AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“An hour ago, you weren’t in the mood to come out. You’ve managed to talk yourself into being here with us, so I’m sure if you try hard enough, you can give yourself the go-ahead to come to the party with us.”
“I’m not going to get out of this, am I?”
“No,” they all said together. I shrugged, but I couldn’t hold back the small smile that curved my lips when I looked at their expectant faces. They were fabulous friends and they had made it their mission that day to cheer me up. After a pregnant pause I nodded, figuring the least I could do was to meet them halfway.
“All right, you win. Where is this party and how am I getting home?”
“Kent’s agreed to take us. He can’t drink alcohol because he’s on antibiotics, so he’s our ride home as well,” Alice informed me. Kent was Alice’s brother who had graduated that summer. “The party is at Gideon Lassiter’s house on the hill, he’s Kent’s buddy… you’ve seen him, the hot-looking guy that transferred in last fall?”
“The Lassiters are so rich, Sandra’s been to their house already. They have an awesome pool and Gideon’s dad is DJing, isn’t that right, Sandra? You know his dad is an events DJ, right?” Jenna piped up, and Sandra nodded.
I vaguely remembered seeing a new good-looking guy hanging around with Kent, but I hadn’t heard anything about the family.
“Alice, are you sure we’re invited? Isn’t he going off to college this year?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry he has a younger sister, Angela. She invited Sandra.”
Sandra nodded. “She did, and when I mentioned you guys, she’s excited to meet and get to know all of you too. You’ll love her, Tricia. She’s so funny and a really nice down-to-earth girl. We were teamed up for that last science lab project. At first, I felt pissed at being given the newbie, but she’s been amazing, I really like her.”
“So you’re coming right? Please? Give us this one night of fun to remember from this vacation,” Jenna asked, with a pleading look that defied me to refuse her.
I sighed heavily, I wasn’t one-hundred-percent sold on hanging out at a party somewhere I’d never been, hosted by someone I’d never met, and without my boyfriend. However, when I took in the hopeful faces of my girlfriends staring back at me, I knew there was no way I’d have let them down.
“All right, I’m in, but it better be good after that buildup,” I warned, smiling. The grins on their faces told me I’d made their day.
* * *
As Kent drove along the exclusive zip code of Shawnee Run, I figured my mom would have peed her pants if she’d bagged an invite to any party at such an exclusive address.
I had even thought if she’d ever had found out that I’d gone there, her focus would have been on the family and how well-to-do they were rather than that I’d put myself in a precarious position by attending as a vulnerable sixteen-year-old girl.
Turning, we entered the stone pillars that signaled the start of the long driveway up to the house, and I could even imagine her boasting to Donnie’s mom that I’d been mixing with her sort of people. It wouldn’t have mattered to her how those people had come by their money, just that they had enough to impress her and for her to want to know them.
Mom was a snob of the worst kind, always comparing what we had against everyone else. Everything was a competition and during the times when she found we’d fallen short, she’d used those shortcomings to emotionally beat my father up for not being wealthy enough.
All my dad had wanted was for us to be happy. He had worked damned hard to provide a good standard of living for us, but whatever we had was never enough for my mom. My father obviously felt inadequate, with her constantly highlighting his failings, so he’d resorted to buying her jewels she’d never worn. After that it was new fully loaded cars with the upgrades she had never used nor knew what half of those were for.
“Tricia, I hope you’re not moping back there,” Alice warned from the front seat, as she flipped down the visor and stared at me through the tiny rearview mirror stuck to the back of it.
“I wasn’t,” I said, objecting to her accusation and glancing toward Jenna and Sandra, who were looking directly at me. I hated Alice had drawn attention to Bradley not being there again. “I was thinking how much my mom would have loved to have come here as well.” The girls knew what a pain my mom was and chuckled.
“Wow,” Jenna said, in a breathy, impressed tone, as she looked out of the windshield ahead. Following her gaze, I almost swallowed my tongue when I saw the gorgeous grand doorway of the Lassiter’s house.
“Are you sure Gideon’s parents know he’s having this party?” I asked, as I noticed more than a few old shabby hand-me-down trucks, a beat-up old Corolla with different colored doors, and worst of all, there was a rusty truck parked on the grass. I couldn’t help thinking my mom would never had allowed any of those cars to park on the driveway of such a property.
Nearer the front of the house, the class of cars changed markedly with a few, pristine, new high-end 4x4s, a classic Ford Mustang, and another shiny muscle car I didn’t know the make of.
Glancing up at the entrance porch with its grand oval-shaped glass door, I felt a shot of nerves run through my body. A normally confident girl contradicted the sudden tension I felt at being in that unfamiliar situation for some reason. It wasn’t as if I’d gone there on my own. My girls were all right there with me, but I had felt uneasy just the same.
“Make sure you girls stick together and don’t take drinks from guys. Get your own, don’t put it down anywhere, and if anyone comes over to talk to you cover it.” The warning look in Kent’s eyes made my back stiffen, and I had felt it a tad dramatic, given we were all school kids and not kidnappers, rapists, and murderers.
“Sandra,” a pretty raven-haired girl, with massive dark blue eyes, gushed from behind the well-built man who’d answered the door. I sensed instantly he was their home security.
“Hey, Angela,” our friend replied, stepping around the huge bodyguard and hugging Angela tight. “These are my friends I told you about, Jenna, Alice …” Pointing at each of us to identify who was who.
“Tricia,” Angela finished pointing to me. “We have English and math together,” she remarked, with the same friendly smile she’d flashed me when we’d passed one another in the hallways or in the cafeteria at break or lunch times. Guilt immediately ran through me, and I had wished for a second or two I’d tried harder to welcome her when she’d joined the school two weeks into the last semester before summer break.
“Yeah, I thought that … sorry we haven’t had the chance to hang out—" I replied, mortified that she’d give me an out. I scanned the gorgeous marble entrance hall with a gallery hallway upstairs, and my eyes settled on the huge antique crystal chandelier hanging from their ceiling. My mom would have gladly died for that.
