Disclaimer in part one.
Here's the next installment; I'm trying to stay far enough ahead of the postings so that I don't have to repost old chapters that have been reedited(I had to do that almost every other chapter with "Miles and Miles" and it sucked, so I'm really trying to avoid that.). Also, again—just pretend that pretty much everything that's happened since the end of last season hasn't happened, except for "Gumdrops" though I actually haven't seen that episode, and Sofia's switch to a detective. Enjoy! And review!
Grace and Jules stumbled through the day, sticking with each other but not really talking. Grace was still incredibly ticked off with Jules—didn't her sister get it? Instead of trying to live up to Mom's expectations of respect, good manners, and tact, Jules had turned into a human hurricane, intent on disrupting anything in her path. She was snippy to the math teacher, someone mentioned to Grace that Jules was 'acting up' in band, she snarled at a lunch lady. That morning, Grace had only been half as worried; Jules was fine with Sara and Nick. But now, at school, she was just being nasty. Grace was sick of being the meek, polite sister who put up the good front and didn't say anything while letting Jules pitch her fit in public. She was actually relieved to go to tennis practice.
Grace liked her new tennis coach; Jennifer wasn't anything like Coach Morriston back home, but she was youthful, energetic, and passionate about the sport. She was the tennis pro at the Desert Hills Country Club, too, where the girls practiced.
It was cooler out, meaning that it wasn't 120 degrees, thankfully. She tightened the laces on her clean white shoes and took a deep breath before emerging from behind a set of lockers. Tennis's official season was spring, but the girls all played on the same club team, which conveniently was coached by Jennifer, too.
The other girls, in the other part of the locker room, were laughing and changing. One particularly outgoing one, a junior named Sascha, was dancing around a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Grace quickly put her head down, sproinged her fingers against the strings to test them, and walked out to the courts.
Only one of the other girls was standing there. Charlotte Ambrose was an intense, slightly scary junior seeded second on the team, though Grace was fairly certain she could beat her when they reseeded—Grace knew that she was quicker than pretty much everyone else. Charlotte was tall, lean, with chocolate-milk skin; her longs legs and muscular arms lent her an excellent serve, though she was more net-game than sheer power, which would eventually be detrimental. Her hair was pushed back with a powder-blue headband, and she wore a matching shirt and wraparound white skirt. Grace shrugged and decided that she'd have to make friends sometime.
She walked up to Charlotte, who was practicing her serve, picking up stray balls and batting them away with her racket as she moved. "Hey," she said.
Charlotte turned to her, startled at being interrupted. "Hey," she said tentatively. "You're back?"
Grace rubbed her lips a little before replying. "Yeah. Do you want to practice? I'm a little rusty."
"That's alright." Charlotte said. "You're kinda entitled," she blurted out, then immediately covered with, "I'm sorry. That was insensitive."
"No, it's alright." Grace said. "Do you just want to serve back and forth or whatever?"
"Yeah. Hey, I'll switch sides." Charlotte jogged across to the other half of the court. "Hey—I'm sorry. I should have said that first, but I'm sorry." She looked completely unsure of herself. "If it helps—and I'm again, completely sorry if this is totally insensitive—but my dad died, car accident, when I was eleven. I know the situations are totally different, of course. But—yeah. It's horrible. So, I'm sorry. And I've been there, too—if you ever need advice, or—I don't know. This conversation's getting really stupid. I'm sorry. I'll just serve now." She swung her arm upwards in a perfect arc before slamming the ball towards Grace.
They volleyed back and forth for a while, but the ball eventually went past Grace. She didn't mind; her heart wasn't really into it. The rest of the girls were petering out of the locker room, anyways; Jennifer was tightening her ponytail in the doorway of her small shed of an office. Grace began to play with her racket strings and walk away, before abruptly turning back to Charlotte. "Does it stop?" she called suddenly.
Charlotte stopped walking, too. She knew what Grace was talking about. "Does what stop? The ache? Or the meaningless words of 'sympathy'?" she drawled the last few words.
"Any of it. All of it." Grace said desperately.
Charlotte smiled and shrugged. "Not really. Not for a long time. But, just when you're sick of everyone being timid and especially, overly kind, it stops. They go on, they have other crap to deal with. And then you want it back. It's still kind of like that for me, on stuff like Father's Day, or Christmas, or his birthday or his death anniversary. You want other people to notice, and to hug you. But—maybe if you mention it, they'll do it the first couple of times. But after that, it's just—lonely. But, hey," she tried to smile. "You're a twin, right? That means you've got like a built-in partner, who's been there and is experiencing everything and reacting to it, too, and all that. My sister's four years younger, she wasn't a help. She was only seven. She's still only twelve."
Grace sighed. "Yeah—but Jules and I are really, really different. I'm quieter, polite; she's willful and independent and always one of those trailblazing people. She—anyways, we take things differently—right now she's being all angry and bitchy with everyone. She's just being so Jules about it. She's anxious and hyper and she always assumes the worst in a crisis. Which is weird because she's one of the most organized, single-minded people I know. But she's high-strung, I guess."
"But you understand, right?" Charlotte said hopefully, like a negative reply would crush her illusions about twins. Which, Grace knew from experiences with other non-twins, were mostly unfounded and had the word 'telepathy' in them. "I mean, you know her completely, so you know why she's acting like that?"
"I know her enough to know I should have anticipated the reaction." Grace said hotly. "But I'm not going to condone it. She's in the wrong. Mom—" her voice cracked but she was getting much better at this, "Mom wouldn't have liked it. And she knows that."
"Give her time," Charlotte shrugged again. "My mom and I—for a whole year or so after Dad died, we would just argue and argue. I didn't speak to her for a month when her sister set her up with this guy. It was just shocking—we'd been so close, and I thought we were alike, but—" there was that shrug again, "even the smallest differences in personality—there were big differences in our reaction. But eventually, your sister's going to be the only one who remembers the stuff that you're remembering on those big days, so just give her room and keep being close to her, I guess. Mom and I eventually worked through it. She remarried a couple of months ago, and we're doing good now, pretty much. But it took a long time."
Practice started then, and Grace concentrated as much as she could on the drills and scrimmages that she was assigned. She did Tennis Suicides, worked on her serve, and did forehand/backhand drills. She found that if she concentrated totally on the task, she could wipe her mind fresh. Almost, anyways.
As they were all packing up, putting their rackets in duffels and pulling Nike synthetic zip-ups over themselves, Charlotte approached Grace. "I was wondering—do you want to go out for smoothies or something right now? There's a great juice bar only a few blocks from here."
Grace hesitated, unsure how to turn Charlotte down. "Sure," she said, surprising herself. "You lead the way."
Charlotte drove to a small, strip-mall store called The Juice Box. Tiny, and decorated in bright tropical colors, it was mostly empty. They ordered at the counter before sitting down. "So, why did you start to play tennis?" Charlotte asked brightly, setting her purse aside. "You're really good, you know."
"Really? Thanks." Grace sat across from Charlotte. "Well. I was about six, or so, and my mom was a court judge at local tennis matches. We lived in California— Sacramento— everyone played tennis really, and Mom loved tennis. So she'd drag me and Jules along, and eventually we just started taking lessons. We both played till we were about nine or ten, but then—I don't know, it stuck with me but it didn't stick really with Jules. She was swimming by that point—she was always this tall, long, little kid. She could kick and paddle her way into medals. With Jules, that was the hook. Eventually, she fell for the sport—but when it was swim practice or tennis practice and swimming got her medals, she went with that. I kept playing tennis. It was fun, lots of my friends did it, stuff like that. When I was about thirteen, I joined a tennis club; since then—it's just been something fun, that I know I'm good at and I like to do well with it. I like the feeling, you know? After you've played a great game. But, it's not like swimming, where thirty seconds can make or break you. I'm too—that's not for me." She smiled. "What about you?"
Charlotte smiled at the barista—was that the right term, if they served smoothies instead of lattes?—as she set their drinks down. "Well," she said, stirring the straw in her strawberry-vanilla smoothie. "My dad, actually, got me started. We didn't used to live here—my mother moved us out here a year after Dad died so that we could get a 'fresh start.' Anyways, we used to live in Maryland. My dad was white, came from this very wASPy family. I actually call his mother 'Grandmother Helen.' They were around at the founding of Virginia, some ancestors of his served in the House of Burgesses or something. He grew up pretending to be a Kennedy—sailing, horseback riding, golfing, and, of course, tennis. They had summer homes and yachts and everything. Completely in that stereotype. My dad wasn't—his family was, his background was. He married my mom, had me and then Caroline, and he started me on tennis when I was like four to spend time with me after Mom had Caroline. We have pictures of me from back then, with the other little girls I played with. They had names like mine, Helen Louise Davies and Sylvia Sloane-O'Henry and Marguerite Dickinson. But they were all the whitest, wASPiest girls you've ever seen, and I'm in the middle, too tall and knobby-kneed, and of course, half-black." She laughed, a big gut laugh, and Grace smiled. "Anyways, he started me out. After he died, I refused to play, actually. Mom made me restart after we moved out here. She said it'd be good for me, and I guess it has." She had a crooked smile, Grace noted, "What do you think of Vegas?"
Grace shrugged. "It's—actually, it's one of the weirdest concepts ever. The whole town is built around gambling. Everything ties into it. There's no infrastructure. It's just odd. Gambling and tourism." She giggled. "It's a ridiculous concept, I know. But—it just feels that way. What do your parents do?"
Charlotte rolled her eyes and smiled. "You're going to love me. Mom's in the tourism—that's marketing in Vegaspeak—department at the Bellagio. And my stepfather runs a security-consulting company that caters to the casinos."
"See, exactly my point." The girls laughed amicably. Grace looked at her watch. "I actually told Sara that I'd be home at about six, which was totally about forty-five minutes ago. I'd better go."
"Who's Sara?" Charlotte rose, brushing the table with her palm.
"She's my mother's cousin. She's who we're living with now."
"Your cousin? She cool?"
"Yeah—pretty much. We're getting along. She's—she's been there, she—Sara's just good, I guess. She's trying as hard as she can. We're—we're getting along. I think we're adjusting." Grace suddenly felt exhausted. "Anyways. That was random. So I'm going to get going."
"Cool." Charlotte said. "Hey—if you're not busy Saturday night, a bunch of us are going to karaoke at this bar. I mean, we're not drinking or anything—it's just this little karaoke bar that we sometimes go to. There's going to be about eight or nine of us. I promise they're not all juniors. If you want to go, just give me a call. Your sister's invited too."
"Thanks," Grace said. "I've never been to karaoke."
"You should definitely come then. It's pretty sweet. We have a lot of fun. What's your cell number?" they traded phone numbers, waved goodbye. Grace watched Charlotte pull cleanly into the flow of traffic before following.