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  Jerry hadn’t brought any flowers this time, but he did bring a half gallon of cookie-dough ice cream and a bottle of whipped cream. I took both from him and headed for the kitchen.

  “The whipped cream’s for the ice cream, right?” I grinned.

  He blushed. “That was the idea.”

  “Just checking.”

  “My dad used to have that on an album cover,” he said, folding his arms against the breakfast bar and leaning his weight against them.

  “Had what on an album cover?”

  “A woman covered in whipped cream. She had brown hair. The album cover was, like, mint-green. The Tijuana Brass, that was the name of it.” He paused, his eyes up toward the ceiling like he was remembering. “And I mean, she was really covered. I guess they meant it to be sexy, but it looked more like she was about to drown in the stuff.”

  “Not very erotic.”

  “Not really. Do I still have any of that root beer around?”

  I handed him one from the fridge. “I hope you appreciate it,” I said. “Lauren gave me a hard time about you leaving it over here.”

  “Sorry. I can take it home if you want.”

  “No, it’s fine with me. Lauren’s funny about her rules. She reads all these books about dating and relationships and really wants all the theories that she reads about to work. Guys leaving their own beverages at a girl’s house after—what, three weeks?—doesn’t work for her.”

  “Four weeks,” Jerry said.

  “Four weeks now. Three when you left them here.”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess so.” His mouth pulled nervously at the corners. “You think we need to slow down?”

  “No, no, no. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just Lauren. I’m not suggesting that I agree.”

  He took the ice-cream bowl I handed him. “Well, what are some of her other theories?”

  “Let’s see. That couples in the early stages of a relationship are better off spending at least half their time apart. And that they should have frequent meetings to discuss the status of their relationship—like, real meetings, where you might want to take notes.”

  Jerry ate a spoonful of ice cream. “I could prepare a PowerPoint presentation.”

  I laughed. “Right now she’s really into the idea of couples’ workshops. Going away to the Poconos or a ranch out in Nevada and having intensive communication sessions with ‘relationship guides.’ Now all she needs is a man to go with.”

  Sitting down on the sofa, Jerry propped a pillow under his arm and carefully scooped up equal parts ice cream and whipped cream. “I would agree that communication is important,” he said, “but it seems like you should be able to talk to your significant other without flying to Europe to do it.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you.” I curled up on the other end of the sofa and reached for the remote. “Let’s see what my sister’s up to this week.”

  Only a few minutes into the show, one of the Yankee girls was shown sitting on her bed with a bolster pillow on her lap, talking earnestly into the camera. “The individual immunity challenges start today,” she was saying, “and it totally sucks. The only girl who doesn’t need to worry about getting voted off is Grace. Everyone wants to be up against her in the Final Four because she’s so mean that she doesn’t have a chance of getting chosen by Rhett or Ashley. But the rest of us are totally on the chopping block.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” I said.

  When the challenge rolled around, all the girls were in the rose garden again, lined up behind individual little Louis XIV-style side tables. Each wore a vintage afternoon dress with a wide hoopskirt and her little flag brooch pinned to her bosom. Brent Holloway smiled from beside a larger table, his hands behind his back again. I envisioned a whole walk-in closet full of those identical raw-cotton shirts, a team of wardrobe assistants pressing casually identical wrinkles into the bottoms with a steam iron.

  “Today we’ve got a very unique challenge ahead of us,” he grinned. “I’ll be setting a variety of foods in front of you that are all well-loved regional Southern dishes. Each food must be eaten in its entirety before you can move to the next round. There are eight of you left, so with each round, the last to finish her challenge item will be eliminated. Do all of you understand the rules?”

  The girls nodded somberly.

  “All right. For our first item, a good old-fashioned Louisiana bayou treat. Alligator garfish.” He set down the blue-flowered china plates in front of them, each with a small brownish-gray fish on it. “Go.”

  The last girl to finish was the one from Louisiana. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I grew up with them things. I’d rather eat garbage.”

  They worked their way through pigs’ feet and eggplant custard and boiled okra, which caused one Yankee girl to gag and disqualify herself by spitting the first spoonful back out onto the ground.

  “It’s supposed to be edible,” she protested.

  “Even I could eat that!” yelled the Louisiana girl from the sidelines.

  “Maybe you’ve had more practice swallowing stuff with that kind of a consistency,” the Yankee girl shot back.

  “Ladies,” said Brent in a reproving tone. “Next item. A traditional slave food that is still eaten today at soul-food restaurants all over the country. Chitlins.”

  The girls looked down at their plates with apprehension. “Made of fully cleaned hog intestines. Ready? Go!”

  Madison was one of the four girls left. She ate her chitlins with no trouble at all. One of the Rebel girls choked, but managed to finish the whole thing. The other remaining Yankee girl folded her arms in front of her chest and didn’t even try.

  “I’m not eating pig crap,” she said. “Forget it.”

  “Okay, then. We’re down to three.” Brent reached under his little covered table and took out three plates, each with a yellow square covered in a thick, tarry brown substance.

  “What’s that?” asked Marci, sounding as though she suspected it might be human flesh.

  “A favorite on Southern tables everywhere,” Brent said with a menacing grin as the plates clinked against the table. “Homemade cornbread with molasses.”

  “We have to eat the entire thing?” asked the other Rebel girl, a blonde from Kentucky, with a nervous quiver to her voice.

  “The entire thing,” Brent confirmed. “Sixty-three net carbs.”

  The Kentucky girl folded her hands over her mouth and ran into the rosebushes to throw up.

  “All right,” said Brent Holloway. “Ready? Go!”

  Madison and Marci picked the cornbread squares up with their hands and devoured them like a couple of Rottweilers going after an Alpo can. Marci stepped back first, holding up both hands, her face smeared with molasses.

  “It’s Marci!” yelled Brent.

  “Oh, man,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” Jerry reassured me. “Remember? The other girl said she didn’t need the immunity.”

  The camera cut to Madison, looking dejected, cornbread crumbs still clinging to the hair around her face. “She totally cheated,” Madison complained. “She just rubbed the molasses all over her face. That’s like two hundred calories just on her nose. And I totally blew my diet for the whole week.”

  They ended up voting off the girl from Kentucky. Everyone voted for her, even Marci, whom I had guessed would vote for Madison on pure competitive impulse. Once the show was over, Jerry kissed me good-bye at the door, the tip of his tongue barely moving out past his teeth. He pulled back and kissed my forehead when I touched mine against it.

  “I’d better get going,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On Wednesday evening I found Lauren was sitting in front of her computer in her bedroom, typing rapidly and taking notes into a small spiral-bound notebook. The calendar above her desk showed the front door of a brick house with mums lining the stairs and pathway, a grapevine wreath on the door. In a big, stylized font across the bottom, it said, “Once-a-Day Aricept (d
onepezil HCl).” Most of the weekend blocks and a lot of the weekdays had men’s names scribbled in black ink.

  “Whatcha doing?” I asked, leaning against the door frame.

  She turned around in her computer chair and took off her glasses. “I’m Googling men. I’m going through my mail from Kismet and deciding which ones I want to answer.”

  “Oh, is this the thing where you look up their college transcripts and medical records and all that?”

  “Not that much. Usually the most I find is a résumé or a few posts on a music newsgroup. But take a look at this guy.” She tapped an entry in her notebook with her finger and clicked the “back” button on her Internet browser. “See, he looked great in his description, but then it turns out he’s got all these right-wing posts on this politics newsgroup. And this other guy has his diary posted online with links to the Web sites of four of his ex-girlfriends. See, it pays to do your research.”

  “Maybe that just means he’s good at staying on friendly terms with people.”

  “Yeah, or maybe it means he’s got so much baggage his friends call him ‘Samsonite.’ They’re free to look me up, too, if they want. I wouldn’t be offended.”

  “How are they supposed to find out anything about a girl named Lauren Walker? There are probably ten thousand of you just on the East Coast.”

  She shrugged. “That’s their problem. They can track me down with a private detective for all I care. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “Except that little Harriet the Spy notebook over there, I guess.”

  She tossed a wadded-up Post-it note at me. “Oh, screw you.”

  “Hey, I’m going to run out to the pharmacy. Do you need anything?”

  “Just a cute stock boy.”

  I dug around in my purse for my keys. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The line at the pharmacy was long, five people deep if you didn’t count the three preschoolers clustered around the woman in hiking shorts with a baby in a backpack carrier. I was fourth, behind a middle-schooler whose basket held a copy of Teen Beat, a twelve-pack of Big Red gum, and a purple notebook to disguise the fact that she’d only come in to buy the box of tampons buried beneath the rest of the stuff. That was okay; I was doing the same thing. Slowly the line shifted forward. One of the preschoolers picked up a pack of Bubble Yum, sniffed it, and surreptitiously licked the back of the wrapper before shoving it back onto the shelf. I reached for a copy of Woman’s World magazine, carefully avoiding all the celebrity rags that pressed in around it. Keep Off That Holiday Weight! said the cover. Surviving Colon Cancer: Her Inspiring True Story. I flipped to an article about a woman who ran a rescue home for abandoned terriers.

  “Ma’am?”

  I blinked. The cashier gave me an impatient look, and I quickly stacked my things on the counter—a pack of Bic pens, a birdseed treat for Tristan and Isolde to fight over, a bag of peanut-butter cups, and oh, yes, that box of tampons.

  “You know who you look like?”

  The cashier was about twenty years old and Latina, with curly, red-highlighted hair. She spoke in a clipped little accent. My mother would have called it saucy. Her name tag said “Hildy.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “That girl who’s on that show, Belle of Georgia. You know the one I mean?”

  “Gretchen?” piped up the woman behind me, looking me over. Gretchen was the fat one who’d been voted out the first week. I felt like kicking her. Just because I wasn’t as skinny as my sister didn’t make me fat, for goodness’ sake.

  “No, not her. That other one. Grace.” Hildy nodded in agreement with herself. “You look a little like her.”

  The woman behind me snickered. She was short and rather heavy, with wispy-ended brown hair tucked up messily into a butterfly clip. Her T-shirt said Sanibel. “That witch,” she said.

  “Oh, I know. Isn’t she awful?” Hildy cracked her gum and waved the bag of peanut-butter cups in front of her scanner. “You hear what she called that Marci girl?”

  “Maybe they took out her heart when they put in her fake boobs,” said the Sanibel lady.

  “She’s probably not like that in real life,” I said, handing Hildy my credit card.

  “You gotta wonder,” said Hildy. “Those girls who go on shows like that. All blond and pretty, and they still gotta win themselves a man like that. I never had no trouble myself.”

  The Sanibel lady laughed and shifted her basket around. “They just do it for the attention,” she said. “Ugly people doing ugly things.”

  I scribbled my name onto the receipt and stuffed my copy into my bag, rushing out the door quickly, before Hildy could notice my name.

  Thanksgiving had arrived, and after hearing me complain all week about the horrible home cooking that my mother would force me to endure, Jerry took pity on me and decided to make good on his offer to cook me dinner. His entire extended family had gathered at his grandparents’ house in Lusby, but he promised me he could skip out early. I was grateful to have a ready excuse not to stay too long at my mother and stepfather’s place. Without Madison there to attract criticism like iron filings to a magnet, I knew I would be in for a long evening.

  While my stepfather dozed in the recliner in a turkey-induced slumber, I hung out on the sofa watching the National Dog Show, idly hoping for a glance of Carter. Sure enough, he got about ten seconds of screen time leading the Empress past the judges. As one judge inspected her back and tail, he pulled a small treat from his pocket and popped it in her mouth, then went on a final jog around the ring, keeping the Empress in a close heel against his suede loafers. It was hard to believe that this was the same guy I had seen consumed with passion. I was still a little sorry we hadn’t had more time to figure things out.

  I left my mother to her leftovers. Right around six I parked in Jerry’s driveway and made my way up to his open front door, tapping my knuckles gently against the metal frame of the storm door. He nearly bounced into the foyer and smiled widely, then unlatched the door and stood back to let me in.

  “Perfect timing,” he said. “I just took the steak out of the fridge.”

  I stepped inside. The house was quiet, all the toys in one of the baskets under the sofa. “Where are Betsy and Marco?” I asked.

  “At my grandparents’ house for the night, with Stella. You want to cut up some vegetables for the salad while I do the potatoes?”

  “Sure. Steak’s a good choice. I’m all turkeyed out.” I pushed up my sleeves and headed over to the sink. “So how’s your week been?”

  “When was the last time I talked to you?”

  “Tuesday night. Two days ago.”

  “Since Tuesday,” he said thoughtfully. “Since Tuesday I’ve watched The Lord of the Flies four times and graded thirty-two essays on the similarities and differences between Sonia and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Thirty-one. My juvenile delinquent didn’t turn his in. I’ve also broken up one fistfight, counseled one wayward teenage girl wearing entirely too little clothing, and gone on a nice long motorcycle ride in the country.”

  “That sounds like an interesting couple of days.” In his own house, moving around in his own kitchen, Jerry seemed much more animated, more talkative. He smiled more. I’d seen him both Saturday and Monday, and I still hadn’t been able to get more than a rudimentary kiss out of him. Lauren’s theory about his sexuality wasn’t sounding quite as far-fetched anymore, and in any case I was ready to settle this argument once and for all. Things were already looking more promising.

  “Just business as usual,” he said. “It was nice to get out on my bike. It seems like it’s been raining for a solid week. How’ve you been?”

  “Good. Yesterday a cashier told me I looked like that girl on Belle of Georgia. Then she and the woman behind me had a conversation about what a witch my sister is. Quote-unquote. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and hide.”

  “Did you tell them you’re her twin?”

  “I was afraid to. I didn’t want
to embarrass them. Besides, it gets complicated, you know. Because we don’t look much alike anymore.”

  “Still enough to get recognized, apparently.” He slid the pan into the oven, under the red glow of the broiler. Instead of closing the oven door back up, he just left it partway open, watching it. “You’re prettier, though.”

  I stopped chopping the tomato that was in front of me. “Prettier than my sister, you mean? Oh, no. No, especially since she had all her stuff done. She’s a knockout.”

  He shrugged. “To each their own, I guess. I told you what I think.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say that.”

  Ducking to check the top of the steak, Jerry cautiously let go of the oven-door handle and took a few quick steps across the kitchen to get a potholder from a drawer. As he passed behind me, I nearly jumped to feel his hand on my shoulder and the quick kiss that touched firmly against the back of my head. “It’s the truth,” he said.

  Jerry was a good cook. He sliced the flank steak paper-thin and served it with homemade au gratin potatoes and green beans amandine and the salad. Just like last time, his house was spotlessly clean. His cats hid from me, one of them peering out from under the sofa with luminous green eyes as we ate dinner at his polished-cherry dining-room table. He poured Coke from a two-liter bottle into two blue-rimmed glasses nearly overflowing with ice.

  “Pretend it’s wine,” he said.

  I giggled and sipped my Coke, the ice bumping up against my lip. “You forgot to buy some?”

  “No, I just act like an idiot when I drink, so I don’t drink.”

  “Ever?”

  “Nah. It’s been years since I drank anything stronger than coffee. I drank a lot in college. A lot.”

  I set my glass down carefully. “Like…problematically?”

  “It was starting to go that way. That’s why I stopped.”

  “Sounds like the right thing to do.”

  He nodded, crunching down on an ice cube from his glass. “Yeah. It wasn’t as hard as quitting smoking. That took me three years. Why are you smiling?”