Avalon High by Meg Cabot Page B

Lance in there, going at it?
    Or was I supposed to lie and go, “Jen? Nope. Haven’t seen her,” and let him continue to live in total ignorance of the fact that his girlfriend and best friend were a couple of lying skanks?
    Who could make a decision like that? Why did I have to be the one who’d walked in on them? I mean, I wanted Will to break up with Jennifer so he could be free to hook up with me—you know, if hell happened to freeze over, or something, and he asked me out.
    But I didn’t want to be the person who, however indirectly, caused that breakup by revealing his girlfriend’s true nature to him! Because whenever this happens to girls on soap operas or the WB or whatever, they never end up getting the guy….
    But before I could decide what to do, Will looked more closely at me and went, “Are you all right, Elle? You look sort of…pale.”
    I felt pale. In fact, I felt a little like I might throw up all that guacamole I’d scarfed down earlier.
    “I’m fine,” I said, though it sounded like a lie even to my own ears.
    “You’re not fine,” Will said firmly. “Come on. Fresh air time.”
    Then something amazing happened. He took my hand—grabbed it like it was the most natural thing to do in the world—and steered me toward a door I hadn’t noticed before. Then he pulled me up a narrow, steep stairway that opened out onto this kind of deck all alongthe roof of the house.
    In spite of the party below, which was in full swing, it was quiet out on the narrow little deck. Quiet and dark, with a fantastic view of the stars overhead, and the bay stretched out below us, the moon reflected like a bright ribbon of light across it. A cool breeze lifted my hair from my face, and immediately, I started to feel a little better.
    I leaned against the ornately carved railing that ran the length of the deck and gazed out at the bay, at the bridge that arched across it, and the occasional glow of a car’s headlights as someone drove over it.
    “Better?” Will asked.
    I nodded, feeling a little ashamed of myself, and wanting to distract him from looking at me too closely—I sensed that I was still slightly green around the gills—I asked brightly, “So what is this thing, anyway?” meaning the narrow parapet Will and I were standing on.
    “You really aren’t from around here, are you?” Will asked, with a grin. Then he joined me at the railing and said, “They call it a widow’s walk. All the old houses around here have them. People like to say they were built for the wives of sailors so they could come out and watch for their husbands’ ships to return.”
    “Nice,” I said sarcastically. Because, of course, if the husband didn’t return, it meant that his ship had gone down and the wife was now a widow, thus making her pretty little lookout post a widow’s walk.
    “Well,” Will said, with a laugh. “yeah. But that’s notreally what they were for. They were built so people could climb up here and put out the flames if their roof caught fire, back when they had to use their chimneys for heat and cooking and everything.”
    “Nice!” I said again, this time with even more sarcasm.
    Will smiled. “Yeah. I guess they should change the name.” He shrugged. “The view’s the same, no matter what they call it.”
    I nodded, admiring the shimmering band of light the moon cast across the water. “It’s nice,” I said. “Soothing.” Soothing enough to make a girl forget why she’d had to come out there in the first place. What was I going to do about Lance and Jennifer, anyway?
    “Yeah,” Will said, totally oblivious to my inner turmoil. “I never get tired of it. It’s the one thing that always seems to stay the same. The water, I mean. The color changes. Sometimes it’s flat. Sometimes there’s chop. But it’s always there. You can depend on it.”
    Not like his girlfriend and best friend.
    But I didn’t say this out loud, of course.
    I couldn’t help wondering if the new Mrs.