The Veil (2 page)

My accent, along with all other things British about me, were long gone by my seventeenth birthday. By then, I was so much of an American that the thing I loved most in the world—my addiction, my obsession, the true love of my life—was coffee.

I still suffered through the occasional cup of tea for Gran’s benefit; she never would have forgiven me if she knew my true feelings on the matter, not to mention the extent of my dependence on caffeine. But I could not deny my total and unrestrained passion for a good, strong cup of coffee.

Which is why I loved that my best friend worked in a coffee shop. Nate fed my coffee habit in return for a ride to school every morning.

When he’d finally managed to appease the last member of the anxious crowd in the pick-up area, Nate looked up and gave me a wave. “One sec!” he called, dumping a pile of grinds into the largest of the three drip coffee machines behind the counter. “The birthday girl deserves fresh coffee!”

Sully, the café’s owner, looked up at Nate from behind the cash register. “Birthday girl?” he repeated. His long dreadlocks, which were gathered into a loose ponytail at the back of his head, swung in my direction. “Addy, is it your birthday?”

“Yup,” I admitted, swallowing in embarrassment as the dozen or so people who were lined up and waiting to give Sully their orders all turned in unison to scowl at me.

My cheeks flushed even more as Sully waved me to the front of the line. I could hear grumbling behind me as he took his time considering the array of pastries behind the counter. He finally decided on cream cheese morning buns, these giant, swirly muffins with cream cheese in the middle. My favorite.

Sully dumped three of them into a bag and handed them to me, waving off my attempt to pay him. “Coffee’s on the house too,” he said firmly. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“Thanks,” I said. Then I frowned; a flash of silver had caught my eye. I squinted and watched carefully as a sparkly, silver blob began to bounce around on Sully’s shoulder. With each bounce, the features of the blob grew more and more defined until there was definitely, no question about it, a tiny silver frog hopping up and down underneath Sully’s right ear.

“Addy, are you okay?”

At the sound of Sully’s voice, the frog gave a great heave of its long back legs and rocketed itself up to Sully’s right temple. From there, it disappeared beneath the café owner’s thick, black dreadlocks.

I blinked.

“How did you do that?” I asked him breathily.

“Do what?” Sully asked, looking warily down at his right shoulder, where I was still staring.

The man directly behind me, who had been next in line until I butted in, cleared his throat pointedly. I stepped awkwardly out of the way, clutching my bag of morning buns and wondering why no one else seemed to have noticed the frog.

Sully laughed. “Nate, get some coffee in her,” he ordered. “Girl’s seeing things.”

“Sure thing, Boss,” Nate said, suddenly appearing at my elbow and holding two cardboard cups in Sully’s sleeves. “I’m out of here. Back at four thirty.”

“See you then. Happy birthday, Addy.” Sully nodded at me, with a look of slight concern on his face, before turning his attention back to the paying customers.

I barely managed to nod back as Nate steered me out the door. Outside, I shook my head to clear it. The cool, morning air made me feel better almost immediately, and I laughed quietly at myself.

Caffeine deprivation. That had to be it.

Reading my mind, Nate slipped one of the coffee cups into my free hand. “Here you go. Just how you like it.”

“Thanks,” I said. I set it on the roof as I unlocked the driver’s side door, and I ignored Nate’s exaggerated, disapproving sigh as he opened the door on the passenger side.

“It’s so sad,” he said as we both wedged our coffees into the cup holders between the front seats.

“What is?” I asked, resignedly.

“You,” Nate accused, as he dumped his school bag in the back seat and stretched his legs out to their fullest extent underneath the dash. Nate was within an inch of my height, and I was not tall. “
You
. You have a full espresso bar and a superbly trained barista completely at your disposal, day after day, and yet all you ever want is plain jane, black coffee with a few drops of nonfat milk.”

I smiled in spite of myself, started the car, and backed carefully onto Grant. Nate and I’d had this argument almost every day for the past year, ever since I got my driver’s license and started picking him up in the mornings for school.

“I can’t help it if I actually
like
the taste of coffee,” I told him haughtily. “I don’t need to cover it up with all that foam, sugar, and flavored junk. That nonsense is for people who don’t actually like coffee. They’ve just been socially conditioned to drink it every morning.”

I nodded meaningfully to the drink in Nate’s hand, which, unless I was very much mistaken, was a half caf, no foam, low fat, extra hot, caramel macchiato. He rarely started his day with anything else.

Nate brought the cup directly underneath his nose and inhaled deeply. “This, my dear, is a work of art I would never expect a Philistine like yourself to appreciate. Silence please, as I give it its proper attention.”

I laughed as I made a U-turn and headed toward school.

——

I parked Gran’s Oldsmobile carefully in my assigned spot in the Marin County High School parking lot. Nate and I had just started the walk up to school when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur of olive skin and smoky black curls hurtling in my direction. I barely had time to shove my coffee safely into Nate’s hand before Olivia threw herself at me and hugged me tightly around the waist—which was a little bit awkward, considering she’s about six inches taller than me.

“Happy birthday!” Olivia enthused, squeezing me so tightly I gasped for air.

When she finally let go, I reeled for a moment. “Thanks,” I wheezed.

Olivia beamed down at me. Then her face grew serious, and she turned suddenly panicky eyes on Nate. “You remembered to get
tonight off, didn’t you?” she asked. There was a slightly hysterical edge to her voice, which was not unusual for her.

“Yes, my beautiful,” Nate assured her as he put my coffee cup back into my hand. “Of course I did. Your
six
phone calls last night did not go unnoticed. Sully’s letting me off at six thirty.”

Nate had always been somewhat infatuated with Olivia. I used to be pretty sure his constant flirting would eventually take a turn toward the truly romantic, but lately I’d begun to think it was not so much Olivia herself who fascinated him as much as it was her passionate commitment to thoroughly enjoying, and thoroughly dramatizing, each and every moment of her life.

“Good,” she said with obvious relief, her face breaking into a wide, dimpled grin. “Then Addy’s Birthday Night can commence!”

“What?” I asked suspiciously. So far, all I’d been told about our plans for the evening was that my presence was required. I was itching for details.

They ignored me.

“You’re driving, right?” Nate asked Olivia.

“I’ll pick you up at exactly six thirty, then we’ll swing by Addy’s house. We should have just enough time to get there and back and still have Addy home by ten.”

“And where is ‘there’?” I asked, groaning inwardly at the mention of my curfew. Gran’s one and only household rule was that I had to be home every night by ten o’clock—it didn’t matter if it was a school night, a weekend night, or New Year’s Eve, I still had to be home by ten on the dot. Or else.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Olivia said, as she finally turned to include me in the conversation. “It’ll be fun. You will be exhausted well before your curfew, I promise.”

“And, quite possibly, extremely ill,” Nate added, with a smile.

I had no idea just how right they would turn out to be on both counts, and neither did they; standing there in the school parking lot, we all thought we were joking.

“Oh, and one more thing, totally unrelated to birthdays,” Olivia continued as we headed up to school. “There’s a meeting after school today for the cast and crew of
The Last Will and Testament of Mrs. Harriet J. Goodrich
. You guys are coming, right?”

Nate laughed. “Could you possibly have made the name of your play any longer, Olivia?”

She smacked him playfully. “When you write a play, you can title it whatever you want.”

But Nate would not be derailed; he turned to me with mock disgust. “She writes the thing, casts herself as the lead, and now she has to organize the tech crew as well. Can you say ‘control freak’?”

“I’m just trying to make sure we get the best people!” She bristled, then took Nate’s arm and bent down to nuzzle her curly head against his shoulder. “Please? Say you’ll be my stage manager?”

“I already promised you weeks ago.”

“And you’ll come to the meeting today?”

“As long as it’s short; I have to be at work by four thirty.”

“Great.” Olivia dropped his arm. “You too, Addy? It
will
be short—it’s just to sign up and pick up rehearsal schedules.”

“Sure,” I said, looking down at my watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. My first period, precalculus, didn’t start until a quarter after eight. But I shifted my book bag a bit anxiously anyway.

Olivia caught my eye and gave me a knowing grin. “See you at break, Addy,” she said, and grabbed Nate’s arm again. “Say goodbye to Addy, Nate.”

“Bye, Addy,” Nate said obediently.

I waved and turned in the direction of precalculus.

“Addy?”

I turned back around; Nate was trailing his foot uncomfortably along the ground.

“Um, are you going to eat all three of those morning buns?”

——

Two morning buns lighter, I finally arrived at precalc. As
usual, I was the first person there. My assigned seat was in the back of the room, and I took my time draping my coat over the back of the chair and arranging my notebook, textbook, coffee, and pastry on the desk in front of me. I sat down and took a large bite of the morning bun, hoping I could finish it before I got busted for eating in the classroom.

I know what you’re thinking—who rushes to be the first person to precalculus? I promise you, my eagerness has absolutely nothing to do with the subject itself; I hate math and always have. Precalculus in particular. There was only one thing on earth that could make me walk into the class more than one second before I had to.

Lucas Stratton.

It’s funny; I never thought of myself as the type of girl who was capable of losing her mind over a guy. I’d never been that kind of girl before, so believe me, I was as shocked as anyone when I walked into precalc on the first day of the school year, a little over two months ago, and WHAM! There he was, sitting in the second row. He might as well have stood up and slapped me in the face, because that’s how hard his mere presence hit me. My heart started beating like I’d just downed twelve cups of coffee and then immediately run a marathon. I was sweating like I had just run a marathon too—I sweated my way through two layered tank tops and a shrug sweater in the five minutes after I first laid eyes on him.

I have no idea how I made it through the first class with him. My seat was four rows behind him and two rows to the left, which definitely helped; it gave me a perfect view of the side of his face. I don’t think I took my eyes off of him for the entire period.

When it was over, after I watched him gather up his books and leave the room, I felt like I’d been run over by a truck and left for dead on the side of the road. I was achy and exhausted (not to mention soaked through) and had absolutely no desire to do anything but follow him out of the door, anywhere in the world he wanted to lead me.

Are you disgusted with me yet?

Wait, it gets better.

I really figured it would pass. I mean, how could I possibly have that intense of a reaction to someone, day after day after day? Especially when I’d never actually spoken to the person. I mean, something based on mere looks couldn’t possibly have any kind of staying power, could it?

Apparently, it could.

At least by my birthday, I’d finally got the sweating thing under control, thanks to the extra-strength deodorant that (mortifyingly) I had to have prescribed by my doctor. The out-of-control heart beating seemed to have died down a bit too, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about the wild surge of emotion that hit me the second we were in the same room together. Every time I saw him, I zeroed in on him like a radar beam and completely lost my ability to function like a normal human (which, if you’ve been peeking ahead in the story, you might find a bit ironic).

I didn’t know what it was about him, not exactly. He wasn’t particularly tall, but neither was he short. His brown hair was a bit longer than what was currently fashionable, but it suited him. And there was definitely no denying that his deep, penetrating green eyes were the stuff of which romance novels are built on.

I know you’re not normally supposed to refer to guys as “beautiful,” but there was just no other way to describe Lucas Stratton.

And I was definitely not the only one who felt that way.

His appearance in our midst at the beginning of this year was cause for the greatest upheaval among the female population of Marin County High since the arrival of the charming, godlike Paul Green in the middle of our freshman year. And believe me, until Karinda Walsh managed to attach herself, squidlike, to Paul and make it clear to every other female in range that he was
hers
, this school was like a seething pot full of venomous, near-to-boiling estrogen, which reduced itself to an angry simmer only after Paul
was decidedly off the market. Heaven help us if he should ever manage to shake himself loose from Karinda’s death grip.

I never really understood what was so great about Paul. But now that I’d experienced the magnetic lure of Lucas Stratton, I could almost understand the nearly-maniacal gleam in Karinda Walsh’s eye whenever another girl stood too close to Paul.

Feel free to be disgusted with me. Nate and Olivia certainly were. But I was way past being disgusted with myself.