Just Visiting Read online

  Praise for Just Visiting

  “Just Visiting is about more than a college campus tour—it’s a glimpse into a rite of passage that, ultimately, teaches the reader a thing or two about love, friendship, and what it means to commit to one’s own future.”

  —Kelly Fiore, author of Just Like the Movies

  “Hilarious and heartfelt, Dahlia Adler’s Just Visiting is a story about breaking out of your small town, falling in love, road trips with your best friend, and figuring out who you’re supposed to be. Reagan and Victoria’s friendship is nothing short of magic.”

  —Rachael Allen, author of The Revenge Playbook and 17 First Kisses

  “Adler gives you a story filled with road trips, hardships, unanticipated love and a pair of best friends who want to find the perfect college to escape their disruptive pasts. You will laugh, cry and feel utterly torn in two, all at the same time. A fascinating and authentic take on friendship and following your dreams, however far-fetched they may seem.”

  —Natasha Minoso, Book Baristas

  “Reagan and Victoria’s friendship is one most teenage girls dream of—but what happens when the two halves of a whole no longer want the same thing? Just Visiting is an exploration of heartache, growing pains, frustration, love, and forgiveness. It’s filled to the brim with everything YA fiction is missing, satisfying that gap while causing demand for more.”

  —Gaby Salpeter, Bookish Broads

  Praise for Under the Lights

  “In a sharp narrative…Adler tackles important issues, such as race, coming out, and bisexual erasure… Recommend to readers who like their romances a little more thoughtful.”

  —Booklist

  “Summer reading at its finest.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “So much fun and so satisfying.”

  —Teen Librarian Toolbox

  “Adler explores coming out and being a minority in a cutthroat industry, deftly weaving both threads together to show their intersectionality. A positive, empowering coming-of-age that lifts the veil hanging over queerness in YA.”

  —Leah Raeder, USA Today bestselling author of Unteachable and Black Iris

  “Under the Lights is hilarious, sassy, and has many scenes with hot girls kissing, so yeah you want this.”

  —Christina Franke, Reader of Fictions

  Praise for Behind the Scenes

  “[A]n enjoyable pick that merges a handful of topics—family, illness, friendships, and relationships—successfully.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Behind the Scenes keeps the promise of its title, ushering readers backstage in a Hollywood romance they won’t want to leave. I loved this book every bit as much as I expected.”

  —Jennifer Echols, author of Biggest Flirts and Dirty Little Secret

  “Behind the Scenes is sweet, sexy, and satisfying. Once you start reading, you won’t want to stop!”

  —Trish Doller, author of Where the Stars Still Shine

  Copyright © 2015 by Dahlia Adler First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by in any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except in cases of a reviewer quoting brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Use of any copyrighted, trademarked, or brand names in this work of fiction does not imply endorsement of that brand.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  Published in the United States by Spencer Hill Press

  www.SpencerHillPress.com

  Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books

  www.midpointtrade.com

  This edition ISBN: 9781633920538

  Printed in the United States of America

  Design by Michael Short

  Cover by Maggie Hall

  DAHLIA ADLER

  JUST VISITING

  To best friends come and gone and especially those who’ve stayed

  CHAPTER ONE

  REAGAN

  There comes a crossroads in every great friendship in which one of you has to tell the other a painful, ugly truth.

  For Victoria Reyes and me, it seems that day is today.

  “Vic, if you buy that shirt, forget rooming with you in college. I will get an actual restraining order against you.”

  She laughs and holds the leopard print…thing against herself. “Rae, my dear, you—”

  “I know, I know,” I say, examining one handwritten price tag after another dangling from flowy garment after flowy garment at Babette’s, the only clothing store in the entirety of Charytan, Kansas. We’d never venture in here at all if the next closest one weren’t the Walmart in Dodge City. Not that I care much either way; that’s exactly where the jeans I’m wearing right now came from. “I have no ‘vision.’”

  A slow smile spreads across Vic’s face as she snatches a belt from a display on the wall and wraps it around what’s either a shirt, a dress, or a weirdly sheer bathrobe. “Exactly. Don’t worry—we will totally style you up for our visit to Southeastern this weekend. This is exactly why you have a fashionista as your bestie.”

  “You know you’re my best friend despite being a fashionista, right?”

  She sighs. “Sometimes I think you are beyond hope.” She puts back the belt, replacing it with a glittery silver one instead. “So, lemme guess. For our first road trip up to college, and basically your first trip out of Charytan ever, you’re gonna wear…those jeans and a hand-me-down flannel from your dad.”

  “I can afford my half of the gas for this trip, or I can afford to buy a Vic-approved outfit from Walmart,” I remind her. “Those are the options.”

  “Fair enough!” She hangs up both the belt and the top, and does a quick glance around the store before leading me out into the late-summer sunshine. “God, that store is depressing. What I wouldn’t give to take it over, fill it with Victoria Reyes originals, pump T. Swift over the speakers…”

  “Yeah, that all sounds great, except that it’s here.” I sweep my arm in the direction of Charytan’s sad-ass lone strip of shops, capped off by Joe’s Diner, where I work way too many hours a week, including today—my shift starts in five minutes. “By the time Babette gives that place up, you and I will be long gone. We’ll be college girls, living on our own, learning actual things and not the racist revisionist shit they try to teach us at CHS…”

  “Certainly sounds like paradise when you make it all about education,” she says wryly as we make our way down to Joe’s, walking slowly to soak up the last bits of sunshine before I’m stuck indoors for eight hours, serving eighty-seven kinds of grease to locals I don’t like and passing truckers I’ll never see again. “If you’re going to amp me up about college, at least focus on the important things, Rae.”

  “Boys and sororities?”

  “Boys and sororities.”

  I shake my head and glance through the front door of Joe’s, immediately assessing the crowd. It looks pretty quiet for a Saturday afternoon, which isn’t great for tips, but is excellent for my sanity and squeezing in some quality time with my AP Chemistry textbook.

  “You sticking around for a bacon tuna melt, or heading home?” I ask, pulling my blond curls into a bun.

  “Gotta go home,” she says ruefully, checking the time on her cell phone. “My parents agreed to let me go next weekend on the condition I finish my English assignment before then, and I’m not even done with the book.”

  “Th
e Sun Also Rises? Spoiler alert: it’s more of Papa Reyes’s favorite genre—White Man Lit.”

  “Oh yay, can’t wait. My dad keeps asking when we’re gonna see Gabriel García Márquez or Julia Alvarez as summer reading. I told him not to hold his breath.” She shoves her phone in the back pocket of her jean skirt and hitches her bag—a colorful cloth thing of her own creation—up on her shoulder. “Wanna come over when you’re done? Watch a movie?”

  By the time I’m done with an eight-hour shift, I know all I’ll want to do is shower and pass out, but both of those things are a whole lot more comfortable at Vic’s house than in the trailer I share with my parents. “Sure. It’ll probably be, like, ten.”

  She doesn’t so much as blink at the late hour, just like I won’t when she devours the bacon tuna melt I bring her in exactly five bites, but absolutely will when she tries to make me watch an old episode of Project Runway. And then we’ll settle on Law & Order: SVU, as we always do, because I love the legal stuff and she loves the drama and Benson’s leather jackets. Basically, we’ve got co-habitation down to a science; how could we ever even think about living with anyone else next year? “Don’t forget—”

  “I let Hector put pickles on it once, Vic. I wasn’t paying attention, and I’m still sorry. It’ll never happen again.”

  She grins. “Cool. I’ll see you later.” Then she blows me a kiss and flutters her fingers in a good-bye wave as she turns to walk home, and I push open the door to the diner, ready to begin that day’s descent into madness.

  My shift goes even later than usual, thanks to a record number of spills and crashes that take forever to clean up. By the time I finally leave Joe’s, it’s too late to head over to Vic’s, and I’m bone tired anyway. I text her that I’m going home instead, and get in the car it took me years of taking orders, juggling plates, and wiping up spills to buy.

  It’s a short drive, but at this hour, it’s far better to just hop in the car and suck up the little bit of wasted gas than walk through the streets, subjected to the beer-breathed leering of the Charytan menfolk who populate the local bars. It’s worse now that my father’s one of them far more often than he used to be, and bad enough I’ll still have to walk past way too many creeps in our trailer park once I get there.

  I park in my usual spot in the makeshift dirt lot in the center of the park—my dad’s truck gets the spot in front of the house—and brace myself for the fifty-foot walk to our trailer. The stench of bad weed is heavy in the air, and I can feel it clinging to me the instant I slam my car door.

  “Hey, Forrester,” Tommy Witson calls as soon as he spots me from the gathering of lawn chairs where he and a few others are passing around a joint and chugging from silver cans I can’t read in the dark. “You bring us back some cheeseburgers?”

  “Sure smells like it.” Britney O’Connell wrinkles the nose I know she’d fix in a heartbeat if she had the money. “Jeez, don’t they let you shower off the stink?”

  I snort. “I realize you’ve never held down a job in your life, Britney, but where exactly do you think they hide the showers in diners?”

  By the time she comes up with her undoubtedly super-clever response, I’m too far to hear it. I used to be friendly with that crew, once upon a time, back when we used to play tag around the park and I actually loved living here. But they turned against me when everyone else in town did, and now they think I’m a snobby bitch, and I think they’re wastes of space, and here we all are.

  But not for long.

  The TV is blaring through the wall of the trailer and I let myself in quietly, thinking maybe I can avoid my parents entirely. Sure enough, they’re wrapped up in each other on the couch, watching some cop show they’ve apparently deemed worth the money they throw away on satellite TV every month but won’t put toward getting our stove fixed.

  “Are you just getting back from work, Rae?” my dad asks gruffly.

  “Yeah. Lot of cleanup tonight.”

  “Joe’s keeping you too late.”

  It’s an empty statement; expressing four seconds of bullshit concern is Bill Forrester Parenting 101. Sure enough, he re-focuses on the TV without waiting for a response, and I trudge off to my room. There’s no point in sticking around to see if my mother will acknowledge my presence. My dad got paid yesterday, which means she doesn’t need anything from me.

  Just as well; I’ve got the early shift at Joe’s tomorrow, and plenty of homework to squeeze in around it. I pull my Chem textbook back out of my bag to resume the reading I didn’t get to finish up at the diner.

  It’s hard to stay focused, though, especially with the TV blaring from the living room and my feet aching something fierce. After ten minutes, I resign myself to the fact that this is gonna have to wait until tomorrow’s shift, where there are far more windows of quiet than in this trailer. I put the notebook back down and pick up the booklet next to it, a course catalog for Southeastern Kansas University, where Vic and I are headed this weekend.

  I’ve read through this thing so many times, there are smudges on the pages with the majors I keep flipping between. English. History. Sociology. So many windows into a world that isn’t here; this little booklet is practically a breathing tube. Just touching the glossy cover calms me.

  This weekend will be Vic’s and my first visit to a college, but we’ve been planning it for so long, I feel like I already know the campus backward and forward. I know what class I’ll be checking out when I get there, which freshman dorm is closest to the library, and where to get the best coffee near the quad. Vic’s scouting may have much more to do with sorority houses, but I love that she’s every bit as excited as I am. Though we may not have tons of the superficial stuff in common, we’ve been united by our desire to get out of Charytan for bigger and better since the day we met in the nurse’s office back in sophomore year—both of us feigning illness to escape the rest of the student body. Charytan was brand-new unpleasantness for her, and sadly old-hat for me, but it’s amazing the way a strong distaste for the population around you can bond friends for life. By the time I went to her house that weekend for the very first time, we were already making future plans.

  And now the future is almost here.

  Finally.

  I close the catalog and take a deep breath. I don’t want to put too much pressure on one visit; hopefully it’ll only be the first of many trips we’ll be taking out of town to scout out our home base for the next four years. I only get four application fee waivers, so I’ll have to choose the final picks wisely, and staying in Kansas is a must for in-state tuition and hopefully a scholarship, but anything that isn’t Charytan Community College seems like a pretty glorious option. And just getting out to visit them feels like its own kind of magic.

  The smell of fried food still clinging to me, I head into the shower, which is icy cold as usual and makes me wish I’d gone to Vic’s after all. Then I climb into bed, reaching blindly for one of the three books that never stray far from my nightstand. I only manage one chapter of Howl’s Moving Castle before I slip under the veil of exhaustion that’s been hanging over me for hours, but it’s exactly what I need to remind me of what gets me through the day.

  There is more beyond this.

  VICTORIA

  I am literally surrounded by clothing right now, and I do not have a single thing to wear.

  On a regular day, I love my clothing. I love that I don’t dress like anyone else at CHS; it goes along with the fact that I don’t look like anyone there, either. I love how much of it was made by my own hands, and that I get to show off my skills, even if no one really appreciates them except my parents and Reagan. But a college visit isn’t a regular day, and right now I’m feeling totally out of my realm.

  Would shorts be too childish? Are jeans too boring? Does a dress look like I’m trying too hard? This is the problem when your best friend couldn’t care less, your only sibling is thousands of miles away in the Peace Corps and doesn’t know a thing about women’s fashion other th
an what bikinis he likes, and your parents cringe just a little more with every extra inch of skin you show.

  You end up talking to your clothing in the mirror a lot.

  “That is not the right belt for this skirt,” I murmur at the glass, untying the cloth sash I embroidered myself under my abuela’s careful observation the last time I visited her and my abuelo in Mexico City. “You need something leather. Or metallic. Or both.” I know I had something like that, somewhere, at some point, but after ten minutes of riffling through my stuff, it’s clear it’s not in my closet. Which means my mom definitely helped herself.

  I sigh and go downstairs, knowing I’ll find her in one of two places—the kitchen, attempting to cook something with a fifty-percent chance of success, or in her office. She turns out to be in the latter, typing so rapidly I know it’s an e-mail to either my brother or one of my thousand cousins she keeps in touch with regularly. I reach up a hand to flicker the lights to get her attention, but she spots me before I can, waves, and smiles.

  “What’s up?” she signs.

  “Do you have my silver belt?” I sign back.

  “In my closet.” She circles her fist in front of her chest, thumb straight across the top—Sorry—one of the first signs I ever learned.

  “No problem.” I start to turn back, but then she gestures with a flattened hand for me to hold up; the conversation’s not over.

  “I thought you were doing your homework now?”

  Oh, right. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing; not packing for a trip I’m not taking for another six days. “I am. Just taking a little break to pick outfits for the weekend.”

  “You know that to get into college, you have to actually do your work, right? No point in visiting otherwise.”

  It’s clear from her smile that she’s teasing, but I know it’s no joke that she or my father will check at the end of the week to make sure it’s been done before they let me get in Rae’s car. My parents met in grad school, where they were both getting teaching degrees—his roommate was my mom’s interpreter—and they’re so obsessed with education, I swear, if my abuela weren’t so into needlework, I’d be sure I was adopted.