school. Every time she saw me since, she was amazed anew that I wasn’t wearing black lipstick.
I gave a courtesy laugh, and starting heaping food on my plate.
“Now you’ve stopped coloring your hair black,” she said, “you look much more like Charlotte.”
“We’re often taken for twins,” I lied.
“Surely not identical,” she said. “Now if only you were a success, like your sisters. How proud your mother would be.”
Before I could kill Aunt Regina and stuff her body in the crawlspace, Billy and Ian arrived—at the same time, like they’d shared a ride. This worried me for some reason, so I raced over to introduce them and be sure the introduction was necessary.
“Ian, this is Billy,” I said, taking Billy’s hand in a loverlike fashion. “Billy, Ian.”
They said hello.
“So this is your boyfriend,” Ian said.
“Yep,” I said—giving Billy’s hand a warning squeeze.
“What?” Billy said. “Me?”
I laughed and dragged him to a corner where I hissingly instructed him that, for the duration of the evening, he was my boyfriend. He claimed he wasn’t. I told him he was. He became stubborn. So I offered an introduction to Charlotte, and he said he’d be my boyfriend for a whole week if he could shake her hand. A month if he could lick it.
We threaded through the crowd as I internally debated the merits of allowing the lick, but Billy dug in his heels when he spotted Charlotte.
“That really is Charlotte Olsen!” he said.
“Yeah.”
“No way. She’s totally—”
“Pregnant,” I explained.
“—hot. She’s totally hot.”
“She’s a water buffalo.”
“She’s a fox.”
“But she’s five hundred pounds!” I pointed out.
“I need a cold shower just looking at her,” he said. “Oh, man.”
“Her feet are bloated.” I thought he should know. “She’s a bloated hippo with clown feet.”
“She’s even hotter than her calendar.”
“And bigger than her car.”
“You know,” he told me, man to man, “I jerked off to that calendar three times a day for like two months.”
Fifteen minutes later, I slipped onto the patio. There was a couple sitting on the Adirondacks overlooking the pool, and chatting in low tones. I was going to sneak past, but it was only Ian and Emily.
“Why aren’t you inside with your adoring fans?” I asked.
“I needed some air,” Emily said. “The photographers…”
Ian shot a longing glance back at the house. “A little peace and quiet.”
It was disgusting. Even in herd-of-buffalo form, Charlotte was breaking his heart. “She’s enormous,” I mumbled. “She’s a one-woman stampede.”
“What?” Ian gestured toward the party. “Is that what that crash was?”
“Oh. Um. That was me. I broke up with Billy.”
Ian opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it again.
“A long way from par,” Emily said. “He didn’t even make it to the first hole.”
“Emily!” I said.
She blushed bright red. “I meant golf hole—like in golf.”
“You’ve been watching too much porn,” Ian told her.
“Porn is film,” I observed.
“Why’d you break up?” Ian asked me.
“We’d grown apart.” I turned to Emily. “So where’s your invisible boyfriend?”
“We broke up, too.”
“Really? When? Why?” The relationship may have been clandestine, but she’d seemed happy.
“It was only sex,” Emily said.
“Well, what did you expect from a porn star? Intellectual fulfillment? I don’t know what—”
“A porn star?” she said.
Ian laughed. “Hung like a moose, I bet.”
Emily shot him a stern look, then finally copped to her blue-movie adventure. “The sex was great,” she admitted, “although his idea of a good film was The Sperminator. He just wasn’t right for me. We didn’t have anything—” Her face lit up as Jamie Lombard stepped out of the house with two margaritas. “Jamie! Over here.”
He headed our way and she sprang at him like a hungry lioness and dragged him to the corner of the deck, where they could talk privately. Did she have her eye on Jamie? They’d make a perfect pair.
I looked at Ian. “Did I imagine that?”
“Maybe she had two secret boyfriends.”
“The porn star and the publisher. Sounds like a sitcom.”
“On the Spice Channel.”
I laughed more than that deserved, because I liked Ian. And he looked good. And apparently had forgotten what I did last time we met. “So…you saw Charlotte,” I said.
“More beautiful than ever.”
“She makes a very attractive Mack truck. Meet my sisters: dangerous mind and dangerous curves.”
“Not feeling dangerous, yourself?”
I held up the plate of food that hadn’t left my side all evening. “Only to the buffet.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a little wickedness in you.”
Okay, he was Charlotte’s ex, so this was marginally incestuous and repulsively secondhand. But he was handsome, single, funny, smart…and nobody had ever called me potentially wicked before. I gave him my lower-wattage version of Charlotte’s smile and said, “A lot of wickedness.”
He laughed. “Remember last time we met? You invited me to your school dance.”
My smile dimmed.
“You were what?” he said. “In seventh grade? I was a senior in high school. It was so sweet. What was the theme again?”
Hawaiian luau. “No idea.”
“Hula or something. You were cute in your little grass skirt.”
Actually, I was. I’d wanted to wear a coconut bra, too, but Dad wouldn’t let me.
Ian smiled at the memory. “You marched up to me with a flower necklace and asked if I wanted to get laid.”
“Lei-ed,” I said faintly, remembering the mortification. I was trying on my outfit and had gone to Charlotte’s room to show her. A half-dozen other kids had been there, Charlotte’s friends, and they’d howled with laughter. Not Ian, though. He’d said, very kindly, no, and on the night of the dance had actually sent me a corsage.
We were silent a moment, listening to the party sounds from the house. Then I turned to him and—God help me— I said, “The offer’s still good.”
Ian took my hand. He told me how flattered he was. He said I was beautiful, wonderful, perfect in every way—but he’d rather staple his earlobes to the deck than sleep with me. Well, I don’t know exactly what he said, because I was busy trying to transform