Her hair looked soft, fanned out over the comforter. I ran my fingers through it. “Not really.”
“Maybe you should just to be sure. There are a lot more options than ’SC.”
I shook my head. “It’s always been my first choice.”
“I know.” She looked away. “As long as it’s what you want, and you’re not doing it just for Dad.”
She sounded concerned, and that didn’t happen a lot. But she’d grown up in the room next to mine; she knew I had a drawer full of USC merchandise and that Dad and I had toured the campus once a year since I was ten. “It is.”
She turned back to me. “By the way, Manning’s coming to the fair with us.”
My fingers stilled in her hair. “What?”
“He’s so serious. I was hoping he’d ask me out, but when he didn’t, I told him about Saturday and he’s never been to Balboa Island. Can you believe it?”
I needed to blink or swallow. I just stared at her with a dry mouth. An evening with Manning excited me, but were they going on a date? No. He hadn’t asked her, and brave as Tiffany was, she didn’t want to seem desperate. That’s what she’d said earlier about making the first move, anyway. “What about Brad?”
“Who?”
“The guy you were hoping would call.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “I talked to him this afternoon. I’m not sure how I feel about him.”
I didn’t ask if that had anything to do with Manning, afraid she’d say yes. How would I respond to that?
She sat up. “Isn’t Manning gorgeous? I should hang around you more often. You’re good luck.”
My neck and cheeks flushed. I loved my sister—she probably knew me as well as my mom. Regardless, hearing her call Manning gorgeous made my ears hot. I’d thought he was handsome before she’d even met him. Didn’t that count for something? Just because I didn’t fawn all over him didn’t mean it was okay for her to.
“I can’t believe he’s from Los Angeles,” Tiffany said. “It sounds so glamorous.”
“Pasadena’s outside of L.A.”
“Guys my age just don’t get me, you know? It’s bad when you have more experience than a guy.”
“What do you mean?”
Tiffany smiled a little, watching me. “Sex.”
My face got even hotter. I didn’t know what to say. Last year, I’d aced an AP English test most of my classmates had flunked. I could recite Pi to the fifteenth digit. I’d made Principal’s Honor Roll the last two years. But on this topic, I knew hardly anything. I didn’t hang around with any girls who’d had sex yet. They weren’t in my classes. They didn’t belong to the clubs I did. They were like Tiffany. “I don’t want to know,” I said. “I’m not interested.”
“You will be soon.” She grinned as she looked over my face, which was surely red. I could never hide my blushing. “I started that stuff around the time I was your age.”
A knot formed in my throat. What did that mean—“stuff”? I mean, I knew the logistics of it. At least, I thought I did. I tried not to think about it, though . . . sex. Girls like me worried about different things.
“Manning just looks like he knows what he’s doing,” she added wistfully.
That made me think of his hands, how they’d enveloped my waist and my forearm earlier, of his fingers, the way they’d set my skin prickling. I didn’t want him to touch Tiffany the way he had me.
I bent my leg under me, picking at my sock. “So he said he’d come to the fair?”
“Yep.”
“What about dad?” I asked. “I doubt he’d want you going out with one of the workers.”
“Imagine how he’d react if I brought home someone who’s older and a construction worker,” she said.
I didn’t understand her sudden, strange smile. “So then maybe you should think about, uh, not going out with him.”
“Why?”
“If it’ll make Dad mad . . .”
Tiffany pulled me down onto the bed, hugging me as she laughed. “You have so much to learn about life. Don’t you realize part of Manning’s appeal is that he’d piss Dad off? A blind person could see that, Lake.”
It was lot to wrap my head around. In one afternoon, everything about my small, easy world had changed. Tiffany was talking to me about sex. I’d met Manning, who fascinated me beyond my understanding. And the three of us were going to the fair.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that even though I’d met Manning first, for some reason, Tiffany thought he belonged to her.
4
Lake
Tiffany thought she had the better room between us and didn’t often let me forget it. That’s because she didn’t know what she was missing. My window opened to a flat part of the first floor’s roof. Saturday night, I crawled through, sat, and pulled my knees up to my chest to wait.