“And triple that amount for what they pay to even come close to the color you come by naturally.” Dropping my hair, she crossed her arms and met my gaze in the mirror with a smirk. Hoo boy—I knew that smirk.
“Of course,” she added, “you then also have to factor in the cost of the Brazilians to which they must subject themselves on a regular basis because we all know those carpets ain’t matchin’ the drapes, baby.”
I shuddered, both at the imagery and the memory of the one and only waxing I’d ever submitted myself to. Never. Again. Thankfully, not really a necessity.
“Claudia?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember how you once asked me never to use the words horndog or douche canoe ever again?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t ever use the words carpet and drapes in that context ever again. Please, I beg of you.”
“Wuss.”
“Absolutely.” I resumed staring at my reflection, acknowledging that with my hair loose and swept mostly to one side, the dress did take on a bit of a sexier vibe. But still...
“You’re really not digging it, are you?” Claudia’s voice was soft and had completely lost the bossy tone.
I sighed as I adjusted the straps yet again, but with a bit less irritation and more consideration. It was...okay. But this was prom. A rite of passage I’d quite honestly never expected to be attending primarily because Warrington—small, elite and with its science and math focus—preferred having an all-grades, all-night, pizza-and-movies bash. I’d been perfectly fine with such a setup. Proms were a leftover from the Dark Ages. Stressful, what with the having to find the perfect dress and the perfect shoes and of course, the whole waiting to be asked, please God, let someone ask.
Then, during one of our late-night text exchanges, Eddie asked if I would be his date, and all of a sudden, I realized how much I really wanted to attend a prom.
Okay, hadn’t realized until I met Eddie and completely fallen for him, how much I wanted to attend a prom with him. That I might actually want to stress over the dress and the shoes and the hair and the flowers, like a normal teenage girl.
I think it was maybe because my whole life, I’d always been just out of step with the rest of the world. Because of my intellect, who my family was and my own sense of not really caring whether or not I was in step with the rest of the world. But, you know, for just this one moment I wanted this one taste of normal.
And for this taste of normal I definitely wanted more than the okay of the dress I currently wore.
“As your reward for indulging my desire to see if my impulse about you and ivory was right—which it was,” Claudia said with that blessedly familiar smirk, “I offer you this.”
I gasped as she produced a hanger from which hung the Perfect Dress.
Snatching it from her hand, I rushed back into the stall and about thirty-two seconds later, I was back out. I grinned as Claudia’s dropped-jaw expression reinforced what I’d garnered from the split-second glance I’d gotten in the small dressing-room mirror before emerging into the larger dressing area with its triple mirrors.
We looked at each other and said it at the same time:
“That one.”
Three
All in all, it had been a highly successful weekend. Taking the train into Boston from Worcester—hanging out at the family homestead, which was at our disposal, what with the parents in...Buenos Aires, I think? Maybe Brisbane. Somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Look, the details were on my computer’s calendar if I absolutely needed them. In the meantime, we had the run of the house and the city, and the mercurial Boston spring weather had even cooperated, allowing us to comfortably wander Newbury Street until both Claudia and I had found the dresses, shoes and other various accoutrements that would ensure a perfect prom.
“Do I need to match my tie to your dress?” Eddie asked during our nightly Skype session on the following Tuesday. Claudia had tactfully taken herself off for a shower—a long one, she’d joked, easily dodging the pillow I threw at her—so Eddie and I could have a few minutes of relative privacy.
“Oh, good God, no.” I laughed at the relief that was so obvious, it almost reached past the confines of computer screen. “Well, if you didn’t want to do it in the first place, why’d you even ask?”
“Uh...it’s a thing?” He lifted a shoulder. “David and I went past the tux shop the other day and they had all these pictures and displays of prom dresses and tuxes with matching ties and vests and what’re the things that go around your pants?”
“Cummerbunds.”
“Yeah. Those.” He made a face. “I can never remember what they’re called.”
“They’re kind of stupid, actually,” I said as I reached for my ever-present can of Diet Coke. “I’ve never seen one that actually stays where it’s supposed to.” And the shirts would end up all wrinkled and puffing out beneath the strap if the man happened to shed his jacket. There was no precision to it whatsoever. “If you’re going to go with one over the other, my vote’s for the vest. But you do not have to match it to my dress at all.”
He tilted his head and stared at me through the screen as if trying to figure me out. Not an uncommon expression from him, really. The irony was that he inherently understood me a lot better than most people.
“What?”
He was silent for a few seconds longer, then said, “You are so unbelievably low-key. All the other guys at school, their dates have gone completely batshit, I swear. Going with them to the tux store, telling them exactly what to wear and how to wear it up to and including the color-coordinated Trojans. But not you. You trust I have the sense to pick something appropriate and you’re willing to leave it at that.”
I tried to shove the horrifying visual image of color-coordinated condoms way to the back of my mind, hopefully never to be heard from again.
“Don’t forget, I’ve seen you dressed for a formal event.” New Year’s—when he’d taken my breath away in his well-cut black tux. The night everything between us had changed.
“I’d never forget that.”
“Me neither—” I touched the computer screen, wishing I could touch him for real. “I don’t care what you pick. I just can’t wait to see you again.”
He smiled, his hand rising into view of the camera. My cheek tingled as if feeling his caress.
“See? Low-key.”
I laughed, recalling how by my family’s standards I was downright neurotic. “Is it really that strange to you?”
“Considering the majority of women I’m surrounded by are Cuban?” His shudder was evident even through the screen. “Yes.”
I laughed, midsip, bubbles going up my nose. “I’m so telling Claudia you said that.”
“Pfft. She doesn’t count.” He rolled his eyes. “She’s been away from Miami long enough, the Cuban high-maintenance has worn off.”
“I’m sure she’ll be relieved to hear that.” I settled myself more comfortably against the pillows and adjusted my laptop’s screen. “Seriously, whatever you want to wear, short of a baby blue tux or all-white tails, is fine by me.”
A wicked grin curved one side of his mouth. “So the UM orange tux would be a go, then?”
“The what?”
An instant later a link popped up in the message window below the video. Cautiously, because I was all too familiar with Eddie’s penchant for terrifying links—like the Prancercising lady in her tight white pants—I clicked.
Then couldn’t click the window closed fast enough.
“Are you trying to blind me?”
He fell out of frame until all I could see onscreen were a pair of sock-clad size twelves, accompanied by hysterical laughter.
“Please tell me that’s not real.”
He reappeared before the camera, wi
ping beneath his eyes. All of a sudden I felt myself nearly overtaken by an urge to be there, with him, sharing the silly moments that I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed the romantic ones.
“Saw it in the flesh,” he managed, straight white teeth flashing in a grin that made him look like a hell-raising little boy despite the weekend-scruff look he had going.
“Well, speaking of flesh, that would be the tux to wear if you wanted to fend off the zombie hordes—” Better prepared now, I clicked on the link once more and took a closer look at the orange horror. Good God, it even had a ruffled shirt—that matched perfectly. So. Very. Wrong.
“Seriously, even the undead have standards.”
“Judging by the tastes of some of the girls I go to school with, not really.”
I winced. “Ouch. That’s wicked harsh, Eddie.”
“Truth hurts, baby.”
Oh, he was making this entirely too easy. “Yeah, well, didn’t some of those girls used to date you?”
He flinched, but the glint in his eye gave away his enjoyment with our game. “Dayum, girl. Low blow.”
“Truth hurts, baby.” I blew on my fingernails and buffed them against the front of my T-shirt. “Bow before the master.”
Instead of bowing, he propped his chin in his palm and stared so intently, it was almost as if he was right here beside me. “That’s why I love you, Peyton.” His voice was soft, giving weight to the feeling of him being right beside me, yet making the distance between us feel even more enormous.
My hand froze against the front of my shirt. “Why? I mean...I’m not trying for props, I’m really not, but I just zinged you and you up and...and say that and...and...why?”
And there went the unfortunate tendency to babble when I got nervous.
That was the thing about Eddie, though. From the moment we’d met—him with his mouth stuffed so full of pastelitos he looked like a six-foot-tall chipmunk, and giving Claudia grief, because that’s what boy cousins did in her family, according to her—he hadn’t ever made me nervous. Much.
In fact, the only instance of honest-to-God actual nervousness between us that I could recall was two weeks ago—the first time he said he loved me. Except then I hadn’t had enough time to be nervous—at least, not in his presence. All I could do was glance back over my shoulder as Claudia dragged me through security, to where he stood, watching me go and looking like he wanted to run right after me and keep me from going.
It wasn’t until I was actually on the plane and leveled out at our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet that I’d finally freaked, because, hello? He said he loved me.
Me.
And I hadn’t had a chance to say it back and how did I really feel and...and...why?
I mean, on paper, Eddie Abreu and I had absolutely nothing in common. He was a fun-loving, good-looking, Cuban-American jock, while I was an uptight, intellectual nerd from one of the snobbiest, elitist families in the country. Who had red hair.
He was smart, sure, because I couldn’t ever see myself dating someone who didn’t have some functioning gray matter, but he wasn’t an academic wonk and as far as any athletic prowess on my part? Well, I was the person who held the singular distinction at Warrington of having broken my leg during the fitness rope climb...before I’d ever gotten off the floor.
See? Nothing in common.
But that was on paper. In real life we shared the same twisted sense of humor and liked a lot of the same music and movies and—once I’d gotten over my snotty assumptions/shock that a baseball player liked reading—books. But even those were little things. I had those same things in common with half the guys here at school. Guys who, on paper, should have been perfect for me. Which was one of my very first lessons in learning that when it came to people, facts and figures and statistical probabilities didn’t necessarily add up to the right answer. Eddie and I—we just...fit. All our outward differences, rather than being negatives, seemed to add up to giving us a never-ending source of conversation and avenues of exploration. Maybe he wasn’t an intellectual wonk, but Eddie...he was curious about everything and wasn’t shy about expressing his interest and enthusiasm.
Eddie just took such joy in everything. And that joy and enthusiasm were, I confess, addicting—especially for a cold, repressed WASP like me who’d spent her life taking comfort from numbers and their reassuring predictability.
That was the intangible we shared—the thing that made us so perfect together when on paper, we never should have worked beyond a holiday hookup between the Hot Popular Jock and the Nerd Who Was a Curiosity.
“Why do I love you?” he asked.
“Um...yeah.” I toyed with the end of my braid, twisting strands around my fingers. “I mean, you only said it once so I wondered if it was maybe an impulse. That you, um...regretted.”
His brows lowered. “And when have you ever known me to regret anything I say?”
“Never,” I admitted. “But then, we’ve barely known each other four months.”
“And I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,” he snapped. “It’s like with Claudia and David, Peyton—I can tell you things I’ve never told anyone else. And you know what? I’ve never told anyone else I love them, either.”
“You tell your mother.”
“Peyton.”
“Sorry, sorry...I’m nervous.”
“And you think I’m not?”
“You don’t seem like it.”
“I am.” He shoved a hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up in a wild disarray of ink-dark spikes. “Okay, in order to give you the precision you seem to crave—” He paused and pinned me with a dark stare. “You paying attention?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I have never told anyone I’m dating or involved with or who’s not a blood relative or David, who might as well be a blood relative, that I love them.”
I was torn between laughing and melting, because, you know, cocky Cuban-boy jock or not, he looked so impossibly sweet and nervous, staring into his computer’s camera.
Battling what felt like a Cirque-du-Soleil troupe doing aerials in my chest, I finally managed, “Neither have I.”
After a pause, he quietly said, “You still haven’t.”
“I know.” I’d wondered about that. If we’d had more time, would I have said it back at the airport? I wasn’t completely sure, but I think I would have. I knew the way I felt about him was different from how I’d ever felt about any other boy. It was...more. And I was pretty certain it was love. I just didn’t quite trust myself to be able to recognize it, was all. I didn’t exactly have a huge amount of practical experience with it—at least, not in the no-holds-barred “love and fight and make up with equal intensity” sort of way that I’d observed in Claudia’s family.
Not exactly how things were done in the Chaffee family.
There was, one thing, however, about which I was absolutely sure.
“When I say it, Eddie, I want it to be face-to-face.”
My voice was so soft I could barely hear it over the blood rushing through my ears. I could feel my lips and tongue moving and could only hope I’d actually said the words I was thinking. Because that was another bad side effect of being a babbler—the unerring ability for my mouth to spew something completely different from what I was thinking.
Thankfully the roaring subsided enough for me to hear his tentative, “But you want to, right?”
Not completely trusting my stupid mouth, I merely nodded, but it was enough, judging by the relieved expression that crossed his face and the “Good” that was as much a sigh as a word.
When I finally felt as if I’d regained control over speech functions, I ventured a soft, “You still haven’t told me why, though.”
Before he could, though, Claudia burst through the door, more wet than dry and with her sweatsh
irt on inside out.
Drops scattered everywhere as she grabbed my laptop, turned it to face her and said, “Yo, cuz, save the tender goodbyes for another time—Peyton’s gotta go.” She slammed the lid shut, cutting him off in the middle of an outraged squawk.
“Claudia, what the hell? Have you lost your mind?”
“Head’s up. Your parents are here.”
I stared. “My what?”
“Your parents. You know, the people with whom you allegedly share genetic material? Although I maintain you were switched at birth or hatched in a lab or something, because you are so not like them.” As she spoke, she bustled around the room, shoving the bags from our shopping expedition into the closet and straightening our ever-growing piles of books into something that wouldn’t topple into an avalanche.
I watched, too stunned into immobility to move—or, you know, breathe. My “How do you know they’re here?” came out more like an unintelligible wheeze than actual words, but luckily, Claudia and I had been roommates long enough she had no trouble translating.
“I ran into Jenny McIntyre in the bathroom. She was over at Main talking to Dean Winchester when they showed up. She said they looked überserious and hastily beat a retreat into the drawing room with the dean.”
The fact they were here was bizarre enough. But here, on a random Tuesday night, and talking to the dean?
“But...why?”
At that moment, the room’s intercom buzzed. “Peyton, you there?”
Casting a sympathetic look my way, Claudia crossed to the unit. “Yeah, she’s here. What’s up?”
“She has guests...” A pause. “Her parents. They’re waiting in the drawing room in Main.”
And with a hiss and crackle that brought to mind Macbeth’s witches, the disembodied voice cut off, leaving behind a silent void that echoed ever more loudly with the question I’d asked Claudia.
Why?
Four
Prom Ever After Page 10