In Too Fast (Freshman Roommates #2)

Chapter 1

I spent my whole life trying to be in the driver’s seat.

And then I got behind the wheel.

My father stood about ten feet away from me. Or about seven bridesmaids away, smiling his father-of-the-bride smile for the wedding photographer. His arm around his daughter—the bride, my older half-sister—standing next to him.

“Bridesmaid on the end. Smile, please. Happy thoughts,” the photographer coaxed, and I realized he was talking to me.

I flashed my brightest smile. The happy thought that went through my mind was that of the photographer bursting into flames and this whole charade finally being over.

He took a few more shots and then motioned the bridal party away and called out his next setup.

“Bride’s side, immediate family only, please. ”

I left the altar area and walked with the other bridesmaids—none of whom had said more than three words to me this whole, excruciatingly long weekend—toward the back of the church sanctuary.

I couldn’t get out of there quick enough, but the other bridesmaids stopped only a few rows past where the photographer was set up in the middle of the center aisle.

The same aisle I’d marched down just over an hour ago when my half-sister, Betsy Stratton, married Jason Bohnner III.

It might not have been so bad if it was the type of processional where your corresponding groomsman walked you down the aisle. But Betsy chose the route where each bridesmaid walked down by herself, meeting up with their guy at the altar.

You could have heard a pin drop before my entrance, while the other girls walked down the aisle, accompanied by a tasteful—in a sea of tasteful, this wedding—harpist. Not so when I entered the church.

Ever hear a swarm of locusts off in the distance but heading your way?

Me neither (not many locust invasions at my oh-so-posh Maryland college), but I imagined that was what the low hum in the very crowded church sounded like when I began my procession.

But I held my head high, pasted on a smile, straightened my shoulders, flipped back my totally awesome hair (my mother sent me to her DC stylist last weekend—begrudgingly, after she realized no way in hell would she be permitted to accompany me to this wedding) and pretended I didn’t hear a thing and that they were all just jealous.

Like I’ve been doing most of my eighteen years.

Hey, you tell yourself something long enough, you start to believe it’s true.

The other bridesmaids all took seats, their attention on the front of the altar, where the Stratton family—plus their newest addition, Jason—were gathering for the family shot.

Not being an emotional cutter (or any other kind, for that matter) I turned and started to make my way to the back of the church only to hear, “Jane, wait.”

If it were Betsy’s voice, or even my father’s, I would pretend I didn’t hear and keep walking. But it was Caroline Stratton, Betsy’s mother, my father’s ex-wife, who called to me, and so I stopped and turned around to see her motioning for me to join them at the altar.

As I walked back toward the group, I caught the look that passed between Betsy and her older brother—my half-brother (yeah, totally confusing)—Joseph Stratton, Jr.

Joey, to his friends. I didn’t consider myself amongst that group. When I did have to talk to him—which was not often—I called him Joseph. He’d never corrected me.

The look between Betsy and Joey only lasted a second, was completely silent, but could be summed up like this:

Betsy: Are you effing kidding me? I invited her to the wedding because Mom and Dad made me. I even made her a bridesmaid because Daddy is paying for the whole thing and said I had to. But the family photos? Really?

Joey: Give her an inch…just like her mother.

Some might say I was being paranoid, that you couldn’t get all that from a simple look.

But I’ve been deciphering looks between this family for years. And just because I was paranoid doesn’t mean they weren’t out to get me.

Even though they’ve tried to make me feel like shit for years (though even when they succeeded, I never gave them the satisfaction of knowing it), I do kind of understand Betsy and Joey hating me so much.

Betsy was ten and Joey twelve when I was born.

It was a year or so later when their parents split up, Joseph Sr. leaving the house.

Never having had a father in the house, I couldn’t relate to one leaving, but my friends who went through their parents’ divorce said it totally sucked. I believed them.

Given Joey and Betsy’s hatred of me from ever since I could remember, I really believed them.

“It’s okay, Caroline,” I said as I got closer to the family. The photographer was positioning them, then stepping back to his camera, then back to them.

She’s been having me call her Caroline ever since I can remember. I only call her Mrs. Stratton when I’m speaking about her to my mother. And only then to piss off my mother. Mrs. Stratton is who my mother thought she’d become someday.

Yeah, right. Keep dreaming, Mom.

The crazy thing is, she does…keeps dreaming about it, I mean.

“Jane,” Caroline said again. “We’d like you in the photo. You’re family.”

I dutifully headed to the altar, standing next to my father. We’re a striking bunch. My father, now in his early sixties, has aged very well. He’s still movie-star handsome. He could be played in the movie version of his life by a slightly older George Clooney.

Caroline’s life showed on her face. The cheating husband, public divorce, years of cancer treatments followed by long remissions; they all showed.

She looked tired, and a little on the thin side, but was still a handsome woman, and had probably had some stylists work with her today, because she was totally put together.

In particular, her shoes: totally killer sling-backs with beading at the peek-a-boo toe that matched her dress.

Betsy and Joey are both white-blonde with clear blue eyes. They look like their mother. I have my father’s coloring, darker hair and green eyes. It was very much an “us” and “them” family in looks. And pretty much everything else too. Though I have my own “me” and “him” relationship with my father.

I stood with my “family”—such as it was—and smiled.

I did it because Caroline Stratton was one woman I couldn’t pull any crap with. She was…stately…was the term they used in the political world. And this woman could have curled up and died long ago, and I don’t mean just from the cancer.

No, she took a lot of shit over the years—mostly at the hands of my mother and father—and came out a class act. Pride intact.

That was going to be me.

Again, I pushed back my shoulders, flipped my hair and tilted my head just a bit to the right; the pose I knew made me look my best. And I smiled like I’d just slept with the hottie professor I’d been trying to bag all semester.

These shots would probably be on the cover of People. At the very least they’d be all over the web, and I’d be damned if I looked the part of castoff, bastard daughter.

Even if that was what I was.