If Julianne hadn’t been scared for her life, she would have made Chloe rewind all the way to “tacky-ass.” In any other situation it would have been hysterical that the phrase had even crossed her sister’s well-glossed lips.
But she was scared for her life, so she just sat there, glued to the gray upholstery, stupefied as Chloe turned her rage away from Remi and back in Jules’s direction. “And you!” she shrieked at her. “I don’t think I can ever forgive you! How could you? How dare you? Julianne, if I can’t trust my own sister, who can I trust? The Moores are trying to take our house away—they are actively trying to make us homeless so they can install a freakin’ sauna—
and you’re practically sleeping with their son? At work?
Jules, who are you? You’ve totally betrayed our family.
What would Mom think of this?”
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Julianne sat there silently, almost numb, staring out the rain-streaked windshield with tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t think of anything to say in her own defense. Maybe Chloe was right. Maybe she was a traitor.
She tried to quell the torrent of words spilling out of Chloe’s mouth. “Chloe, I never meant . . . Remi’s really—” she began.
Chloe cut her off before Julianne could figure out where her own thoughts were going. “Remi?!” she barked. “You trust him over me? Over Dad? Over every single solid thing we’ve seen happen this summer? Grow up, Jules—he’s probably using you to find out how much it would take for us to just sell outright to his parents!
He’s probably a spy!”
It had never occurred to Julianne in all of her imaginary spy scenarios that she could be double-crossed. She felt cold all over. Remi was just using her. He had been spying on her for his father all along. Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Remi idolized his father.
He was using Julianne to help his father make his architectural dreams come true. Jules forgot everything she had felt in that stupid bathtub, for the past month, and even the first time she had seen Remi at the bonfire party. It was like the anger accompanying Chloe’s words automat-ically made them true. Julianne couldn’t move. She sat in the passenger seat, tears silently staining her face until her dark curls hung limply against her cheekbones.
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“I can’t believe you would compromise our position like this!” Chloe continued. “Did you know that we might have to sell the house? Did you even realize that?
I can’t believe you would do this to us! As soon as Dad gets back to LA, you need to tell him about this, Julianne. If you don’t, I will.” Julianne couldn’t argue. She spent the rest of the car ride in the same stunned silence.
When Julianne and Chloe got home, Julianne ran right into the living room to assess the damage. At the very least, she could be helpful. All told, the flooding wasn’t bad. The old ottoman was soaked through; it would need to be replaced. So would the rocking chair, but it had been slowly crumbling for years, anyway.
As Julianne scanned the room for additional damage, her heart caught in her chest. Last week when she’d given her mother’s painting to Dad and Chloe, they’d propped it up against the grate in front of the fireplace, to get an idea of how it would look above the mantel.
Sure enough, her painting—her mom’s painting—that she’d worked so hard on all summer had been caught in the deluge. A border of about four inches of paint at the bottom of the canvas was totally distorted. She couldn’t even tell it was paint, let alone a picture of their beach.
It was completely ruined. Everything was completely ruined.
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Chapter Twenty-one
!
For the next few days, Julianne walked around like a zombie. She called out sick from work, ignoring the obvious concern in Bill’s voice. She just couldn’t face Remi.
Chloe wouldn’t talk to her or even look at her.
She’d never known Chloe to hate another living soul in her entire life, and she never in a million years would have thought that she’d be the first. Julianne could barely even sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she had horrible nightmares about telling her father what she’d done. In one, he threw her out of the house, leaving her with nowhere to live but the beach—which wasn’t really an option, because the Moores had paved over the entire thing and built an amusement park. In 192
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another, Dad made Jules walk down to her mother’s grave to apologize in person for betraying her memory, only to find the epitaph had been changed to read, “I don’t forgive you.”
The flood damage in the living room was so intense that Julianne wasn’t sure how to tackle it, so she’d decided to start by cleaning the rest of the house first. As Julianne pedaled her bike toward Palisades Hardware for cleaning supplies, she looked at the clear sky and sparkling beaches and couldn’t believe that this was just a pocket in between miserable storms. The fronds of the palm trees were a lush green, and the beach looked smooth as stone. She pulled up in front of the store, checked her pocket for her shopping list, and pushed down her kickstand. Locking her bike, she headed inside.
Julianne was standing near the front of the store, trying to figure out how much of what she needed would fit in her bike basket and her backpack, when she heard her name. Looking up, she saw Liz Moss, a girl from school who’d sat behind her in calculus last year.
“Julianne! How are you?” Liz asked with a hug. “You look upset. Are you okay?”
Julianne made a concerted effort to perk up. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just a little bit stressed. The storm hit us pretty hard. The entire living room is flooded and my dad’s out of town, so I’ve got lots to do.” Julianne gestured at the aisles of the store. “How has your summer been?” 193
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“Oh, yuck. Sorry about your living room. My summer has been good.” Liz’s shaggy, blond hair bounced around her face. “I’ve been lifeguarding—the usual. It’s been really nice. But I promised my mom I’d help her stain the deck today, so here I am.”
“Well, have fun. It was great running into you.” Julianne gave Liz a hug goodbye.
“Yeah, good luck with the flooding stuff,” Liz said as she turned to go. “But I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Jules—if worse comes to worst, you can always move into that glass castle thing that’s growing next to your house!” Liz giggled and waved as she walked off to find her mother. Julianne sighed and headed in the opposite direction.
The last few days, she’d been getting out of bed in the middle of the night, cleaning and dusting and straightening the house. She was fixing the things she knew how to fix before Dad got home and everything else fell apart again.
! ! !
When she got home from the hardware store, she beat out the rugs over the deck railing and sorted the wrapping paper in the living room drawer by color. Julianne couldn’t sit still, but she didn’t have any idea what to do with herself, either.
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She was shocked that she could feel this lousy. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. She had completely destroyed everyone she loved. And, to top it all off, her mother’s painting was totally ruined. The paint had twisted into grotesque lumps of oill and plastic; even the canvas underneath had warped. She wouldn’t even know where to begin to repaint it. It had been so hard the first time, Julianne couldn’t imagine trying to reconstruct it now—what with most of the summer light gone, along with the view of the beach that had informed it in the first place, not to mention her ability to see anything beautiful in the world at all. She had somehow managed to lose every single thing she cared about. Julianne moved through the living room, trying to separate out cushions that were ruined from ones that were still usable. She had been planning on taking the now saggy, waterlogged ottoman out back to dry a bit before she left it on the curb, but it had started pouring again right after she returned from the hardware store. She set up fans to dry out the rest of the soggy furniture and mopped up the few puddles that had collected along the floor moldings when the rain picked up again. Frustrated at how little progress she was making, she sat on the window seat, looking out on the angry gray waves, her forehead pressed against the cold glass and her ruined painting sitting dejectedly at her feet.