Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  Violet was a source of intrigue throughout the high school. While it was not uncommon for people to move away from town, like Emily, and disappear from the world of Willow forever—despite earnest promises to write letters and send e-mails—it was a rarity for anyone new to appear in the student body. Willow just hadn’t been the kind of town to attract new residents for at least a decade. It was far enough away from Green Bay that commuting was almost an hour-long drive for parents who had jobs there. For a long while in the eighties and nineties, there was a pretty big tourism business geared toward the nature lovers who wanted even more autumn leaves and clean air than were offered by Wisconsin Dells to the south of us, or by Door County, to our east. But there was no real reason for anyone to move to Willow. There was no major corporation offering high-paying jobs anywhere nearby. There wasn’t any big scientific research laboratory attracting the families of high-profile scientists. The beach along Lake Winnebago was rocky and surrounded by woods, not anything at all like the white sandy beaches in Tampa, near my dad’s place. However, I guess one could make the argument that Willow was a decent place to live if you were really into boating culture and happened to live in Wisconsin.

  So the fact that Violet was new in town was enough to make her an instant celebrity at Willow High School. The fact that she was also gorgeous only added to her fame. Violet had a heart-shaped face with very wide-set crystal-blue eyes, which looked eerily iridescent because the brown hair framing her face was so dark.

  She was porcelain pale in a town where every other girl made a point of showing off her summer’s worth of tanning efforts in September, pushing the limits of the high school dress code with short shorts and tank tops to expose as much bronzed flesh as possible. Even two weeks into the school year, none of us knew her very well. She kept to herself and refrained from gossip, most likely because she didn’t know anyone at school well enough yet to contribute. She was a hair twirler, a lip biter, and seemingly a daydreamer, drifting off into her own thoughts often at lunchtime until she heard her name called as a command to rejoin the conversation. Everything about her was a little girlish and romantic, right down to the tiny but chic antique locket she wore around her neck.

  And the fact that she was new in town meant that boys refrained from approaching her, just like they shied away from me.

  “You should ask Jason,” Mischa told me when she surfaced from her underwater bolt across the pool. “He told Matt he thinks you’re hot. He’d totally say yes.”

  The Fall Fling, and absolutely every detail related to it, was terrifying to me. I had never danced in public before, other than at my cousin’s wedding. Feeling pressured to find a date by a deadline, or else, was also a first for me. In this case, I wasn’t even sure what the else might entail if no one asked me to the dance. Olivia’s wrath? Banishment from the popular group? There was no way of knowing. There was only an increasing despair rising in my chest that the night of the dance would arrive, and I’d still be dateless. There was already a lavender cocktail-length strapless gown hanging despondently in my closet. I wouldn’t wear it to the dance the following Saturday night, but I had no way of knowing that in Olivia’s pool the night of her party.

  “If he thinks I’m hot, then why doesn’t he just ask me? I don’t like the idea of doing the asking,” I grumbled.

  “Oh, come on, McKenna! It’s not the Middle Ages. You can ask a boy out,” Candace scolded me. “You don’t even have to ask him outright. Just linger around his locker and ask him if he’s going to the dance and if he’s asked anyone yet. He’ll get the picture. Boys just need to be pointed in the right direction.”

  “That’s not very romantic,” I said. Why couldn’t my life be just like Olivia’s and Candace’s, with boys approaching me? The fear of being rebuffed and maybe additionally even insulted was something neither of them had ever experienced.

  “What about Trey Emory for Violet?” Mischa suggested. Olivia squealed.

  I felt a chill run up my spine and sensed dread filling my stomach. Trey Emory was a senior who might as well have been from another planet. He didn’t play on any sports teams, didn’t go to football games, and mostly kept to himself, other than his occasional outings with the skateboarder guys who often ditched classes to smoke cigarettes near the service entrance of the school cafeteria. He smoldered of danger and mystery; he had an actual tattoo. Teachers despised him. Even though he’d been placed in remedial classes most of his life, he had won a statewide high school bridge building competition and was taking Advanced Physics.

  And he just happened to live next door to me.

  There was no particular reason why any of my new friends would have known where the Emory family lived, or that every once in a great while, Trey and I would exchange solemn waves from our bedroom windows if we’d just happened to catch a glimpse of each other before closing our blinds at night. Once, toward the end of sophomore year, when I was still the old, unpopular McKenna, we stepped out of our houses in unison on a morning when it was pouring rain. He hadn’t even really asked me if I wanted a lift. He had just flashed his keys and then lingered in his driveway with his engine idling until I worked up the nerve to dash through the sheets of rain and climb into the passenger side of his crappy, banged-up Toyota Corolla. We had ridden together all the way to school in silence after I awkwardly managed a “thanks” as we’d pulled out of his driveway.

  “Oh my God, totally!” Candace agreed. “He’s a freak but a hot freak.”

  “Who’s Trey Emory?” Violet asked innocently.

  “You know who he is,” Olivia taunted. “He’s that smoking-hot senior guy with the dark hair who wears the green army jacket every day.”

  “That guy? He gives me the creeps,” Violet complained, leaning back in the water to soak her hair again.

  Trey and I were kind of friends in some very strange and abstract way, but I dared not leap to his defense. I had a suspicion that an admission of our acquaintance would not be well received.

  “Yeah, so? I still wonder what’s under that army jacket,” Candace continued. She really was incorrigible.

  One of Violet’s slim, lily-white legs kicked up, breaking the surface of the water and creating a little ripple that spread out in a circle around her, drifting toward the rest of us. “Whatever he’s got under there, I don’t want it coming with me to the dance.”

  It bothered me a little that Mischa had suggested Trey as a potential boyfriend for Violet rather than for me, and I was a little relieved that Violet had dismissed the idea. It was probably because I’d known him for so long that I felt a little possessive about him, even though he’d never given me any reason to believe he was into me.

  * * *

  Hours later, after pizzas brought home by Henry and an ice cream cake served up by Olivia’s parents with a cheesy group performance of “Happy Birthday,” all five of us occupied the Richmonds’ basement in our pajamas.

  “Yawn,” Candace declared as we flipped through Netflix options.

  It was barely eleven o’clock on a Friday night and we were already out of fresh gossip, Fall Fling chat, and songs to which we could emulate moves from music videos. On the last two Friday nights at that hour, the five of us had been tumbling out of movie theaters, giggling and squeamish after watching horror movies.

  “What about Blood Harvest?” Mischa suggested. Mischa was the one who especially loved scary flicks. . . . She loved being terrified out of her wits.

  “Bring it,” Olivia commanded from her blanket nest on the couch. One of her deeply tanned legs poked out from beneath the striped wool blanket she had spread across her body. The warm summer evening had turned into a chilly autumn night, and Mr. Richmond had come downstairs with us after pizza to light a fire in the fireplace. I sat on the floor near the sofa, as far from the fireplace as I could get, paranoid about flames, as always.

  “I love Ryan Marten,” Candace commented during the movie’s opening sequence, during which Ryan Marten, a Hollywood he
artthrob portraying a vampire, arrived at a farming community with his loyal clan just as the town was preparing for its annual carnival.

  Candace reached into the bag of mini pretzels that Mischa passed to her and popped a handful into her mouth. “I can’t imagine any guy as hot as Ryan Marten ever coming to this sad-ass town.”

  “Hey! Pete’s as hot as Ryan Marten,” Olivia objected.

  Candace dramatically rolled her eyes at Olivia across the couch. “Yeah, whatevs. Sure he is.”

  I smiled nervously up at both of them, not daring to comment. In my own opinion, Pete Nicholson was every bit as hot and sexy as Ryan Marten, and just as untouchable as the famous action star too. Pete looked like an Olympic sprinter or something. He was so tall, his facial features were so perfect; he seemed entirely out of place in our town. In Willow, most guys were built like linebackers and were preparing for futures in which they would take over the failing family farms from their dads. Mischa’s boyfriend, Matt, was cute, but he was as tiny and compact as she was, herself. He wore baseball caps backward and threw gang signs like a rap star, even though the closest thing to a gang he belonged to was the wrestling team. Candace’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Isaac, had a square jaw and probably would have been considered to be good-looking at any American high school, but it was easy to envision the kind of soft-gutted, sunburned farmhand he would be in as few as ten years. There were a lot of men in our town who looked just like Isaac someday would, with faces prematurely wrinkled from long days on a tractor in the hot sun, and dirt beneath their fingernails even at fancy restaurant dinners on Sundays.

  Violet was looking down at her hands in her lap. She had rarely mentioned boys or contributed to conversations when boys were the topic in the two weeks since she had entered our world. I wondered if maybe she had decided that the only boy Willow had to offer worth her interest was Pete.

  “Were there a lot more cute guys in your old town?” I asked her suddenly, realizing I couldn’t even remember where it was she had told us she had lived before.

  “Sure,” Violet replied. “I mean, not so many. But my last school had three thousand students, so you know, it’s just simple math that out of fifteen hundred boys, there would be more than one or two cute ones.”

  Three thousand students. Our high school had barely three hundred students. There were fewer than eighty kids in each class, with the most in the senior class and the fewest in the freshman class. “Fifteen hundred boys,” Candace repeated dreamily. “I can’t even imagine so many boys under one roof.”

  “Where are you from, again?” Olivia asked Violet.

  “Lake Forest,” Violet said. “Outside Chicago.”

  I’d only been to Chicago once. My mom had gone to college there, long before she’d met my dad when they taught together at the University of Wisconsin–Sheboygan. She’d been a graduate student teaching Introduction to the World of Natural Science as a requirement for earning her master’s degree in biology, way back when she still wanted to be a veterinarian. He’d been an established psychiatry professor, ten years her senior, already having an established taste for girls younger than him. My poor mom wouldn’t realize until she was no longer a young girl that his preference wouldn’t change. I felt a pang of guilt suddenly for leaving my mom home alone on a Friday. Before I became popular, Friday nights were when we watched all our favorite British sitcoms together until our faces hurt from laughing. She was probably relieved to have some time to herself, but I still felt uneasy about it. I felt a little sorry for myself, because I was the only girl in the basement who felt the burden of her mother’s loneliness like a weight pressing down on my chest.

  “God,” Olivia muttered. “I can’t wait to get out of this place and live in a real city.”

  We all lost interest in the movie quickly, none of us particularly caring about the plight of the citizens in the town being invaded by vampires since all we wanted was for Ryan Marten to have more screen time. I was starting to get a little sleepy, but I knew very well what happens to the first girl who falls asleep at slumber parties. I stood and stretched, and excused myself to go upstairs to use the bathroom. “Me too,” Candace announced, and followed me up the stairs leading to the kitchen.

  “One of you can use my bathroom on the second floor,” Olivia called after us.

  We reached the top of the stairs and I suddenly felt strange—like a burglar—in the Richmonds’ house. I could hear a television on upstairs. The ice cream cake had already been cleaned up by Mrs. Richmond, and the kitchen was quiet other than the buzzing of the stainless steel fridge.

  “Olivia’s room is to the right at the top of the stairs,” Candace told me as she stepped into the bathroom off the kitchen and flipped on the light.

  I remembered the approximate layout of the Richmonds’ house from when I’d played there as a little kid. As I walked down the hallway toward the front of the house, where I could ascend the staircase that led up to the house’s second floor, I stopped to peek through the front windows at the driveway, where it looked like a red Toyota had been parked next to Henry’s truck. The Toyota had a big pink bow on it. I immediately looked away, feeling guilty about having spotted Olivia’s grand birthday present before she did.

  On the way up the stairs, I heard a door open on the second floor, and music leaked into the hallway. Suddenly, Henry was at the top of the stairs, smiling at me. We crossed paths in the middle of the staircase, and he was carrying a plastic cup in his left hand, presumably on his way down to the kitchen for a refill of whatever he’d been drinking.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” I replied, realizing in a hot panic that I was wearing very, very short red shorts and a tank top as pajamas that I hadn’t really intended to model for any boys when I’d stuffed them into my backpack earlier that morning in preparation for the slumber party.

  “You shouldn’t sweat the Fall Fling so much,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, blushing furiously, hoping he had not overheard our discussion in the pool.

  “It’s just a dumb dance,” he said, his eyes locking with mine intently. “Just a bunch of idiots clapping their hands to bad music. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t go.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, because I don’t think I’m going to go,” I said, only aware as the words left my mouth of how true they were.

  “I mean, you could go,” Henry backtracked, studying my face. “I mean, I might happen to be back in town next weekend for my last radiology appointment. It would be kind of fun to be back in the high school gymnasium one more time. It would also be kind of fun to spy on my sister and ruin her big night of romance. If the only thing keeping you from going is not having a date, that is.”

  My heart was beating awfully fast. I felt like I might have been starting to perspire under his gaze.

  “Are you, like . . . asking me to the dance?” I asked with a confused smile, desperate to not be making a pathetic, wrong assumption. If I did, and if Henry told Olivia that I’d jumped to a silly, hopeful conclusion about him asking me out on a date, I would die of embarrassment.

  “I guess I am,” Henry said. “I mean, if that’s allowed. I guess since I’m not technically a student at Willow anymore, you’d have to ask me.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said, having a hard time believing that this was actually happening. That Henry Richmond was actually asking me—me—out. “Olivia might get kind of mad, though. You know, about you being there, as you said, to ruin her big night.”

  Henry smiled his killer megawatt smile. “Come on, McKenna. She’ll get over it. It’ll be fun. I know my sister pretty well, and I think she’d rather have you come to the dance with me than not go at all. So, what do you say?”

  “Yes, okay. That would be awesome.” I couldn’t help but grin so hard my cheeks hurt. “You can get my number from Olivia to, like, make plans.”

  I danced across Olivia’s dark bedroom, taking care not to step on any of the discarded
clothing or shoes littering her floor on my way to the adjoining bathroom. It might have been the happiest moment of my whole teenage life, being asked to the Fall Fling by a college guy, way, way cuter than any of the guys who still went to Willow High School. I smiled at my own reflection in the mirror over Olivia’s bathroom sink. My nose was peeling a little bit from my fading tan, and my hair was wavy from having air-dried after the quick shower I’d taken before dinner. I was going to have to remember to thank Rhonda for the millionth time for making so many salads for me over the summer, and for dragging me with her to Pilates.

  As I washed my hands, I wondered if  Trey Emory would be going to the dance. The mere thought was so ridiculous that I rolled my eyes in the mirror. Trey would not wear a polyester suit and dare to show his face in the high school gymnasium, or do the step-and-clap dance beneath red and black streamers. Dances were not something a guy like him would be into, which made it all the more preposterous that Mischa had urged Violet to consider going with him. It would just never happen. But I wondered what he’d think if he heard I was going with Henry Richmond. It was possible he wouldn’t care at all.

  Back in the basement, the movie was ending, and Candace was turning off the lamps on both sides of the couch to make the setting spookier for ghost stories.

  “You first, Mischa,” Olivia insisted. “Mischa tells the best ghost stories,” she informed Violet.

  Mischa’s eyes began glowing with enthusiasm. “Okay . . . What about Bloody Heather?”

  “Oh, man,” Candace whined. “You always tell that one. I’ve heard it, like, a million times.”

  “Yeah, but Violet’s never heard it,” Olivia said.