Ben shifted his backpack as we walked. “Do you think she’ll still want to go to the dance next week?”
“You mean, do I think she and Cornell are going to break up?” I asked. He made a noncommittal grunt and I shook my head. “No, I think they’ll be fine as long as he lets this drop. And we bought dresses this weekend. There’s no way out now.”
His mouth twisted into half of a smile. “Sound less excited, please. Your enthusiasm is embarrassing. It’s like you got bribed into going.”
I laughed, nudging him with my shoulder. “I did get bribed into going, you doofus. You all lambasted me. If I opted out now, I’d have to take my lunches in the library with Mary-Anne.”
“Which would be much worse than putting on a dress and dancing.” He grinned as we reached the front of the math and sciences building. He grabbed the door as it started to close behind the group ahead of us.
I made a face at him as I passed into the building. “I did not agree to dancing. Dress, yes. Dancing, not so much.”
He followed me inside and down the hallway that stood between our fifth-period classes. I’d grown accustomed to this stretch of wall. It was ever so slightly closer to my Calculus classroom than to Ben’s Computational Biology class because Dr. Kapoor would eviscerate me with questions if I got stuck in the front row. Mike Shepherd passed us with a half wave and Ben didn’t even twitch.
“You agreed to go to a dance. Obviously, there is dancing involved,” he said.
I leaned against the wall and looked him over. While my feelings about him had warmed over the last few weeks, he was the same gangly scarecrow he’d always been. He was just a scarecrow with excellent hair now.
“You dance?” I asked dubiously.
“Does the chicken dance count?”
“Are you a thousand years old? Why would they play the chicken dance at the winter ball?”
He bent close to me, his eyes shining with mock seriousness. “There are some perks that come with the weight of my elected office. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a very important member of student council. I’m in charge of choosing and paying the band.”
It was increasingly difficult to breathe with him standing so close. I caught a whiff of something that reminded me of apple cider. “And you’re going to use this grand power of yours to request the chicken dance?”
“Unless you’d prefer the Macarena.”
I wet my lips and took a small step to the side, just to maintain a modicum of my sanity. “I can’t say that I know how to chicken dance or Macarena. We did learn the Electric Slide at Aragon in PE.”
“I remember that. You complained the whole time.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a click-top pen. Before I could stop him, he took my left arm and pushed back the sleeve of my cardigan until it bunched around my elbow.
I squirmed. “Those are my personal notes.”
“Then you shouldn’t have left them out where I can add to them. Haven’t you heard of paper?” he said, holding my wrist in place with one hand as he wielded the pen with the other. The ballpoint pressed lightly against my skin as he scrawled. I tilted my head, taking the free moment to examine the points of his hair. There was a spike askew near his right temple. He straightened suddenly and announced, “There.”
I pulled my eyes away from his fingertips still pressed into my wrist. Underneath my Russian Literature reading assignment, he’d written LEARN CHICKEN DANCE.
I laughed loud enough to draw the attention of the people passing us in the hallway. Clamping my mouth shut, I tugged my sleeve back down.
“Harper’s wrong, you know,” I said, glancing up at him as I fiddled with my sleeve.
He chuckled. “You don’t think the Mess is working us like dogs? Because your wrist says otherwise.”
“No, about us being…” I choked on the word friends. I hadn’t stopped to consider whether or not Ben and I were friends now. It wasn’t completely ridiculous. But it didn’t feel like the right word—not that anything else sprang to mind as an easy replacement for it. I tried again. “About us being okay with each other now. I didn’t hate you before the ranking was taken down.”
“Ditto.” He smiled before adding, “Not that either of us have stopped thinking about the ranking.”
“Oh, of course not.” I smiled back. “I will destroy you.”
“And I’ll buy you a soda when you graduate fourth in the class.” He swung his backpack off one shoulder and unzipped the front pocket, pulling a white sliver of card stock from its depths. He handed it to me and I saw the words Winter Ball, Admit One printed on the front in a flowery font. “But first, you will learn to chicken dance.”
[8:49 PM]
Me
Stop emailing me dance videos. I am not going to learn Thriller. I have homework.
[8:49 PM]
Ben
First day of vacation, Trix. Can’t you write essays and listen to Michael Jackson at the same time?
[8:51 PM]
Me
You know I hate zombies.
[8:52 PM]
Ben
Do you want to borrow my rubber axe?
[6:02 AM]
Meg
Happy Thanksgiving, friends!
[6:04 AM]
Harper
Happy Thanksgiving!
[7:05 AM]
Me
Enjoy your turkey, meat eaters. It smells like burnt tofurky in the Watson house.
[7:08 AM]
Harper
Trixie, you can come have squash with my family, if you want.
[7:11 AM]
Me
I have resigned myself to eating an entire pumpkin pie. That’s the same thing, right?
[7:17 AM]
Peter
I support you, Trixie!
[7:20 AM]
Ben
Why are you all up so early? It is a holiday.
[7:22 AM]
Cornell
Dude. Parade.
[7:24 AM]
Meg
There’s a Sonic The Hedgehog float!
[7:25 AM]
Ben
God bless us, everyone.
18
It seemed unfair to make the lowerclassmen decorate for a dance that they wouldn’t be allowed to set foot in, but no one else seemed to question the mandate—probably because it came from Peter. The week back from vacation, the student council table was overrun by arts and crafts. Even Mary-Anne came back to the cafeteria to supervise the giant butcher paper scroll where the juniors were inscribing Wilde’s “From Spring Days to Winter.” Peter sat with us in three-minute stretches, wolfing down whatever was on his tray in between glad-handing the juniors and seniors into buying tickets.
“It’s a shame he can’t run for reelection,” Harper said the Monday before the dance, watching as Peter sat down with some of the drama club girls. “This is easily twice as much work as he put into actually campaigning last year.”
“That’s because his campaign was, ‘Hey guys, I’m a Donnelly; look at my family’s name on all these plaques,’” I said. “Speaking of, did Jack actually come back to school today?”
“He’s here. Peter’s got him selling dance tickets in the library,” Cornell said, stealing a French fry off Harper’s tray. After their lunchroom spat the week before vacation, Harper had insisted that they’d “agreed to disagree.” But she bristled as Cornell ate the fry.
“It’ll be a miracle if the cricket team actually gets their uniforms out of this,” Ben grumbled, fussing over a scientific calculator and making notes in the small notebook he kept in the front pocket of his backpack. B was stuck with the other frosh officers at the ticket table next to the door and he’d left Ben with a pile of price estimates.
Cornell elbowed him, grinning. “Remember in DC, when we told the other interns that our school had a cricket team? They wouldn’t even believe us when we pulled up the website. They swore it was a prank.”
Ben gave a vague laugh as h
e continued punching the numbers on his calculator. “When, in fact, it’s just one of many dumb things our tuition pays for.”
“What are you doing?” Mary-Anne shouted at one of the boys hovering over the butcher paper poem. She reached over and snatched the paintbrush out of his hand, waving it over her head like a dueling wizard. “It’s a calligraphy brush, Marcus, not a crayon. Clean strokes! Clean!” She thrust the brush at the nearest underling. “Fix it before it dries.”
“You guys actually have council meetings, right?” I asked Cornell.
“Every Tuesday,” he said.
I motioned around the table, from the butcher paper to the piles of paper lanterns and pots of paint and glitter. “What do you guys do at meetings if you bring all of this here?”
“More of this,” he said. “No one wants to sacrifice too much homework time, so it spills over into lunch.”
Ben laughed under his breath, his head still bent over his notebook as he scribbled. “Believe it or not, there’s more arguing.”
“Lying Cat says, ‘lying,’” I muttered. He glanced up at me and smiled.
“Have we officially given up on the idea of a limo for Friday night?” Harper asked, scooting forward on the bench. “It does seem kind of unnecessary to pitch in money just to get driven here.”
“It seems like it because it is,” I said. “I was anti-limo from the start.”
“You were anti-everything at the start,” Meg said, scrunching her nose at me. I stuck my tongue out at her in response and ducked as her hand shot out, poised to yank said appendage out of my mouth.
Peter reappeared at the center of the table. He leapt onto the bench and reached for what I assumed was a very cold hamburger, which he took three bites of in rapid succession. He threw a hand up to keep from showing us the massacre in his mouth. “What’d I miss?”
“Mostly crafting,” I said.
“And transportation plans for Friday night,” Harper said. “Will you have your parents’ minivan?”
He nodded emphatically, mostly to distract from him taking another massive bite of his lunch. “Definitely. Since my brother can’t go, I’ll have five empty seats.”
“Great,” Harper said. “Then you can take Trixie and Meg so they don’t have to ask their parents. Or walk.”
“What?” I asked. I looked at Ben, waiting for him to announce that, obviously, my transportation situation was under control. If I was going to get tricked into doing the chicken dance, he was absolutely going to have to borrow his dad’s car. That just made good sense. But he continued plugging data into his calculator, seemingly deaf to the surrounding conversation.
“I learned from the harvest festival that I no longer walk long distances in heels,” Meg said pertly. “And it’s going to be way colder than it was two months ago.”
“Cornell and I are going to drive in together,” Harper continued. “But we’re both on the opposite side of town. So, we’ll meet you guys here.”
“Are you gonna need a ride, Ben?” Peter asked.
“Nope,” Ben said, still somehow not reading the look I was throwing him. “I’m set. I’m not going to risk getting stranded here like I did during the harvest festival.”
“I did apologize for that.” Cornell frowned.
Ben looked up just long enough to throw him a lopsided smile. “It’s no big. I’ve got wheels.”
“Then we’re set,” I said, each word sharpened down to a knifepoint. “Harper and Cornell are going to drive in together. Peter is going to drive me and Meg. And Ben is going to go solo.”
Harper reached over and clapped her hand on Peter’s forearm, momentarily putting a halt to him stuffing his face. “See, you were worried about not having a date and now you have two.”
“I’m a lucky guy.” Peter beamed at us. “Although, I guess I’ll have to buy two corsages now.”
“I’m cool without, thanks,” I said, inwardly cringing at the thought of spending an evening with a flower strapped to my wrist. I didn’t even wear normal bracelets, much less ones made of flora. It sounded cumbersome. And itchy.
“What about you, Megs?” Peter asked, cocking his head at her.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Meg turn an interesting shade of fuchsia. There was a chance that her limbic system was finally winning against her thought experiment.
“She’s going to be wearing purple,” Harper said.
“Cool,” Peter said. He polished off his burger and stood, throwing his backpack over his shoulders. “Duty calls. See you guys later.”
He limped across the cafeteria again, planting himself at a table full of juniors. I could feel Meg’s leg trembling next to mine. I knocked her foot with mine and she let out a long breath.
Harper folded her hands neatly on the table. “Well, that all worked out quite nicely.”
“Quite,” Meg squeaked.
Ben continued writing silently in his notebook.
[6:31 PM]
Ben
I think Cline used google translate on this essay. Have you been able to track down the original German article?
[7:09 PM]
Ben
I emailed you the link to a better translation. I should send it to Harpo and Corny.
[7:10 PM]
I’m not going to send it to them. Now we can fight to the death for valedictorian. Ha ha!
[8:51 PM]
Ben
Earth to Beatrice.
[8:51 PM]
West to Watson.
[9:02 PM]
Trix?
19
The music pouring through my headphones drowned out the whir of the sewing machine as I fed satin under the needle. I’d long ago learned to lock Sherry out of my room when I was sewing, as he had a habit of leaping up on the desk to see what was making all the racket and getting his paws tangled in the thread. My headphones blocked the sound of him scratching at my door, too.
I squinted against the glare of my desk lamp, watching as the machine serged the crisp Star Wars fabric to the slit I’d cut in the side of the black dress. I pinched the fabric until my fingertips went white with the effort of keeping the slippery satin from sliding away from me.
I didn’t really have time to waste on an extracurricular project. I could have been asleep already, like my parents. I could have been listening to an audio version of one of my schoolbooks—like the recording of The Cherry Orchard I’d downloaded from the library—instead of a loop of Doctor Who scores.
But, no. I was awake in the middle of the night, attempting to be my own fairy godmother and put some personality into a lifeless sack of black satin that—had I not cut open the side—could have easily paid for months’ worth of comics, Slurpees, and hummus-and-sprout sandwiches.
It was stupid—and pointless—to be disappointed by what had happened at lunch. For whatever reason, I had deluded myself into thinking that Ben West had asked me to the winter ball the way normal people got asked to fancy events. Like it was a real date. Like he was validating everything I’d overheard Meg and Harper talking about a month ago. But that wasn’t what had happened. He’d asked me to go because, like me, he didn’t actually want to have to go to this ridiculous showcase. I was moral support to keep him from being the fifth wheel on everyone else’s double date. Because we were friends.
Gritting my teeth, I yanked the dress more aggressively under the machine’s presser foot. After years of having only Harper and Meg, it was actually kind of nice that we’d branched out. I enjoyed spending time with the boys. I liked that Peter didn’t understand all of our references—and vice versa—and that Cornell always had an interesting insight into our homework. It was nice having more real friends, instead of just classmates to nod to between classes.
But being friends with Ben bugged me. Walking to class together, murmuring comments in the cafeteria, the buzzing of texts pouring into my phone—it was false advertising. It looked like friendship, but it didn’t feel like friendship. It felt like something else,
like I’d been ramping up to something huge and found out that it was flat ground.
It was worse because it wasn’t even his fault. He hadn’t cornered me and professed his undying love. I’d heard about it third hand from two people who didn’t even know that I knew. And who was to say that Harper and Meg were right? For all of their musing about Ben being absolutely gaga for me, there’d been no sure sign of anything other than him being a fairly likeable dude—once you got past the rambling.
The problem was me. In the crushing guilt of realizing that I’d been hurting Ben’s feelings for years, I had opened myself up too much. I’d tried too hard. I’d gone from insulting him in the hallway to texting him from the second I got home until the moment before I fell asleep. I’d hunted for his good qualities and found them—he made me laugh and he pushed me to work harder and he always smelled like apples—Fujis, not Granny Smith. He was nice to Meg and Harper and didn’t abuse the froshlings. He’d returned my copy of Buffy clean and with the packaging taped so the comic wouldn’t bend.
The problem was that I actually liked him quite a bit. And the idea of him not returning that feeling in the same way was a new kind of awful.
I shut off the sewing machine and shook out the dress, which gave a crack of stiff fabric loud enough that I could hear it over the BBC orchestra in my ears. The added panel flared out of the mass of black satin, a pop of loud color and Lucasfilm intellectual property. It was everything I’d imagined it to be. I threw it on my bed as my phone bleeped, interrupting my music.
Pulling the phone out of the pocket of my pajama pants, I braced myself for another text that I wouldn’t answer. Instead, there was an email from the Mess administrative office waiting in my inbox. There was no chance that the office secretaries were sending out emails after eleven to announce Free Ice Cream and Puppy day. I’d unsubscribed to emails regarding sports, orchestral concerts, and drama club performances. This would not be good news.
To: Messina Academy Students
From: Administrative Services
The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You Page 17