I was lost in thought when my phone rang. I looked down and saw it was Adrienne.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I have some bad news. We had a model get hurt in a car accident.”
“It wasn’t Kara, was it?” I asked, suddenly worried.
“No, but I sent Kara to take her place. Kara won’t be able to be your date for Prom.”
“She warned me, I guess,” I said dejectedly.
“I feel bad, but you realize business has to come first,” Adrienne reasoned.
Of course I did. What made it bearable was that Kara hadn’t promised to come; she said she would if she could. I know it didn’t help that I would now be going to my prom stag, but it wasn’t like she’d broken her word to me, either. Kara had made a tough choice to go into modeling full time. I respected that she took it seriously.
“No, that’s fine,” I said to let Adrienne off the hook.
“What do you plan to do?” she asked.
“I’ll just go by myself and have fun. I’m sure I can find some girls willing to dance with me.”
Adrienne chuckled. It didn’t sound like she felt too sorry for me.
“I’ll find you someone. Jackie Chan will be there to take photos, and you need someone like Melinda at your side for Prom,” Adrienne said.
That made me feel better. Melinda would be fun to hang out with again, both during and after Prom. I wasn’t letting Adrienne completely off the hook.
“If you think that would be best,” I said with a sigh.
She chuckled again at my dramatics. I thought I was a better actor than that.
“Cheer up. Kara wasn’t happy with me. She said I had to make it right and call you personally,” Adrienne explained.
“I’m all growed up. I’ll put on my big-boy pants and suffer through. Tell Kara good luck on her shoot and that I’ll miss her.”
“As long as you’re being a big boy, I’ll let her know you’re okay,” Adrienne teased.
After we hung up, I started to daydream about alternative dates. Melinda would be a lot of fun, but maybe Adrienne knew Hailey Clauson, the girl who had been the blonde bombshell on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Another one I wouldn’t be disappointed in was Kate Bock. Now that was a sexy woman.
I’d just finalized my top-25 wish list when Cassidy jabbed me in the ribs.
“Earth to David.”
I scrunched up my eyebrows and gave her a dirty look.
“What?”
“I asked,” Brook announced to get my attention, “why am I not going to Cuba, and Cassidy is?”
“Rumor has it they’re going to Japan with you,” Halle chimed in.
I didn’t need this. Maybe I could leave for Cuba tomorrow. I turned to Zoe and raised an eyebrow. In the past weeks, I’d been practicing facial expressions, and raising just one eyebrow was harder than you might expect.
“I can’t afford to go,” Zoe said.
“I’ll make you all a deal. If I make the USA Under-18 National Team, I will fly you all out for the games in Monterrey, Mexico.”
“Wow, thanks, man,” Tim said.
I looked around at the table, and everyone was smiling at me. I’d only meant to invite Zoe, Brook, Halle, and Cassidy. Now it looked like Tim, Wolf, Tracy, Pam, and Lisa thought they were invited, too. I would have to start saving up so my debit card could pay for the trip. If I didn’t, I would have to listen to Caryn about my spending habits again. This might fall right into what she warned me about: spending money on my friends. I gave Tim a tight smile.
Then I remembered my life goals. One of them was to learn to say ‘no.’ I also thought back to a passage from The Godfather. I remembered it from the book and had thought it was too bad it never made the movie. It involved Tom Hagen telling Michael the one lesson he hadn’t yet learned from his father Vito was how to say ‘no.’ When Hagen was gone, Michael asked his father for just that.
Vito said you can’t say ‘no’ too often, not to your friends, but when you did, it was always best to make it sound like a ‘yes.’ So now what I had to do was figure out how to do that.
I decided that since I had my closest friends here, I should just tell them how I felt about stuff like this. It would be better than taking one of them aside, and then the message getting messed up.
“I think we need to talk about this,” I said, and everyone looked at me.
I gave them a weak smile. This was harder than I expected because I wanted to be liked, and spending money on people was a strategy Uncle John had pointed out to me. One consequence of knowing about strategies was that once you realized you used them, you could change. I honestly didn’t want to buy my friends. I wanted friends who liked me for who I was and not what I could do for them.
“Remember when I had the chance to take the young Han Solo role and turned it down?” I asked.
They all nodded.
“Turning it down was easy once I realized what I’d be losing. If I’d taken that role, it would have meant I would give up the rest of my junior year of high school and all of my senior year. Yeah, I didn’t want to give up my dream of football. But even more important, I didn’t want to give up my friends, and I didn’t want to have to grow up that fast,” I said.
“I wondered why. That had to have been tough. I’m not sure I would’ve made the same decision,” Halle said.
I smiled at her. Halle was in a different position than I was. She knew she wanted to be a movie star. She also hadn’t yet made walk-away money doing movies.
“I’m not sure I could have turned it down this time last year. The money and potential it offered with other roles down the road would have been too much to give up. If I hadn’t gotten the signing bonus for the two Star Academy movies, I might have been forced to take it,” I admitted.
Halle nodded her understanding.
“The bottom line is there aren’t many people in the world I can really count on as friends, and almost all of them are right here, at Lincoln High.
“Last year, when we all went on those recruiting trips together, I did it because I wanted to keep going to school with all of you, and I still do. A part of that is because I want to keep playing football with you. But the major part is that I want to keep my friends together and with me. In a way, it’s kind of selfish,” I said, and then looked at Wolf before I continued.
“Looking back, we added a lot of extras on those trips. The fancy hotel and the, uh, companionship in Georgia, the wild stuff at a few other schools. They were a lot of fun, but they had consequences. And later, my parents pointed out that it seemed like I was trying to buy your friendship.
“I didn’t want to do that, but you guys are my friends. I always want you to be happy and have the chance to have experiences you might not otherwise be able to. It confuses me sometimes, trying to keep everything in perspective and figuring out what’s right to do. Sometimes, it confuses me a lot,” I said with a sigh.
“I’ve never felt that way about you, and I would be the first to say something if I did,” Wolf said.
“I’m glad to hear that, but let me finish my thought. There’s the other side of the coin. I desperately want friends I know are friends because they just are, not because of my money or what I can do for them. No, I don’t mean like helping you with your goals by helping you get an internship. That doesn’t cost me anything, and it’s something I’m absolutely glad to do for my friends because they’re my friends.
“But let me give you an example. One time, I showed up at a party, and the first thing the hostess said was, ‘Oh good, you have to buy the pizza.’ It turns out I paid for the booze, too. When I pulled some money out of my wallet, she just grabbed it out of my hand, turned, and walked away. I just wondered if I was there because she liked me or because I had a fat wallet. I absolutely hated that feeling.