Most Likely (Most Likely #1) - Sarah Watson Page 0,28
promised me twenty minutes.”
Scott sighed, and at that exact moment, his phone rang again. He laughed at the absurdity of it. Jordan did not. So he stopped laughing too. “One sec,” he said to her. “Office of Councilman Lonner. Scott Mercer speaking.”
Jordan couldn’t believe this. She grabbed her phone from his desk and tossed it in her purse. “Thank you so much for your time,” she said flatly, and started to walk out.
“Jordan. Wait.”
She turned back.
“Can you hang on for just a second?” he said into the phone. He put the call on hold. “Look, how about this. If you can come back, I’ll give you your full twenty minutes. It’ll give me time to talk directly to the councilman and get you an answer on what you were asking about. Because I honestly don’t know. But I’ll get you an answer, and I’ll give you your twenty minutes. You have my word.”
Another line on Scott’s phone rang. He threw up his hands like he couldn’t believe it. This time Jordan did laugh. So Scott laughed too. “And, Jordan, maybe we should make it outside of business hours. Do weekends work for you?”
Jordan nodded. “You had me at ‘I’ll give you your full twenty minutes.’”
“How about Saturday? Elevenish?”
“Let me consult my iCal.” Jordan knew she was free, but she made a big show of checking. “I can make that work.”
“Great,” Scott said. He smiled and his blue eyes sparkled. “It’s a date.”
“‘It’s a date’?” CJ was sprawled across Ava’s mom’s king-size bed with Ava on one side of her and Martha on the other. The three of them were staring at Jordan’s phone like it was an old-timey radio, not an iPhone balancing upright on a purple PopSocket playing back a recording of her interview. “What a creepy thing to say.”
Jordan poked her head out from the master bedroom closet. “It didn’t come out that way. I think he was just flustered.” She smiled triumphantly. “I flustered him.”
“Hell, yeah, you did,” said Martha before rolling onto her back. She grabbed a pillow and clutched it to her chest. “Did you hear that the Tylers started a YouTube channel about saving the park?”
CJ nodded. The Tylers were Tyler Welles and Tyler Ziegler, and they were best friends. Mostly because they were both named Tyler. “But have you seen it?” CJ asked. They were asking people to share their fondest park memories. In theory, it was a great idea. In execution, it was a disaster. “I’m not sure that a video of Grayson fondly remembering the time he got stoned underneath the slide is really going to help our cause.”
Jordan hovered in front of the closet. “I feel weird about this.” She turned to Ava. “Are you sure your mom won’t mind?”
“She won’t even notice anything’s gone. The stuff for Goodwill is in the back. It should be in a grocery bag.”
If Jordan was going to pull off a second interview, she needed a new professional outfit. Ava had graciously offered up the suits from her mom’s reject pile. As Jordan rooted around in the closet, Martha pulled up one of the Tylers’ videos. Sasha, a drama-club girl with bright-green eyes and a vacuous personality, delivered an overly dramatic monologue about how evil the city was for “oppressing our right to self-expression.” It was not convincing, and it made CJ feel tense. Like everything was up to them. She sat up and rubbed at her temples.
Sasha’s video finished, and Martha clicked on the next one. CJ was too distracted to watch. Something that had happened earlier that day was nagging at her. She grabbed the pillow from Martha and held it to her chest.
“Hey,” said Martha. “There are like ten other pillows on this bed. Take one of those.”
CJ didn’t give the pillow back. She hugged it tighter. “I had my meeting with the college counselor today.”
Jordan emerged from the closet. “Is this it?” She held up a grocery bag. “What’s wrong with CJ?”
CJ loosened her death grip on the pillow. “You had your meeting with Ms. Fischer today too, right?”
“Yeah,” Jordan said.
“Was it…” CJ didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
“It was… fine,” Jordan said tentatively in a way that made CJ think it was better than fine. “Why? How was yours?”
“Not fine. When I said that Stanford was my dream, she pursed her lips. Like, literally. She said that it was admirable to shoot for the stars but that we should talk about some realistic options too.”