The Reece Malcolm List by Amy Spalding Read Free Book Online Page B

Google—walks into the room. He’s also shorter than I expected. His brown hair is thinning a little, which you can’t tell in photos, but his smile is one of those mega-watt ones I’d kill for, and he moves with ease, like nothing in life is uncomfortable.
    I’d kill for that, too.
    “Malcolm, good to see ya.” He crosses the room to join us and leans in to kiss my mother’s cheek. “Where’s your English schoolboy?”
    “Shut up, Vaughn. This is Devan. Devan, this is Vaughn Sinclair, who I’m ashamed to tell you is also my agent.”
    I pretend like that’s news to me and shake his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
    “You too, kid. How’s L.A. treating you? You see anything besides the Valley yet? A shame your mom settled herself there, but if I could figure out the weird stuff people do, I’d go be a shrink. Drinks, cocktails, wine? Full bar as always.”
    “She’s sixteen ,” my mother says.
    “Right, you never drank at sixteen.” Vaughn makes his way to the bar at the back of the living room. And when I say “living room” I mean giant space decorated entirely in an Art Deco style, with the kind of light fixtures and divans and whatever else I’ve never seen in a real house before. Compared to this, my mother’s house is down-to-earth and homey, though weirdly enough this feels way more my style. If you’re going to keep your house like a magazine spread, at least make it one you’d want to read, right?
    “It’s weird, huh?” Vaughn says to Kate once he gets a drink for my mother and a Diet Coke for me.
    “Be nice,” my mother snaps.
    “It’s just that she’s a total mini-Reece,” he says. “That’s all I’m saying. You looked just like this at sixteen, didn’t you?”
    Very slowly, my mother nods. “Yeah.”
    “Bad news, kid,” Vaughn says. “That’s definitely you at thirty-two.”
    Thirty-two? Holy crap. I don’t like that math at all. It’s one thing knowing she’s young; it’s another to actually pin this number onto it.
    “Bad news? Reece looks amazing,” Kate says, which I guess is true, not that I know exactly what a thirty-two-year-old should look like. I only know that a thirty-two-year-old is not what I expected to get as a mother. “Devan’s very lucky with those genes. And Reece’s mom looks amazing for her age.”
    “Please, my mom’s had a lot of work done,” my mother says. “There’s nothing we can gauge from her except a different set of priorities.”
    I wonder what this plastic surgery–getting person is like. My grandmother . Dad’s parents lived far away, on the other side of the state, so we didn’t see them very often, only once a year at Christmas. Dad clearly inherited his ways from them because I could never figure out how to get close to them, either.
    Kate, Vaughn, my mother, and I eat dinner in a huge dining room off fancy square plates with heavy brushed-silver forks and knives. The longer I’m here, the less ridiculous it seems. Where and how else would Kate and Vaughn eat? Afterward, my mother and Vaughn promise to clean up, so Kate and I are free to head to the music room. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, considering the rest of the house, but this is just a simple room holding a piano and a shelf’s worth of sheet music.
    “I’m good at warm-ups.” Kate sits down at the piano. “Actual music, less so. Isn’t that unfair? Five years of piano lessons, but I finally had to accept the truth.”
    “I’m not any good at it, either,” I say. “But doing scales is totally all I need.”
    So she launches right into some, and my voice just sort of flies out of me, like it always does. I feel the past days’ events rise off of me like steam on a cold day. Nothing feels wrong or bad or hopeless when I’m singing. The whole world is just music.
    “Oh my God,” Kate kind of squeals when we’ve gone through a few different warm-ups. “ Your range . I’d kill for it.”
    “Yours is amazing, though,” I say, my first