She caressed the words in her mind as she continued on toward the school library. The library door was flanked by bulletin boards. As she posted flyers on the first bulletin board, the library door opened. Pearl didn’t bother to glance at the student—until she realized the student hadn’t left.
Arms crossed over her chest, Bethany blocked the second bulletin board. “You returned home,” Bethany said.
“They forgave me,” Pearl said. Instantly she wished she hadn’t spoken. She didn’t have to defend her actions to anyone, especially a human.
“And you forgave them? Just like that? Pearl, I know you can’t see it, but that environment . . . I’m sorry to say bad things about your family, but you know I’m right. You can’t stay there. You aren’t like them.”
Pearl slammed the flyer onto the bulletin board right next to Bethany’s head. Bethany flinched. “Yes, I am,” Pearl said. Instantly she wished she’d held her temper. The last thing she wanted to do was provoke suspicion. She softened her voice. “I can’t leave my family. They’re part of who I am.”
“They’re part of who you were. You’ve changed, and that’s okay,” Bethany said. “You said yourself: ‘Anything that fails to transform’—”
The bell rang, and students began to pour out of the classrooms. “I have to finish up before next period starts.” Pearl strode away from Bethany, but the persistent girl galloped after her.
Students waved and smiled as Pearl passed.
Bethany gawked at them. “Zero to hero? What happened? Just a few days ago you were the girl who stomped on cars.”
“Another power shift,” Pearl said. “Didn’t you feel the earthquake in second period? Administration approved the change in venue and date for the junior prom.” She waved the flyers at Bethany. “It’ll be a night to remember, or so it says in print. And print never lies.”
Bethany wrinkled her nose at the flyer. “You’re organizing prom?”
“To save it from sheer patheticness,” Pearl said. “It was slated for the school gym. I must be developing Evan’s hero complex.”
Behind her, Evan said, “I do not have a hero complex.” He plucked a flyer out of Pearl’s hands, and she let him. She felt a pang inside her rib cage as she inhaled. He smelled especially good today. He must have used a new soap, instead of his sister’s shampoo. She thought of the smell of the sheets on his bed and the night she’d spent listening to him breathe in the darkness. “You had us worried,” Evan said. “All the time you were out organizing prom?”
“She also returned home,” Bethany put in.
Zeke and Matt joined them before Pearl could reply. They scooped the flyer out of Evan’s hands and read it together. “Hey, does this mean you are going to prom?” Zeke asked. At the same time Matt said, “Whoo-hoo, date night is on!”
Uh-oh, she had to think of a way out of this. She couldn’t attend prom with two wannabe vampire hunters at her side. As inept as they were, that was too much risk. “I don’t—”
“She’s going with me,” Evan said.
All of them turned to look at Evan, and then they all looked at Pearl. She debated turning him down—it was his hero complex again, trying to come to her rescue. This time, though, she decided to let him save her. She didn’t have a better idea. “Sorry, boys,” she said to Zeke and Matt. “Taken.”
Evan smiled at her, the kind of smile that erased everyone else. She had the unsettling feeling that he knew what she’d been thinking, that she’d chosen to let him be her knight in shining armor.
Zeke raised his eyebrows at Matt, and Matt nodded. As one, they turned to Bethany. “Would you do us the honor, Miss Bethany?” Zeke asked.
Bethany blinked. “Both of you are asking me to prom?”
“Otherwise we’d have to duel to the death,” Matt said. “Wouldn’t be pretty.”
“Uh, okay, I think,” she said.
Zeke and Matt high-fived, and then they headed off down the hall conferring with each other about tuxedos.
“Just as friends, right?” she called after them.
Swallowed up by the press of students, they didn’t answer.
“Why do I suddenly feel like this is a bad idea?” Bethany asked no one in particular.
As Evan met her eyes, Pearl asked herself the same question.
Days and nights became a blur of preparation. During the night, Pearl continued to assist with the cleanup of the mansion cellar. All the gunk had been scrubbed, scoured, and chipped away to reveal a black stone floor that Mother insisted they polish until it gleamed. The walls were polished too, so that the mica in the stone twinkled like stars. Each wine bottle was replaced with a bottle of blood, in case the guests felt peckish before the feast. Each table was decorated with crystal vases that Mother planned to use for night-blooming flowers. Strands of tiny Christmas lights were strung throughout the cellar, after Uncle Stefan nixed the medieval torches as too flammable. With the addition of the lights, even Pearl had to admit that it was beginning to look beautiful.
In daylight hours, in addition to school and track, Pearl cut out decorations with the prom committee: silver stars and crescent moons, as well as silhouettes of dancers. She argued over DJ playlists, and she helped organize student car pools for the prom—ostensibly to cut down on drunkenness but really to cut down on the number of limo drivers outside the mansion that the vampires would have to contend with. She talked up the prom with everyone: the track team, the soccer team, the debate club, the theater kids, the band. . .
She discovered she was looking forward to both events, a development that disturbed her. She was worrying over that revelation as she loaded up her backpack at the end of school one day. “Pearl?” Bethany asked. “I think I need your help.”
“You know I haven’t done homework all week, right?” Pearl said. “You should ask Evan.”
As if on cue, Evan appeared beside them. “Ask Evan what?”
“How do you do that?” Pearl asked.
“Do what?”
“Always appear when we’re talking about you.”
He shrugged. “I like to stalk you. Plus you’re standing next to my locker.” Reaching past her, he opened his locker and switched out his books. On the inside of his locker door, Pearl noticed he had a slip of paper stuck between the photos of his family: a few lines of a poem. She walks in beauty, like the night, she read. He shut the locker, and she thought about how Lizzie had told her that he thought she was beautiful. She wished she didn’t know that, and she wished she didn’t know he liked poetry. All of this would be easier if she’d met boorish humans instead.
“Not homework help,” Bethany said. “Prom help. And lately, you’re the prom expert. I don’t have a dress yet. Are you any good at dress shopping?”
“Sorry.” That was more Cousin Antoinette’s province. “My aunts made me a dress.”
Bethany wrung her hands like the star of a melodrama. “Prom is in two days!”
Evan began to back up. “Uh-uh, don’t look at me. Malls terrify me to the core of my being.” He faked a shudder.
Pearl heard a high-pitched squeal-like laugh from across the hallway, and her eyes slid over to Tara and her entourage. “I know someone who knows about shopping.” She grabbed Bethany’s wrist and pulled her across the hall.
“But I don’t really know them . . . ,” Bethany protested.
“Good time to start,” Pearl said. She halted in front of Tara. Ashlyn, she noticed, was nowhere to be seen. She tried to think when she’d last seen the girl with her haunted eyes and couldn’t remember. Instead, she thought of Brad’s eyes. She pushed the memory firmly down. “Bethany here is in need of a makeover.”
All the girls focused on Bethany, who shrank back.
“Really, I’m fine,” Bethany said. “Just was wondering about where to shop. . .”
“A prom dress,” Pearl said. “You guys free after school? Feel like a trip to the mall? Bethany has a minivan. She’ll drive.”
All the girls broke out in
smiles. Chattering to Bethany about colors and styles and fabrics, they swept her down the hall. Feeling like patting herself on the back, Pearl watched them.
“That was nice of you,” Evan said softly behind her. “Bethany always saw them as the popular kids, the untouchables, like they’re some stock characters from an eighties movie.”
Pearl shrugged. “They’re just people. She shouldn’t be afraid of them.”
Softly, so softly that Pearl thought it could have been in her own mind, Evan said, “Who should she be afraid of, Pearl?”
Pearl was not prepared for the mall. She’d been here before, but only at closing when the kiosks were packaged up and the chain gates were rolled down. Employees were an easy catch at the end of the day when the mall was nearly vacant. She especially loved the ones who worked at Cinnabon. But you couldn’t hunt them when they had customers, so she’d never bothered to come any earlier. She hadn’t anticipated how much of a crowd there would be midafternoon. She halted in the department store entrance as the force of the noise hit her like a wave. Canned mall air blasted in her face from the vents by the door.
“You okay?” Bethany asked.
“I feel like I fell inside a pinball machine,” Pearl said.
Bethany laughed. “You see why I prefer the library.”
Tara and her friend Kelli pushed through the doors without pause, dancing around a mother with a double stroller and a woman with a walker. Both girls wore matching yellow-and-white shirts plus jeans. They only varied in their jewelry: Tara wore hoop earrings that could have doubled as bracelets, and Kelli wore three strands of bead necklaces. Their conversation had been going since the end of school without any help from Pearl or Bethany.
“Strapless?” Kelli asked.
Tara said, “You need balls to wear strapless.”
Behind her, Pearl said, “Not literally.”
Bethany giggled.
Ignoring both Pearl and Bethany, Kelli considered the matter and proposed with the air of someone making a grand concession: “Spaghetti straps, then. Or halter?”
“Depends on her shoulders,” Tara said. She glanced back at Bethany, who tiptoed around a howling toddler as if he were a live wire about to electrocute her. “No halter.”
“Sequins or satin? Ooh, I so want these jeans!” Kelli scurried over to a mannequin that wore a pair of jeans that looked to Pearl exactly like every other pair of jeans in the department store.
“Sequins,” Tara said, “and your hips are too narrow for those jeans.”
Following the two of them, Bethany whispered to Pearl, “Are you sure this is a good idea? I don’t want to look like a cheap disco ball.”
At the dress department, Tara took command. Kelli rummaged through the aisles and returned with dresses. Tara would issue thumbs-up or thumbs-down. “Arms out,” she ordered Bethany. Dress after dress was piled on top of her outstretched arms.
As yet another orange dress landed on top of her, Bethany ventured to say, “I like pink.”
“Not with that hair you don’t,” Tara told her.
Leaning against a wall, Pearl admired the growing pile of dresses. She was beginning to understand how one could spend the whole day at the mall. This was kind of amusing, especially watching Bethany’s increasingly pained expression.
When the stack of dresses reached Bethany’s chin, Tara marched her into the fitting area and gave her a little push toward the first room. “Go on,” she said. “And come out when you have them on. We want to see them.”
Kelli nodded in solemn agreement.
“All of them?” Bethany squeaked.
“Not all,” Tara said. She scooped a midnight-blue dress off the top of Bethany’s stack and shoved it toward Pearl. “This one is for you.”
Satin, it slid over Pearl’s arms as she caught it. “I told you I have a dress.” She discarded it onto the floor. Her skin tingled from the touch of the satin.
“You’ll like this one better.” Tara scooped up the dress and hung it on a hook. She then shot a look at Bethany. “Shoo.”
Bethany disappeared into the room.
The three of them waited in the hall between the fitting rooms. Pearl hoped that Mother didn’t ask for a report on the day. Shopped at the mall was not going to sound overly impressive.
After a few minutes Tara knocked on the dressing room door. “Are you changed yet?”
“I tried a few,” Bethany called back, “but I don’t think—”
Tara let out a long-suffering sigh. “Put the first one back on, and show them to us one at a time. You wanted our help. You do this our way.”
“Yeah, we need to see,” Kelli said. “You can’t shop without verification.”
There was a pause, the sound of fabric rustling, and then Bethany opened the door. The dress was yellow and very tight. It hugged her from her armpits to her knees.
“Hmm,” Tara said.
“Well . . . ,” Kelli said.
Tara shook her head. “Clearly, no.”
Bethany’s cheeks tinted pink. “For the record, I didn’t pick it out.”
“I did,” Kelli said. “Apparently, I have horrible taste.”
Bethany blushed harder until her skin was redder than her strawberry-blonde hair. “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply—”
Tara waved her hand. “You aren’t getting it. Whole point of going to the mall is to mock. So, let her have it. What do you think of Kelli’s choice for a dress?”
Bethany looked down at herself and then at the three-paneled mirror that reflected her and the brilliant yellow over and over again. “I look like a banana.”
Tara nodded. “Not bad.”
Pearl said, “Toss in an adjective and you may even have yourself an insult. How about: You look like a latex banana.”
The side of Bethany’s mouth quirked up into a half smile. “I look like a number two pencil after it’s been chewed on.”
Kelli clapped her hands in approval.
Smiling fully, Bethany ducked back into the changing room. The next dress was declared to look like a purple porcupine with indigestion. The third dress resembled a sailor suit worn by a drunk toddler. The fourth was a napkin. The fifth . . .
Pearl studied her in the green dress. “That’s it. This one’s gorgeous.”
Both human girls nodded.
“Perfect,” Tara proclaimed.
“Keeper,” Kelli said with two thumbs up.
Tara had Bethany twirl once and then said, “Don’t you dare wear flats with this. Two-inch heel at least. Four, preferable.” She then turned to Pearl. “Your turn.”
Pearl began to protest but then stopped. Honestly, there was no real reason not to try on the dress. Until Mother woke, she could do as she pleased. “All right.” Scooping up the satin dress, she swept into an open changing room. Her reflection met her, and Pearl deliberately turned her back on the unsettling image of a second Pearl.
She slipped off her clothes and stepped into the dress. It was a sheath dress in midnight blue satin with a single ruffle flare at the bottom. Also, it was strapless, which made Pearl smile—Tara thought she had balls. It slid on easily. She hopped a few times as she zipped up the back.
From the other side of the door, Kelli said, “Don’t just admire yourself. Come out and show us.”
Without checking her appearance in the dressing room mirror, Pearl swung open the door. “It’s nice, but my aunts made a dress and they’d literally kill me if—”
All three girls stared at her.
“What?” Pearl looked down. It seemed to fit.
“You’re wearing that,” Tara said. She took Pearl’s shoulders and turned her around to face the mirrors.
Pearl looked at herself. The midnight blue made her skin glow, and the shape of it made her look . . . She pivoted as she examined herself from all angles.
She looked beautiful.
“I’m wearing this,” Pearl declared.
Bethany beamed at her, and the other three girls looked as pleased a
s cats with milk. She met their smiles with her own until a terrible thought occurred to her:
Oh, crap. I have friends.
Chapter
TWENTY-FOUR
The mansion shone like a fairy-tale castle in the light of the nearly full moon. Pearl climbed the marble steps to the carved wood door and understood why the prom committee had nearly peed themselves when she’d offered up this place. She imagined the expressions on the students’ faces as they walked up to the entrance. It was not only better than the school gym; it was perfect. Except, of course, for the bloodthirsty vampire horde that would be in the basement. “Details, details,” she said. All she had to do was convince said horde to exclude just a few humans from the feast. Surely, that wasn’t too much to ask.
At the door she heard a buzz saw. She frowned and wondered why she could hear work from the basement all the way out here. She’d thought the soundproofing was better than that. If the prom-goers could hear the vampires downstairs, that could be a serious problem. She pushed the door open and entered the ballroom. All sound ceased.
A half dozen vampires stared at her.
A second later, work resumed as she was deemed not a threat. She shut the door behind her and surveyed the stacks of lumber, tools, metal bars, and paint. She hadn’t thought the ballroom needed any work. Upstairs was always kept in perfect order for corporate events and weddings. Besides, Mother had a to-do list for downstairs that had to be giving her nightmares, especially since the ceremony was only two nights away.
“Ah, the author of our triumph,” Uncle Felix said. He crossed to Pearl in three large strides. “You can take the north side ballroom windows.” He poured a pile of nails into her hand.
“And do what?” she asked.
“Nail them shut, of course.”
Looking around again, Pearl realized the goal of all this cheerful industriousness. The vampires weren’t improving the cosmetics; they were improving the trap.
Drink, Slay, Love Page 20