Hallie Hath No Fury . . . by Katie Finn Page A

check if she could switch lanes. Normally my mother was cheerful, if always a little frazzled, too likely to get caught up in her latest manuscript to remember about dinner, then ordering out for enough pizza to keep us in leftovers for a week. But when she wasn’t working, she was chatty—which made her sudden silence feel all the more ominous.
    I was still trying to get my head around it myself—the unexpected turns the summer had taken. It had started out amazing, like something out of a storybook. We’d been living in a cottage on the beach, and my mom was happy—her writing and teaching both going well. And there had been Gemma Tucker and her father, Paul. From the outset, Gemma and I had had a ton of freedom to hang out at the beach all day, ride our bikes around, swim in the pool of the crazy mansion where Gemma was living, the house of a real-life movie producer. It was a world I’d never thought I’d get to spend any time in, and there was a piece of me that was selfishly glad that my older brother, Josh, hadn’t been there, too. It seemed like Josh was always getting to do cool stuff in interesting places (the benefit of being a crazy-good lacrosse player) so I was thrilled that for once, it was happening just to me.
    My mom told me after the first week that she and Paul were thinking about dating—wanting to see if I was okay with it. My mother hadn’t dated anyone seriously since my dad had died five years earlier, and I found, a little to my surprise, that I was okay with it. I really liked Paul, but mostly, I saw how happy he made my mom.
    There had been a few bumps in the road, of course—my mom accidentally put the wrong date on my birthday Evite, which meant nobody came—but for the most part, things had been great. Until the night of the dinner party.
    My mom had been so excited about it—Paul’s big-time agent was going to be there, and he was going to consider representing her as well. There were editors, journalists, people who might be able to help her book really succeed. But the party hadn’t gone like my mother had hoped, and over the next few days, we watched, horrified, as everything started to fall apart.
    She was accused of plagiarizing her novel, and from all over the Internet, people were rushing forward with examples to prove it. Paul’s agent wanted nothing to do with her. Her publisher canceled her book contract and made her return the money she’d been paid for it. And yesterday, the Hamptons Writing Workshop had fired her and told us we had twenty-four hours to vacate the rental house we’d lived in all summer.
    We’d jumped into action because we had to, packing up a summer’s worth of things and cleaning out the refrigerator. But the action had been interrupted by the most terrible revelation yet—that Paul was the one who had started the rumor that she’d plagiarized her book. It was that blow that seemed to do my mother in. She basically hadn’t said anything, not even when Paul and Gemma stopped by, Paul to try and explain what happened and to give us a box of our stuff that had migrated over to their house.
    Gemma had stayed in the car, occasionally glancing at me but then looking away. I guess she didn’t know what to say, and there was a piece of me that wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault—and maybe if she would have gotten out of the car, I would have. But she just stayed there, not meeting my eye—as if we hadn’t spent almost every day of the summer together—her expression … troubling, though I couldn’t say why, exactly.
    Paul and Gemma left soon after that, and my mom and I put the last boxes in the car, then drove back to Brooklyn in suffocating silence.
    I just couldn’t understand it.… Why would Paul have done something like that? It didn’t make any sense, and any explanation I would try out just seemed to ring