The Downfall of the 'It Girl'

Let's have ourselves a little talk here, shall we??....

“Yeah, well, she works really hard and deserves it,” I replied, and that most definitely wasn't a lie. And once I had spoken the words, I knew that was exactly what I was going to do: give the new car to my mom. The car she currently drove was beginning to have problem after problem, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise that Landon had provided us with a solution before the problem had a chance to get any worse than it already was. “I didn’t really come over here so you could check out the car, though…” I added after another minute or two of silence. I desperately wanted to get back on track to the reason why I had come over here.

“I know,” he said, still gazing out of the large front window. After several more seconds had passed, he slowly turned around to face me, where I still stood near the couch, about twenty feet away. “Fine, Jenna. You wanna talk? Let’s talk,” he added.

“Here?” I asked, glancing around similar to how he had done earlier.

“No, not here…” he paused, as if he were thinking of where the best place for us to talk privately would be. “Follow me. We’ll talk out back,” he said after a moment, and began making his way through the house, with me following a little ways behind him. Making our way through the magnificent house, we wound up entering a kitchen that Gordon Ramsey would be envious of, and stepped outside through a sliding glass door onto a massive back deck that was about three-quarters of the backside of the house in length.

The backyard was beautiful. Hedges and flower bushes that I didn’t know the names of all around the edges of the deck, a decently sized oval-shaped in-ground pool about fifty feet or so away from the deck. Their yard spread for about another half an acre in the back, the well-manicured lawn ending at a line of giant oak trees.

“Wow, it’s really nice back here,” I breathed, taking in the scenery.

“Thanks,” Calvin replied nonchalantly, making his way over to a patio set to over to our right. I followed behind silently, and sat in a chair across from the one that he had chosen.

“So you wanna talk, huh?” he asked, slightly cocking his head to one side. 

“I do,” I answered, nodding my head. My stomach was a mess between the nerves and the butterflies inside of it. I wrung my hands nervously underneath the tabletop.

“Well, let’s talk, then,” he said, leaning backwards in his chair.

“Okay,” I said slowly, carefully, trying to figure out exactly where I wanted to begin with all of this.

“First off, you can tell me where that car out from REALLY came from,” he said suddenly. I couldn’t help but look over at him, stunned.

How had he known that the car hadn't come from some contest?, I wondered to myself, unable to find my voice to respond to him.

“Uhh… What do you mean: ‘Where it really came from’?” I asked, still trying to figure out how he knew that I had been fibbing for one thing, and trying to buy myself a little bit of time, for another.

“Well, the shocked expression on your face when I said that was kind of a dead giveaway for starters, Jenna. And I have this incredible knack for being able to tell when someone is trying to get one over on me,” he replied, the expression on his face surly and unpleasant. Oh, this was really not starting off well at all. 

“Oh,” was all I said in response, dropping my head to stare at my hands twisted together in my lap.

“If we’re going to sit and have this talk that you seem so badly to want to have, then I suggest you start being completely honest with me. If you’re not, trust me, I will know,” he said, an eerie calmness in his voice.