Chapter 5
Without Further Exposition

Kate

The moment I saw the Harringtons, I think I understood that they would change things. You could tell just looking at them. They were the kind of people who couldn't help but change things, whether they meant to or not. To back track a little, as soon as they stepped into the living room on that first day, I instantly felt that it would be a different summer entirely. And I'm not just saying that now.

But I'll tell you, I did not understand just then how much Rachel would change Adrien. Or how much, eventually, they would both change me.

For now though, it was only Adrien undergoing transformation.

He liked Rachel. A lot.

I set off to find him on Tuesday afternoon, for no particular reason aside from that I was lonely and that I knew for once he wasn't with his sisters and the Harringtons. I found him in his father's study, which had of late been largely adopted by him. When I stepped inside the door, Adrien was on the phone. He looked from behind his hair, smiled, and mouthed, "One second." I settled down on a chair. I watched idly out the window and sucked at my water bottle while Adrien finished the call.

Everyone else was outside. You could see them from here.

The Mansfields had two horses from several years back, when Jess had decided she needed one. That was before Adrien had taken charge over things like buying horses. Anyway, they'd turned out to be useful enough. Or at least, everyone—including me and excepting Jess who had wanted them in the first place—learned how to ride.

Manda and Jess were showing Scott and Rachel the horses now. Rachel appeared either terrified or delighted by them. Either way, she was putting on quite the performance down there, for no one in particular.

"Yes. Excellent. Thank you. Okay, bye." Adrien hung up the phone. Which meant he was talking to me when he said, "Good news."

I turned away from the window too look at him. He leaned back in his chair and continued. "I can take Behavior Management from 5:00 to 6:45 on Tuesday and still student teach this semester at the same time."

I chuckled a little, not because that was particularly funny but because Adrien looked so positively relieved. It was kind of cute. "Hurray," I said, raising my water bottle to him in a mock toast.

"Hurray," Adrien agreed, with a humorous degree of solemnity. He grabbed an empty soda can from the desk in front of him and tipped it against my bottle. I drank. And finally, he laughed. Then he said, "I still have to call Verizon, though."

I was tempted to throw my water bottle at him.

"Do it later," I said. It came out somewhere between a plea and a command. Adrien raised an eyebrow.

"I've managed to sneak away from Aunt Lucy, and it would be evil of you to spend my five free minutes on the phone."

"Evil," Adrien repeated, eyebrow still raised. Obviously laughing on the inside. This was the largest block of Adrien's attention I'd had since Rachel's arrival. I was glad he still found me unintentionally funny. A little victory.

"Yes. Evil," I confirmed, with all the mock seriousness I could muster. Adrien laughed out loud. And then, unfortunately, his eyes drifted to the window where he caught a glimpse of Rachel being adorable. And Rachel, unfortunately, caught a glimpse of the window. She waved enthusiastically. A sort of sloppy, puppy dog smile crossed over Adrien's face.

When someone spends all their time all their life with one person, it must not be unusual for them to have similar opinions on, well, basically everything. Up till now, Adrien and I had always thought pretty uniformly. But as I watched him watching Rachel, I knew that he was very quickly going where I couldn't follow.

Adrien smile faded and he sighed. "Kate, I don't have time for this," he said, still looking out the window.

I found I didn't want him to clarify.

"Prioritize," I suggested. I had the vague apprehension that I was digging my own grave. Sorry to use the cliché, but how else can you say it? I was giving him permission to reshuffle his priorities and put Rachel on the top of the list. And me on the bottom, if that's where I landed.

Of course, I didn't have the slightest suspicion that that was where I would land. And poor Adrien—I don't think he meant to put me there. He felt terrible about it afterwards.

Ridding lessons began for Rachel the very next morning. Adrien was naturally the primary teacher.

That conversation in the study was the last conversation I had with Adrien for the next four days. In fact, it was pretty much the last conversation I had with anyone other than Aunt Lucy and Mrs. Mansfield. I'm not going to tell you about the first three days. It would be just too tedious. I'll skip to day four. That's all you really need to hear to get the gist of how things were going for me.

Now when Aunt Lucy put me to work, I did what she said. But I wasn't a martyr—I didn't go looking for her in the morning or anything. Typically, I went looking for Adrien. But he had lost so much presence in my life that by the fourth day, I didn't even do that. I took my coffee straight up to my room. Within the hour, Aunt Lucy found me.

"Kate, aren't you going to do something about breakfast?" she asked.

Of course I was. And afterwards I was going to eat my portion in the kitchen, while in the dining room Rachel flirted with Adrien and Jess flirted with Scott. I could've eaten with them if I'd wanted to. But honestly, what for?

Manda came in half way through breakfast and startled me. "Kate, don't you think it's disgusting?" she demanded, slamming her plate into the sink. It didn't break. A small miracle.

I wasn't exactly sure what she was referring to. "I…um…" I stuttered. I wasn't used to Manda asking for my opinion about anything. It turned out, she'd been asking a rhetorical question anyway.

"She has, like, a fiancé and she's, like, all over Scott all the time!" It's impossible to express the vehemence with which Manda said this. Meanwhile, she was scrubbing her plate clean with remarkable violence. "DOES NOBODY NOTICE THIS BUT ME?" she practically shouted. We were lucky for sound-proof walls.

Whether this one was rhetorical or not, I answered. "Yeah, I noticed."

"Good," Manda said. She appeared to be doing yoga-related breathing exercises to calm herself down. "Adrien doesn't notice," she continued bitterly. "He's too obsessed with Rachel to notice anything." She glanced, a little too pointedly, at me. Sometimes I wondered whether Manda was smarter than she let on.

"Anyway," she shrugged, "I like Rachel at least."

I don't know whether she meant this to be mean or not.

Shortly following the Manda episode, Aunt Lucy found me and, after chastising me for "languishing in the kitchen when there was work to be done," she enlisted my services to clean up after everyone else. After that small and relatively painless task was finished, my day really began.

The Mansfields had a yard guy, who mowed the lawn and that sort of thing. He was also supposed to weed the beds behind the house, but it turned out he rarely did that. Once, as a joke, he'd asked me to marry him. And, as a joke, I'd said yes. I was not feeling so favorably inclined now that I was doing his job.

It was one of those 90-degree summer days, with a humidity index of at least 80. The flower beds were vast, and heavily invaded by weeds. There were really more weeds than beds at this point. I had my hair pulled back as best I could, with a rubber band and at least several hundred bobby pins. Not that that was helping too much. I'd been out since ten o'clock and now, at two, my T-shirt was soaked through. I had a migraine. I was possibly suffering from heat exhaustion.

After finally uprooting an especially deep-rooted dandelion, I laid back in the grass. Fatigue was taking over. I squinted at the sun and then threw my arm over my eyes to block it. I intended to catch my breath before I started working again.

"Kate, what are you doing?"

The question came from above me. It was Adrien's voice. It would have been alright if he were by himself. But when I opened my eyes, I came to find that he was, of course, with Rachel. Imagine what I looked like—sweaty, red-faced, covered in dirt, with my hair pulled back all funny. I groaned inwardly and struggled into a sitting position.

"Weeding," I answered. I moved from sitting to kneeling. I meant to start working again right away, as if I wasn't tired at all. But a particularly strong headache hit while I was moving and I winced.

Rachel kneeled down beside me. She had been being friendly towards me lately. It really just made things worse for me, because I had to like her for it. "Weeding, what fun can that be?" she asked with that air she had, like nothing in her life had ever bothered her.

"Working is better than not working," I answered and meant it. If I wasn't out here, I would just be inside hearing Mrs. Mansfields sniveling or Aunt Lucy's lectures.

Rachel laughed, charmingly of course. "Well, that's something I certainly don't understand." She threw a look at Adrien, as if she was talking mostly for his benefit. Then she continued, "You talk some sense into her, Adrien. I'll be inside." She laughed again and added, "Not working." And then she skipped away.

Adrien walked around me and sat down, facing me. He seemed to be studying me, but I wasn't really looking at him. I was digging furiously around another weed.

"You look terrible," he said finally.

"Well thank you," I snorted. I didn't look up at him.

"That's not what I meant, and you know it," Adrien sighed. "Look at me."

I obeyed. How could I not?

"How long have you been out here?" Adrien asked.

I sat back on my heels. "I don't know," I shrugged. "Like four hours or something."

"That's way too long. It's too hot."

"Working is better than not working," I repeated, in case he wasn't listening when I was talking to Rachel.

"I know what you mean." Adrien ran his hands down his face, a typical gesture of self-frustration. "It's my fault," he said. "I haven't been paying attention. Aunt Lucy's been bullying you."

"You have been a little distracting," I answered, not sure if I was excusing or accusing him.

Adrien laughed a little satirically. "Indeed," he said dryly, looking in the direction that Rachel had headed in and shaking his head slowly. "But seriously Kate," he said, as he turned back to me and leaned back on his hands, "never tell me to prioritize again. I'm obviously crap at it." His eyes were very apologetic.

"No, you're good at everything," I teased.

Adrien laughed. He stood, and helped me to my feet. "As for you," he said, "you get yourself inside right now and be as lazy as possible for the rest of the day. You're not allowed to do anything productive tomorrow either, for that matter."

I smiled. His concern was endearing, but it wasn't really as if he needed to be anymore endeared to me. We walked inside together. Then I headed up to the shower, and he headed to wherever Rachel was.

And I'd won a battle. But I couldn't help feeling I was loosing a war.

- - - - - -

To: Johnny Mansfields
From: Kate Pierson
Subject: La la la, I'm not listening

Your very bad, and very NOT funny, by the way. The Adrien-and-Kate-sitting-in-a-tree jokes are getting a bit old.

The apartment renters turned out to be quite the duo. You have to come now, so you can tell me what you think of them. Everyone else is enchanted, but nobody else is perhaps very perceptive, and that includes me.

Come on, come on, come on. You know you wanna.

Impatiently yours,
Kate

PS. I'm serious about your brother, though. Not even an ounce of romantic feelings. Not even a mili-ounce, and I think I just made that term up.

- - - - - - -

To: Kate Pierson
From: Jonny Mansfield
Subject: RE: La la la, I'm not listening

Methinks she doth protest too much.

I'll save the rest for when I see you, which will be soon, but I'm not saying when. I come as a thief in the night.

- - - - - - - - --

To: Johnny Mansfield
From: Kate Pierson
Subject!!

Jesus comes as a thief in the night. I wouldn't compare myself to him if I were you.

- - - - - - - - - -

A/N: I did proof read this chapter. Once. Quickly. Not as good as I would have liked too, so sorry for any typos—I have to take my computer apart now to take it back to school, and since I won't have it up again for several days I wanted to get this posted. Anyway, a round of applause for all of the wonderful reviewers, especially the ones I guilt tripped into reviewing ;o) Please keep on reviewing, I love it.

NotreDamegirlie: He he. I'm actually rather attracted to Scott as a character. Bastards are so sexy. This must be some twisted problem I have.

Amarafemi: I would love to try Sense & Sensibility someday. Perhaps, perhaps. It's all too much to think about right now. I mostly decided to do MP because I'm like the queen of unrequited love, and thus relate very well to Fanny, lol.

NNichollaa: I know what you mean. I actually think that Henry is the strongest character in Mansfield Park and he's, like, the "bad guy." I'm trying to make Kate quiet and a little submissive but still smart, with a mind of her own. I dunno. That's kind of how I see Fanny.

schokolade: Sorry about the typos. When I started this, I actually intended on writing the story through just Adrien and Kate's POVs. But then I just suddenly felt like Scott deserved to have one too. He plays such a huge part. And besides, it's kind of fun writing through the jerks' POV. :o)

cookie: Thank 'ya! I'm still trying, getting better at it, I think.

jencogmatic: I'm excited to see where I'm going from here too, lol.

Hollie Black: I meant to get this chapter done faster for ya, cuz you left me such loverly reviews. I was home all day Friday and I fully intended to be productive. And then I ended up plodding around the house in my PJs and watching mindless romantic comedies. Ah, life.

BeyondtheSea: Tar and feather him, that's what we'll do!

Huntress of the stars: Another chapter down! I'm feeling v. accomplished. I'm starting school in another week, but I am, vaguely, in the back of my head, thinking about doing another little Shakespeare fic—Taming of the Shrew or maybe Much Ado About Nothing. As long as things don't get more hectic at school than I expect them too. I dunno, we'll see.

BreezyGirl: Hope you enjoyed Kate and Adrien's triumphant return :o)

missusmesser: Why thank you! And thank you for reviewing!

Linnath: I shall give you insight into my mind. Tell me what you think: At this point, in my head, Kate has no family. I isolated her because I think it works better in the story. Instead of going to her family, I have plans for Kate to go to college, early to take a couple summer classes. I think the most important thing is that she leaves the Mansfields and gets her act together, not so much where she goes.