Envy

They didn’t call it comfort food for nothing.

But comfort wasn’t in the cards.

“Do you see what I see?” Miranda hissed to Harper as soon as they’d stepped inside the coffee shop. At Harper’s clueless look, Miranda jerked her head toward the far wall, where Beth was huddled over a stack of notebooks, clearly studying her bland little heart out. Not a big surprise. The surprise was sitting across from her- and his name was Kane. She pulled Harper back out the door, hoping they hadn’t been seen. “What’s he doing with her?”

“Calm down, she’s just tutoring him for the SATs,” Harper said impatiently. “Can we please go back inside now?”

“She’s tutoring him?” Miranda asked incredulously.

“What’s the difference?”

Harper could be so dense sometimes. Miranda knew that when Kane looked at her, he didn’t see some babe he was desperate to bed. She knew he probably didn’t even see someone he was that eager to be friends with (fortunately for her, he was stuck with her by default-she and Harper were pretty much a package deal). But she’d always thought that he’d at least seen her as a brain. Who did he call when he needed to copy some homework? Who did he go to when he needed to cheat on a test?

Miranda, that’s who. It had been her one thing, and she had always hoped that someday it might be her in. It was, if nothing else, a start.

So what had changed?

“The difference is, if he needed someone to tutor him, why didn’t he just ask me?” Miranda asked, staring at the two of them through the window. They were laughing about something, and she saw Kane briefly touch Beth’s arm. And she knew. “He’s after her, isn’t he?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Harper said quickly. “She’s dating one of his best friends. Even Kane wouldn’t stoop that low.”

“But look at them in there,” Miranda said dubiously.

“Miranda, if he were after her, I would know. I promise.”

“I still don’t understand what he’s doing with her,” she complained. “They’re not even friends.” And she wanted very much for it to stay that way. As far as she was concerned, she had one-and only one-advantage over the bimbos Kane constantly draped himself with. They were bimbos-and Miranda wasn’t. So if he ever got tired of making conversation with beautiful airheads, if he ever wanted a real relationship with a real girl, where else would he look but his old friend Miranda? Or, at least, that was her secret hope. But it all depended on the fact that, aside from Harper, Miranda was the only girl of substance he really knew-until now. For all Beth’s blandness, she was sharp, serious. Real. If he befriended tall, slim, beautiful Beth, if she was in his life when he finally stopped playing the field-then Miranda’s last, best hope was dead.

“I’m sure it’s nothing, Rand, really,” Harper assured her. “Can we go in now?”

But Miranda shook her head and turned away without a word, walking back over to the car. Her appetite was gone.

They had spent two hours buried in books, digging their way through algebra equations and an endless list of synonyms for good and evil. And there was still so much more to do. Beth felt the familiar flutter of panic as she began to think about the massive number of practice questions she needed to get through and strategies she needed to memorize before the big test-but somehow, everything seemed a little less daunting than before. Maybe because, thanks to Kane, she was no longer alone. Maybe because he’d bought her a mug of chocolate milk and a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie, the best in town. (It was a little juvenile, Beth knew, but her sweet tooth demanded daily chocolate intake, and nothing was better than a Bourquin’s cookie dipped into a frosty glass of chocolate milk. Kane had been only too happy to oblige.) Maybe it was just Kane, sitting across the table from her, working, questioning, laughing-making the time fly by. They’d only had one afternoon together, but she could already tell that working with Kane was going to be nothing like she’d expected.

He was nothing like she’d expected, Beth mused, watching him up at the counter grabbing them both refills.

The Kane she knew was smug and self-absorbed, caustic and catty, and above all, lazy.

Not this Kane.

Not the guy who’d pulled out her chair for her when she’d sat down, who’d thanked her so profusely for spending the time to tutor him, and who’d been working diligently, without a break-or a single snide remark-for more than two hours.

No, this was a complete stranger to her. But she hoped he wouldn’t be for long.

Adam flipped through the channels idly, too bored to watch anything for more than a few seconds. It was pretty slim pickings: a Food Channel documentary on the secrets of cereal (hot stuff), a stupid political show… even ESPN was showing some kind of greatest hits montage of old golf shots, and who wanted to watch that? No one under the age of sixty-five. Adam would be willing to bet on it. And thanks to Secrets of Las Vegas, showing around the clock on the Travel Channel, he now knew exactly how and where to do so.

Just because Beth had stood him up was no reason to spend the day lying around on the couch, counting the cracks in the ceiling, he reminded himself. It’s not like he didn’t have plenty of other friends and plenty of other options. It was just that there didn’t seem to be much of a point. Why go to all that effort just to do something he didn’t particularly want to do? He wanted to spend some time with his girlfriend. Was there something wrong with that?

So he’d told the guys to leave him out of whatever half-assed activity they’d come up with for the afternoon (last he’d checked, it had been a tie between bowling and shooting rats down at the town dump-neither a big draw, as far as he was concerned). But half-assed activity or not, he was beginning to regret the decision. Even hunting rats might be better than lying on the couch nibbling stale pizza all day.

Lucky for him-and for the rats-the phone rang.

“I thought you might be a little bored,” Harper said by way of a greeting.

She didn’t know the half of it.

“I just ran into Kane and Beth at the coffee shop,” she continued, “and figured you might need someone to play with.”

Adam’s stomach clenched, but he forced himself to ignore it. He also forced himself-and it took a significant mental and physical effort-not to request any details. So what if his girlfriend and his best friend were getting cozy over coffee while he played couch potato?

“She’s tutoring him for the SATs,” Adam explained gruffly.

“I heard that,” Harper said in a perky voice. “It’s so nice of her-I know how busy she always is. It’s great that she made the time for him.”

Drive the knife in a little deeper, why don’t you, he thought, but struggled to keep his irritation in check. After all it’s not like any of this was Harper’s fault.

“You know Beth,” he offered half-heartedly.

“She just can’t say no,” Harper agreed.

Interesting choice of words, Adam mused. Lately, it seemed that “no” was the only word in Beth’s vocabulary. At least when it came to him. When it came to the questions that counted.

But that, too, wasn’t Harper’s fault.

“So I’m bored,” he admitted. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Funny you should ask…”

Freshly showered and changed from his ratty Lakers shirt and boxers into jeans and a slightly less ratty Red Sox shirt, Adam met Harper in his driveway, and they drove to the 8 Ball, a pool hall on the outskirts of town. The place was reliably empty on a Sunday afternoon, except for a few die-hard pool sharks and a deathly pale, spiky haired bartender with a thick snake tattoo coiled around the length of his right arm. He waved at Harper as she came in, and Harper grinned back, giving him a sly wink.

“You know that guy?” Adam asked. But she’d already left his side, flitting over to the bar to order them a pitcher of beer. With a bemused shrug, he followed behind and slid into a seat at the bar next to her as she poured them both a mug of Pabst. It was crap, but it was also five dollars a pitcher-three on Sunday afternoons. The large wooden sign on the wall read CONSERVE WATER: DRINK BEER-and Adam was only too