The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  “Don’t you love the Cure?” An unfamiliar guy with long, well-kept dreadlocks appeared in the doorway next to me.

  “No,” I said, with as much disdain as possible. Where was Jake?

  “They’re like, so magical.” He closed his eyes, an expression of peace on his tan face. “Listen to that guitar.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Listen, have you seen —?”

  “Shhhh,” he said. “You have to listen.” He took my hand. “Close your eyes.”

  To my surprise, I did. “Breathe,” he said, and I did, deeply. A galaxy of unfamiliar constellations appeared in my dark vision. The muscles in my shoulders relaxed, and my body grew heavier, slumping against the polished wood.

  When the song ended a moment later, the guy gave my hand a warm squeeze. “Take care of yourself.” By the time I opened my eyes, he was gone.

  Lacey’s room was upstairs, the final door in an endless hallway of guest rooms, closets, and bathrooms. She kept a myriad of bandages, knee braces, and athletic tape in the top drawer of her dresser. Or at least she did, before. Captain of the dance team, Lacey had been no stranger to injury, even before the accident. If I could just wrap my ankle, I’d be able to put weight on it. The fewer people who saw me limping the better; I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to steal Lacey’s cripple angle.

  The light was low under Lacey’s door, and I could hear murmured voices. My heart pulled against its moorings, beating frantically. Idiot. I was an idiot. I’d spent the entire night looking for them all over the house and they were in her bedroom the whole time.

  I reached for the doorknob. Inside, the murmurs turned to laughter. I considered just turning around and leaving. I wanted to know the truth, to put a stop to all of the suspicion and sadness that were wearing me so thin, but the thought of actually catching them in the act made me dizzy.

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the promise of future pain, from the memory that, once captured, wouldn’t fade.

  Deep breath. I turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  A figure on the bed sat up. “Paige?”

  “Nikki?”

  She leaned against Lacey’s pillows in her bra and panties, her shoes and dress in a pile on the floor. She giggled, brushing her long hair off her face. The guy next to her trailed his hand up her arm, watching me lazily. He looked like a lion who’d just been fed. “Don’t tell Lacey, okay?” Nikki asked.

  It was last spring all over again: clothes on the floor, older dude in the bed, Nikki half undressed and mostly drunk. Déjà vu. I almost expected Lacey to barge in and drag Nikki out to the car, screaming at me about kissing her brother.

  “Okay, Paige? Don’t tell.”

  I backed out of the room. “I didn’t see anything.” Before I could pull the door shut, the lion rolled over and reclaimed his kill.

  Gross. Gross. I hobbled back down the hallway, cringing with every step. I tried to shake the sight out of my head, her skinny, vulnerable arms, his thick fingers.

  And then I found Jake and Lacey. Or they found me.

  They were walking up the stairs together, laughing, their shoulders touching with every step. Jake looked kind, protective. Lacey looked drunk.

  “Oh!” she said, seeing me. “Paige!”

  They were leaning on each other. They were laughing. They were fully clothed, but somehow they seemed far more intimate than half-naked Nikki and the faceless dude had. That just seemed like sex. This seemed like something deeper. Like — I didn’t want to form the word, not even in my own head.

  My breath came in little bursts. I felt so stupid, so naive. Faced with the truth at last, I realized I’d never really believed that they could do this to me, had never actually thought that Jake was cheating on me with her. With my evil, evil crippled bitch of a best friend.

  Lacey and Jake glanced nervously at each other, sharing an entire conversation without saying anything. Somehow that pissed me off more, the notion that they had some shared understanding binding them together. That was betrayal. Jake and I were in love. The understanding was supposed to be between us.

  Jake looked at me, and for a second I saw the boy he’d been when we first got together, sophomore year. My anchor. My love.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Where have you been all night?” Jake asked. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “Where have I been? Where have I been?” I gasped for air. I would not cry. Goddammit, I would not cry.

  “We couldn’t find you anywhere,” Lacey said. “We looked everywhere.” She paused. “And then we found you here.” She and Nikki sounded alike when they were drunk, I thought distantly, like a goddamn Dr. Seuss book.

  “Paige? Are you okay?” Jake asked gently. He sounded like himself. He sounded like my Jake.

  Instinctively, I moved toward him. “I —”

  “Yeah, where were you?” Lacey interrupted. “It’s like you disappeared into the darkness! And then you reappeared into the light! Right?”

  “Oh, put it on me,” I said, trembling. “I’m the one who disappeared. Where the fuck were you all night?” I was asking Jake, but Lacey answered.

  “Paige,” she said seriously, reaching out a wavering hand. “My parents . . . are splitting up.” She waited, full of self-important sadness. Her eyes blinked slowly in the dim hall light. What did she want from me, I wondered. What did she seriously expect? Did she think I’d throw my arms around her and cry? Beg her forgiveness? Give her my goddamn boyfriend as a consolation prize?

  “I know.” My voice was bitter. “But look on the bright side: at least your boyfriend isn’t cheating on you with your best fucking friend.”

  Jake reached for me. “Paige, we weren’t —”

  Lacey looked shocked. “My parents are getting a divorce!”

  “We were, uh, talking about our parents. And forgiveness,” Jake said.

  Lacey smiled at him, nodding solemnly. “Like Jesus.”

  “Like hell!” I said. “Would Jesus screw his best friend’s boyfriend?”

  “Baby,” Jake said. “We would never — I would never —”

  “Jesus wasn’t GAY!” Lacey exclaimed.

  “Fuck you!” I pushed right through them, forcing them apart, and ran blindly down the stairs.

  Anger is buoyant. It carried me down the front staircase and out into the night, masking the pain in my ankle until I was nearly to the unlit cul-de-sac. With every step I took, the woods bent and creaked, moaning in the night air. My heart pounded in my chest, pushing shards of glass through my veins, tearing at me from the inside. If I could outrun the spasms in my ankle, then I could outrun the gaping holes in my chest where he was supposed to be, where she had been since middle school. But as soon as I slowed down, it all came speeding back — ankle ache and heartache — punishing me for my flight.

  The Lanes had a pair of faux-rustic wooden benches at the end of their driveway, perhaps to offset their ostentatious mansion — or perhaps to emphasize it, as if to say, “You think this house is grand? Shucks, this is only our little country cabin. You should see our real house!” Normally I didn’t even notice the benches. Lacey and I had long ago stopped objectively seeing the elements of each other’s lives. Like family, we saw each other in glances only, no longer truly looking at each other. When I thought about it, I could more easily picture Shanti Kale’s face than Lacey’s or Nikki’s.

  I collapsed onto the rough-hewn logs. The woods around me were quieter now, with the faint wheeze of late cicadas and the slight rustle of leaves. There were no cars speeding down the driveway after me, no muffled rubber thup thup of sneakers on the pavement. I released a breath I hardly knew I’d been holding.

  I dug in my purse for my cell phone. I couldn’t call my parents for a ride: my mother would demand to know why I wasn’t going to wait for Jake, and her answer to anything I told her would inevitably be advice on how to be properly wifely in order to win him back. My father would come get me if he was the one who answered the
phone, except he had an early meeting at the university the next morning, and my mother would kill me for dragging him out of bed in the middle of the night. I flipped through the contacts saved in my phone. Brian, Chris, Jake, Lacey, Nikki, Prescott, Randy, Tyler. No good — they were all at the party behind me, probably all drunk. I scrolled through my list again, looking for anyone not at the party. Dentist. Doctor. Grandma. Shit.

  Sighing, I scrolled through again, paused at the Ms and pushed the SEND button.

  It rang three times before she picked up. “What.”

  “I need you to come get me.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  It was on my phone, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “Uh . . . no.”

  “It’s fucking one in the morning.”

  “Look, Miranda —”

  “It’s Mirror.”

  I took a deep breath and counted to five. “Mirror. Please. I’m at Lacey’s, and I need to get out of here now. Please do this for me.”

  She hung up without answering. I took it as a yes.

  The night was getting colder, and I was dead sober. I should have taken Jake’s jacket before I ran.

  I shifted my weight on the bench and settled my foot on a fallen log. The blood thrummed through my ankle for a moment and then subsided, and after a few minutes the constant throbbing pain began to subside, too. I closed my eyes, leaning against the branchy backrest.

  “Tough night?”

  My eyes flew open and my hand tightened around my purse. “Who wants to know?”

  A dark figure stepped out from the woods and sauntered over. In the faint glow from the picturesque yard lights lining the driveway, he looked a lot like Ethan. But what would Ethan be doing at Lacey’s house in the middle of the night?

  “Hello?” I asked uncertainly.

  “Hey, Paige.” Definitely Ethan. He stood above me for a moment, as if waiting for some cue. Finally he asked, “Is this seat taken?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, awkwardly sitting up. “Sure, sit down.”

  He settled himself next to me, leaving a few inches of space between us. Through a patch of sky above the street, the moon floated, round and white.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You weren’t at the party, were you?”

  “In fact, I was,” he said. “Hard to believe, right?”

  “No,” I said too quickly. “It’s just — you don’t seem to, um . . . get along . . . with most of these people.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t. But I know Prescott from this summer, and he invited me. I didn’t realize it would be so heavily attended by Willow Grove’s intellectual elite.”

  I coughed. “You know Prescott?”

  “Yeah, we played Ultimate together. I was taking summer classes at the university. That’s where I met Shanti, incidentally.” He folded his arms behind his head. “When Pres said he was having a party, I assumed it would be on campus, not some high school thing full of stupid jocks and their asinine girlfriends.”

  Ethan glanced at me. “Present company not included, of course.”

  I shrugged, unable to care enough to take offense on behalf of my so-called friends.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “Back in Omaha, my best friend, Aaron, used to wonder obsessively about these parties. Were they as cool as everyone made them sound on Monday morning, or was everyone just reciting some agreed-upon narrative to make themselves feel cooler?”

  He glanced at me as if I might have an answer to this question, but I didn’t say anything. Ethan went on. “This was back in like ninth grade, when he and I were the two geeky freshman in a math class full of juniors and seniors. Back then, Aaron would have killed to get into a party like this. We both would have, I guess. Now I don’t really care either way.”

  “Huh,” I said. I’d been a part of the popular crowd since middle school, and though we’d always relished the idea that the rest of the school looked up to us, envied us, it had always seemed very abstract. I’d never considered that people actually sat at home feeling sorry for themselves because they couldn’t come to our parties. The idea made me feel strange, kind of sad and responsible and helpless all at the same time, like when you looked at pictures of little otters and ducks covered in oil from an oil spill and felt like somehow you should be there, with gloves and a bucket, scrubbing them down one by one, while concurrently understanding that you would never actually do that, you would just stay in your house looking at pictures and feeling sad and hopeless until you couldn’t take it anymore and clicked over to something happy.

  “Of course, half the people here tonight think I’m a freshman anyway, so maybe we can still count this as a win for Freshman Ethan.”

  He looked at me, seeming to expect some reaction. I gave him a wan smile.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  I sat up a little straighter, trying not to jostle my twisted ankle. “What do you mean?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Lacey’s my best friend.”

  “Okay,” Ethan said agreeably. “Which explains why you’re sitting on a bench at the end of her driveway.”

  “I hurt my foot.” I gestured lamely to my ankle, which in the dim light looked like it was already swelling. Great.

  “So you’re waiting for your boyfriend to take you home.”

  “Well,” I said, and shivered. “Not exactly.”

  “You’re cold. I’m sorry, I’m an asshole.” He started to pull off his sweatshirt.

  “I’m fine,” I said, but it was too late. He scooted closer on the bench and draped his sweatshirt around my arms.

  “Thanks,” I said. His sweatshirt was warm and smelled like campfire. Without thinking, I snuggled into it, catching a trace of a citrusy clean scent beneath the smoky campfire. He was watching me, and I suddenly became keenly aware of his eyes, how dark and rich and endlessly deep they were, deep enough to lose yourself in, and I had a strange, heady sense of falling, and then suddenly I was kissing him.

  He was surprised, but he sank into it willingly and kissed me as deep as the dark night woods. I dissolved into the kiss, and the shards of glass in my veins melted back into sand and light.

  After an eternity, we pulled apart, and I smiled slowly at him. He reached over, smoothing a strand of hair behind my ear and tracing his thumb down my cheek, my neck, across my collarbone. “You’re so beautiful,” he breathed.

  My smile faded. What the hell was I doing? It was last spring all over again: have a bad night, kiss a random boy. I was so stupid.

  A moment later, the too-bright lights of Miranda’s old Honda Civic swept the cul-de-sac and stopped in front of us. Gratefully, I grabbed my purse and jumped up from the bench. A flame of pain shot up my ankle, but I kept my voice cool. “That’s my ride.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said, rising. “I could have —”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said, and hurried toward the car. “Thanks anyway.”

  Jeremy Carpenter was sitting in the passenger seat, and I had a moment of total paranoia — he was the editor of the school paper, and for a second I was absolutely convinced that he was spying on me as part of some crazy paparazzo stalker thing, that he would publish pictures of Ethan and me together to sabotage my chances at queen. It took my brain a long moment to realize he wasn’t holding a camera, not even a phone, and then I remembered my sister saying something about doing community theater with him over the summer. So now they were best friends? I didn’t know why a senior would want to hang out with a sophomore, but as long as no one had seen Ethan and me together, I didn’t care enough to try to figure it out.

  I opened the back passenger-side door and flung myself inside.

  “Hi, Paige,” Jeremy said.

  I slammed the door behind me. “Let’s go.”

  As Miranda pulled the car around, I looked down, trying not to see Ethan against the dark forest, standing alone.

  “Was that Ethan James?” Jeremy asked.

 
“No!” I said. “It was, um. Some college guy. Just some dude.” I covered my face with my hands and realized I was still wrapped in Ethan’s sweatshirt. “Shit.”

  “Rough night?” Jeremy asked sympathetically.

  “What was your first clue?”

  My sister glanced at me in the rearview mirror, her eyes flicking scornfully from my dress to my hair. “What’s wrong, didn’t enough people tell you how pretty you are?”

  “Hilarious.” I leaned down to rub my ankle, which was definitely swollen. It occurred to me that I probably should have taken my shoes off before running away from the party.

  Miranda looked at me again, taking her eyes off the road for longer than I liked. “Who said you could wear that necklace?”

  I touched it absently. “Mom did.”

  “That’s supposed to be my necklace,” she said. “Grandma promised it to me.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Like you care!” she snapped. “Like you’ve ever spent one minute thinking about anyone but yourself!”

  “God, Mirror, give her a break,” Jeremy said. “She obviously had a hard night.”

  “Whatever,” Miranda said. “Why couldn’t Jake give you a ride home, anyway?”

  I shook my head and looked out the window. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “What, did he hook up with someone else or something?”

  “Mirror!” Jeremy said.

  I gritted my teeth. “What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ do you not understand?”

  “You’re so pathetic,” Miranda said. “You and all your friends, your fake little parties, your prancing around to see who’s the prettiest. Your life is basically meaningless, you know? You’re such a phony. You’re such a nothing.”