The Promposal (The Ugly Stepsister Series Book 2)

by Sariah Wilson

  Ella gave Deacon her contact info on his phone and handed it back to him. He grinned at her, and his enthusiasm was kind of contagious. You could tell how excited he was, even if he was trying to play it cool.

  The bell rang, and they said goodbye to each other. My sister came over to me, still sporting the smile that almost reached her eyes.

  “Congrats on the promposal! That dude moves fast,” I told her. “That school’s only known about the whole Trent thing for a couple of days. I don’t know who’s telling everyone—”

  “Me. I told everyone.”

  Ella was the one oversharing about her breakup? That was so unlike her. “Why?”

  “Because by talking about it, I made it real. It would have been easy to pretend that I was still in that state of limbo, waiting for Trent to come back into my life. This way, it’s final. There’re no delusions. I’ve forced myself to face the facts that it has ended and we’re over.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  She nodded. “It is. And now I’m even a little bit glad. How sweet is Deacon? I can’t believe he went through all this effort for me.”

  “Why not? You’re totally worth it.”

  She squeezed my arm with a real smile this time. “Thanks. I know I’ll have a good time with him.”

  “If you don’t, just say the word and I’ll take care of him. But if you start calling him Deacon Myboyfriend, I’m not sure we can stay friends.”

  “There’s no chance of that happening,” she reassured me. “And don’t worry. I know your promposal is coming.”

  I desperately hoped so.

  For a second, I thought I heard someone calling my name. I turned in the direction of the sound, and I saw someone running toward us. It was Shoshana. She was head of the other regular dances, but was currently taking care of the decorating for the prom committee under Ella’s direction. Her face was animated, and she called my name again.

  I let out a groan. Had she just gotten a promposal, too? I didn’t want to hear about it.

  “Mattie!” she gasped when she finally reached us. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “I had to see a guy about a horse.”

  She stared at me, not getting my joke. “What? That . . . whatever. Doesn’t matter. I have important news. I’ve been trying to find you because . . . there’s not going to be a prom.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Were auditory hallucinations a thing? Because there was no other way to explain what Shoshana had just said. “Not going to be a prom?” I echoed. I must have misheard. She must have actually said, “North Korea’s going to drop a nuclear bomb” or “A 9.7 earthquake is coming and we have to stay calm.” Something that would make actual sense.

  “Shoshana, what are you talking about?” Ella asked in a ridiculously mellow voice. How was she not panicking? We either had a bomb, an earthquake, or Promageddon to deal with. Was it bad that I was still holding out hope for one of the first two?

  “There’s. No. Prom.” Shoshana said each word slowly.

  “There’s no prom?” I repeated. This news had turned me into some kind of confused parrot, incapable of forming my own thoughts and just saying whatever the people around me said. I understood each of her words individually, but not the combination she was using them in.

  “I called the manager at La Caille.”

  That I understood. I had wanted to have prom at La Caille since I was twelve years old and my dad had taken me there for the wedding of some art friend. It looked like a French château. The ballrooms had been decorated with white fairy lights and had large windows that overlooked a nearby city. It had the most beautiful gardens I’d ever seen, streams and trees and flowers and bridges. They had peacocks and little families of quails that darted in and out of the bushes. It was just . . . perfect. Before I took office, the school’s proms were always held at nearby hotels to make it easier for the alumni to attend. But since the students were the only ones going this year, we could have it at an out of the way château.

  The day I became president, it was the first phone call I’d made, and I’d arranged our prom date based on their availability. The only French food I liked were French fries, French toast, and French vanilla ice cream, and I didn’t even care about what they would serve. I only cared about how magical and fairy-tale-esque our surroundings would be.

  “Why did you call the manager?” Ella encouraged Shoshana to keep talking.

  “I was calling to ask them when we could start bringing the decorations over, if they had a place for us to store them because I have stuff that would interfere this week, and it would be easier to do it today or tomorrow instead of waiting for Saturday and doing it all last minute—”

  “What did the manager say?” I demanded, uninterested in her tangent.

  “She said that there had been a stop payment put on our deposit check, and so they rented the venue out to someone else.”

  “What?” Was this what a heart attack felt like? A crushing blow against your chest that made it impossible to breathe? And like your heart was going to explode everywhere?

  I also couldn’t understand how there was a money issue. We had tens of thousands of dollars in our activities account. There was no way this could be happening.

  “Mattie?” Ella was asking what I wanted to do next.

  This wasn’t a time to wallow and freak out. It was a time to get stuff done. “Call an emergency student government meeting right now.”

  “But everybody has to get to first period,” Shoshana reminded me.

  “I don’t care. Get them. Now.” This had to be some kind of mistake. Something where when we all got together and talked it would make sense. “Before you go, give me the phone number. Let me call the manager.”

  Shoshana brought up the number on her phone and showed it to me. “The manager’s name is Tricia Monson.”

  Monson. For some reason the name made me think of monsoon, which made my stomach feel even more twisty and upset.

  I dialed the number and put the phone up to my ear. It rang twice before someone answered. “Can I speak to Ms. Monson, please?” I glanced at the immobile Shoshana. “What are you waiting for? Go get everyone!”

  She ran off, and Ella said, “I’m going to go help round them all up.”

  I nodded and walked toward the student government room.

  “This is Ms. Monson.”

  “Hello. This is Mattie Lowe. I’m the student body president at Malibu Prep, and we’ve had your venue reserved this Saturday for our prom since September, and now I’m being told that there’s some kind of problem?”

  “There’s no problem on our end, I’m afraid. We were unable to deposit your check, and as per our agreement, we couldn’t hold the venue. We have a very long waiting list.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut. “I don’t know how that happened because we have the money. We have plenty of money.” Even if the well had somehow gone dry, I would have had my dad cover the deposit and then paid him back. “This was some kind of mistake, and we’ve sold all these tickets, and our entire senior and junior classes are expecting to be there on Saturday.”

  “Ms. Lowe, I sympathize with your position, but there’s nothing to be done. We’ve already accepted a deposit check from someone else.”

  “Who?” Maybe I could bribe them and get them to give La Caille back to us.

  “I can’t give out that information.”

  This just kept getting better and better. “What I don’t understand is why we weren’t notified. If you’d just called us and told us, I would have driven a cashier’s check over to you myself.”

  “You were notified.” I heard a rustling sound, like papers. “Let me just check my file. Ah. Yes. We called a Parminda Kandhari and told her about the situation. She said she understood and that your school was simply short on funds and to cancel our agreement.”

  Mindi? Mindi had done this?

  Why?

  I staye
d silent for so long that Ms. Monson spoke again. “Ms. Lowe, I am sorry for the confusion, and I wish you the best of luck in finding somewhere new for your dance. I am afraid you might have a difficult time of it, though, as this is wedding and prom season.”

  She hung up.

  I hadn’t needed the reminder that it was prom season. I’d been living for this day for so long. My perfect, amazing senior prom.

  A prom that Mindi had just single-handedly gutted.

  I walked into the student government room and sat at the head of our table, in my regular seat. I watched as everybody started to file in, taking their spots. When Mindi arrived hand in hand with Victor, it was all I could do to stay in my chair.

  When everyone had sat down, Ella closed the door shut behind her.

  “I just got off the phone with the manager at La Caille.” I kept my eyes trained on Mindi, watching the color drain from her face. “Apparently Mindi put a stop payment on our deposit check, and we’ve lost the venue. Care to explain?”

  Mindi opened and closed her mouth several times, like a fish who suddenly found herself drowning on dry land.

  “Is that true?” Victor asked, still holding Mindi’s hand.

  Part of me wanted to throw a textbook at them because she didn’t deserve any emotional support or comfort right now.

  Her eyes filled with tears, and she nodded.

  “Is the money gone? Did you steal it?” I asked. Because nothing else made sense. Mindi had her huge public Disney-themed promposal. She had obviously wanted to go. Why else would she stop the check unless she had been like embezzling funds or something?

  If she told me that she’d cleaned out our prom account so that she could have her perfect dream beach wedding with Victor Herboyfriend, I was going to end her. Leap across this table, wrap my hands around her scrawny little neck, and choke her out.

  “The money’s still there,” she whispered.

  “Then what happened?” I demanded, slamming my hand down against the table. The sound caused everyone to jump.

  “Maybe we should all just calm—”

  The boy needed to stay quiet. “Do not finish that sentence, Victor. Because I have a feeling you’re somehow a part of this, and Mindi is going to explain why she ruined prom.”

  The tears ran down Mindi’s face, and she didn’t seem capable of speech.

  And I was not in a forgiving mood. “Every week we sat in here, and you told me it was all taken care of. We were fine. Not to worry. But you were plotting behind our backs? You lied to us on a repeated basis, even though I was nice to you.” Did she not know how hard that was for me? Because of how annoying she was? “You’re going to explain why. Now.”

  She took in some shaky breaths. “Do you know that I come to school a half hour early every day?”

  What did that have to do with anything? I threw both of my hands out to the side, as if to say, “So?”

  “My parents are very old-fashioned and very strict. I am not allowed to wear makeup. I’m not allowed to wear my hair in crazy styles. I’m not allowed to wear the clothes I want to wear. I get here early to change, and at the end of the school day, I change back. Every day.” She wiped the mascara-stained tears from her cheeks. “And the one thing I most definitely am not allowed to have is a boyfriend. My parents would kill me and then ground me for the rest of my life. I’m expected to have an arranged marriage like theirs when I’m older. I can’t start dating until I’ve graduated from college. And I’m especially not allowed to date non-Indian guys.

  “I love Victor. He is the best thing in my life. And I would do anything to protect what we have. Even ruin the prom.” He put his arm around her, like he wanted to shield her from me.

  “I’m still not connecting the dots here,” I told her.

  “Mercedes Bentley came to me and said that if I didn’t find a way to stop the prom from happening, she would send my parents pictures of me kissing Victor.”

  Mindi did this to hold on to her boyfriend? That was literally the stupidest thing I had ever heard. And I’d sat through Scott and Mercedes’s presentation on the American Revolution.

  Ella repeated Mercedes’s name and then used some words I had no idea she even knew. Of the four-letter variety.

  Some part of my brain heard Victor ask, “Why didn’t you tell me?” but mostly all I could think about was that Mercedes had done this. I knew she was up to something, and here was the proof. What did she care if she ruined prom? Ever since Ms. Rathbone had caught Mercedes sneaking into the masquerade ball after she’d been suspended, Mercedes had been banned from all dances. Including prom.

  And I guessed if she didn’t get to go to prom, no one did.

  “We just have to find somewhere else to have it,” Ella said. “We have all the other elements in place. The decorations, the DJ, the crowns for prom king and queen—”

  “Not the food,” I reminded her.

  “Okay. We need food. But Shoshana’s dad owns a bunch of restaurants. Maybe he could get us some stuff to serve last minute?” she asked in a hopeful voice.

  “I’ll call him right now,” Shoshana said, walking over to the corner of the room.

  “It’s prom and wedding season,” I told Ella. “We’ll never find somewhere else to hold it.”

  “Maybe we should call Dad.”

  That was like the one thing we couldn’t do. “We can’t go to the adults asking for help. Not after we made such a big deal about them not coming.” It was bad enough that Shoshana had to ask her father for help on the food, but we didn’t have a choice there. We would find a place to hold the prom, on our own.

  Ella clapped her hands together. “Okay, everyone get on their phones. Call around to hotels, restaurants, any place that has a space big enough for us to hold our prom in a fifty-mile radius.” All the kids around us did as she asked.

  Except Mindi and Victor, who left. Which seemed unfair, given that she’d caused this mess. The least she could do would be to help us get out of it.

  My sister and I watched them go, and then Ella said, “I am going to find that Mercedes . . . and . . . and rip off her head with my bare hands!”

  I’d never heard her threaten someone with physical harm before. Me? I did it all the time and had even carried through with it at least once (although Jake claimed it was twice). Maybe if Ella was rubbing off on me, I was rubbing off on her, too. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “There’s no point. If you rip off one head, she’ll just grow two more to replace it.”

  “Why would she even do this?”

  I’d long ago given up trying to figure out why Mercedes Bentley did anything. “You know how it is for her. The end justifies the mean. I’m sure she’s off somewhere doing a victory dance or slaughtering a goat or whatever it is that makes her happy. I told you that I thought she was up to something.” I just had no idea it was something this big and this destructive.

  “Just like the triangle opposite the hypotenuse.”

  Huh? “You know I don’t know what that means!”

  “It’s means you’re right.”

  I sighed. “Fat lot of good that does me. I shouldn’t have just blindly trusted Mindi. I should have followed up. Verified her information.”

  “You couldn’t have known this would happen.”

  “But prom is one of those things people remember most from high school, and now it’s totally screwed up.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “We can fix this. Don’t give up. Don’t let Mercedes win.”

  “Don’t let her win?” Ella didn’t get it. “Mercedes has already won.”

  That became even more evident a half hour later when we all had to admit defeat. Ms. Monson had been right. There was nothing available. Everybody was booked solid. Some places even laughed at us for trying to schedule a venue that big with such short notice.

  “Maybe we can have it at somebody’s house. Lots of people here have big enough houses,” someone in the back volunteered.

/>   It was a valid suggestion and probably our only option at this point. That didn’t mean I had to like it. “Having it at a student’s house feels like admitting to the alumni that we couldn’t pull this off.”

  Ella shook her head. “We could pull this off. We almost did. We were just sabotaged, and nobody could have predicted that.”

  I should have expected it, given what I knew about She Who Shall Not Be Named.

  The door flew open, and Victor Kim stood there, looking a bit angry. Which surprised me. I’d never seen Victor displaying an emotion before. “You don’t have anywhere to hold the prom now, right? So I have a proposition for you. My family has a ballroom. A huge ballroom. My mother’s a diplomat, and they entertain constantly. Our ballroom was featured in Architectural Quarterly a few months ago.”

  “That was your house?” Ella said, her eyes going wide.

  Victor nodded.

  She turned to me and murmured, “It’s gorgeous. As nice as any hotel. It wouldn’t seem sad if we had it there.”

  “It will still be a glorified house party.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” she whispered back.

  “I’ve already called and cleared it with my parents, and they said we could use it.”

  “And what is it you want in return?” I asked. Because he was making it obvious he wanted something.

  “I know it’s going to be hard to forgive Mindi, and I’m hoping that by using my house it might help out a little in that area. What I’m asking is that you don’t all hate her without at least considering things from her side. You guys don’t know what it’s been like for her growing up in her house, how strict her parents really are. I just need you to try and see things from her point of view.”

  What I wanted to do was make a really sarcastic retort, but I bit my tongue. I thought about me and Jake. About what I would do if my father didn’t allow us to date, despite me loving him the way that I did. There probably wasn’t much I wouldn’t have done to be with him. I wouldn’t have destroyed a prom for the entire school, but I was capable of doing something maybe just shy of that so that we could be together.