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Overview
Garnet Brown is seventeen years old, has a great mother, a boyfriend Andy, and a cute tutor Grant who is undeniably geeky but somehow still charming and attractive. Her life plan revolves around getting into a good college and getting out of the poor neighborhood she’s lived in her whole life. The one where she’s mostly known as the child of an illicit affair that cost her mother her job and reputation and that left Garnet seeing her father only every few years, in court, where her parents would argue about money.
So, when her well-to-do father comes to call, asking her to come visit and meet the family: the wife, the older half-brother and the younger half-brother they had after he went back to his wife, there has to be a might big string attached. Like a son with cancer and a last-chance hope that Garnet can be a bone-marrow donor.
Life hasn’t ever been easy but it’s suddenly gotten way harder and a surprising kiss from Grant turns everything on its head even more than suddenly having a father in her life. The choices are surprising, confusing and surprisingly romantic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480498075 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 18 Years |
About the Author
ArLynn L. Presser, granddaughter of science fiction and fantasy writer Fritz Leiber, has published more than twenty-seven romance novels. Some have been published under the name ArLynn Presser, but most often she has used the name Vivian Leiber. She lives in the Chicago area, where she writes and directs plays designed to teach ethics to lawyers. She has a law degree and practiced law before becoming a full-time writer. Among her recent publications are a short story, "The Archivist Says Goodbye to His Daily Routine," in the New England Review and Winnetka: Images of America from Arcadia Publishing, both published under her full name.
Read an Excerpt
Second to None
By ArLynn Leiber Presser
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1994 ArLynn Leiber PresserAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-9807-5
CHAPTER 1
"An isosceles triangle, on the other hand, has angles which are of the same length and the corners are from equidistant ..."
I had been staring for some time at the workbook in front of us. Me and my tutor. Me and Grant. Grant's hand pointed out one geometrical figure after another—but his fingers were shaking, and, when I thought I would absolutely die from watching them tremble, I touched his index finger with the tip of my pen.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
Grant's cheeks turned as red as the Target logo, and he looked out the window, studying the black-topped basketball court outside the library
I liked him.
Not liked him.
Just, well, maybe tolerated him is a better way to put it.
Yes, I tolerated Grant Crzanowski much more than one would expect—given that he was a geek. A nerd. A dork. A laser brain. Every school has them. You know—the guys in the Computer Club. The ones doing science projects. The ones who know what an isosceles triangle is without any coaching.
It hurt my pride that here I was a senior relying on a sophomore to help me do well on the SATs, but I never held that against Grant. Maybe because he never tried to make me feel stupid. That—the feeling stupid part—just came with the territory.
I have nothing against brains. You may think they're idiots until senior year when they're talking about University of this and of that—and you know that they have a future that's opening up. Everyone else is just scraping by, thinking about the factory, a job at the mall, or the city colleges. Then you realize that all that brain-power is there for a reason. For these kids, high school was a bad dream that was going to be followed by a rosy morning. For the rest of us slugs, high school was it—the last best moment when nothing quite counts. Then you get a job, have kids, get old. Don't look at the stars—it's not where you're going—look at your parents and how they turned out.
I might not be a brain, I told myself, but I'm determined to get out of my neighborhood. I might be average, but I'm not going to be a loser. I can't sing, I can't act, I'm not model pretty, I don't blog and I don't think I'd be very interesting on a reality show.
On that day in the library with Grant, I was a senior, a month and a half into the first semester. Sometimes it made me feel great—you know, freedom just around the corner, the prison walls about to tumble, throwing your weight around when it came to freshmen.
But sometimes it wasn't the greatest. Sometimes, it scared me when I realized that there wasn't anything out there waiting for me.
That was what Grant was for.
Grant is about a zillion times smarter than me and the rest of the planet. I've gotten used to having a lot of people be smarter than me, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
But I am more determined than most people, which gets me through.
"Let's keep talking about isosceles triangles," he said, pulling his hand back from the page.
He was nicer-looking than the average brain. He could have had a girlfriend, I guessed, if she was the sort of girl who was, well, whatever it is that dorks who join the Computer Club like.
An hour after school every Monday and Friday was what he volunteered for. He did Chess Club on Tuesday and Computer Club on Thursday.
Peer tutoring was supposed to help both of us, something about "enrichment" for him.
But really it was for me. I had screwed up big time on the PSATs, and I didn't want the SATs to turn out the same way. There are seven city colleges in Chicago. I didn't want to go to any of them, because none of them would get me out. If I screwed up again, I'd be consigned to a life as an administrative assistant to the assistant head of bookkeeping somewhere. I wanted University of Illinois—and, if I really let my imagination run away with me, Northwestern University. Then maybe I'd be somebody.
My grades were good, but I knew enough to know that good grades in a terrible school wouldn't cut it—Chicago public schools are supposed to be the worst in the country.
After the PSAT disaster, I knew I needed extra help.
"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked, wondering what kind of problems someone like Grant could have. After all, his future was something that would expand, bigger and bigger, to include anything he wanted. What kind of problems could he have? Maybe girl problems. Maybe ... nah. He probably spent all his nervous energy worrying about physics.
He shook his head quickly, ducking his head down toward the page of the workbook in a way that made his wavy black hair capture the lights from above. Okay, they might have been fluorescent library lights and his hair might have been cut just a little too short for my taste, but the point was that Grant certainly could have had a girl if he had wanted one.
If he could stop talking about computers and science projects and brainy stuff long enough he might actually get a girl. A weird girl, but a female nonetheless. Unless maybe he liked guys and just didn't admit it to himself ...
We finished up real fast that particular day in October, giving up on the math section because I was getting it, really getting it, and some of our sessions were starting to repeat themselves.
I had to get home and change for Andy. It was Friday. Party time. Grant wanted to walk home with me, but I said forget it. I had had just about enough of isosceles triangles for one day. I might have been determined to get out of the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, but that doesn't mean I had to like the work I had to do to escape.
It was the last afternoon before everything went haywire. Hard to believe, but a couple of hours after I saw Grant, everything would be changed.
I'd still be seventeen, a senior at Harold Washington High School. I'd still have straight brown hair that exactly matched my eyes. I'd still be my mom's daughter, but the difference is that I'd be my dad's, too. I'd still think Grant Crzanowski was a brain, but the difference is.... Well, I'm not sure what you'd call the difference.
I had to think about what kind of people were around me. I had to think about who really loved me for me.
Just me.
Garnet Brown.
They were standing on the porch of our apartment building when I got there. Mom at the door, Dad on the steps. I'm not sure I had ever before seen them within five feet of each other. Not separated by lawyers either.
I knew it was my dad long before I turned the corner on Provident street. Because he didn't belong. People in our neighborhood wear Sears clothes and drive cars that almost always have rust at the edges. They don't wear mint green polo shirts and plaid pants.
He kept looking back at his car—it was a nice one but at the time I didn't know what kind —as if he expected it to get stolen. I'd later find out it was a Jaguar, one of the most expensive kinds of car you can buy. He had a right to be worried, I guess.
But, still.
People from outside the city always think that they're about to be robbed.
I had only seen my dad a few times, mostly in court.
But I recognized him anyway.
He has a family. A real family.
Two sons, one three years older than me and one four years younger. He has a wife that my mom used to call "the Bitch" under her breath when she was angry and thought I wasn't listening. He also has a house in Lake Forest, which is a wealthy suburb on the Lake—I'd even seen the house a few times long ago when my mom got so angry that she wanted to park outside and look. Just look. You couldn't have fit his house in our apartment building, it was so big.
I'm what happened when they had an affair.
My mom had thought he would get a divorce. My mom had thought he would marry her. This was a long time ago, when she was working for him as a secretary. Instead, she got fired.
She says she was young, too young. She's not bitter anymore, but she was once—when she found out that she was pregnant and that he wasn't going anywhere. Except back to his real family. Her parents were furious; people gave her grief. It's a huge deal to some nosy people when a kid has no dad.
For years, she let herself be angry, even in front of me. Not angry at me; I think she very quickly decided she loved me and all that. But she stayed pretty angry at him. Then, somewhere along the line, she stopped even talking about him.
The only times I've seen my dad have been in court. Every few years, they'd go back—to fight about something new. Actually, it sounded like something old to me—always money. She told me that the first time, she had to get blood tests to prove I was his kid. He said I wasn't. But the blood tests proved him wrong. I'm his kid all right.
And it would turn out that those blood tests were important. He would end up using them to claim me as his own daughter. When he needed me.
I walked right up to the porch, because there wasn't anywhere else to go. Besides, I was curious about what he was doing in our neighborhood.
"Hello, Garnet, you've certainly grown," my dad said, with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. He looked nervous and sad, and there were sweat rings on the underarms of his polo shirt even though it was a crisp fall afternoon. "Grown into a beautiful young lady," he added.
I wondered how he would know whether I had grown or not. I could have been this tall forever for all he knew.
By the way, just so you know, I hate my name. It was picked by Mom when she was too young to know that garnets aren't nearly as precious as rubies and diamonds and sapphires. She named me after a second-class jewel, even though she was trying to name me after something expensive, to give me cachet. Like how a lot of kids are named Tiffany, after the jewelry store, or Lauren, after Ralph Lauren the designer.
I didn't know whether I should smile at him or look stern. My mom was standing right there on the steps. I felt disloyal just for listening to him. And that made me feel angry at my mom, even though she hadn't said anything.
I stayed on the front lawn, making sure I was—what did Grant call it?—equidistant from my mom and my dad.
We made a little isosceles triangle.
"I was thinking it was time for us to spend some more time together," my dad said. "Get to know one another, you know. Maybe you could come out to the house."
By the house, I knew he meant the place in Lake Forest. I had never been inside, just spent those few times sitting in the car on the street—watching it with my mom while she just cried. Each time, the police would eventually come by and tell us to move along. In Lake Forest, the police don't have much to do.
I breathed deeply, sucking in the image of an afternoon with my dad. A Sunday afternoon in Lake Forest. Just in time for tea. Isn't that what really rich people have instead of happy hour? Or maybe, in addition to happy hour. And his wife, wearing something black velvet with puffed sleeves and being nice to me—even though, when you think about it, she'd have no reason to be nice to me. I'm just living proof of her husband's unfaithfulness. And my half-brothers would be there, brothers I had never seen. They'd hold my chair for me while I sat down.
I was sucking in the image, and sucking in a lot of confusion.
Why now? I wondered.
My mom spoke softly, but I could tell she was really furious.
"Why don't you start with the truth, Win?" she demanded quietly. "Tell her what you really want. The visiting can be part of it, but I think you should tell her the bottom line first."
Bottom line?
When you prick a balloon, it bursts into nothingness in a second. You don't even see it deflate. It just pops and becomes a piece of limp rubber.
That was my tea time you just heard pop!
"Now, Jennifer, I think it's important for me to talk to her about this on my own," he said. "I don't need your interference."
"My interference?" Mom repeated. "I just don't want to see her hopes raised. I think you need to be very clear about what you're proposing."
Hopes raised?
It was starting to sound bad, whatever it was.
I didn't want to listen to them fight. I never like to see or hear anyone fight. It makes me crazy. So I shoved past my mom, slamming the security door behind me, and ran upstairs to our apartment. I heard both of them calling after me. I didn't care.
I had to get dressed for my date with Andy. It was Friday night, after all.
But, even when I turned on the water full blast, I thought I heard the sound of them. Every time I turned off the shower to check, there was just silence.
"He wants you to come up to Lake Forest," Mom said, coming into my room while I was putting on my makeup. She slumped onto the bed. "And, while I think you should give him a chance, I don't think you should go quite yet."
I turned around, not trusting her reflection in the mirror. I wanted to see the angry set to her mouth for myself. But it wasn't there. Just something tired about her. A redness to her eyes.
"Why not?"
She waited a long time to tell me.
"I should have told you a lot earlier. Brian is sick," she said finally. Brian was the younger son, the one that Dad had had after he went back to his wife. "He has leukemia, and conventional chemotherapy isn't working. They need a bone marrow donor to help him, and you look like their last hope."
Come again?
I wasn't prepared for that one.
When I was a kid, I wanted my dad. He had no interest in me, but I decided it was probably that his wife made it real hard for him. I guess when your dad doesn't want you, you can never quite give up the idea of him suddenly changing his mind. Of him coming to his senses. Of it all having been a terrible mistake. Of him really being in the back row, hidden away, during the class play. Of him standing silently, apart from the crowd, at the sidelines when the girls' hockey team plays. Of him showing up for a birthday party, staring through the window.
In my case, it was the hope that his wife would finally let him have a relationship with me. It was that he and my mom would stop fighting over the money—and he would see me, truly see me, separate and apart from Mom.
Don't get me wrong—I'm grateful to my mom for everything she sacrificed in order to give birth to me and raise me.
"Do you want to talk?" Mom asked.
"About what?"
"They want to test to see if your bone marrow is compatible with Brian's. If it is, your father wants you to donate it for him," she finished. The words themselves seemed to exhaust her. "I told him no, because it's invading your body. But he says that if I were willing to have you undergo a blood test years ago to prove you were his daughter, I should be willing to have you tested now."
The whole last couple of sentences—she might as well have never spoken them for all I cared.
Because, it didn't register. At least, everything all at once didn't register. I didn't think about the operation. Or about Brian dying. Or about whether being willing to have a blood test to prove paternity meant you should be willing to have a blood test to prove you can be a marrow farm for your half-brother.
Instead, I was just wondering if this was the wedge.
That fantasy again, you know. Boy, I was hot. My brain was spewing out scenarios. He'd see what a great kid I was. He'd see how hard I try at school. He'd see how nice I am. Mostly, the wife would see it. I'd save her son's life. I'd be polite, I'd be helpful. It'd be like an audition. I'd win the part.
My cell vibrated. And since I thought it was sure to be Andy and since I didn't know how to talk about this with my mom, I raced out to the kitchen and caught it.
It wasn't Andy. It was Grant. I didn't even hide the disappointment I felt.
Why should I?
It was just Grant.
He had to know that I had more important things to do on a Friday night than talk to my tutor.
"Uh, I was just calling about Monday," he said.
He did it all the time—calling to "confirm" our next session when both of us knew that I had to go to tutoring. Usually I just said yeah, I'll be there, and then Grant runs out of anything to say and mumbles a goodbye. How dorks operate is beyond me.
"Grant, are you okay?" I asked, thinking about how he had seemed distracted and nervous earlier. I may say and think terrible things about geeks, but I'm still a nice person. I'd never say anything mean to Grant's face. And he had seemed awfully on edge.
I heard him take a deep breath.
"I'm fine," he said. "You're busy, aren't you?"
"I am going out on a date in a few minutes," I admitted. "But I still have time to talk to you."
"No, I'll let you go. Have a great weekend."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Second to None by ArLynn Leiber Presser. Copyright © 1994 ArLynn Leiber Presser. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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