by Melody Rose
“Cheyenne, don’t you look--” Rick said, but I yanked my hand away before he could finish.
“Ravishing,” I finished, cradling my hand against my chest. “So I’ve been told.”
“Hey, man,” Darren said as he approached Rick and me. “Get lost. I saw her first.”
“You held her against her will!” JJ snapped from somewhere behind me.
The air suddenly grew very hot and very tense. But not with the kind of tension and heat we originally aimed for. I felt the muscles bulge on these military-trained men, and panic seized my heart.
“Okay, all of you need to calm down,” I said, but my words went unheard as Rick pressed himself up against JJ.
“You need to stay out of this,” Rick growled as his blond hair flopped into his face.
“Or what?” JJ threatened.
“Rick?” Janet squealed from somewhere nearby. She approached the group right as Darren moved to take my hand.
A thousand things seemed to happen at once. When Darren reached for my hand, I swatted at him. Upon seeing me move towards Darren, JJ lashed out at my friend, but Rick held back his arm from landing the punch. Which gave Darren the opening he needed to sock JJ right in the nose.
The crack broke the air like thunder and echoed even louder than the music. All of a sudden, the three men exchanged violent blows. I backed away from the fight while Janet called out Rick’s name, trying to get him to see reason. When my hand scraped against something, I jumped back, utterly terrified.
Alexander looked at me with wide and hungry eyes. His gaze traveled up and down my dress, making me feel dirty.
“Simply ravishing,” Alexander drooled.
“Hey, fat boy,” a girl named Brigit, a third-year Nero student, tapped Alexander’s shoulder, causing him to spin around. “I saw her first.” Then she socked him in the face.
My breathing raced, and I knew right then that I had to get out of there. Something was wrong, and I was caught in the middle of it all. However, I couldn’t get very far without guys approaching me, and some girls too. But when they saw other people looking at me, another fight would break out. I dashed for cover to get out of everyone’s sight, but I only left a trail of fighting students in my wake.
My brain raced too fast, dropping the puzzle pieces as I went. I didn’t understand why this was happening, but something about Love Struck had amplified and turned on me.
Hands grabbed at me, and I tore away. People got in my way, and I aimed to dodge them, but then I would just fall into another pair of arms. The swarm of bodies suffocated me all the while choruses of “Ravishing” and “I saw her first” rang out.
I tripped over my own high heels as I ducked to avoid an outstretched arm. I curled my knees up to my chest and tried to crawl out of the way. The tangle of legs was difficult to navigate. It was near impossible when someone threw a blanket over my head and a strong pair of arms wrapped around my middle.
Someone hoisted my body in the air. I lost control then and kicked and screamed to get out of the grip of whoever had a hold of me.
“Calm down, Cheyenne!” a familiar voice whispered in my ear. “We’re getting you out of this.”
As if tonight hadn’t been wild enough, my rescuer had been the drama teacher himself, Oliver. When I recognized his voice, I stopped thrashing and, instead, let myself be carried away from the battle zone.
Before I knew it, the music and the fighting quieted. The change was so sudden I thought I had been dunked underwater. I could still hear remnants of the party, which meant it was still nearby, but I was no longer in the middle of it all.
Then Oliver removed the blanket from my head, and I saw we were in the kitchen. He sat me down on the floor by one of the stainless-steel fridges and collapsed in a nearby chair. His face was red and puffy, sweat dripping down his crooked nose. Oliver pulled out a handkerchief from inside his elaborate robes and dabbed at his head.
“Well, you certainly know how to liven up a party,” Oliver commented with a chuckle. “Want to tell me what all that was about?”
23
“I have literally no idea,” I replied, barely able to keep my words steady. “They were all on me the minute I walked into the quad.” I gestured out towards the wall, indicating the dance still going on outside. “First, it was Darren, which was super weird because he’s one of my best friends, and then it was JJ, which like, just no.”
Oliver stood and moved to the door of the kitchen. He stuck his head out of it. A tidal wave of noise rushed through the small crack and blew the drama teacher back, and a combination of blaring music and shouting cut in through everything. Oliver yanked the door closed and doused the room in a muted quiet again.
“Are they still going at it out there?” I said, a quiver I didn’t anticipate coming through in my voice.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the answer. There was no clear answer as to what was going on, but all I knew was that it was my fault. Maybe not intentionally, but something I did caused this upset. This dance was supposed to be something fun and hyped up and different for the campus. Now it had just devolved into a fighting spree.
People were getting hurt because of me. All of this planning and all of this scheduling and all of this worry was just about to go down the drain. There was no way Eros was going to come now. This was turning into a party for Ares, the god of war, rather than the god of lust.
Before I knew it, my eyesight grew blurry. I ran a manicured hand over my face, wiping it as quickly as I could, but the drama teacher caught me. Oliver rushed away from the door and over to my side.
“Oh, don’t worry about this, my dear,” Oliver cooed. “Everything is going to be okay.”
I hadn’t expected sympathy from him. I thought he would have ranted and raved about this being a complete disaster. How I’d ruined everything. How the world was ending because I’d wrecked the dance. Instead, surprisingly, he was being kind.
“Now, I need you to tell me what they were saying to you,” Oliver said as he lowered his eye and looked at me expectantly. “I need to know what you were doing when all of this started.”
“That’s the thing!” I exclaimed, sitting up straighter. “They were all using the same words. Just like the Love Struck people do. Except this time instead of ‘We have this connection’ and lovey-dovey stuff, it was ‘ravishing’ and ‘I saw her first.’”
“Well, you certainly unleashed a whole lot of chaos on the place,” Oliver said as he dabbed at his forehead again.
“Great,” I said, slumping back against the fridge, defeated. “The Olympic Officials are just going to think the whole Love Struck thing is my fault all over again.”
“They blamed you originally?” Oliver clarified, with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh yeah.” I nodded vigorously. “Because I’m immune to being Love Struck.”
“Immune?” Oliver leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, interlacing his fingers.
“Apparently, I’m the only one on campus who has absolutely no traces of the disease,” I informed the drama teacher. “Lucky me.”
“Do you know why you’re immune?” Oliver asked.
I shook my head. “No. All I know is that they found traces of the disease in everyone else, some in smaller doses than others, but I was the only person on campus that they hadn’t found a single trace in.”
Oliver stroked his mustache, following the direction of the hairs along his upper lip. “That is the most interesting part about this whole thing so far.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Don’t you think so?” Oliver said with a cocked head in my direction, his big brown eyes never leaving me. “What makes this daughter of Hephaestus so special?”
There was an undoubtedly awkward silence, and I simply sat there while Oliver examined me. My expression flattened in surprise, while my eyebrows remained high on my head.
“I’m not special,” I said quietly.
“Surely, that’s not tr
ue,” Oliver said as he shook his head. “I bet whoever planted this plague on campus didn’t plan on having an immune party. This was set to infect everyone, disrupt everything. Create mass chaos!” Oliver swept his arms out wide to the side and raised his voice. “But here you are, at the eye of the storm, a mountain against the wind. It’s quite poetic, actually.”
“If you say so,” I said, drawing out each word uneasily.
“But then!” Oliver stood suddenly, with more spring in his step than I expected. “There you are! Suddenly at the center of it all. Causing all of this disruption. We should work on figuring out what makes you so… different,” Oliver said as his nostrils flared.
I closed my eyes for a second longer than I needed to, to recenter myself. “I didn’t do this, you know.”
“I know you didn’t,” Oliver said. He reached down and sat down next to me against the fridge. He took my hand in his reassuringly. It was surprisingly dry and warm, a comforting gesture. The teacher tapped the top of my hand with his free one. “It was nothing you did on purpose. But something about you did set them off.”
“Okay, look.” I sat up and scooted a little way from Oliver so I could stare at him straight in the face. “I’m not this person. I’m not pretty or attractive or the girl that turns heads. There has to be something seriously wrong. It’s also the same symptoms as being Love Struck.”
“Or Dumb Struck,” Oliver said with an eye roll. “Only an attractive woman could make so many men go all stupid like that.” Oliver snapped his fingers, an idea striking him. “An attractive woman in an attractive dress.”
The drama teacher flicked the end of my red dress, right around the fluff at the bottom. I tucked my knees up and hugged them to my chest, suddenly defensive of my dress and my choice.
“A dress?” I said, full of disbelief. “My dress? You can’t be serious. It’s just a dress.”
“Where did you get the dress?” Oliver said sternly.
“You can’t be serious,” I downplayed my annoyance and my doubt. “There’s no way that a dress did this.”
“Well, you said it wasn’t you,” Oliver reasoned, “but it was something about you. What’s changed? What you’re wearing. It only makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, completely baffled. “You’re telling me that a magic dress drove all of these students crazy for me. Like it enhanced their symptoms or something.”
“Where did you get the dress, Cheyenne?” Oliver redirected the conversation back to his first question. “Did you make it? Did a friend loan it to you?”
Seeing that I wasn’t going to be able to change the subject successfully, I sighed and relented. “I bought it.”
“From where?” Oliver pressed.
“Some boutique in town,” I said with a shrug. “Janet and Violet were with me. There was nothing weird about the dress then.”
“Maybe it’s not the dress then,” Oliver said as he twirled his mustache.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter,” I grumbled. “You heard them out there. They were still fighting. There’s no lust, no love. It’s the last place Eros would want to be right now. The whole thing is ruined, anyway.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Oliver waved his hand at me, as though he wasn’t worried about the mess I’d created. “Hate is only a coin’s toss away from love. We can still salvage this.”
“How?” I hoisted myself up, using the handle of the fridge to help because the tightness of the dress made it difficult to use my appendages normally. I walked over to the door and stuck my arm out at it. “This whole Love Struck thing has gotten way out of control.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Oliver smiled. He rolled to the side and tried to push himself up. But he looked like an egg rolling around on a table as he tried to get to his feet. I crossed over to the drama teacher and steadied myself, offering my hand so that he could use me as leverage. “Thank you, dear.”
“What do they say?” I asked, having no idea where Oliver was going with this.
“Oh, yes.” Oliver blinked slightly as if he was regaining his thoughts. Then Oliver spread out his arms and wiggled his fingers, mimicking jazz hands. “The show must go on!”
I listened to his words. I heard his words, but I didn’t understand right away. They made their way through my ears and up to my brain, but I couldn’t get them in the right order. My mouth opened, and I blabbered some incoherent noises. Oliver put his hands together, the sound of the clap jolting me back to reality.
“You’re not saying what I think you’re saying?” I hesitated. “Are you?”
“If you think I’m saying that we need to move forward with the show, right now, then yes, I am,” Oliver said as he rubbed his palms together. His eyes brightened with excitement. He blazed past me to the door and moved to open it, but I blocked him off.
“Wait, no, we can’t do this,” I said, a new kind of panic kidnapping my stomach. “Not while all this is going on. Plus, we weren’t supposed to start for another hour. I don’t have any of the props or costumes, and it's not like they’re going to pay any attention to us.”
Oliver reached out and grabbed my shoulders, like a swimmer holding on to a life raft. “We will make them pay attention to you. Between you and Ansel, you will light the room on fire.”
The drama teacher moved to the door, but his eyebrows knitted together. “Just not literally. Please don’t literally light anything on fire.”
Before I could utter another word or another rebuttal, Oliver held up a finger to my lips, silencing me. “I’ll get Ansel. You stay here. Don’t leave and get out of that dress before you break any more hearts.”
Then the son of Dionysus left me in the empty kitchen. Alone.
I wrapped my hand around the door handle, intent on following him out there and stopping him. But the minute I thought about leaving the safety of the kitchen and going out into the fray, I froze. The feeling of all those hands reaching for me, grabbing for me, made goosebumps rise uncomfortably on the back of my neck. I cracked my neck from side to side for some relief and stepped away from the door.
My hands folded together, palm to palm, and I pressed them against my lips. I focused on my breathing but could only stay with it for a couple of seconds before my mind flew into a fit of nerves.
I hadn’t wanted to do this performance in the first place. Secretly, I had still hoped the dance would go so well, be so charged with sexual energy, that Eros would show up before Ansel and I had to go through with it. But now, it looked like that performance might be the only thing to save this hair-brained scheme.
Not for the first time, I wondered why I was saddled with this responsibility. Somehow, I had found myself at the center of another weird encounter at the Academy. First, it was my relationship with the Eternal Flame and taking down a chimera. Then they dubbed me the creator of the Ultimate Weapon. Esme decided to go rogue and make me take the fall for her betrayal. And now I was somehow the only demigod on campus unaffected by a disease that turned people into whores or jealous freaks.
None of it made any sense. Had I done something in a past life to warrant this kind of responsibility? I was a simple blacksmith. I wasn’t supposed to be fighting monsters or organizing dances. I was supposed to be making weapons for the fighters and trinkets for the dancers. I wondered what had happened to change my role from being on the sidelines to front and center under the spotlight.
Now I was about to be in the literal spotlight, the last place I ever wanted to be.
I released a groan that rattled against the pots hanging from above the island in the center of the kitchen. The stainless steel room seemed cold and lifeless. The immaculate counters shined in the soft glow of the blue safety light near the door.
I rubbed my own arms, seeking any sort of warmth. My hands migrated down to my thighs. When I felt the smooth, red fabric beneath the fingertips, a sudden repulsion welled up in my gut. Quickly, I jerked my hands away and curled them into fists.
Spurred by a sudden curiosity, I reached around to my back and unzipped my dress. I shimmied out of the slick fabric and let it fall around my feet. With an unbalanced hop, I stepped out of the center. Now I stood in my strapless nude bra and panties in high heels in the middle of the kitchens, circling a heap of a red dress like it was a snake ready to strike.
My heels clacked against the tile floors. My labored breathing echoed in my own ears. Then a spark of sanity hit me.
Why was I so concerned about a damn dress? It was just a dress. A well-cut piece of fabric that, yes, made my ass look fabulous, but other than that, had no other magical properties.
That you know of, an inner hint of doubt said.
I bit the tip of my thumbnail and narrowed my gaze. I thought back to my time at the dress shop with Janet and Violet. It had been odd that we couldn’t find anything for me. There were dresses in my size, but nothing as perfect as the one currently crumpled on the floor. The one that the shopkeeper had picked out for me.
I tapped one heel on the floor, keeping a familiar beat in my head. The shopkeeper had pulled the dress out of nowhere. At the time, I’d just thought she pulled it out of the back or something, but could she have done something to it?
I remembered the long pale face of the woman behind the counter, with her straight black hair and knobby knuckles. I couldn’t remember specific details, like how old she might have been or what she was wearing. But I remembered her eyes, dark and swirling. She had winked at me when I had the dress on. I thought she had been encouraging me, but could I have been mistaken?
As my thoughts rambled on, I noticed that I was tapping out the rhythm of my mom’s silly song. It seemed like an odd time to be thinking of that song. Normally we reserved it for happy moments, cementing the good times in our memories.