Notable (Smith High)
“Houston, do we have a problem?”
“Cute.”
“Always.”
“You can save the effort. That might have worked in high school, but it’s not going to help you here. Especially since I already know the way you operate.”
I did a pointed once-over, not exactly an easy task considering that I was squashed between Houston and some stranger who was snoring heavily and taking up more than his share of the armrest.
“I’ve known you for all of fifteen minutes. So I seriously doubt you know anything about the way I operate.”
“I know that your dad asked me to find a program for you because he couldn’t have you around right now.”
I didn’t flinch even though this latest parental betrayal stung like hell. Any sign of weakness is a fatal mistake when you’re playing poker with a shark.
“You?” I said skeptically. “My dad confided in you? Again, I doubt it.”
“He said you needed to get out of Portland so you wouldn’t trash your life.”
More by Marni Bates
AWKWARD
DECKED WITH HOLLY
INVISIBLE
Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.
NOTABLE
Marni Bates
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
“Houston, do we have a problem?”
More by Marni Bates
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
A Notable Playlist
Teaser chapter
Copyright Page
This book is dedicated to everyone who feels judged based solely on their looks. Never forget that you have layers of awesome beneath the surface. And that you’re all beautiful to me.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment pages are hard.
Seriously. Everyone wants to have a particularly clever way of thanking people that goes beyond “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
But the truth is that I absolutely could not have written this book without . . .
Alicia Condon: my editor, aka the Patron Saint of Panic-stricken Author Emails. This book is immeasurably better because you worked with me on it. Thank you so much!
Laurie McLean: my rock star agent, who encourages me onward. I love being on this journey with you!
Marina Adair: my critique partner/best friend/savior of my sanity. I can’t begin to express how much your friendship means to me. Your talent, persistence, kindness, and sparkling sense of humor inspires and humbles me. Thank you for insisting I remove the Navy SEALs.
Lisa Lin: Whether we are counting imaginary cows or plotting world domination, you never fail to brighten my day! Thank you for telling me to keep the Navy SEALs.
Suzanne Brockmann: Okay, maybe it’s a little strange to thank someone I’ve never actually met. Regardless, your Navy SEAL romance novel Prince Joe began my love of the genre. Your staunch support of the LGBTQ community has inspired me for years. Thank you for all that you do!
Shoshana Werblow: I’m still giggling over your response to my plans for Chelsea. “You know what they say: ‘Write what you know, Marni.’ ” I’ll have to keep that in mind for next time.
Mom: Thank you for loving me no matter what.
Lewis & Clark College: I am honored to have you as my alma mater. Thank you for emphasizing more than test scores and for putting up with my personal brand of crazy for four years.
And the most Notable of them all: my incredibly awesome readers!
Thank you for making all of this possible!
Chapter 1
It never should have happened. Oh sure, in the movies, the geeky girl gets the guy, but let’s all get real for a second: High school doesn’t actually work like that. No way. The absurdly sweet (yet popular) guy might continue being tutored by the geek, but he also keeps making out with his beautiful ex-girlfriend until they decide to give their relationship another shot.
That’s how it should have worked, but apparently my good luck had run out a long time ago.
Because even as I gazed into the gray eyes of my perfect hockey-captain ex-boyfriend, Logan Beckett, and put it all on the line: told him point-blank that I missed him and wanted to get back together—I knew it was too little, too late. Instead of kissing me back when I leaned in and pressed my lips against his, he took a step away.
His eyes were full of pity. “I’m sorry, Chelsea. I just . . . don’t feel the same way about you anymore.”
Then he glanced over at his best friend Spencer’s house and everything sort of clicked into place. He wasn’t throwing away everything good that was still between us because he hadn’t forgiven me for my middle-school mistake. Oh no, he was firmly rejecting me, Chelsea Halloway, because he was more interested in dating the most awkward girl at our high school. Actually, thanks to an embarrassing You Tube video, Mackenzie Wellesley had accidentally raised her profile beyond the hallways of Smith High School until she became best known as America’s Most Awkward Girl.
Yet he was still choosing her over me.
It didn’t make the slightest difference that I’d been in the midst of pouring out my freaking heart to him when he shot me down. That I was willing to grovel for ever breaking up with him and explain that, regardless of the rumors circulating in the wake of our breakup (mainly that I was ecstatic to have traded Logan in for a more popular high school boy), I’d been a wreck over our split.
But instead of hearing me out and then sweeping me off my feet in a passionate kiss . . . he just shook his head.
“Sorry, Chels. Take care of yourself, okay? I’ve got to—”
Go.
He had to scurry off to locate the girl who was so much smarter and sweeter and better than me in nearly every way. Leaving me, quite literally, out in the cold. No amount of pain from our first breakup had prepared me for this level of hurt. Nothing compared to smiling until my cheeks ached while I watched Logan leading a stumbling Mackenzie to his car with a transparent affection he never once showed me.
And I couldn’t even cry without becoming fodder for another round of rumors.
“Hey, did you hear that Chelsea had a total meltdown at Spencer’s party? Girl has some serious issues, if you ask me.”
That was what I would have to pretend not to hear following me down hallways . . . into classrooms . . . even into the dressing room of Mrs. P’s School of Ballet.
So I did exactly what everyone expected of me.
I tossed my long, shiny, blond hair over my shoulder, sauntered over to the nearest, hottest available guy, and began flirting like I didn’t have a care in the world. As if my heart hadn’t just been trampled over with a Logan-shaped footprint. But I forced myself to keep my voice even and my eyes dry b
ecause even the slightest crack in appearances could be enough to de-throne me as the Queen of the Notables. Which is why, instead of bawling my eyes out, I batted my baby blues at some guy whose name I didn’t bother to learn before making my getaway.
My mom always instructed me that it was best to leave them wanting more.
Of course, she had said that in the context of my dance recitals, but it applied to flirting too. In both cases, it takes a lot of practice to hide sweat, nerves, and performance anxiety, but if you let any of it show, it kills the magic. And I had spent enough time faking happiness that I could flirt while replaying exactly how it felt to have Logan’s lips against mine one last time—soaring hope and an overwhelming sense of rightness as my body recognized that this was exactly where I belonged.
But apparently Logan hadn’t felt any of it.
I maintained that stupid fake smile even after a stranger splashed beer on my shoes as I headed toward the door. It was only when I was driving home that I began ranting to myself about the cosmic unfairness of realizing that I had never gotten over my first love only to find out that he had definitely gotten over me.
But it became pretty obvious when I pulled into my driveway that my night wasn’t about to get any better. Because waiting for me by the door was my dad’s suitcase. I had his teaching schedule memorized, and I knew for a fact that there were no upcoming academic conferences scribbled on the kitchen calendar for months. There was no logical reason for his luggage to be slumped against one of our enormous ceramic flowerpots.
Unless I was finally getting to see the closing night performance of the divorce walk of blame.
Not just a trial separation. Not a temporary experiment. Not something that would blow over eventually, like it always did. Nope, this time he was really leaving.
And you would think that losing both Logan and my father in one night would forever earn it the terrible distinction of being the very worst evening of my life. My personal all-time low. Rock freaking bottom.
But it wasn’t.
It’s funny how being hunted down by a group of certifiable bad guys in a third-world country can change a girl’s perspective on what constitutes a tragedy. Not ha-ha funny, obviously . It’s more of a laughing is my only alternative to disintegrating into a million pieces type of funny. When your every decision is a matter of life or death, even truly ridiculous amounts of personal drama fade into insignificance.
Hunt or be hunted.
Hide or . . . wind up with a gun aimed at your head.
I found that out the hard way.
Chapter 2
My dad tried to break it to me gently.
“Now, Chelsea,” he began in his dry professor voice, which I suspected made most of his students at Lewis & Clark College struggle to stay awake during his two-hour lectures. “You know your mother and I have been having some problems for a while now.”
That was the understatement of the century, skating brilliantly over the fighting, the squabbling, the incessant bickering, the “trial separations,” the therapy, the self-help books, and the return for even more therapy and positive visualization exercises. For as long as I could remember, they’d been unhappy together. Possibly because my mom’s pregnancy wasn’t exactly planned and she felt pressured into doing the “right” thing, according to her very Catholic upbringing. And then I was born and they were even more determined to hold their farce of a marriage together.
Probably because their therapists kept urging them to consider what was best for the child before making any hasty decisions.
If anyone had ever bothered to ask me, I would’ve set the record straight: One quick break would have been a lot easier to deal with than their constant on-again off-again emotional warfare.
That kind of stuff makes for good television but a really crappy home life.
“You don’t have to treat her like a child, Paul!” my mom squawked indignantly. “It’s not like she’s too young to understand this!”
She was right about one thing: I could handle the truth. But my mom wasn’t actually telling my dad to treat me like an adult; she only wanted to use this as yet another example of how he coddled me too much. Yet another one of my dad’s habits that rubbed my mom the wrong way. Not that there had ever been a shortage of those. My mom was practically born with an ability to multitask, to set specific goals and not back down until she achieved each and every one of them (according to her exact specifications), which is probably what makes her such an incredible businesswoman. She has standards that she expects everyone to meet and preferably exceed, and a deep-rooted conviction that my dad’s inability to employ her brand of “tough love” was what kept me from reaching my true potential.
“This is a very sensitive situation, Suzanne!” my dad countered. “You know what the books said about possible . . . reactions.”
“It wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t spoil her all the time. For god’s sake, she’s not made out of glass. If you spent a little less time with your nose in a book you’d know that!”
“And if you spent less time at your corporate retreats—”
I couldn’t take any more.
“So about that divorce,” I interrupted. “Good plan.”
About freaking time.
I kept that part to myself. No need to give them anything else to squabble over. They already debated my upbringing enough. I was too wild. Too prone to hanging out with the “wrong crowd.” Too many boyfriends, not enough IQ points. Too skinny. Too fat. Too much of something, they usually decided. And that, missy, was usually only the beginning of an epic lecture.
“We want you to know that we considered all of this very carefully,” my dad assured me, running a hand through his graying hair. Back when I was a little kid, I spent hours in my dad’s office, drawing stick-figure ballerinas while he graded papers until his hair stood up in tufts just as it did now. At the time, I thought he resembled a very handsome duck with his feathers ruffled. I wanted to look just like him, but my coloring favored my mom: pale skin, thick blond hair, undeniably blue eyes, and a thin frame. My mom still loudly mourns the fact that I inherited her looks but not her ability to ace standardized tests.
I nodded and delivered the solemn response I knew he wanted to hear. “I understand. I know you guys examined all the possible alternatives.”
It’s about time for the two of you to finally come to your senses.
My mom somehow managed to snort elegantly in disdain. “There were no alternatives.”
“Suzanne!”
My mom propped her hands on her hips and mimicked his outrage. “Paul!”
O-kay . . . time to get the hell out of there.
“Well, thanks for the update. I’m going to my room. I have dance rehearsal first thing tomorrow morning, so—”
My mom’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Great.
“Chelsea, your mother and I discussed this and . . . we really think it’s for the best if . . . you should consider the benefits to—”
“Just spit it out, Paul!”
For once, I was in total agreement with my mom. I couldn’t stand waiting for the other shoe to drop. And since I’d already been dumped, kicked aside, and informed of the dissolution of my family unit (such as it was) that night, I figured there was still plenty of time for it to get worse.
A lot worse, as it turned out.
“We think you should leave,” he blurted out.
I stared at them blankly. “Leave where?”
“Here. Forest Grove. Oregon.”
He still wasn’t making any sense.
“Wait, do you mean leave my home, my school district, or my state? What’s going on? You and Mom split and I have to join the witness protection program or something?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Chelsea.” My mom buffed her shiny nails casually on the sleeve of her sweater.
“We just think some time out of town will be good for you, honey. Clear your head.”
>
“My head is plenty clear, thank you very much!”
“It’s so clear, it’s empty,” my mom added snidely, before she shrugged off our disbelieving stares. “What? You saw her SAT scores, Paul. Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking the same thing. Her grades are abysmal, her extracurriculars are a joke, she completely ignored her curfew, she reeks of alcohol, and her chances of getting into a good school are slim to none. Someone has to be the firm, responsible adult here—and it sure isn’t going to be you!”
“Thanks, Mom. That’s exactly what I needed to hear right now!”
“But she’s right, princess. You need a totally fresh start if you’re ever going to get your life together. You need accountability, intellectual stimulation, a whole new social environment, and right now . . . you mother and I aren’t in a place where we can provide you with those things. Trust me, princess. We are just doing what’s best for you.”
“You picked one hell of a time to finally start caring,” I snapped bitterly, as pain splintered across my father’s face.
“We’ve always cared, Chelsea. You know we would do anything for—”
“You’re only encouraging her to act out, Paul. She needs to accept that her actions have consequences and that this decision of ours is final.”
There was a sickening silence that followed her pronouncement while I felt the last dregs of anger and outrage seep right out of me. It hurt too much to care. About Logan. About my parents. About leaving. About anything, really.
All of me ached and throbbed as if I’d just spent hours dancing in brand-new ballet shoes.
Except my heart was blistering instead of my toes.
“My decisions have consequences? What about yours? You guys want to split up, fine. That doesn’t mean I should be forced to leave my friends and my school and my life!”
“It’s only for a semester, Chelsea. You’ll still be walking at graduation with your friends. And it’s exactly what you need,” my mom said staunchly. “Besides, international travel will spice up your transcript.”