Angelique glanced between the three of us and looked confused. "Angelique?" she said, her voice uncertain.

"Yes," I said, trying to help her out because, no matter how displeased I might've been about her tagging along with me that night, everything about Sam's recent hot-cold, fake-flirting, wacko behavior displeased me more. "Sam Blaine, this is Angelique Lawson. She's here visiting. Try to be polite for a change."

Sam acted as if I were invisible. He said to Angelique, "Too bad you're not planning to stay for good. We could use a few new faces here, especially pretty ones like yours." He grinned at her and my insides twisted. "Can I talk you into hanging around?"

Angelique blushed. She looked so fl.u.s.tered I worried she might break into nervous French at any moment.

He didn't wait for her to answer. "Ah, Angelique. Well, I'm glad we met. Maybe I'll see you later tonight?" He reached out and patted her arm.

"Peut-etre," she murmured. "I mean, perhaps."

Sam's eyebrows shot up and he became even more debonair. "Oh, you speak French? J'aime le francais." He bowed slightly and gave her another of his winning grins.

Jane declared, I abhor this boy, her tone startling in its vehemence.

I gulped back my own displeasure. Since when did Sam Blaine speak French? He'd taken only Spanish cla.s.ses since sixth grade.

My cousin stammered out a timid "O-Oui."

"Fantastique," Sam said, glancing over at me. Finally. "Well, we've got Spandau Ballet coming up soon, and there's somewhere else I need to be for it." He arched a victorious eyebrow in my direction, then turned back toward Angelique. "Au revoir, ma cherie," he told her.

Then, very deliberately, he eyed a soph.o.m.ore female I recognized all too well. The girl stood along the wall with a small troupe of friends nearby, and Sam made sure I knew who he was looking at before striding toward her.

With Terrie glaring at his back and my cousin staring at him with an expression of pure astonishment, I told myself I was glad to see Sam walk away. I just wished he'd have walked toward almost anyone else.

Ellie, stop this, Jane ordered. Feel no regret in his departure. You are right to be rid of him.

Yeah, probably, I said as I watched him sidle up to Stacy Dasch.e.l.l and grin at her in that charming, charismatic way that came so naturally to him.

Jane's disdainful sniff echoed in my mind. He would have brought trouble upon you, and you know too well he meant only ill will to your cousin.

I know. Then the voices outside my head began debating and I was forced to pay attention to the females I could see.

"He's an, um, interesting guy," Angelique said.

"He's a little snot," Terrie replied. She made a fist, punched it into her opposite palm and caught my eye.

I blinked but tried to keep my expression impa.s.sive. Jane was right, of course. Sam's intentions toward my cousin were hardly, as she would say, "honourable." Especially not now when he had his arm around Stacy's shoulders. d.a.m.n him.

Angelique saw where I was looking and frowned. "Um, Ellie, is something going on that I should know about? Should I not be talking to him?" Her forehead creased and she squinted at me with a look I interpreted as total bewilderment. "There was an odd...oh, je ne sais quoi, I guess, between you two. Sorry about the French." She nibbled on her lip.

I almost laughed. "Yeah, I don't know what it is either, but total hate has to come pretty close." I shrugged at her, trying to keep the hurt from showing. "Talk with him, if you want. I don't care."

Terrie's gaze flicked toward the ceiling and back, but she refrained from saying the "Yeah, right..." that I knew she was thinking. Terrie had, after all, caught me writing "Ellie Blaine" on a piece of scratch paper back in September.

As we watched Sam pull Stacy away from her friends and toward a darkened corner, Terrie motioned us closer. "Stacy's totally wasted," she said, the voice of authority on school gossip. "And she just got dumped, you know."

"Really?" I didn't know. I didn't think anybody ever dared to cross Stacy, not even her uppercla.s.sman, wrestling-champion, now ex-boyfriend. And he dumped her! Huh. Wonders never ceased.

"You mean that blond girl, right?" Angelique jabbed her finger in Sam and Stacy's direction. "The tall, snooty-looking one with the really pointy nose?"

In spite of myself, I did laugh this time. Sometimes it was easy to appreciate my genius cousin. "The very one."

Do not look, Jane told me.

Why not? I looked anyway.

Across the gym, Sam whispered something in Stacy's ear, which made her crack a smile. Then she leaned against him and touched her pointy nose to his straight one. He grinned at her again, extra brightly.

I swallowed.

Terrie grabbed a few more brownies from the refreshment table. "Here," she said, thrusting the dried-out chocolate squares at my cousin and me. Repulsive, but eating them gave us something to do.

When I stepped away to toss out my napkin and scavenge around for another Dixie cup of soda, I saw a couple of guys from Terrie's biology cla.s.s talking to her and Angelique. All four of them spontaneously laughed about something.

I downed my thimble of Pepsi and took a step back toward them just as that Spandau Ballet song came on. It was "True."

Do not look, Jane said again.

But I ignored her and glanced over at Sam, who had his lips on Stacy's neck. Stacy, meanwhile, threw her head back and put her hands on Sam's a.s.s.

Aw, no.

I saw my friend and my cousin being led to the dance floor by the two bio guys. All of them looked like they were having more fun than actors in a Love Boat episode.

Do NOT look, Jane warned for the third time.

But did I listen? No. You'd think I'd learn.

Now Sam's mouth covered Stacy's. He was in the process of devouring her whole, and she was letting him. Right there. In full view of everyone. To the sounds of Spandau Ballet.

I winced.

Then the worst of it happened.

As he traced patterns on her back and dipped his fingers to her waistband to skim the top of her jeans, he caught my gaze and held it. He lifted one corner of his lips in acknowledgement and projected his most conquering stare right back. He all but shouted across the gym, "See what you're missing, Ellie Barnett? See how I don't need you to have a good time. I could have anyone I want, and I don't want you."

And at that moment, when his triumphant blue eyes turned away from mine and fixed on Stacy's unnaturally perky chest, I vowed I wouldn't want him either, not even in secret. Jane was right about him being a big jerk like Wickham. And I knew with absolute certainty that I'd never let myself get seduced into liking Sam Blaine again, no matter what.

Let me repeat: NEVER.

Which just goes to show how wishy-washy I turned out to be. Because, as the years went by, look at what I did. Not only did I let myself get seduced into liking Sam Blaine and into taking some consequent action (but just once, okay, and we used a condom), in no way was I able to keep secret the private heartache that resulted.

Sam knew.

Jane knew.

h.e.l.l, Camryn knew, and even that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Dominic might've guessed.

All these years later and I was still being driven to battle Sam-and my inappropriate feelings for him-by forces that seemed beyond my control. So, I decided my only hope for the dream relationship I longed for rested in finding a man who was the Anti-Sam. The Anyone-But-Him Hero of My Heart. I still didn't know where, precisely, to hunt for such a mortal, but I was open to possibilities and more than willing to stalk a little, if necessary.

And I was just optimistic (and, well, desperate) enough to think I'd succeed in capturing a guy like that. One who'd be my Sam-Antidote and heal the hurt Sam had inflicted.

3.

Women fancy admiration means more than it

does...And men take care that they should.

-Pride and Prejudice In the weeks that followed Sam and me running into each other at that bar, my life began the last stage of a drastic surface metamorphosis.

In one sense, I knew I was finally becoming the monarch I'd dreamed of. I'd emerged from my coc.o.o.n of adolescence, transitioned into young adulthood and was incredibly close to being able to float around the world of grown-ups in my b.u.t.terfly costume. Inside, however, I remained much the confused caterpillar I'd always been.

The problem, of course, was that the people around me, with the exception of Jane, rarely looked beneath the surface so, to them, I appeared fine. Or, at least, as fine as they figured I should be. And this forced me to keep up the charade of fineness at home.

Case in point: we had a family dinner the night before I drove off to grad school. Mom made her famous chicken potpie, which I usually loved, but in the wake of having so recently seen Sam again and having just broken up with Dominic, I didn't have much of an appet.i.te. So I picked at my food while my family discussed me in their typical, ever-tactful manner.

My dad, smiling at the steaming potpie, said, "Our Ellie, off to do more studying. Hmm. I hope you like it." He sounded slightly mystified. Dad was a pretty bright guy, but he let me know on multiple occasions how, when he was in school, he couldn't wait to get out of college and get his first real job. "Two more years, right?"

I nodded. Two more years of going full time and I'd have dual master's degrees: MA (Master of Arts in English Lit) and MLS (Master of Library Science).

"Well, good," he said. "We know you'll do well at that."

Di snickered and hissed under her breath, "Yes. It's the one thing 'Our Ellie' knows how to do well."

I glanced at her mutely and sighed. Becoming Mrs. Evans had not improved my sister's temperament one whit. Name change or no, she remained the same nasty Diana Lynn Barnett who'd hated me since toddlerhood.

My brother, Gregory, however, in a rare gust of goodwill, said to Di's new husband, Alex, "Ellie was always the best student in the family. She got more A's in one year than I got in all of high school."

"That's cool," Alex said, his dangly silver earring swinging freely between strands of his long, dark hair as he nodded politely and dug into his dinner.

I shot Gregory a brief and grateful grin, but then Mom burst in. "Well, no. I think Angelique got more A's than anyone in the family. She's at Stanford now, you know."

Mom said this for Alex's benefit, but I was, indeed, well aware of my cousin's whereabouts. Aunt Candice, whose move to Illinois those years ago had afforded her easy weekly visits to my parents' house, proved herself incapable of speaking a multi-syllabic sentence without referencing her daughter's battle against "those uncouth Californians."

"Angelique is, of course, going to Stanford for her graduate studies," my aunt often commented. "They overlooked her after high school, put her on a waiting list for undergrad entry-the nerve of them! But, they sure realized their mistake later. I told her, I said, 'Angelique, darling, you should just forget about Stanford. Make them suffer. Give the Ivies another try, or keep living at home and continuing on at Northwestern.' But-" Aunt Candice sighed. "She insisted on moving out West and joining all those surfing and Rollerblading Californians." She grimaced. "They're going to get skin cancer, the lot of them. I keep sending her bottles of sunscreen, but I'm not sure it's enough."

Since I was staying safely in the frigid Midwest, I didn't require nearly as much sunscreen as my genius cousin, but Mom tucked a bottle into my bag anyway. And the next morning I left home and soon found myself on my new campus in my new life, three hours south of Glen Forest, registered as an official grad student.

Unlike my undergraduate years, I wasn't forced to take any sucky PE courses, pointless mathematics cla.s.ses or boring humanities prerequisites. I could focus exclusively on literature with my side order of library science.

But, just like my undergrad years, and my high school years before them, it turned out that academic issues weren't destined to be my problem-guys were. And just like my coursework increased in difficulty from the undergrad to grad level, so did the degree of conniving I encountered from the male members of the species. Brent Sullivan headed the 400-level cla.s.s on Problematic Men.

"Check the list," Brent said to me one early winter night during my first semester. "I dare you."

The curly-haired, future MBA grad leaned across Wilder Hall's front desk, where I was working the eight-to-ten p.m. shift. (I needed the money and wanted a job nearby. I lived on the third floor of Wilder, the only all-grad student dorm on campus, so it took me thirty-two seconds to get to work.) Brent pointed to the reservation book. The saucy twist to his lips only grew more p.r.o.nounced as he edged nearer to me.

I flipped open the book and, sure enough, his name was penciled in. Sauna key. Ten o'clock. That very night. In my best barbed tone, I said, "So, what then? Are you issuing a general invitation?"

He laughed and brought his nose a mere two inches from mine. "No. A very specific one. To you."

"I see." I pretended to be like a fine English lady I knew, and I forced my excitement and my anxiety under control. The sauna was our university's equivalent to something like Make Out Point, a locale visited for the purpose of getting personal with someone of the opposite s.e.x. A private invitation to the sauna was right up there with the come-on "My roommate's gone. Wanna come up and see my beer-can collection?"

"Do you, Ellie? Do you see?" Brent asked me.

I stared at Brent but didn't answer. He loved the chase and, having been his prey for a month now, I knew better than to give in too quickly. In studying his face for so long, though, I noticed that only a couple of small blemishes marred his smooth, golden complexion. His pores, though large, were somehow intriguing, especially up close like this. It made me laugh. That was my test to see if I had a bad case of l.u.s.t-when even a guy's pores looked s.e.xy.

"What's so funny?" he said, seeming surprised by my reaction and, for once, a little vulnerable. It was the vulnerability that finally got to me.

He pulled back a few inches, and I realized this was the moment of truth. The time when I needed to choose whether to follow up or not.

"You are," I told him. I glanced down at my Poetry 417 notes, riffled through them until I found the Henry Vaughan page, and began quoting from a complicated seventeenth-century poem called "Corruption."

I finished reading and Brent grinned carefully at me. "I have no freakin' idea what that means."

"I'll give you a hint," I said, pointing to the t.i.tle.

His grin broadened. "Ah. So that's what you see."

"Exactly," I said dryly, but I added a smile and a wink so he knew I was stepping into the game. "The verse is actually about death, but Vaughan named it 'Cor-"

He reached out and snagged my sweatshirt collar with his finger, tugging me toward him. He planted a kiss on my lips. A long, hot one. No doubt at all about his s.e.xual orientation. (Given my vast history of mistakes, I didn't want to misinterpret a guy's intentions again. I'd already made that error as an undergrad.) "I'll be back at ten, then," he informed me. And he strode away, the picture of fearlessness and unquestioned masculinity. The sauciness back in place. The vulnerability a well-used, now discarded tool.

The desk phone rang.

"Wilder Hall," I said, my lips still smoldering from Brent's kiss, my mind racing with the possibilities of where this relationship might be headed.

"Hi, Ellie! How are you?" The relentlessly cheerful voice of my cousin came across the line loud and clear.

"Angelique. What's up?" I asked this although I already had a sneaking suspicion. She'd been calling me from Stanford with goofy questions about s.e.x and dating all semester. California guys were, presumably, a new breed of male, and any prior advice about Midwestern men didn't apply.

"I've got a question for you." She paused to add suspense. "What do you wear to a bar mitzvah?"