Page 31 of The Parent Trap

She shakes her head. “Nah. She just up and vanished. It was as much of a surprise to me as anyone else—we weren’t really friends. I hear she went to live with her aunt and uncle down in San Diego, but that’s all I know. No guy I know of ever claimed it, and she never came back to say. And even the fact that she got pregnant is, honestly, more hearsay than hard fact. I never heard it from her, is what I mean.” A glance at me. “So. Did you or did you not ever sleep with Leslie Donovan?”

I sigh. Nod, once. “I did.” A tip of my head sideways, and then I sip scotch. “Sort of.”

“How do yousort ofsleep with someone?”

I hand the bottle to her. “I, um…” I groan. “It’s not something I talk about a lot.” I grin at her. “Not for the reasons I think you’d assume, though. I actually asked her out on a legitimate date, and we actually went on one.”

“You and Leslie Donovan went on adate? When?” She’s incredulous.

“Junior year, toward the end. This was after Dell and her hooked up—and I can confirm his claim, FYI. I was there.” I laugh. “Not, like, you know, when they were doing it. But at the party. So unless they went into the bathroom together and came out twenty minutes later and didn’t actuallydoanything…”

She shudders. “Ick.”

“Hey, Leslie Donovan was hot.”

She shakes her head. “Sure, but that’s my brother.”

I shrug. “True. But you brought it up. Anyway. We went on a date. Charlie’s for dinner, the theater for a movie. Afterward, we went for a drive. Found a little spot north a ways—”

She drops her head and nods, laughing. “I know the spot. Every teenager who grew up here knows it.”

“And so do the cops, apparently,” I say with a rueful laugh. “Because we were literally seconds away from going at it when along comes who but Officer Alsworth knocking on the window. Sort of ruined the mood.”

She snorts. “And you never tried again, anywhere else, later?”

“I was going to, but then I found out she went out with Tom Crawford the very next night and slept with him. So I was like…maybe not.”

“Why? You can screw a different girl every night but she can’t do the same thing?”

I swig, hand it to her. “You know, I never thought of it that way. But yeah, I guess that kind of was my mindset, back then.” I take the bottle back after she’s done. “And honestly, it wasn’t a different girl every night.”

“No?” She’s supremely skeptical.

“Nope.” I’ve had enough, so I cap the bottle and set it down—Delia doesn’t object. “It was a different girl every weekend. I was doing homework on the weeknights.”

She wipes at her lips with a thumb, and it has to be the whisky in my system, but for the first time I notice her lips—plump, pink, with a perfect Cupid’s bow. They have sparkles on them, as if the lipstick or lip gloss or whatever she put on them had sparkles in it.

“You know, I always assumed you paid one of the tutor nerds to do your homework for you.” She shrugs. “Just the truth.”

I laugh. “Nope. I earned that salutatorian on my own, thank you very much.”

She blinks. “You were, weren’t you?”

I nod. “Yup, I was. Didn’t have a chance at valedictorian, though. The girl who earned that was a serious overachiever. I think she had, like, a five-point-oh GPA or something ridiculous.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s even possible.” A sigh. “It was four-point-two-seven.”

“I heard four-point-five.”

“There were a lot of rumors. It was four-two-seven. And I didn’t blow the principal to get it, either, despite what the rumors claimed.”

I cackle. “I heard that one. I knew it wasn’t true, though.”

“Why, because you started it?”

I tilt my head. “No, that wasn’t one of mine. Could have been, but wasn’t.”

“So how did you know it wasn’t true?”