My mother glanced at me, concernedly. “You didn’t know about this, Susie?”

It was my turn to shrug. “No,” I said. “But it’s cool. I never really thought of myself as the student government type.”

This reply did not have the desired effect, however. My mother pressed her lips together, then said, “Well, I don’t like it. Some new boy coming in and taking Susie’s place. It isn’t fair.”

“It may not be fair,” David pointed out, “but it’s the natural order of things. Darwin proved that the strongest and fittest of the species tend to be the most successful, and Paul Slater is a superb physical specimen. Every female who comes in contact with him, I’ve noticed, has a distinct propensity to exhibit preening behavior.”

My mother heard this last comment with some amusement. “My goodness,” she said mildly. “And you, Susie? Does Paul Slater cause you to exhibit preening behavior?”

“Hardly,” I said.

Brad burped again. This time when he did it, he said, “Liar.”

I glared at him. “Brad,” I said. “I do not like Paul Slater.”

“That’s not what it looked like to me,” Brad said, “when I saw the two of you in the breezeway this morning.”

“Wrong,” I said hotly. “You could not be more wrong.”

“Oh,” Brad said. “Give it up, Suze. There was definite preenage going on. Unless you just had so much mousse in your hair that your fingers got stuck in there.”

“Enough,” my mother said, as I drew breath to deny this, too. “Both of you.”

“I do not like Paul Slater,” I said again, just in case Brad hadn’t heard me the first time. “Okay? In fact, I hate him.”

My mother looked aggrieved. “Susie,” she said, “I’m surprised at you. It’s wrong to say you hate anyone. And how could you hate the poor boy already? You only just met him today.”

“She knows him from before,” Brad volunteered. “From over the summer at Pebble Beach.”

I glared at him some more. “How do you know that?”

“Paul told me,” Brad said with a shrug.

Feeling a sense of dread—it would be just like Paul to spill the whole mediator thing to my family just to mess with me—I asked, trying to sound casual, “Oh, yeah? What else did he tell you?”

“Just that,” Brad said. Then his tone grew sarcastic. “Much as it might come as a surprise to you, Suze, people do have other stuff to talk about besides you.”

“Brad,” Andy said in a warning tone as he came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of sizzling strips of beef and another of soft, steaming tortillas. “Watch it.” Then, lowering the twin trays, his gaze fastened on the empty chair beside me. “Where’s Jake?”

We all glanced blankly at one another. It hadn’t even registered that my eldest stepbrother was missing. None of us knew where Jake was. But all of us knew from Andy’s tone that when Jake got home, he was a dead man.

“Maybe,” my mother ventured, “he got held up in a class. You know it is only his first week of college, Andy. His schedule may not be the most regular for a while.”

“I asked him this morning,” Andy said in an aggrieved tone, “if he was going to be home in time for supper, and he said he was. If he was going to be late, the least he could have done was call.”

“Maybe he’s stuck in some line at registration,” my mom said soothingly. “Come on, Andy. You’ve made a lovely meal. It would be a shame not to sit down and eat it before it gets cold.”

Andy sat down, but he didn’t look at all eager to eat. “It’s just,” he said, in a speech we’d all heard approximately four hundred times before, “when someone goes to the trouble to prepare a nice meal, it’s only polite that everybody shows up for it on time—”

It was as he was saying this that the front door slammed, and Jake’s voice sounded from the foyer: “Keep your shirt on, I’m here.” Jake knew his father well.

My mom shot Andy a look over the bowls of shredded lettuce and cheese we were passing around. The look said, See. Told you so.

“Hey,” Jake said, coming into the dining room at his usual far-less-than-brisk pace. “Sorry I’m late. Got held up at the bookstore. The lines to buy books were unbelievable.”

My mom’s told-you-so look deepened.

All Andy did was growl, “You’re lucky. This time. Sit down and eat.” Then, to Brad, he said, “Pass the salsa.”

Except that Jake didn’t sit down and eat. Instead, he stood there, one hand in the front pocket of his jeans, the other still dangling his car keys.

“Uh,” he said. “Listen…”

We all looked up at him, expecting something interesting to happen, like for Jake to say that the pizza place had messed up his schedule again, and that he couldn’t stay for dinner. This generally resulted in some major fireworks from Andy.

But instead, Jake said, “I brought a friend with me. Hope that’s okay.”

Since my stepfather would rather have a thousand people crowded around our dinner table than a single one of us missing from it, he said equably, “Fine, fine. Plenty for everyone. Take another place setting from the counter.”

So Jake went to the counter to grab a plate and knife and fork, while his “friend” came slouching into view, having apparently dawdled in the living room, no doubt taken aback by the plethora of family photos my mother had plastered all over the walls there.

Sadly, Jake’s friend was not of the feminine variety, so we could not look forward to teasing him about it later. Neil Jankow, as he was introduced, was nevertheless, as David would put it, an interesting specimen. He was well groomed, which set him apart from most of Jake’s surf buddies. His jeans did not sag somewhere midway down his thighs but were actually belted properly around his waist, a fact that also put him a cut above most young men his age.

This did not mean, however, that he was a hottie. He wasn’t, by any means. He was almost painfully thin, and pasty-skinned as well, and had longish blond hair. Still, I could tell my mother approved of him, since he was excruciatingly polite, calling her ma’am—as in “Thank you very much for letting me stay for dinner, ma’am”—though his implication, that my mother had prepared the meal, was somewhat sexist, since Andy was the one who had done all the cooking.