I actually met him the way I meet most people—through surfing. He’d signed up for a lesson at my parents’ boardwalk shop. When he showed up on the beach, wearing high-end surfing clothes and carrying a thousand-dollar board, I planned on hating him. Obviously he was just another rich kid padding his extracurricular résumé. He’d take one lesson, check surfing off his badass to-do list, and then run back to the country club.
But Preston was legit. We stayed out for five hours on our first day. He went from struggling to pop up on his board to going after his own waves. A few lessons later, Pres was almost as good as me, and we’d hung out together ever since.
“So you and Swimfan. What was that about?” Parvati’s voice was light, but her eyes were slitty. She had obviously seen me with Cassie.
Preston sat at the head of the table where he could see everyone and be part of the All-Stars’ conversations when he so desired. “Yeah, what was that about, Maximus?” He swiped at his phone with one finger and then angled it in my direction. Pres had an obsession with recording people. At school. At parties. In the football locker room. He definitely had some boundary issues. “The lovers are fighting,” he intoned. “Let’s hear what the guilty party has to say.”
“Get that thing out of my face.” I grabbed for Preston’s phone. He didn’t even know what had happened. He was just trying to stir up shit as usual. With his shiny blond hair and green V-neck sweater, he looked more like a golf pro than a shit-disturber, but looks could be deceiving.
“Is this your first fight?” He turned the phone toward Parvati. “You guys might want this moment captured for posterity.”
Parvati faked like she was going to karate chop Pres in the throat. Still grinning, he slipped his phone back into his pocket.
She turned back to me. “Let me guess. That was Cassie’s phone playing Boyz Be Crap.”
“Yep. Apparently the fate of the Vista Palisades girls’ swim team has now been secured, since yours truly took her detention.”
“Ah,” Parvati said, nodding. “What’s the opposite of collateral damage?”
“Collateral benefits?” Preston suggested. He was half listening to us and half listening to one of the football players talk about next week’s game.
I pulled the twenty out of my pocket and snapped it open in front of them. “Speaking of benefits.”
“No way. She paid you?” Parvati’s eyes widened. “Who knew lying could be so lucrative?”
“Lawyers,” Preston said.
Parvati smirked. Her mom was a defense attorney. “And politicians,” she shot back. Preston’s dad was a U.S. senator.
Sometimes hanging out with them felt like being miscast in a prime-time teen drama—one where everyone else was rich. My parents, Darla and Ben, owned a souvenir shop called The Triple S. Sun, sand, and surf. Mostly we sold hermit crabs and five-dollar T-shirts.
I peeled the bun from the top of my chicken sandwich and squirted a couple packets of mayonnaise on top of a translucent tomato slice that had seen better days. Even smothered in goo, the sandwich still managed to be dry enough to make me gag.
Parvati’s eyes scanned the caf, a pen poised over the mini-notebook balanced on her lap. She wrote a gossip column for the Vista Palisades High Gazette and was always jotting down seemingly random observations.
“Maybe you should join the twenty-first century,” Preston said. “Use a tablet or a laptop like a legit reporter.”
“I have a laptop,” she said, “but the battery is fried.” She scribbled something down and then looked up, her gaze locking on to something over my shoulder. Before I could even ask what she was looking at, I felt fingers tap me on the arm.
“Max?”
I craned my neck to see who was talking. Amy Westerfield stood behind me in her silver-and-blue cheerleading uniform, awkwardly transferring her weight from one foot to the other.
Parvati stared at Amy like she was an endangered species that wanted to eat out of my hand.
“Yeah?” I said, expecting another grateful thank-you for preventing a swimming catastrophe of epic proportions.
Amy leaned over close to me, resting her forearms on the table. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I have a proposition for you.”
TWO
THE DAY WAS TURNING MORE surreal by the minute. On a normal day, no girl besides Parvati even spoke to me, and now I’d been approached by school royalty twice in an hour. “Oh?” I said, taking extra care not to let my gaze drop below the neckline of Amy’s cheerleading outfit.
She fished around in her purse, pulled out a permission slip for the senior civics field trip to Coronado Naval Base, and slapped it down in front of me. “My parents wouldn’t sign this. I’m grounded and they don’t want me to have a whole day away from school with Quinn. Ten bucks if you help me out.”
Quinn was Amy’s meathead jock boyfriend. Even though I had nothing in common with either of them, I knew how bad it sucked to be banned from your significant other.
“Why not just sign it yourself?” I asked.
“Because I’d get caught. And suspended. And kicked off the squad. And grounded for a jillion years.” She pulled a pen from her purse.
“What makes you think I can do a better job than you?” My eyes flicked across the table at Parvati. She was chewing on one of my french fries, watching the proceedings with what seemed like mild interest.
Amy shrugged. “Because you don’t write in big, bubbly letters?”
“Fine.” I grabbed the pen from her hand. “What’s your dad’s name?”
Parvati slapped her hand on top of mine. “Twenty bucks,” she said.
“Fifty bucks,” Preston said with a languid smile.
“Preston!” Amy looked a little offended.
“What?” He adjusted the gold band of a watch that cost more than my car. “I’m a businessman.”
A mass of wrinkles formed across Amy’s normally smooth bronze forehead. “I don’t have that kind of cash on me.”
“No worries. Max here’ll take an IOU,” Preston said. “If you don’t pay he’ll just have an attack of conscience and confess his little deed.”
“I will?” I looked back and forth between Preston and Parvati.
“You will,” Parvati assured me. She arched a thick black eyebrow at Amy. “Name?”
“Tom. Tom Westerfield.” Amy’s tan skin was starting to turn blotchy and red in places. I wondered if she was that nervous about forging a permission slip or if she was just mad at being taken for fifty bucks.
She coached me on the signature and I practiced a couple times on a napkin. When she nodded her approval I scrawled the name on the form and handed it back to her.
“Thanks, Max,” she chirped, slipping the permission slip back inside her purse. “It’ll totally be worth it.” A couple of other girls in blue and silver waved at her from across the cafeteria, and she practically skipped over to their table.
The bell rang, and most of the guys from the football team got up as a group. They all had fifth-period gym. “You coming?” Our center, a guy named Nate, looked straight through me to Preston.
“Catch up with you guys in a minute,” Pres said.
Nate grunted and turned to follow the others. They lumbered off like a herd of buffalo.