My throat burned and I could not speak. I could not even bear to look at him. I felt both guilty and ashamed of myself and terrified at the prospect of losing him. He had been my rock. He was my heart and soul and my conscience and my compass. No matter what torments were going on I knew I had him to retreat into at the end of the day. And we were absolutely above scrutiny. Cheryl, Coffey, Trevor… none of these people even knew he existed and so could not contrive to hurt him or my relationship with him. He was my secret solace. I couldn’t bear the idea of giving him up regardless of what senseless, primal urges I might have occasionally felt. I was too young to be swept under by primal urges anyway. Sticking with Stefano was the eminently more sensible path.
“Are we going to enjoy this evening together?” I whispered hoarsely. “Because we have to find something else to talk about.”
His eyes softened and he bowed his head.
“Then embrace me first, so that I know you are not angry at me,” he stretched out his arms.
“Of course I’m not!” I gasped as I fell into them.
We remained like that, quiet and still, for what seemed like minutes.
Finally he pulled back from me and smiled gently and said, “What should you like to discuss then, Lady Catherine?”
I looked up at him and a little shy smile played about my lips and gradually grew into a mischievous grin.
“What are you thinking, my dear one?” he laughed.
“Byron!” I exclaimed. “Tell me another story about Byron!”
“Gah!” he groaned and threw his head back. “You are a devil, you are!” he roared at me playfully. Then he sighed dramatically and said, “Very well then. Let me see…”
He regaled me all night with exotic tales of rogue poets on the loose in Italy. I’m sure he manipulated the stories so as to cast Lord Byron in the worst possible light, but the more scandalous he made him seem, the more entranced I was. It was such a delightful evening that I completely forgot to ask him to help me with my Italian homework. And I fell asleep curled up in the warmth of his field of energy and was content.
In the morning, furious pounding on my door. It was Cheryl and Janice, of course. Who else?
“Come to town with us – were shopping for Halloween costumes!” Cheryl trilled at me as Janice stood behind her looking bored and snapping her gum.
“Cheryl. I’m not going to the dance. I told you, I’ve been barred,” I said with frustration.
Janice was ready to give up and go, but Cheryl was not having it.
“Oh come on! We’ll get you a really good disguise. It’s perfect!” she insisted.
I looked past her to Janice, whose gaze was on the floor, on the ceiling, down the hall…anywhere but at me. I wondered how she felt, being elevated to the status of Cheryl’s number one sidekick now that Lisa was out of the picture. And then I wondered why she couldn’t look at me. Was this a trap? Was Cheryl cozying up to me and pretending to be my friend in the hope of getting me to go the dance so that she could rat me out again, like she had done with the English homework?
I was taking no chances. I had no interest in going to the dance, and I had no interest in anything beyond a peaceable détente with Cheryl.
“No,” I said simply and shut the door on them.
It was rude of me, to be sure, but I could think of no other way to deal with someone who refused to take no for an answer. And now, the more I thought of it, it had to be some sort of trap. There was no other explanation for why Cheryl was trying so hard to act like nothing had ever happened and that everything was normal. I remembered all too well the vicious look in her blue eyes when she told me I would be sorry. I believed her then. I absolutely believed her.
A few hours later they came back. And they brought me a present.
This time Cheryl came to my door alone.
“Oh, Cath-er-ine!” she sang. “I have a little something for you!”
Oh dear god, what now? I thought as I grumpily got up from my bed where I had been reading to answer the door.
“Look!” She was grinning from ear to ear as she displayed the costume for me. “It’s the wicked witch of the west!” she laughed. “And the best thing is, it has a mask, so your face will be completely covered!”
She barged into my room and laid the costume out on my bed. It consisted of a long black shapeless dress, a conical black hat, and a green rubber mask with giant witch nose and chin and that were both punctuated by warts.
“You already have the long, dark hair!” she squealed. “It’s so perfect! Nobody will know it’s you!”
I sighed. Now if I said no, Cheryl would have a hissy fit after having gone to the trouble and expense of buying a costume for me.
“Cheryl,” I said firmly. “I’m not going. This was very sweet of you, but I hope you kept the receipt because you’re going to have to take it back.”
“It was final sale,” she pouted.
“Well, I’m sorry. I mean thank you, but I didn’t ask you to do this.” I was filled with exasperation. Not to mention suspicion. I remembered what Margie had said when Cheryl had brought her computer over – beware of Trojan Horses.
“Okay. Well I’m going to leave it here for you to try it on. I still have almost a whole week to try to convince you to come. It’ll be fun. And it’ll be like a new beginning for us to celebrate,” she said and she put her arm about my shoulder and gave me an awkward half-embrace. “Just try it on,” she winked at me as she left my room.
As the door clicked shut behind her, I scrunched the dress and the mask up into a ball and threw it and the hat into the back corner of my closet. I was more determined now than ever that I was not, under any circumstances, going to the Halloween Dance. Cheryl wanted me to far too badly.
On Monday, we had to hand in our essays on Jane Eyre. Mine was longer than five pages – I couldn’t help myself. I could go on about Jane Eyre forever. As it was, I had difficulty containing myself to seven pages.
Cheryl and Janice came in and took their usual desks in front of and beside me. I think Janice was slightly miffed that Cheryl chose to sit directly next to me instead of her. Her brow darkened a little when Cheryl slid into the desk next to mine and she realized she would have to sit with her back to us.
“Did you finish your essay?” I asked Cheryl. I was having a hard time believing she was capable of writing five pages about anything, let alone a novel she hadn’t read, and was amused by the thought of her struggling to do it.
“Oh, god! Yes!” she groaned. “I was up all night last night. So stupid. It’s not five pages though, it’s only four, and I used a really big font.”
“What was your thesis?” I asked
“My what?”
“Your thesis – the thing your paper was about,” I explained.
“Oh – why didn’t you just say that?” she rolled her eyes at me. “I wrote about the pretty girl. And why the old man chose to marry Jane instead. Like we talked about.” She looked at me like I was stupid for having forgotten already.
“Yeah, but what did you write about it? Why do you think he chose Jane instead of Blanche?”
“Oh I don’t know,” she shrugged and twisted her face up. “I just wrote that I thought it was a stupid decision because marrying Blanche could have helped him out socially and financially. And she probably wouldn’t have cared about the crazy woman in the attic.”
“Right,” I nodded, and wished that I could be a fly on the wall when Ms. Tyrol read that.
“What did you write about, Janice?” I asked, trying to be nice by bringing her into the conversation.
“I wrote about the harsh conditions at boarding schools and how they can shape or break a person’s character,” she said un-ironically.
“Cool,” I said, wondering how much of that she actually related to the novel.
“What did you write about?” Cheryl asked me pointedly.
“I wrote about how Jane’s unwavering moral fortitude made her always choose the most d
ifficult path, but in the end she was rewarded with everything her heart desired. You know, like, the meek will inherit the earth, sort of thing,” I looked at Cheryl to see if she got what I was saying.
But she had already lost interest in the conversation and was busy responding to a text on her cell phone.
That same afternoon I got to Italian class later than usual. Chad was already there and when I saw him I took a deep breath and decided to go over and sit next to him.
He smiled as I sat.
“Hey!” he said to me.
“Hey,” I smiled sheepishly back. I felt like I had been awful to him, putting him on freeze when he had been nothing but good to me.
“When are you going to write another column for us?” he asked.
“Oh – I hadn’t thought about it,” I confessed. “Do you want me to?”
“Yes! Of course! All your stuff has gotten great response.
“Well, I don’t know what I’d write about. I mean, I had let go of the idea of having a column, you know? The last one was sort of, special circumstances. If I had been writing them consistently I suppose I would have developed a theme to build on, but it’s been so erratic, I don’t know….”
I was talking too much. So I stopped.
“Wellllll,” he said hesitantly, as if he was testing the waters with all those extra ls, “We could hang out after school today and talk about it more at length if you want?”
I didn’t know. Was it safe? Was Cheryl over this now?
“What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I finally said. “Let’s do it. Over food though, there was nothing good at lunch and I’m starving!”
“Deal!” he smiled at me.
I was so suspicious of Cheryl and her extreme interest in having me come to the dance, that I realized it didn’t matter if I saw Chad outside of class or not. She was still out to get me, so it didn’t really matter what I did.
Stefano, on the other hand, gave me far more cause for concern.
I loved him. I really did. With every shred of heart and soul that I had in me. With every cell in my body. He was part of me, and the thought of being without him was something akin to the thought of having my arm amputated. I just couldn’t bear it.
But sometimes, Chad smiled at me a certain way, and the corners of his eyes would crinkle up, and I had a hard time not thinking of him in ways that I shouldn’t. And I had remembered the electrical jolt I had gotten that one time when he had grabbed me and I craved that feeling again. I wanted to feel that again, but I wanted to feel more. I wanted to see where that feeling would go. I wanted to breathe in Chad’s smell and find out if his skin tasted salty and feel his actual physical pressure on me when he put his arms around me.
And then I felt like a horrible awful person, for to think these things was a betrayal of Stefano. And Stefano knew it. He could read me like a book. And what broke my heart the most was that he would actually give this to me – he would let me go so that I might experience this. And to think that someone could be that selfless, and would be willing to make that kind of sacrifice for my happiness, had me berating myself for even thinking about thinking of someone other than Stefano. It was an impossible situation.
“Things have calmed down now? Nobody’s hassling you since your last column came out?” Chad asked me as we strolled across the lawn together toward the dining hall.
“No. I mean, Cheryl is still being suspiciously nice to me, so I kind of think that something is up. I’m being very cautious. And I haven’t even seen Trevor around. I’ve been laying pretty low, though. I tend to grab food and take it back to my room.”
“Are you still afraid of him?” Chad asked me.
“Well, no. Not so much. I mean, if he does anything to me, it’s been published in the school paper that he had threatened me and that I was afraid of him. So he’d be stupid to try anything, right?” I reasoned.
“And I think that all of his free time is being taken up by Cheryl, now, so he’s probably not thinking too much about you or getting revenge,” Chad commented.
“Well, good,” I said “They deserve each other!”
“I won’t argue with you there!” Chad replied.
We had no sooner reached the dining hall, gotten something to eat and settled into a table, when Cheryl appeared. Her ears must have been burning and so she had come to find the source.
I saw her first, as Chad had his back to the entrance. She clocked us and a storm cloud darkened her face for a fraction of a second. Then she seemed to recover herself and smiled as she came sauntering over to our table.
“Oh! You two look cozy again!” She was smiling like the serpent under the flower.
“Chad, did you ask Catherine to come to come to the Halloween Dance with you? Because I don’t seem to be having any luck getting her to say yes to me!”
“Um, no. We were talking newspaper stuff,” he said evenly.
“Oh, well, I think you should try to convince her to come! She’s afraid to because she’s barred.” Cheryl looked at me and winked.
“Catherine can do whatever Catherine likes,” Chad shrugged. “Far be it from me to ever try to convince someone to do something they don’t want to do.”
The jibe was lost on her.
“Oh, well, we bought her a costume and everything,” Cheryl said in her saccharine, baby voice.
“That was silly to buy a costume for someone who doesn’t want to go,” Chad replied.
Cheryl pouted with confusion for a nano-second.
“I was just trying to be nice,” she said, wounded.
I looked down at my plate of pyrogies and thought that they must be getting cold. I wished Cheryl would hurry up and leave so that I could eat them.
“You’re going to the dance, right?” she asked Chad.
“I imagine I probably will, yes,” Chad answered indifferently.
“What are you dressing up as?” She had flipped into flirtatious mode now, but Chad was oblivious.
“I hadn’t really thought about it. Maybe I’ll put a sheet over my head and be a ghost.”
Cheryl giggled girlishly at this. “I’m going to be an Arabian belly dancer!” she gushed. “You should see my costume. It’s gorgeous. And sexy!”
“I’m sure it is, but isn’t the point of Halloween to dress up as something scary?” he asked.
“I guess,” she muttered, “If you want to be completely boring.”
“We do. And if you don’t mind, we have business to discuss,” he said dismissively.
Cheryl sighed and flounced off.
“Do you see what I mean?” I asked as soon as she was out of earshot. “She has an unhealthy interest in wanting me to go to the dance. It kind of freaks me out!”
Chad mulled this over for a minute. Then suddenly he asked, “What kind of costume did they get you?”
“A witch! With a green mask and a big long sort of tent dress!” I told him.
“Do you think it would fit me?” he asked.
“I suppose it would!” I laughed as I realized where he was going with this.
“Do you have it? Or does Cheryl?” he asked excitedly.
“I have it – it’s balled up at the bottom of my closet!”
“Perfect.”
“Well, if you’re trying to fool people into think you’re me, your hair is a little bit too short! Like, by a foot and a half!” I laughed.
“I’ll go to the drama department and see if I can get a wig!” he grinned.
“But what if they mean to pull a Carrie on me? And you end up covered in pig’s blood or something?” I suggested only half-jokingly.
“I’ll live, whatever it is. And then imagine how horrified they’ll be when it turns out that they pulled their prank on me.”
“Honestly, I think all Cheryl wants to do is lure me to the dance and then rat on me for being where I’m not supposed to be. It would be funny if Coffey showed up to unmask me and it was you!” I laughed. “She’d sure look
pretty stupid. But you won’t fool her,” I pointed out reasonably, “Seeing as how you’re six inches taller than me!”
“I’ll hunch over! Or maybe people will think you’re wearing high heels under your witchy gown!” he suggested.
“Well, it’s just might be crazy enough to work! I’ll put the costume in a bag and bring to you in Italian tomorrow,” I told him.
“Perfetto!” he said.
And I did do just that. I was very glad not have that eyeless, soulless green face staring back at me every time I opened my closet.
The rest of the week went by rather unremarkably. Cheryl pestered me every time she saw me about going to the dance. I decided to pretend (for the sake of Chad’s little ruse) that she was beginning to break me down. On Wednesday I told her I’d think about it. On Thursday I asked her how she could assure me that I wouldn’t get caught, and on Friday I said that I might go depending on how I felt on Saturday.
So on Saturday, the first thing in the morning, she came knocking on my door to ask me if I thought I was going to go that night. (I had managed to get away with never giving her my cell phone number.)
“Yeah, maybe,” I hedged.
“Well come into town with us this morning,” she tried to entice me. “We’re going to have breakfast and then we’re going to shopping for last minute things for our costumes.”
I was awed that Cheryl would go back to that diner in town after the way she had behaved last time. But then, I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me at this point that Cheryl had her head shoved so far up her own arse that she was completely oblivious to the effect her behavior had on others. It made me wonder, how could her head be stuck up there while the sun shone out of it at the same time?
“I’m getting a bit of a headache,” I lied. “I’m going to take some pills and lie down for a while.”
“Oh well, come with us and get something to eat. You’ll feel better,” she suggested.
“Cheryl! I just want to lie quietly for a bit. Please!” I was really losing my patience with her now that I was no longer so afraid of her. She had done her worst and I had survived to tell the tale.
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