“Just tell me you aren’t calling Bo.”
“I’m not calling Bo.” But she frowned. “I thought you liked him.” Jem and Lacey had driven to the condo to have dinner with Kacey and Bo a couple of months before. A friend of Lacey’s, another case worker, had offered to stay with Levi. It had actually been a nice evening.
“I do like him. I just don’t think he’d like it here.”
Kacey wasn’t sure he would, either. And maybe that was why she’d been reluctant to give him her key. Something else she’d yet to tell her sister.
“What?” Lacey’s beautiful blue eyes studied her with concern.
Kacey shook her head. Michael’s call could come anytime. “I just... You’ve been gone. I’ve got some things to tell you. But they can wait until tomorrow.” She was staying Friday night, but had to be back in LA for a date with Bo Saturday night. An opening they’d been invited to attend as an official couple. He’d been thrilled.
She’d been kind of warmed by the idea, too. It was nice being considered part of a couple.
Lacey nodded. Gave her another look. No more questions.
Which made Kacey nervous.
What did Lacey know that she hadn’t yet figured out?
Before she gave her sister any of the scoop on Bo, she was going to find out. Tit for tat. Sisters could do that on occasion. If the situation was drastic enough to warrant it. She was tired of being an emotional idiot.
* * *
“WHERE ARE YOU?” Hearing his voice went right along with the high Kacey was already feeling, sitting locked in her car in a parking lot at the beach. She’d played it safe. Parked next to Uncle Bob’s, a popular eatery that was still open.
“I’m at the beach. How about you?”
“Sitting out back again. Willie’s in his room with his headphones on.”
“Last summer, when I was here with Lacey, she and I used to walk down to the beach almost every night. It was one of the first things that told me I wanted to change my life.”
“Nightly walks with your sister?”
“Well, that, too. Being with Lacey was really the crux of it, but it was the beach, the way I felt here, the calm and peace and excitement at the same time. It showed me myself in a new way. That I could be me and have some of what she has, too. That I could do my job, be part of the Hollywood scene, without partying every night. And I wanted to be that person.” She was kind of babbling. They hadn’t really talked all week.
Lacey knew something she didn’t know about herself.
The look in her sister’s eye, the way she’d backed down and been gracious about Kacey getting out of the house for a phone call she didn’t want to talk about...
Had Lacey somehow found out about her and Michael? Had she read the signs wrong, just like Michael had predicted everyone would do? Was Kacey going to be responsible for blowing this, too?
“The girl who cheated by reading Willie’s answers tried to recant her guilt,” he told her. And just that quickly her worries about her sister dissipated.
“What? How can she do that?”
“She just did. She heard he was expelled, she hadn’t seen him around, didn’t know he’s attending a different biology class so he can do labs in the morning, and thought since he was already out, she’d save herself by throwing him under the bus.”
“But...I thought that was all resolved.”
“She had to take a zero for the test and could fail the class, which would prevent her from graduating.”
Sometimes life was just...unfair.
“Is that why he’s in his room with headphones on? He’s shutting you out? Did he lose his chance to graduate?”
“No. She did.”
“What?” She was still frowning. Not quite sure she’d understood him.