“Sounds dangerous,” I say.
She nods solemnly. “Double the chocolate, double the murder. I’ll see you tomorrow, Vance?”
My skin prickles when she says my name, with a smile that is both secretive and brilliant. Get a hold of yourself, mate. You aren’t a schoolboy.
“Tomorrow,” I reply, but before she disappears into the house I add, “Hey, um…”
She pauses in the doorway, and glances back. “Yeah?”
I take a deep breath. Well, if I’m going to feel this way, I might as well do the things she wants. “Since we hit it off so well before, and clearly we don’t hate each other, what do you say about…going out with me?”
She turns to me slowly, and her eyebrows furrow in this strange, disappointing sort of way. Did I say something wrong?
“We could go out as different people. I can pretend to be a hotshot American again,” I add, adopting a midwestern accent—the same one I had the night we met—“and you can be—”
“I don’t think so.” Her voice is soft, a sigh. “I’m sorry, Vance.”
And she disappears into the house, leaving me alone with this weird shiver across my skin, even as I rub my arms to make it disappear.
I don’t understand.
I’ve always gotten everything that I ever wanted. All I’ve ever had to do was ask. Money. Cars. Dates. Even parts in studio movies.
I—I don’t understand.
No, I do, but I don’t want to admit it. And her no feels different from any breakup I instigated, or any friendship I ruined. I’ve always known what I wanted from someone—their fame, their lips, their companionship. But wanting anything of her feels wrong.
She said no.
And a strange part of me agrees.
I must have stood in the backyard for longer than any normal person, because Elias comes back outside to check on me, a kitchen towel over his shoulder. He leans against the side of the sliding glass door as Sansa squeezes her way in, wet fur and all.
Elias says, “Everything okay? She didn’t lobotomize you while I was away?”
“What? Oh, no.”
“Then did…something happen?” he asks. “I was going to fire her, you know.”
“I know. I just—changed my mind.”
“Oh?” He crosses his arms and leans against the doorway.
I take a deep breath. “Do you remember that night at the con in Atlanta? When I disappeared and didn’t return until morning?”
“Your mother about killed me, of course I remember.”
“You know the girl? The one I was with?”
His eyebrow shoot up. “It was Rosie?”
I nod, and find myself twisting my fingers nervously. “Um—you know me better than anyone, so I was wondering…how do…how…” I scrub the back of my neck, pursing my lips. Get it together. You aren’t like this.
“You’ve dated a lot of people, I’m sure you don’t need my expert coaching,” Elias fills in with a shrug.
My stomach turns. “She said no.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t sound so shocked, please.”
“Well, I just—I’m not, really,” he replies. “I honestly can’t blame her.”
“Thanks.”
He cocks his head. “Well, c’mon, you’re going to help me make enchiladas tonight. You said you wanted to learn how, yes?”
I swallow the knot in my throat, and nod. “I’m terrible at cooking.”
“And that is why we practice and say to the god of burnt food—not today.”
Not today.
As I follow him back into the house to start the enchiladas, I catch my reflection in the sliding glass door. My T-shirt is still damp from the rainstorm, and my sweatpants hang on me heavily, and my orange-ish hair is wild and curling out from the sides of my head. I don’t look like a prince of Hollywood right now. I am so used to having to entertain people. To use them. To be used. Dates with paparazzi, with scheduled outings and scripted meet-cutes.
But when I was with Rosie in the pool house, for the briefest moment I felt like—
Like she didn’t want anything of me at all, not a piece, not a part, broken off to be hoarded and sold to the highest bidder. She was just there, and she was nice when she had absolute no reason to be.
It was a gift I wasn’t expecting, and her no was an answer that had been coming for a long, long time.
ANNIE, QUINN, AND I MEET FOR BREAKFAST at the diner as we usually do. Quinn is trying to write out their Homecoming PSA for this afternoon, but they keep on crossing out everything they start. How do you write a thirty-second speech about why the student body should vote for you in a popularity contest? For anyone who isn’t self-involved or rolled a twenty on Charisma when they were born, it’s pretty tough, I imagine.
I’m still a little distracted by yesterday. The rainstorm, the conversation, me actually turning down the Vance Reigns. I must be absolutely out of my mind. Any girl would die to date him, but in the moment…
He ticked me off, honestly.
I wouldn’t want to go out pretending to be anyone else, and when he adopted that accent—the accent I met him in—everything sort of just fell into place. He wouldn’t mind going out with me as long as he wasn’t himself when he did.
Like we couldn’t be a match if he was his true self.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
I’m not a heroine in a rom-com, and guys like that don’t fall for girls like me. Besides, he’s so infuriating I sort of want to smother him between my thighs and not in the sexy way. Like literally smother him.
Maybe I can write that as my college essay. Which is what I’m trying to work on right now, staring mindlessly at a blank Word document, but my mind is still stuck in the pool house, my thoughts still damp and my heart beating like a thunderstorm.
“…Okay, but what if I don’t do a speech at all and just do, I don’t know, an interpretive dance?” Quinn asks.
Annie gives them a pointed look and spears one of her eggs. “Too avant-garde for the viewership. Ugh, if only there was a way to be really flash and extra.”
“They’re holding auditions for the mascot again after Bradley broke his leg diving off a bleacher,” they muse. “Maybe I should audition…”
Annie rolls her eyes. “Ugh, who wants to be a mascot?”
“I mean, I would.”
“Don’t—Rosie, tell Quinn not to ruin their senior year.”
I snap out of my thoughts. “What?”
“Have you really not been paying attention?”
“Um…”
Annie throws her hands up. “What has been up with you today? You’re disassociating hard.” She leans over the table to glance at my laptop screen. “And you haven’t even written a word in your essay!”
“It’s hard,” I mumble in reply, and then I frown, because that’s not quite the truth of it, and I need to tell someone about what happened yesterday. If I keep it bottled up, I feel like it’ll just become this gnarled, tangled mess. “Vance asked me out yesterday.”
Both of my friends sit at attention.
“Excuse me?” Annie gasps.
“When’s the wedding?” Quinn adds.
Oh, good. This is going to go fantastically. I shift uncomfortably in the booth, closing my laptop. “I…sort of turned him down.”
“YOU DID WHAT?” they cry.
The other occupants in the diner whirl around to look at us. I sink lower in my booth. “I know! I know. I just…” I frown and look down into my half-eaten breakfast of pancakes and bacon. I guess I should finally tell them. Rip off the Band-Aid. It’s not exactly my dream anymore, or a story to keep me company at night. “Remember at ExcelsiCon, when I disappeared for that night?”
“Yeah,” Annie fills in.
“Well…I met a Sond cosplayer that
night, and we went out and…had an amazing night. The best night of my life, really. I’m sorry I kept it from you. I just felt like…it was mine, for a while.”
Quinn gives me a narrow look. “But not anymore?”
“Oh, please don’t tell me you’re holding out for him,” Annie adds.
“No, because I found him.” I take a deep breath and say, “It was Vance.”
Quinn about chokes on their coffee. “Come again?”
“The cosplayer was Vance,” I repeat with a shrug. “I know, it’s kind of bonkers and really weird but—we found out a few days ago when I sprained my ankle.”
Annie squints at me. “So did you or did you not fall off a bookcase?”
“…Not.”
And I explain to them what actually happened. I tell them about going to look for a missing book, and being annoyingly curious (“Yeah, that’s your MO,” Quinn says, and nods in agreement), and finding the mask instead. The same mask that Sond wore that night. I explain the miscommunication between us—how I thought he didn’t tell me who he was because he was ashamed it was me, and how he didn’t want to tell me because he was afraid I would be ashamed that it was him, and how I accidentally took a tumble down the last few stairs, and then yesterday how we got locked out of the house and caught in the rain and hid in the pool house.
When I recount it, the entire ordeal sounds like a fanfic in the making, right up until I say, “He asked me out and said we could go on dates as other people, but I met him as someone I wasn’t and as someone he wasn’t, and I…don’t want that. I want someone who wants to take me out as himself, you know?”
Quinn and Annie don’t respond at first.
“…Is that weird?”
Quinn puts their napkin over their plate and slides across the booth to me. They wrap their arms around my shoulders and squeeze tightly. “No,” they reply quietly, as Annie slips underneath the booth and pops up on the other side and puts her arms around me, too.
“You deserve better,” she adds.
I melt into my best friends’ hug, and finally for the first time since turning Vance down, I feel okay. “Thank you.”
* * *
—
IF THIS MORNING VINDICATED MY CHOICE to turn down Vance, the special afternoon Homecoming announcement does the exact opposite. It makes me question everything I have every done up to this point in my life. It makes me wonder if I should join a convent and pledge myself to baby Jesus and forget about this whole love thing to begin with.
The Homecoming announcement starts out innocuously enough. I do feel bad about not helping Quinn with their speech, but I can’t even write my own college application essay. How the hell could I write a speech that would make the student body vote for them and not, well—
“First up is William Wu,” says the Not Another News Show news anchor—I forget her name—as the camera pans over to a strikingly stocky guy with a shock of black spiky hair. He’s the high school’s football captain, so he’s popular, which’ll give him a few votes at least.
“ ’Sup, guys,” he starts, giving the camera a bro-nod. “You should vote for me, because these babies are illegal in forty-nine states.” Then he raises his arms and flexes to an astounding degree.
And that’s how it begins.
I find myself trying to make a list of worthwhile college essays as some of the other students running for Homecoming King—Overlord—make their cases. It’s not like running for student body president—they can’t enact change, and they can’t promise less homework or to bring Pizza Friday back—but they can show off their ridiculous pecs and their popular talents.
And then it’s my best friend’s turn.
“Hello there, my name is Quinn Holland,” they begin in their unmistakable monotonous voice, reading from a small neon-pink note card, “and I think you should vote for me because I am diligent and hardworking, and none of that matters.”
Oh, dear.
They drop the card and look deadass at the camera. “Aren’t you tired of voting for the same old boring dudes? Sure, I get it, I like a nice snack too, but wouldn’t you want someone with a little more substance?”
“Yeah, like me,” the next participant interrupts.
My heart drops like a lead balloon into my toes. I know that voice. Before Quinn can finish their speech, the camera pans to Garrett Taylor.
He grins and jabs a thumb over to Quinn. “Yeah, you can vote for them,” Garrett says with a little too much emphasis, “or you vote for me and help me fulfill my dream of taking the most gorgeous girl in school to the Homecoming Dance. I had a good friend tell me the other day that the way to someone’s heart is through getting to know them, so what do you say, Rosie Thorne? Would you want to go to Homecoming together and get to know me?”
Oh God.
He took what I said and he twisted it—again. I slide lower in my seat as half of the class turns to look at me. I angle a hand over my face, trying to pretend that no one can see me in my supreme moment of embarrassment. But people are looking at me, anyway.
I want to disappear.
“Vote for me, and let’s make our dreams come true!”
Never mind that I wouldn’t go with him even if he was the last person on earth, and certainly not now, but try telling that to the entire school.
Soon after the announcements end and the bell rings to dismiss us for the day, a girl from my English class comes up to me as I’m packing up and asks, “Why don’t you just go with him?”
I glance over at her, surprised. She’s never spoken to me once in our entire high school career. “I don’t want to.”
“It’s messed up that you’re playing with him like this,” she replies as she leaves.
* * *
—
QUINN AND ANNIE ARE WAITING FOR ME beside my locker. Quinn looks more than a little pissed, and I don’t blame them. They’re ranting to Annie as I come up and spin the dial on my lock. “And he just butted in! I had an entire thing I wanted to say!” they raged. “I want to win now more than ever. We’re not letting you go to Homecoming with him, no matter what.”
I put Twilight into my locker, beside Dracula—poor Dracula, discarded after three chapters because I found SparkNotes more helpful—and give them a surprised look. “I’m not actually going to go with that idiot—” From over Quinn’s shoulder, I see a flash of a red Spider-Man cap, and I slam my locker closed. “Hold that thought. I have someone to kill.”
I push away from my locker and head straight for Garrett Taylor.
“I hope she doesn’t actually kill him,” I hear Annie say to Quinn.
“I’d be okay if she did,” they say. “Thinning the competition.”
Garrett’s hanging back with a group of friends by one of their lockers near the science wing, high-fiving and relishing in his pretty sweet PSA. It was not sweet. It was not even charming.
He doesn’t see me before I grab him by the arm. “We need to talk—now,” I hiss, and before his posse can stop me from kidnapping their ringleader, I haul him into the open janitor’s closet and slam the door behind me. I feel for the light switch and flick it on.
Interrogation time.
He winces at the bright light. “Whoa, Rosie—it’s nice to see you, too—”
“Stop trying to ask me out.”
He gives a laugh. “Where did this come from?”
“Just stop it!”
“But I thought you said that the best way to like someone is to get to know them! You have no one else to go with. We’ve known each other for years. C’mon, Rosie, just give me a chance. You never know until you try.”
“What part of no don’t you understand?”
“Then what else do I need to do to prove to you that you deserve me?”
“What?”
“What else do I need to do?” he rep
eats. “Do I need to grovel at your feet? Write a song? Win a Homecoming vote?” That he laughs at, because he thinks he already has it in the bag. “C’mon, Rosie. Give me something here. Let me try.”
For a long moment, I stare at him, wide-eyed and wondering how in the hell anyone likes this guy. He’s getting something out of all this, if not my unwilling participation…then what?
I’m not sure, but I definitely do not like it.
I steel myself to say, “The answer is going to be no, Garrett. The answer is always going to be no.”
Then I reach up for the light switch and turn it off, leaving him in the janitor’s closet. He emerges a few moments later, but I duck into the girls’ bathroom before he can figure out where I went.
I breathe out a long sigh, locking myself in the farthest stall, and sit up on the toilet. I just have to survive until Homecoming. That’s it. Then after that, this entire nightmare will be over.
I just hope I can last until then.
* * *
—
THE DAYS GO BY QUICKLY, and the further Vance and I distance ourselves from that rainstorm and the pool shed, the more I can’t forget about it. And neither can he. We tend to orbit around each other like binary stars, trying so hard to avoid each other and yet somehow always finding ourselves in the same vicinity.
He’ll be in the kitchen when I get a glass of water, or he’ll come down the stairs as I walk in the front door, and every time he’ll turn on his heel and leave as quickly and silently as he came in. I never even have the chance to tell him hello.
After a week, it gets irritating trying to avoid each other, and he doesn’t turn on his heel every time I come within eyesight again. But he doesn’t really pay attention to me, either, even though it feels like I’m hyperaware of wherever he is while I’m in the castle-house—like a flesh-and-blood ghost that just won’t go haunt someone else.
Then, on Friday after a particularly bad world history test that I know I failed, I come to the castle-house and retreat into my haven—only to find him sitting crossways in one of the wingback chairs in the library. His long legs are stretched over the armrest, his hair tucked up into a dark blue beanie. He’s wearing a flannel shirt and frayed jeans and looks much more like the kind of guy I’d find at my local Starbucks than any sort of moody starlet—neither greasy nor sparkling.
Bookish and the Beast Page 14