Birthday Vicious (20 page)

So now A. A. was in a state of total anxiety. If he wanted to ask her out, why not just do it?
JUST DO IT!
she felt like screaming. Why was it so hard for him to say?

And now A. A. was trapped in the living room, waiting for Ashley to make her extremely late grand entrance. From her vantage point by the vintage lion's cage, A. A. could see Ashley getting snapped and buckled onto the
trapeze. Any second now she was going to whiz through the air, swing back and forth high above everyone's heads, and then get lowered onto a throne held in place by four contortionists using only their toes to keep the chair steady. Ashley had told them all about it; she'd been rehearsing for days.

“ASH-LEY, ASH-LEY, ASH-LEY!” everyone in the living room was chanting, even the unicycle-riding waiters. Up on the high mezzanine, Ashley sat on the trapeze, a huge smile on her face, accepting the adoration of the crowd.

“And now!” roared the ringmaster MC, cracking his whip so hard that everyone jumped. “Please welcome the guest of honor, the birthday girl herself, the most
extrrrrraaaaooordinary
young lady to grace the high wire . . . Miss Ashley Spencer!”

“Yay!” A. A. cheered as loudly as she could, clapping her hands above her head. Ashley was pretty brave, soaring through the air on what was, essentially, a swing seat. One giant
whoosh
, and there went Ashley—toes pointed, Grecian tunic flowing, swinging back and forth across the great room like a dainty fairy.

Guinevere Parker was so entranced by the sight, she dropped her tape recorder on the floor without even
appearing to notice, and Cass Franklin had to pull out her portable oxygen tank to stop herself from hyperventilating.

“Pretty over-the-top, huh?” Tri reappeared, wriggling up close to her and leaning against the iron bars of the cage. A. A. pretended to be watching Ashley getting lowered onto her foot-held purple throne, but her heart had started thudding loud and hard again.

“Literally,” she said, trying to sound as breezy as possible. A. A. didn't want Tri to think she'd just been standing here waiting for him, even though that was pretty much the truth. “As in, she's over our heads.”

“So, you know what I was trying to tell you earlier?” He leaned close to her, and A. A. wished—not for the first time in her life—that she wasn't wearing such high heels.

“Yeah?” she sniffed. She thought of the advice her mother had given Lauren: Play it cool, don't show them you're desperate, act like they're no big deal. Even when you feel the exact opposite. This was it: the moment of truth. Tri was going to tell her he'd liked her all along, and that he wanted her to go out with him. Yikes!

“I wanted to tell you,” Tri said, lowering his voice so much she had to bend over to hear him. “I've been
looking around the house, and I found the TV with the Xbox attached. It's in the den. I didn't want to say anything in front of Lili in case she made a big deal about us playing a game when we should be dancing or something. But I knew you'd be into it, right?”

“Oh, sure.” Now A. A. had to struggle to sound enthusiastic.

“Great!” Tri gave her a huge grin. “I can't wait to whip you at Call of Duty. I'll go get it set up. Do you want to grab some sodas? Get enough for four, because I'm going to round up some of the guys.”

A. A. nodded mutely, trying to keep a false smile fixed on her face. So that was Tri's big news.

It was not: Wanna go out with me? Instead it was: Wanna play? Oh well. They were back to the way things used to be, she guessed. Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Not enemies. Just friends.

Maybe that was all they were supposed to be, and it was time A. A. accepted it.

“Excuse me!” A. A. began her slow march through the crowd, looking for the drinks table. She'd do just as Tri said—pick up a few sodas, then make her way to the den. Playing a few rounds of Call of Duty might be fun.

But somehow, she didn't feel much like
fun
anymore.

LILI NEEDED TO TAKE A
break. she'd spent the last ten minutes on her hands and knees, helping the cleaning staff pick the remains of Ashley's cake off the floor and attempt to reassemble it on the table. It was a total lost cause, but they had to try something.

All the big-top cake resembled now was a deflated red-and-white-striped beach ball. The feet and legs of the miniature Ashley had been chomped by Princess Dahlia von Fluffsterhaus, so Lili perched the remaining half on the top of the beach ball, letting the gilt ropes hang from the figure's little arms.

She looked like Houdini trying to make an escape. Lili sighed—what else could be done? Ashley was still
going to have an almighty nervous breakdown, but the majority of guests wouldn't know the cake had spent way too much quality time on the floor.

All of Max's idiot friends had disappeared, and Lili hoped they'd had the decency to leave the premises. She hadn't even gotten the chance to ask them about Max, but that didn't matter—she'd given up on finding Max here tonight. He probably decided to blow the party off, and sent his pathetic posse instead.

“Young lady, you're covered with frosting!” Her father had finally managed to track her down. Really, he was a hopeless guard dog! She gave a quick explanation about the cake, leaving out the part about the total guilt of Max's friends.

The name “Max” was a dirty word in the Li household this week. “You should go get cleaned up,” he told her, pointing to the powder room off the front hall. “The dancing's starting, and we can only stay one more hour, okay?”

Lili scampered off to the powder room, eager to clean the sticky mess off her hands. If she only had one more hour here, she had to make the best of it. After Ashley got changed into outfit number two, they were all supposed to meet at the VIP Ashleys-only dance floor
right in front of the cage. It wasn't exactly a romantic evening with Max, but it was better than nothing.

The line for the powder room stretched all the way to the front yard, so Lili darted in the opposite direction, heading down a narrow hallway toward the kitchen. The Spencer staff knew her and would let her into the bathroom there, especially because she'd helped them semi-fix Ashley's demolished cake. She held her disgusting hands up in the air, resisting the temptation to eat the moist cake crumbs trapped underneath her fingernails, and rounded the corner at high speed.

Oops! She almost crashed into someone sloping along, hands in pockets, not watching where he was going.

Max.

“Omigod!” she squealed, planting a sticky hand directly on his shoulder before she realized what she was doing. He stared with distaste at the red and white residue. “I've been looking for you everywhere! Do you know what your friends did? They wrecked Ashley's cake!”

“So what.” He shrugged.

“So what?” Lili was incensed. Max was acting as if
he was mad at her, when she had every right to be mad at him.

“I don't care about some stupid cake. And by the way, nice to see you, too.” He frowned and began to walk away. She couldn't understand it. Then it dawned on her that Max thought she'd been avoiding him all week, when the exact opposite was true.

“Hey! Wait! Max—forget about the cake. I wanted to tell you I've been wanting to thank you for the flowers, but I've been grounded all week and I couldn't call you or anything,” she babbled, almost in one long breath. “I missed you so much!”

“Sure,” he said, and continued to walk back toward the party. “Whatever.”

“Max—I'm telling you the truth!” Lili pleaded. “My mom and dad took my phone and everything—I wasn't even allowed to go to school!”

“That's not what I heard,” Max said in a chilly voice, not even turning to look back at her. “I heard you thought the camping trip was the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life! Cassie and Jez said you bitched and moaned the whole time about having to sleep outdoors, and that you totally hated the whole thing.”

Okay. So that was kind of true. Maybe she shouldn't
have shot her mouth off at the Evanescence twins. Especially since they were using it against her. They wanted her out of the picture and were only there to sabotage Ashley's party. She wanted to strangle both of them with their own stringy hair.

“Max!” She scrambled after him, but he had already disappeared into the crowd in the lobby. The only guy she could see was her father, looking for her in the powder-room line.

“Would someone mind letting my daughter cut in, just to wash her hands?” he was asking, and Daria Hart, who was next in line, started waving and smiling at Lili. She probably thought this meant they'd be besties on Monday. As if!

Lili couldn't even manage a grateful smile. She slipped into the powder room and rinsed the congealing cake off her hands in the tiled Moroccan sink. Her hands were shaking so badly it was hard to get soap on them.

Max hated her. He never wanted to see her again.

“YES!” TRI THREW DOWN HIS
control stick in triumph and rocked back on the leather sofa. He'd beaten A. A. in Call of Duty. In fact, he'd beaten everyone—the other two Gregory Hall boys who'd managed to sneak into the den were his first opponents, because A. A. had been slow joining the secret party. She'd been dancing with the other Ashleys in their VIP area, even though it was difficult to dance to burlesque rockabilly when you were wearing a tight dress.

And though the VIP area was a cool idea, in reality it wasn't so much fun. Ashley danced facing the rest of the room, preoccupied with spotting the mysterious Cooper. Lauren was so busy fluttering little waves at Christian
that she kept flubbing the choreographed steps—plus, without any shoes she looked kind of weird.

Lili had run in whispering something about “cake” and “disaster” as well as “Max,” “break up,” and “life over.” Ashley soon left to deal with the cake crisis, Lili looked depressed and didn't want to talk, and Lauren and Christian were in their own world, so A. A. had headed straight to the den, as promised, with a stack of soda cans and a handful of red-and-white-striped straws.

She'd played a couple of rounds, and then there was a huge commotion from the party and the other guys went to check out what was happening—probably just Ashley getting her birthday gift in the front yard.

That left just two of them in the den—A. A. and Tri. She gurgled the last of her soda and told Tri she didn't feel like playing another game.

The whole evening felt really flat. She didn't even care about getting beaten by Tri—she wasn't making much effort, so it really didn't count. He seemed to sense her strange mood.

“What's up?” he asked, tapping her on the arm with his soda can.

“Nothing.” She shrugged. She didn't have the energy to get up and rejoin the party. Maybe she should just call
the Fairmont driver and go home. Tri sat his empty can on the coffee table and turned to face her.

“You know the other day in the diner?” he asked her, his voice quiet and serious. “I was trying to tell you something.”

“About breaking up with Cecily, I know.” A. A. leaned her feet against the edge of the table. These shoes were killing her.

“Yeah, but I also wanted to explain what happened with Ashley a while back.”

“Oh,
that
.” A. A. waved her hand. She knew everything about Ashley and Tri's breakup—Ashley had told her the whole thing, every boring detail. “That's ancient history.”

“But I'm not sure you know the truth,” Tri persisted.

“What do you mean?” A. A. couldn't face listening to this sorry saga again.

“The truth Ashley didn't want anyone to know,” said Tri. He gazed down at his pants and picked at an imaginary thread.

“Know what?” asked A. A. impatiently.

“That the day after the . . . um, the Seven party, I went to see her.”

“Yeah, I know all about that,” she snapped. The last
thing A. A. wanted to hear was how Tri went crawling back to Ashley on his knees, whining about how she was the only girl for him—just hours after he was kissing A. A.!

But Tri soldiered on with his story. “So I went to see her, and I told her that I'd kissed you, and that I thought it was best if she and I broke up.”

A. A. did a double take. Say what?

“But she asked me if I would just keep pretending to be her boyfriend for a few more days. Until that whole
Preteen Queen
thing was over. And I know it was really lame of me to say yes, but I felt guilty about kissing you, I guess. I thought that once the
Preteen Queen
party was over, I could ask you out. But then you were with Hunter so I kind of got mad at you, and then things have been all weird between us ever since.”

“You told her about what happened at the Seven party?”

“Yup.” Tri nodded, hanging his head. “She asked me not to say anything to you about our . . . our arrangement. I thought she didn't want to be humiliated, so I went along with it.”

A. A.'s stunned mind was swinging faster than Ashley's trapeze. This was all news to her. According
to Ashley,
she'd
broken up with Tri, not the other way around. She never said a word about knowing Tri had kissed A. A. Could all this be true? Had Ashley really lied to her?

“She never told me any of this.” A. A. shook her head in disbelief.

“So now you know the truth.” Tri gave her a hopeful smile. “I'm not telling you all this so you'll be mad at Ashley. I was just wondering—can we forget everything that's happened this semester and, um . . .” Tri blushed. “I mean, I think you know how much I like you.”

A. A. glanced over at him. Tri's face was red, and he looked intensely nervous. How weird: This was
exactly
what she'd been hoping to hear from him this evening, but now that he was saying it, telling her he liked her, asking her out . . . it didn't feel right. It was all just too much to process.