Prince in Disguise

by Stephanie Kate Strohm

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, realizing that my joke wasn’t actually a joke at all. “You are. You’re pregnant.”

  “Not everyone who barfs is pregnant.” She wiped a hand across the back of her mouth and rose to her feet, flushing the toilet.

  “No, but you are.” I watched as she neatly rinsed her mouth out with water from my sink, hardly able to believe what I knew, somehow, was true. I prided myself on being able to see pregnancy plot twists a mile away on TV; how could I not have figured this out earlier? Maybe because it seemed impossible that perfect Dusty could be pregnant and not yet married. “You’ve barfed at least twice since we got here. Highly unusual behavior. And you’ve been looking particularly busty.”

  “Don’t look at my bust, weirdo.”

  “I can’t help it; they’re just out there!” I pointed at the large boob-shaped lumps discernible even under her oversize rugby shirt. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Admit it! You’re pregnant!”

  “There is nothing to admit! I’m just havin’ some tummy troubles, and that is all.”

  Dusty and I stared at each other, neither willing to look away. Or blink. And then, a really, truly horrible thought occurred to me. I didn’t want to think that Dusty would do something so life altering for such a stupid reason, and yet…she’d gone so far down the reality TV rabbit hole already.…

  “Did Pamela put you up to this?” I asked, trying to find some semblance of the truth in her eyes. “To create more drama for the show? Is this all a plot twist? Did Pamela impregnate you?!”

  “Of course she didn’t, you wackadoodle!” Dusty sighed, exasperated, balling her hands on her hips.

  “Dusty!” I cried. “You can’t have a baby for ratings!”

  “I’m not havin’ a ratings baby!”

  “Do you even know where the line is anymore? Between reality and reality TV? Is any of this real, Dusty? Are you real anymore?” I pinched her.

  “Ow!” she shrieked. “Did you just pinch me?” She rubbed her arm exaggeratedly. “Of course I’m real, dummy.”

  “Are you? What about all of this? You don’t even have real eyelashes, Dusty.” I waved my hand in front of her face. “This show is so fake. And it seems like you’re being fake right along with it.”

  “Ouch, Dylan. Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”

  “I’m sorry, I just…I just don’t understand any of this. It’s so dumb, the way we have to pretend things are real when we know they’re not. How are you so okay with all of it?”

  “Because it’s not real life. It’s just a show. So it doesn’t matter. Goin’ along with what they want, givin’ Pamela what she wants to see, none of that stuff matters. What matters is me and Ronan. That’s real.”

  “And the baby’s real?”

  “I—” Dusty hesitated, emotions flitting across her face so fast I couldn’t read any of them. “Goddamn it, Dylan, Ronan and I promised nobody would know but us. I just wanted this one thing to myself, you know? This one big special thing just for us.” She placed a protective hand over her belly.

  “I’m sorry, Dusty, I wasn’t trying to make you—I mean, I’m not—”

  “The baby’s real,” she confirmed quietly, looking down at her stomach, almost like she couldn’t quite believe it either.

  “Wow. I just—Wow.” I couldn’t believe Dusty was really pregnant. That she was going to have a baby. That there was going to be a brand-new addition to our family, which had been such a small, self-contained unit of three for so long. “How did this happen?”

  “Sometimes accidents—beautiful accidents—happen between two consenting adults who are madly in love—”

  “La-la-la-la-la!” I covered my ears with my hands. “Never mind. Don’t know why I asked that. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Dilly.” She lifted my hands off my ears, a pleading look in her eyes. “You can’t tell anybody. Not a soul. Nobody knows.”

  “Not even Mom?”

  “Not even Mom. Just me and Ronan. And I can’t have his mama findin’ out before the wedding. She ain’t exactly my biggest fan.”

  “I won’t tell. I promise.” My hand reached out involuntarily toward Dusty’s stomach. I pulled it back before making contact. It seemed impossible that there was a future niece or nephew in there. I was going to be somebody’s Aunt Dylan! “Maybe Florence will be happy about the baby.”

  “Happy?” Dusty asked incredulously. “Happy?”

  “Um, yeah. Babies usually make people happy. ’Cause they’re like cute and small and stuff.…” Catching sight of Dusty’s expression of disbelief, I trailed off into silence. “She’s gonna be a grandma?”

  “No, Florence is not gonna be happy about the baby. She’s gonna think I’m a slut who can’t keep my damn legs closed.”

  My jaw dropped open. That was the kind of language that caused people to lose their Miss America titles.

  “Or worse, that I tricked Ronan into marryin’ me. That he’s only marryin’ me ’cause of the baby. And I’m exactly the worst kind of social-climbin’ manipulative gold digger everyone thinks I am. Gold digger,” she snorted. “Ain’t that ironic. There’s nothin’ here to dig. What’s left of Ronan’s family money is tied up in keepin’ this stately pile from tumblin’ down around us.”

  Apparently, Kit had been right on the first day I’d met him. Well, it made sense, really—Ronan didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would pursue reality TV fame without a reason. And certainly Florence would never have let cameras in here without a really good reason. But it was obvious how much Ronan loved his home, and how proud he was of its history. Even I could understand sacrificing your privacy for something you loved that much.

  “Then talk about that,” I encouraged her. “In your confessional. Show Florence and everyone else that you’re not interested in Ronan for his money. Because he doesn’t have any.”

  “Nah, that won’t play well. They’d never air it. It’s not part of the fantasy. Cinderella isn’t supposed to move into a castle with extensive water damage, a cracked foundation, and lead pipes.”

  Lead pipes? I did a mental tally of the amount of tap water I’d consumed in the past couple weeks, and I didn’t like my odds.

  “But a baby? That’s great television.” She sighed. “Can’t wait to see what Twitter has to say about this one.”

  “Maybe it’s not that big of a deal, Dusty,” I said tentatively. “I mean, you guys love each other. And you’re getting married. And you were gonna get married anyway. Uh, right?”

  “Of course we were,” Dusty said angrily. “We didn’t find out about the baby until after we got engaged.”

  “So maybe—”

  “Maybe nothin’. Florence can’t find out about this baby. I need you to swear you won’t tell a soul. Not Heaven. Not Mom. Not Jamie. Nobody.”

  “I swear, Dusty. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.”

  I held out my pinky, like I had so many times when I was little. She hooked hers in mine, and we shook.

  “It almost feels good, to tell somebody else,” she said with a sad smile. “Of course, I’ll be pissin’ myself for the next week, worryin’ you’ll let somethin’ slip—”

  “I won’t! You can trust me, I—”

  “But it still feels kinda good. To tell my sister. And nobody else. I don’t need all of America’s opinions on the peanut right now.”

  “Can I seeeee?” Someone who sounded like Heaven was banging on the door. Dusty and I both jumped, then stared at each other.

  “Should we let her in?” I whispered.

  “No, let’s be super suspicious and lock the door. She wants to see your makeover.”

  “My what?”

  “Makeover. For your date. Honestly, Dilly, sometimes I think everybody got it wrong and you’re the dumb one.”

  “Dumb one? Who thinks you’re the dumb one?”

  Dusty flapped her hands at me as she went to open the door. First I find out the magnificent Dusty is premaritally pregn
ant, then that she worries people think she’s dumb? I needed to sit down.

  “DYLAN!” Heaven shrieked, practically rattling the pictures on the wall as she plowed into my room. “HOLY HECK, YOU LOOK LIKE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON!”

  “It’s not a big deal,” I muttered. The big deal was sitting in utero two feet to my left.

  “It is a huge deal.” Heaven placed her hands on her hips. “You look amazing! And it’s your first date! At the advanced age of sixteen!”

  “Sixteen is not that old—”

  “Why don’t you just put your damn heels on?” Dusty suggested. “Don’t want to keep him waiting too long.”

  “Is he waiting? Am I late? Oh my God, am I late?” I reached for the shoes, tripped, landed on the rug, and sent the shoe box flying across the room, where it smacked into the door and fell to the ground.

  “Oh, girl.” Heaven hauled me up to my feet as Dusty bent down to retrieve the shoes. “Try to keep it together, ’kay?”

  “This is me keeping it together.”

  I sat down on the bed and took the shoes from Dusty, slipping them on one at a time. I hadn’t worn heels since…ever? The last thing I needed was to look taller. This was going to be interesting.

  “I really hope this date doesn’t involve a lot of walking,” I prayed fervently as I rose to stand, testing my weight on uneven footing. I must have been nearly six foot five now. Someone should warn the villagers. I didn’t want to accidentally kick off some kind of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman mass panic.

  Another knock at the door. All three of our heads swiveled toward it.

  “Is that Jamie?” I asked, my voice almost unrecognizably squeaky. “I’m not ready! I mean, I am ready, but I’m not ready. Oh God.”

  “Sweets, are you ready?” Definitely not Jamie. Mom. Dusty flung the door open, and Mom walked in, holding a very old-looking camera.

  “Oh God, Mom, no,” I groaned. “No pictures. Please.”

  “Do you know how hard this was for me to track down?” Mom ignored me completely and started snapping away, the flash making tiny explosions in the dim lighting. I did my best to blink in every shot so they’d all be unusable. “TRC may have taken my phone, but I am not letting my baby leave for her first date without photographic evidence.”

  “You got your evidence, okay? Now can you stop?” I pleaded. “I am well and truly mortified. Mission accomplished, Mom.”

  “Go take one with your sister. Heaven, you get in there, too.”

  Dutifully, I stood between Heaven and Dusty and grimaced as they posed. Surely royal ships had been launched with less fanfare.

  “Are we done now?” I knew I sounded whiny. But I felt whiny.

  “This one’s going straight on the fridge. And maybe in the Christmas card, too,” Mom said happily.

  “Great.” With my luck, Mom would probably add in a lovely handwritten note that read, Season’s Greetings from the Leighs—can you believe someone finally asked Dylan out?! We all thought that would never happen! or something equally terrible. “Time to go. Heaven, can you grab my sweatshirt?”

  “Your sweatshirt?” Mom yelped. “Dylan. Honestly. You are not tossing a sweatshirt on over this gorgeous dress.”

  “You can borrow my nice coat,” Dusty offered. “And you can borrow as much of my clothing as you like the rest of the time you’re here. Maybe that’ll get you to stop dressing like a tween skater boy.”

  Mom and Dusty shared an extremely annoying amused glance.

  “Is it really time to go?” Mom asked, checking the delicate gold watch on her wrist. “I don’t want her to get there too early. Nothing wrong with keeping him waiting a little.” She winked. I blinked back at her stonily.

  “Jamie might be able to wait, but production can’t. Heaven, get her to the stairs,” Dusty ordered. “I’ll meet y’all down there with the coat. But make sure she walks down ’em alone. You can’t be in the shot. You neither, Mama.”

  “Yeah, yeah, got it.” Heaven took my arm and led me down the hall, like she was helping an old lady cross the street. “‘Stay out of the shot, Heaven. Don’t get in the frame, Heaven.’”

  “Reality TV not all it’s cracked up to be, eh?” I teased.

  “So it’s not as glamorous as I hoped. Doesn’t matter. I’m still plannin’ on being the Bachelorette in about a decade or so.”

  “Good luck with that.” We’d reached the end of the hallway. The staircase loomed below me, curving down into oblivion. And Jamie. “This is weird, Heaven,” I whispered, clutching her arm tightly. “This is too much.”

  “Too much?”

  “There’s too much going on.”

  “With the date?”

  “Um. Yeah. With the date.” I sternly squelched all baby-shaped thoughts from my mind. To be fair, even if Dusty’s news hadn’t thrown me for a loop, I would have been freaking out about the date anyway. “It’s way too much. Like, too much pressure. Too fancy. I know this is beautiful and magical, and we’re in a castle, and I’ve sure never looked better, but I feel like I’m going to prom. Right now I almost wish I’d met Jamie in Tupelo,” I said wistfully. “And we were just, like, going to watch a movie in his mom’s basement.”

  “With the door open, of course.” Heaven grinned.

  “Of course.” I grinned back.

  “Dylan, all this extra shizz”—she gently untangled a few strands of my hair from a dangly earring—“it’s just frosting. Icing on the cake. You’re just going to hang out with a boy you like. That’s all it is.”

  “Then why am I so nervous?” I whispered.

  “’Cause you like him, stupid.” She rolled her eyes. “I threw up in a trash can in the girls’ bathroom at the Cineplex when Tate took me to the movies for the first time.”

  “You did not.”

  “Did too. Just never told you ’cause I was embarrassed.”

  “I am appalled that you would keep something like that from me.” I feigned outrage.

  She shrugged. “I’m tellin’ you now. Now quit stallin’ and get down there.”

  “Okay, okay.” I exhaled slowly. “I can do this.”

  “You were born to do this, baby,” Heaven said encouragingly. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

  “Sting?”

  “So maybe Dad’s advice doesn’t work in every situation.” She shrugged. Heaven’s dad coached football at our school, and whenever I was in need of motivation she tended to channel him. “Just get down there, all right?”

  “All right.”

  And there it was—the camera, resting on the shoulder of a skinny guy in a dark blue sweatshirt. He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, the lens only inches from my face. I took a shaky breath, conscious of the camera’s eye on my sweating forehead, my nervously fluttering hands, my too-fast heartbeat that thudded so loud I was sure the camera could hear it. He was close, too close. I felt like I was suffocating. Breathe, Dylan. I had to remember to breathe.

  I placed one heel on the top steps. For balance, I rested one freshly manicured hand on the wooden banister and began my slow descent, the cameraman mere inches behind me, slightly off to my side. This would be fine. Everything would be fine. I’d walked down a hundred thousand staircases in my lifetime. Sure, I’d never had a cameraman following me before, but I’d try my best not to let him see how badly he’d rattled me.

  And then Jamie appeared, waiting at the bottom of the stairs, almost painfully handsome in a dark gray suit with a simple striped tie. He’d done something with his hair so it fell in a soft dark curl across his forehead. Pamela may have been the devil, but I thanked her from the bottom of my heart for getting me this dress. Because Jamie’s jaw had dropped, and he was looking at me with the kind of light in his eyes that I’d only ever seen in movies, and I never thought I’d see when someone looked at me.

  Jamie took a few steps toward me, his own cameraman trailing behind him, almost like he was being pulled by an invisible string, until he arrived at the foot of
the stairs. He reached a hand out, and I took it, landing beside him on the ground with only the barest hint of a wobble. I knew there was a camera behind him, and another that still hadn’t left my side, but for the first time, I didn’t care. It was only me and Jamie.

  “Dylan,” he said, “I…There are no words.” He shook his head. “For the first time in my life, language has failed me. Utterly.”

  “No poetry, then?”

  “You are poetry,” he said simply. “I’m sorry.” He rubbed his brow, wincing. “Was that naff? No, don’t answer that—it was terribly naff.”

  “I don’t even know what ‘naff’ means.”

  “Erm, cheesy.”

  “It was very cheesy. But I liked it anyway.”

  And then we just stood there grinning gooily at each other for a couple minutes.

  “Eh-hem.”

  I turned. Dusty stood behind me, holding a thick emerald-green wool coat open. Mom hovered just behind her shoulder, smiling her real smile—the one she saved for me and Dusty—the one that never made it on the air at Good Morning, Mississippi! I was seized by a desire to run over and hug her as tightly as I could, but I didn’t want to look like a baby. I was going on a date, not leaving for college.

  “Have fun, Dylan,” Mom mouthed at me, silent so the mic couldn’t pick it up. “Have fun.”

  I nodded at her, almost imperceptibly. Her smile widened.

  “Don’t want you to freeze that flat butt of yours off, baby sister,” Dusty said as she helped me into her coat.

  “Thanks.” I pulled the coat closed and fastened the top button. It swung out around me in a bell shape. “You’re, um, you’re okay?” I asked quietly.

  “I’m fine, Dylan.” She narrowed her eyes at me, but not in a mean way. “Don’t think about me, all right? Just have fun on your date. It took you long enough to get one. Might as well enjoy it.”

  “Shall we?” Jamie asked before I could come up with a crushing retort. He held out his arm. It felt weird to take it, like I was a character in a play, but I honestly wasn’t sure I could walk down the front steps without holding on to someone.

  A uniformed member of the staff swung open the door. Outside, it looked like the front of a Christmas card was waiting for me. Big, fat, fluffy flakes of snow fell softly onto a deep-crimson sleigh and two dappled gray horses. A driver in the front tipped his top hat. The cameraman next to him tipped nothing, just kept the camera trained impassively upon us. It was Mike, from breakfast. Guess he’d finally been taken off the breakfast shift. Or maybe he was relegated only to shooting the most boring, unusable footage. Maybe he was on the Dylan beat, for when TRC was desperate for a couple minutes of filler before the next commercial break.