thanksgiving at home with my mom's notoriously bad turkey and famously good sweet potatoes. Parker and I worked together on the stuffing. Afterward, I drove to Logan's house for a low-key dessert with his parents. The more time I spent with them, the more I liked them, and I found myself avoiding them despite the fact that they were always warm and welcoming. When I was alone with Logan, it was easier to shut everything else out, but that
was a lot harder to do while looking into Warren Fairchild's haunted eyes, watching Leslie touch his shoulder reassuringly as she passed by.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving I put on my new jeans and a slouchy sweater and headed to Selena's house. The guys were at Liam's, breaking in a newly released video game, and Selena and I had agreed to go with Rachel, Olivia, and Harper to a beach party in Malibu. After hearing one too many stories about Rachel's wild nights in LA and Hollywood, I'd offered to drive. I didn't want to be at her mercy if I wanted to leave. Plus, Selena had lied to her father, telling him we were going to dinner and a movie, and her cover story depended on making curfew.

She was waiting in the driveway, wearing black jeans that accentuated her curves and a thick white sweater under a leather jacket. As always, her hair was barely contained in its ponytail, curls springing out around her face like they had a mind of their own.

“Hey!” she said, sliding into the passenger side. “I hope you brought a jacket. It's going to be cold down by the water.”

“I did.” I put the car into gear and headed for Olivia's house. “And didn't you say beach parties were over for the year?”

She shrugged, reaching for my iPod on the console. “They practically live on the beach in Malibu. Or so I've heard.”

“How'd it go with your dad?” I asked.

“Good.” She changed the song and put the iPod down. “We have no problem as long as I'm home by midnight.”

We picked up Olivia and Harper, and I laughed as they piled into the backseat, fighting over who was going to sit in the middle once we picked up Rachel.

“She is going to
hate
sitting back here,” Harper said with what I thought might be a note of satisfaction.

“Yeah, how did you get her to let you drive?” Olivia asked. “She never lets us drive.”

I felt a childish twinge of satisfaction. “I told her Parker wanted me to have my own car in case the cops showed up.”

“You pulled the Parker card?” Olivia laughed. “Good one.”

“So she really likes him?” I asked. I knew they texted and had been out a couple of times, but Parker was otherwise close-lipped about how far things had gone between them.

Olivia leaned forward between the two front seats, and I caught a whiff of her perfume, expensive and French. “I think it's more the chase, you know? Rachel's not used to having to work for it.”

“Work for it?” I repeated, turning onto Rachel's road. “Seriously? We're talking about my brother here.”

“Sorry. You know what I mean.”

“Guys usually fall all over themselves for a shot with Rachel,” Harper explained from the backseat. “I thought she was going to die of embarrassment when Logan broke up with her.”

“Logan broke up with her?” I don't know why I was surprised.

“Yep,” Olivia said. “Gave her the old ‘it's just not a good
fit' line. Like he was firing an employee. She was totally humiliated.”

I let that sink in as I turned onto Rachel's street and stopped at the end of the driveway. I used the call box, then waited as the gates swung open.

Rachel was standing near the garage, looking completely comfortable in spite of her silky pajama-like pants and loose tank top. Her only nod to the cold was a cardigan draped over one arm.

Olivia opened the back door. “Ready to partay?”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Only if you move over. There's no way I'm sitting in the middle.”

We all laughed as Olivia moved to the center of the backseat.

There wasn't an exact address to type into the Saab's GPS, so I left the peninsula and followed Rachel's directions up PCH toward Malibu. Harper complained that it was the long way, but Rachel insisted it was faster than driving inland to the freeway only to work our way back out again to get to the beach.

As we headed up the coast, I began to relax. It was oddly intimate being crammed into such close quarters, the car dark except for the lights on the dash. Selena dished about David, telling us how his voice had shaken when he met her dad and how he'd asked permission to kiss her after they'd gone to a movie the night before. We talked about Liam's reported hookup with a quiet girl no one seemed to know and about a locker raid that had busted two of the school's
top students for possession of Adderall. In between, they passed around Harper's compact mirror, freshening powder and reapplying lip gloss. We'd been driving for nearly an hour when Rachel finally told me to slow down.

She leaned forward, gazing out the window past Harper, her eyes combing the beach. “There,” she said. “Park up ahead by those other cars.”

“Where are we?” Harper complained. “And how do you hear about this stuff?”

Rachel didn't answer.

I pulled into a turnout at the side of the road and parked behind a silver Lexus. When I cut the engine, music drifted in through the closed windows. A bonfire lit up the beach below us, everything dark outside its perimeter of light.

“You sure this is the right party?” Olivia asked.

“It's somebody's party,” Rachel said, opening her door. “And I
need
to get out of this car.”

“Wait . . .” Harper slid out after Olivia. “Are you saying you didn't know if there was a party here? That we weren't invited to this one?”

Rachel waved the questions away. “There's always a party up here. And it's a public beach. It's not like they can kick us out.”

“You always do this,” Harper huffed.

Selena stood next to me as I locked the car.

“Is this cool?” she asked me softly.

I looked around. The bonfire was on an empty stretch of beach, the water on one side, a giant hill leading up to the
road on the other. The party seemed pretty low-key, with less than fifty people sitting around the fire. Someone laughed, and it was carried up to us on a rush of wind.

“I think so,” I said. “And if it's not—I dangled the keys in front of her—“we can always leave.”

Rachel pulled a bottle of vodka from her shoulder bag. “Let's go.” She headed to the beach with Olivia and Harper.

“I can't believe we're doing this,” Selena murmured as we fell into step behind them.

I smiled reassuringly despite the fact that my nerves were clanging like a wind chime. The success of any job relied on controlling the elements of the con. We'd been taught to know our marks and the other players, weigh the odds, assess the risk of any situation before making a move. The bonfire at the Cove had been easy, almost controlled. A mile from home with people we'd carefully researched in attendance, it was only the details that were unknown. Would I have a chance to talk to Logan? Would I get the opportunity to win over Rachel?

Now I knew nothing about the situation we were walking into, and I braced myself for anything.

We descended to the beach using a set of concrete stairs built into the hill. The music got louder, the hum of conversation audible as we stepped onto the sand. Now that we were closer, I heard the thread of two different songs—one playing through a minispeaker propped up on a cooler, the other strummed softly on a guitar by a long-haired guy near the fire. The smell of pot mingling with salt water hung over the beach, and several of the kids turned nervously our way as we headed toward them.

“Hey!” Rachel held up the vodka and stepped into the light cast by the fire. “We heard there was a party here. Did we come to the right place?”

The guy with the guitar set it aside and took a joint from the muscle head next to him. “What's the password?” he asked on the inhale.

“Um . . .” Rachel looked around, her eyes landing on the bottle in her hand. “Vodka?”

The long-haired guy stood up, opening his arms expansively as a smile lit his face. “How'd you know?”

Laughter and a few halfhearted cheers went up around the fire as everyone introduced themselves. The long-haired guy was Waldo (after Ralph Waldo Emerson, he claimed when Rachel laughed), but I was too busy processing the scene, trying to detect possible problems, to remember all the other names thrown my way.

They offered us beer from the cooler—Selena and I passed—and we found seats on the sand and in a smattering of beach chairs around the fire. Everyone was nice, lubricated by copious amounts of weed and no small amount of beer. They were all friends from Malibu High, and I listened as they compared it to Playa Hermosa, seeming to find some kind of rich-kid kinship with Rachel, Olivia, and Harper.

An hour later, Olivia was deep in conversation with a jock wearing a Malibu High jacket and Selena was talking about summer-abroad programs with the olive-skinned brunette sitting next to her. Rachel stood, linking hands with Waldo, the guitar-playing stoner. They walked off, disappearing into the darkness beyond the fire.

I turned to Harper. “Is she seriously going to make out with Waldo?”

Harper turned her eyes to the fire, something wary settling over her delicate features. “Rachel's different when she's not in Playa Hermosa.”

“Different how?”

She leveled her gaze at me, her eyes cold. “You don't really think she's the Rachel she shows to everyone at home, do you?” I noticed the same angry edge to her voice I'd heard that first night at the Cove. “Rachel would never be seen with someone like Waldo in front of Logan, in front of her parents.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. “She's two-faced?”

Harper's laugh was brittle. “That's a nice way of putting it.”

I turned back to the fire. I didn't believe for a minute that Rachel was trapped in some kind of rich-girl wonderland, forced to be someone she wasn't by the expectations of her family. There was something too gleeful in the way she switched roles. The way she kept everyone off-balance. Like a high-strung toddler who got some kind of subconscious pleasure from keeping everyone on edge, wondering what she'd do next.

“Hey, Grace, let me have your keys?”

I looked up, surprised to see Rachel standing over me with Waldo. “My keys?”

“We're going on a beer run,” she said. “And since you insisted on driving, I need your keys.”

“Um . . . I don't think my parents would like it if someone else drove my car.” I stood up. “Besides, you've been drinking. I'll drive.”

She sighed. “I had half a beer an hour ago. I'm completely sober. Don't be a baby. Just give me your keys.”

The conversation had grown quiet around us as everyone watched our exchange. I felt suddenly self-conscious, like the goody-goody in a group of delinquents.

“The sooner you give me the keys, the sooner I'll be back,” she said, extending her hand.

She wasn't going to let it drop. I could either give her the keys or draw even more attention to us by continuing to argue with her in full view of everyone on the beach.

Reluctantly, I reached into my pocket and withdrew the keys. I put them in her hand. “If you wreck my car, Parker will kill you.”

Her laugh echoed off the water. “Whatever, Grace.”

She skipped off toward the stairs, red hair streaming behind her like a brightly colored banner, with Waldo in tow.

“Did you seriously just give her the keys to your car?” Selena hissed.

“I didn't know what else to do.”

“It's fine,” Olivia said, dropping next to me onto the sand. “She'll be back.”

A girl with short, dark hair had picked up Waldo's guitar. We listened as she strummed, the notes soft and slightly melancholy. It was cold, and I hunched down into my jacket, trying to calm my nerves, telling myself that Olivia was right; Rachel would be back. It's not like she was a car thief. I didn't know how much time had passed when I noticed the faint cast of blue and red near the stairs.

“What the . . . ?”

“Cops!” someone shouted.

A police cruiser was parked on the road near the stairs, and two uniformed figures were descending to the beach.

I jumped to my feet amid a flurry of activity: blankets thrown over shoulders, half-smoked joints and beer bottles buried in the sand as everyone dispersed, heading away from the stairs toward some unknown exit.

“What do we do?” Selena asked, her eyes a little wild.

Olivia shrugged. “Nothing we can do without a car.” She eyed the cops heading our way across the sand. “Just play it cool.”

I watched the police officers—one tall and stocky, the other small and wiry—get closer. They stopped in front of us, the little one surveying us with shrewd blue eyes.

“What are you doing out here, ladies?” he asked.

“Just waiting for our friend,” Olivia said. “She had to take someone home.”

The big guy raised his eyebrows. “You don't have a ride?” The look in his eyes said he'd been expecting a routine party bust, and a fresh note of panic thrummed through my body.

“We do,” Olivia said. “She'll be right back.”

“Why don't you girls come on up with us,” he said. But it wasn't really a suggestion. We had no choice but to follow.

We trudged up the stairs, my heart pounding in time to our footsteps on the concrete. I tried to talk myself down. This was no big deal. I had a valid California driver's license in the name of Grace Fontaine. I hadn't even been drinking. And if the police wanted registration and
insurance information on the Saab, I could give it to them when Rachel came back. Worst case, she didn't come back in time, and I'd call my parents. They wouldn't be happy I'd called attention to myself, but I'd been working, worming my way into Logan's crowd like I'd been assigned. It happens.

We reached the police car, and the smaller officer—I saw now that his name tag said Gutierrez—held out his hand. “Let me take a look at your IDs.”

We handed them over. Olivia and I had driver's licenses, Selena had a learner's permit, and Harper had only her school ID.

The cop named Gutierrez glanced at them. “Stay here.”

He headed for the police car, slid into the driver's seat, and shut the door while we stood awkwardly next to the bigger cop. I couldn't quite make out his badge, but he seemed bored, which was a good sign.

A few minutes later Gutierrez reappeared. He handed us back our IDs, then looked at his watch. “I'll give your friend ten minutes. After that, we have to take you in and call your parents. I'm trying to give you a break, but you're minors. We can't just leave you standing out here by the road.”

I glanced at Selena, feeling responsible for the terror in her eyes. The rest of us would get off easy if our parents found out we'd been at a random beach party in Malibu. Selena would be grounded for life.

Time seemed to stretch long and dark; the lights from the police car cast a kaleidoscope of blue and red across the
pavement. It seemed like ten minutes had passed ten times over by the time I heard the sound of a car approaching on PCH. We all turned toward it, relief flooding my body as it slowed to a stop at the side of the road.

Rachel got out of the driver's seat. There was no sign of Waldo.

“Hey!” She flashed a smile that would have been more at home at a fund-raiser, like nothing at all was wrong. Like we weren't standing by the side of the road, minutes from being taken to the police station because she'd insisted on taking my car. “Sorry about that!”

Gutierrez held out his hand. “License and registration.”

Rachel dug around in her bag. “I can help you with the license part, but it's my friend's car.”

“I'll get the registration,” I said, heading for the Saab.

I held my breath as Gutierrez looked over everything. “You girls go on home now,” he said. “It's not as safe as you might think to be out on an empty beach at all hours.”

Rachel smiled. “Yes, sir.”

I snatched the keys from her hand and headed for the car. No one said anything as they piled in, the police car still parked in front of us. I had just started the car when Rachel opened the back door.

“Hold on,” she said. “I forgot my sweater on the beach.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Selena muttered.

The door slammed shut, and we watched as Rachel headed for the stairs to the beach, waving breezily at Gutierrez, who had once again stepped out of the police car.

“Is she serious?” Harper said.

“She's Rachel,” Olivia said. “You know how she is.”

“I'm tired of making excuses for her,” Harper said. “Let's just be honest—sometimes she's a fucking bitch.”

The atmosphere was thick with shocked silence in the moment before we all started laughing.