After searching for most of her senior year, Chloe finally found something she could wear—a flapper dress, vintage and hand-beaded in glass. It had a cascading fringe, a straight fall and an almost modest V-neck. She wriggled into a square-necked black Spanx slip to cover up her cleavage, and after putting on black eyeliner and black satin sandals, was generally pleased with her almost Audrey Hepburn–like appearance. She left her hair mirror-shiny and down, and wore a red lipstick and a red rose corsage to contrast with the silver beads. She also contrasted well, she thought, against Mackenzie’s pink tutu of a dress, against the girl’s infuriatingly long legs and cheap stilettos. Mackenzie’s straps looked ready to snap at any moment—on her shoes and her shoulders. What a mess that girl was. Why didn’t the boys think so?
While Hannah and Taylor and Courtney spent the day fussing with their hair and makeup, Chloe was done by one. She then sat on her manicured hands and waited, dreaming about Europe and fretting about traveling from Riga to Barcelona.
“It’s two thousand miles by train, Chloe,” Blake had said to her. “What’s the big deal? In July a band of men travel two thousand miles up the French Alps on their bikes. It takes them three weeks. You’re telling me we can’t do the same sitting on a train?”
Chloe had been wrong about Blake. As soon as he heard of the new plan for Europe, he produced maps and atlases, guides on the Baltics, a Latvian–English dictionary, several National Geographics about flying around the Baltic Sea, the 1915 partition of Poland, and a story on the last of the Polish Jews. Absurdly, he acted more excited about going to Riga than to Barcelona. He told her he had always wanted to visit Vilnius. Chloe corrected his geography, told him Vilnius was in Lithuania, not Latvia, and he corrected her right back, telling her that you couldn’t get to Poland from Latvia without first going through Lithuania and the Gates of Dawn. Jostling Hannah, shaking her like a bear shakes a rabbit in his mouth, play punching Mason, filling his notebook with pages and pages of notes and facts and stories and asides about Riga and Vilnius and Warsaw, a thrilled Blake acted as if it was paradise already.
For the prom Jimmy lent the four of them his Durango, and Blake drove them to Grand Summit. Initially they had planned to rent a white limo and go in style, like some of the other kids. But now that they had the expanded trip to the post-Communist world and three weeks of travel to budget for, no one wanted to plonk down eight hundred bucks on a limo. To save money, Blake and Mason even said they would forego tuxes, until Janice put her foot down, thank God, and paid for their tux rental herself.
The girls had seen their boys in suits once before, at a funeral, before Chloe and Mason started dating, but tonight was different. Mason, of course, was groomed like a country-club lawn, but even Blake made an effort to comb his hair and trim his stubble. It was funny how he tried to fit his all-over-the-place self into a black tux and patent leather shoes. Though he looked handsome, he didn’t look as if he were born to it. After the first fifteen attempts to fix his crooked bow tie, Hannah gave up.
Chloe and Mason had been nominated for prom queen and king. The king and queen were voted on as a pair, and Chloe knew she was holding Mason back from winning. Without her he would have been prom king for sure, but she was never going to be prom queen, not even in a dress with beads shimmering and clinking like champagne glasses. It’s an honor just to be nominated, cooed Taylor, trying to stay positive.
The week the nominations had come out, Chloe had found an anonymous note stuffed into her locker. How does it feel to know you are keeping that boy from winning what is rightfully his? Chloe threw the note in the trash, but she thought about it now, on the dance floor with Mason. She couldn’t ignore the sense that other girls were appraising them, and concluding that she wasn’t good enough for that boy.
Fed up with their imaginary glances, Chloe excused herself. In the bathroom, she took off her dress and squirmed out of the suffocating Spanx. Her liberated breasts rose up in rebellion out of their gunmetal V. With cleavage on display, she looked much less like Audrey Hepburn and more like a squat Sophia Loren. Perhaps this was a more fitting look for an almost prom queen.
She strode out into the ballroom where Mason was waiting. The way he smiled at her, it was worth it to overlook for tonight one of her mother’s more critical mottos against revealing clothing.
Mason was a great and special boy. Although he wasn’t much of a dancer, tonight he kept up with Chloe song after song, dancing alongside Blake and Hannah, doing the Macarena, seeing how low he could go under the limbo stick. Pretty low, it turned out. Lower than Blake, even. She touched his face as they danced. She kissed him. On the dance floor she was almost allowed to do this. The Academy’s six vile lunch ladies had transformed themselves into equally vile prom chaperones. They waddled between the tables like malevolent mallards, quacking. What are you doing? You’re sitting too close. No public displays of affection, go dance, but respectably. Are you finished with your dinner? You haven’t touched your steak, your mother and father will be pleased to see their hard-earned money going into the garbage. Fix the straps on your dress, young lady, Miss Divine, your dress is riding inappropriately low. Miss Divine, I’ll thank you to keep your hands on the table, not on your boyfriend’s lap. Mr. Haul, please remove your paws from your date’s bare back. Miss Gramm, do you have a shawl you can throw on? You look cold. Miss Divine, do you have a shawl you can throw on? Mason, honey, you look wonderful tonight. As you were, dear boy. As you were.
Although the occasion was jolly, Hannah seemed less jolly than usual. When they had a minute to themselves on the dance floor, Chloe pulled Hannah close. Keith Urban’s “You’ll Think of Me” was playing.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said to her friend.
“Nothing. Why? Do I seem off?”
“Little bit.”
“No, I’m fine.” She patted Chloe. “It’s all good.”
“You look beautiful.”
“You too. Very va-va-voom.” Hannah sighed. “He’s threatened suicide, you know.”
“Who?”
“Martyn, of course. Says he can’t handle it. What am I going to do? How am I going to go to UMaine, knowing I’ll run into him?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe replied, a little too loudly and brightly, as if delighted by the possibility that Hannah might consider not going to UMaine.
“Maybe I should just join the Peace Corps.”
“What?”
“Why not? I’m an idealistic young person. I’d like to visit Ecuador. They travel all the time. I’d meet new people. Experience different cultures.”
“Um, are you selfless and unobtrusive?”
“Yes.”
“You know they don’t get paid, right? They’re volunteers. It’s not like joining the army.”
“I won’t need any money. I’ll be in Ecuador.” Hannah’s long arms draped over Chloe’s neck. She smelled of Dior Poison. It drowned out Chloe’s gentle musky scent. Chloe patted Hannah’s bare back. She could feel the blades of her shoulders, like wooden fence boards.
“The Peace Corps has been in the news lately,” Chloe said. “And not in a positive light. They may have forgotten their initial objectives.”
Hannah chuckled, pulled Chloe closer, ran her hand over Chloe’s hair. “Silly girl,” she said. “I love how you’re always trying to talk me out of bad choices. Don’t worry, cutie. I’m not serious about the Peace Corps. Besides, I can’t not go to UMaine. I’d never leave you there by your lonesome. So don’t worry. You want to go find our boys?”
A pasted-on smile greeted Hannah when the girls disengaged. “Cheer up,” Hannah said as the girls made their way through the taffeta and satin jungle, searching for their dates. “Like you said, we’re not Darlene Duranceau. Everything’s still ahead of us.”
They got separated. Chloe remained at the edge of the pulsing, strobe-lighting floor. Somewhere on the other side of the ballroom, near white walls and glass doors, reflected in black windows and royal
mirrors, Chloe glimpsed Mason, his spiky hair, smiling mouth, delight, bow tie, surrounded by a flurry of shiny silk snowflakes, a lake of reflected satin and soft flesh. In other words, encircled by the cheer squad, blonde hair and soprano giggles all. They were trying to ensnare him in their ribald karaoke routine. In the strobes Mason was being girl-handled, teased, laughed at, pawed. It all throbbed across in fractions of real time, two seconds of black followed by a neon explosion. Chloe couldn’t even be sure it was him. It could have been nothing more than a flash of athletic-field memory. After school, she sits in the bleachers and does her homework, while on the field Mason pitches and flirts with the flirty girls. But mostly he pitches, and mostly Chloe reads, and it’s only for a fraction of an image between blinks and pages that Chloe thinks, is there something there or is it just adolescent fun? She barely even thinks it. She feels it, and in only two or three beats out of a whole minute of her heart.
“Chloe,” a voice says. She blinks and comes to.
Blake was in front of her, smiling, appraising her with his familiar eyes, soaking up her shiny baubles, glittering beads, perhaps other luscious things.
“Have you seen Hannah?”
“She’s looking for you. Seen Mason?”
“He was over there.” Blake waved to the glassy parquet. David Bowie started up. Almost involuntarily their bodies moved up and down and sideways to the pulsing one-TWO, one-TWO of “Let’s Dance.”
As they were already gyrating, they gyrated toward each other, looking around for Hannah, for Mason, Chloe trying to make her breasts bob less (not easy) and make her tacked-on smile less uncomfortable. Her ears ringing like the bells of Notre Dame, Chloe wished she could check her watch. David Bowie was so loud. Oh my God, she thought, am I really that old? Is David Bowie too loud for me at seventeen? Let’s dance.
Maroon 5 came on, kinder, softer, better, lights flashing, bodies inching closer, and she and Blake inched reluctantly closer with apologetic smiles. Sorry there’s no one else to dance with to Adam Levine, their awkward expressions read. Then he opened his arms. She raised hers and stepped up to the Blakeplate. Placing one hand into his, she rested the other on his large tuxy shoulder. She felt the pressure of his palm low around her waist, felt his open fingers not just resting against the back of her flapper dress, but holding her.
“Look, I shaved,” he said into her ear. “Do you see?”
She saw.
“Do you like it better like this, or normal?”
What was the thing to say here? “Either way’s fine.”
“Do you know this song?”
“What?”
He leaned down, toward her, close. “This song, Chloe,” he screamed into her perforated eardrum. “‘She Will Be Loved.’ Do you remember it?”
She knew it well. Everybody knew it. The boys and girls sang it as they played volleyball in gym, as they ran up and down the stairs, as they spring-cleaned the front lawn for field day, as they devoured their sandwiches at lunch. They sang it, they knew it. “She Will Be Loved.” She pretended she didn’t hear him or that it was too loud to reply that of course she remembered it. She nodded in the general direction of his shaggy curly head.
“Are you excited!?”
“About what?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been as psyched about anything in my whole life. Riga! Vilnius! Warsaw!”
And Barcelona, she wanted to add to his litany of paradise, but there was no point—he wouldn’t hear her. She tried to catch the floating threads of his voice. He was repeating his avid approval of her idea last week that they should each keep a journal in Europe and at the end of the trip share them with one another. At least, that’s what she thought he was saying. The music was so relentless. Where was the prom queen who didn’t belong to him? He searched for the eighteen-year-old every day for miles. Your dress is pretty, Blake might have said. Very sparkly. You and Mason light up the floor.
“What did you say?” she yelled. Her heart was full.
“You smell so good,” he said, his head near her perfumed earlobes. “What is that?”
“Jovan Musk,” she yelled back. “And Love’s Baby Soft!”
Where was Mason? She flew across the bodies, searching for this mysterious Mason, and found him entombed in a bevy of loathsome beauties dazzling him with their best cheer moves. Come hither, said the spiders to the fly.
“He’s not happy,” Blake yelled, warm breath in her face, his eyes merry. “No boy likes that kind of attention. Makes him feel like a hog at a fair.”
In a moment of swoony weakness, Chloe leaned her cheek against Blake’s black lapel. His big hand tightened around hers. His palm opened wider against her back.
She caught herself, and blessedly “She Will Be Loved” ended.
In silence the four of them chased dreams with time to lose in the empty ballroom. They were the last to leave. The overhead lights had been switched on. “A Hundred Years to Live” turned off in sync with the honk of Mackenzie’s dad’s rickety Buick. The waitresses were clearing the last of the teacups and the janitors were dragging black trash cans around. Most of the white balloons had run out of helium and floated down to the floor in tired gasps.
Chloe watched a red balloon twitching under a table. She and Mason didn’t win. Was he disappointed? He didn’t say. But he also didn’t say something corny like, don’t worry, you’re still my queen. He wasn’t a corny guy. Chloe appreciated that. Mackenzie had invited them all to her house for an after-prom sleepover. They didn’t go. Chloe wasn’t allowed, and Hannah didn’t want to. Go if you want, Chloe had said to Mason. I won’t mind. Are you sure? he asked. The briefest of glares from Blake interrupted him. Mason’s just kidding, Blake said. Yes, I am, said Mason. And now here they all were.
“They’re going to throw us out.”
Hannah, wrapped around Blake, her head thrown back, looked up at the lights. “Let them try.”
Mason was next to Chloe. He was perspiring, and his bow tie had come undone. His tux jacket off, his hair wet from dancing, still slightly out of breath, he sat glazed, staring across the deserted dance floor, squeezing and unsqueezing Chloe’s hand. He was staring into the space by the wall where a short while ago he had been flanked and fondled by smiling shining soon-to-be-extinct nimble-bodied cheer queens.
Only Blake remained fully animated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he sang, yeah, yeah, yeah.
“I don’t know what you’re so happy about,” Mason said to him. “Once high school’s over, our life as we know it is over. Everything familiar slides across the floor, out those double doors, and vanishes.”
Blake cheerfully thumped his brother on the shirt sleeve. “Duuude, no. Wrong attitude. The magic is just around the corner.”
Chloe pulled on Mason’s hand to redirect his attention from the spectral past to the material her. Obligingly he leaned over and she kissed him to make him forget whatever it was he couldn’t.
“I hope we find some good souvenirs,” Mason said. “Everyone is dying of jealousy that we’re going. I want to bring something back for them.”
“Like the clap?” Blake asked.
“That’s what you hope to get out of our adventure?” said Hannah. “Cheesy trinkets for your dumb friends? Perhaps a fridge magnet from Auschwitz?”
“Let’s see if his friends can spell Auschwitz,” muttered Chloe.
“I’m afraid,” Mason said, “that the best part of my childhood is done. That when we come back, we won’t be kids anymore. Won’t see each other anymore.” Slowly he turned his head to stare at Chloe.
In shame she looked away.
“You and I will be kids forever, bro,” said Blake.
“And we’ll be only two hours from here, Mase,” said Hannah. “It’s not like we’re going cross-country. You’ll drive up one weekend, we’ll come down the next. You’ll see. It’ll be awesome.”
Now it was Mason who looked away. “Will it?” His dull voice faded into the white tablecloths.
Blake
nudged Chloe, his black patent foot pushing the satin heel of her sandal. Nudged her, eyeing his brother, as if to say, don’t give up. Do something. Say something.
Not knowing what to say, Chloe stared up at a lonely blue balloon clinging to life. It had drifted off and hid around a glittering chandelier. Soon Spain. What would it be like? Noises of cities, flickering lights, midnight music, endless dancing, now and forever. A raucous man to swoon and sing the words, I want you to be queen. I want to tremble and laugh, Chloe thought, I want to cascade down the waterfall like a goddess, to see the substance of my fortune, to find the answer to my prayers. I want to see things I’ve never seen. Holy nights, intoxicating nights. I want to feel things I’ve never felt.
“I just figured out what’s in my blue suitcase,” said Blake. “Oh God. Of course. How could I have not seen? It’s fantastic. But don’t even ask. I won’t tell you. You’ll have to read to the end to find out what happens next.”
Part Two
Johnny Rainbow
One half of me is yours, the other half yours
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
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