“So? I’m not going to this party with his dad.” Hallie sulked.
“It’ll be good for you to get out, start making friends,” her mom insisted. “Now, go tell your sister. I think she’s reading by the pool.”
Hallie rolled her eyes and pulled herself off the chaise, but instead of finding Grace, she hid away in the guesthouse: taking an extra-long bath, and hoping that by the time she emerged, her mom would be distracted by painting again and forget all about her orders for Hallie to socialize with Brandon and his weird surfer friends.
But she was out of luck. When Hallie finally headed back to the main house for dinner, Brandon and his visit were the only topics of conversation at the table.
“Such a polite young man,” her mom cooed, over a spread of roasted chicken.
Amber nodded in agreement. “I heard they paid three million for that house.”
“And he seemed plenty taken with you,” Auggie added, giving Hallie a wink. “You could have yourself a new beau there.”
“Ugh! No way. He was just being polite,” she said quickly, but Auggie was not to be dissuaded.
“Trust me, I can see these things,” he insisted.
“He does,” Amber agreed. “Like a little cupid, aren’t you, sweetie?”
Grace gave Hallie a smug grin. “Hallie and Brandon, sitting in a tree . . .”
“Grace!” She kicked her under the table.
“Oww!”
“He’d be good for you,” Auggie mused. “Solid, dependable. Bit quiet, I’ll give you that, but you can talk enough for the both of you!”
“Look, she’s blushing.” Amber giggled. “Maybe we’ve got a match on our hands.”
“No,” Hallie tried again. They were like some kind of wretched double act, chirping and gossiping away! She thought quickly for a diversion. “Anyway, Grace is the one you should talk to about boyfriends.”
As predicted, Amber and Auggie lit up. “Who?”
“Nobody,” Grace said, glaring at Hallie. “I don’t have anyone.”
“She’s just being shy.” Hallie smiled serenely. “But I’ll tell you, his name begins with the letter T.”
“T!” Amber exclaimed. “Hmmm, Tristan, or Tyler . . .”
“Toby,” Auggie offered. “Teddy.”
“Todd!”
Grace shot her a murderous look. Hallie just grinned. Served her right. Grace’s tryst with Theo was the worst-kept secret ever, but Hallie didn’t know what Grace saw in him. Sure, he was nice enough — if by “nice,” you meant boring, and lifeless, and bound with blood to their mortal enemy — but Hallie would never bring herself to settle for that.
Nice! No, Hallie wanted passion, adventure, spirit. A Heathcliff! A Romeo! (Except not quite so slow on the uptake when it came to life-or-death planning.) Sure, she’d dated a little back home, but it had never lasted. The guys she knew all just wanted to hang around in windowless basements, watching movies, talking about politics, and attempting to slip her clothes off without her noticing. (As if Hallie would be so distracted by the evils of late-stage capitalism that she’d somehow lose all track of her underwear.) Even the college boys were a bore: acting as if a messy dorm room and half a semester of literary theory made them kings of the known universe.
She didn’t want to fool around in a drunken haze, or hold hands at the movies like every other pedestrian teen couple. Let Grace simper at Theo all she liked; Hallie wanted more. She was looking for a Great Love: something epic, and sweeping, that would shake the very foundations of her soul. A love that would affect her, open the world to her; something mysterious and magnificent, the kind of grand affair that would be written about one day, by hushed scholars in a dusty library. A Burton to her Taylor. A Fitzgerald to her Zelda. A Brad to her Angelina.
She wanted (and Hallie sighed at this, with no small measure of longing) a man.
Grace agreed to come to the party — more to escape Auggie and Amber’s relentless questioning than because she wanted to go, she told Hallie with a scowl — and soon they were piled into Brandon’s shiny new Jeep and headed for the coast.
“How are you feeling?” he asked Hallie, looking over from the driver’s side.
Hallie softened, appreciating his concern. “Better, now. Thanks.”
She studied him thoughtfully. He radiated an intense kind of quietness, and he hadn’t bothered to shave or even change for the party: still wearing the same rumpled shirt and two-day stubble from that afternoon. She would have thought being mistaken for a crazy psychopath might have inspired some adventures in basic hygiene, at the very least.
“So, what’s your deal?” she asked curiously. If his family lived in the sprawling Greco-Roman abomination next door, he must be rich, so perhaps this scruffy beach-bum look was the Californian equivalent of the whole East Coast disheveled wealth thing — where they dressed in moth-eaten cashmere and scuffed Italian leather shoes to prove just how ancient and stuffy the family fortune was. That must be it, Hallie decided: kind of like, “I’m too busy surfing to need a real job. Or a shower.”
“What do you mean?” Brandon asked.
“What do you do?” Hallie pressed. “Are you home from college, or dropped out, or what?”
“I never went to college.” Brandon kept his eyes on the road. “And, I’m not really doing anything right now.”
“Hmmm.” Maybe he had issues, Hallie decided. Smoked too much pot and dropped out of regular life, like Kenny Mathers from her theater group. One day, he was all set for a sound-design course in Florida; the next, he’s locked up in his room playing first-person shooter games for twenty hours a day and subsisting only on cheez-based snack foods. Now that Hallie thought about it, Brandon’s eyes did seem kind of bloodshot. . . .
Her gaze drifted to the puckered line of red skin on his neck. “What’s the story with your scar?”
“Hallie!” There Grace was again with the wail of protest.
Hallie twisted around and glared at her. “What? I’m just asking.”
“No, it’s OK.” Brandon coughed. “I, uh, was in Iraq.”
Hallie stared.
“Like, the army?”
“Yup.” Brandon rubbed his neck absently. “I served a couple of years.”
Hallie blinked in surprise. She’d never met anyone who actually joined; most of her friends were the ones staging antiwar sit-ins and campaigning about the hypocrisy of American imperialism. “So what happened?” she asked.