Belle of the Brawl

by Lisi Harrison

  Next, Allie found AJ’s crocheted green tam and shoved it over her honey-blond hair, stuffing her ponytail inside and pulling it down low on her forehead. Hiding her shoes behind the toilet, Allie unlocked the stall door and ran toward a row of gilt-framed mirrors above the long row of sinks. Opening her bag again, she took out sunglasses and an eyeliner pencil. She expertly drew AJ’s mole onto her upper lip. The one good thing about sneaking into the Academy by posing as AJ was that she could reclaim her fake identity in her sleep. Adding sunglasses made her transformation complete. Nobody would know the eyes underneath the glasses were blue, not green. Examining the AJ facsimile staring back at her in the mirror, Allie slouched the way AJ always did. She smiled and tried out AJ’s high, breathy voice on her reflection. “Welcome back.”

  Hurrying out of the bathroom just as a couple of Alphas came in, Allie ditched her tote in the wings of the cabin’s small stage and grabbed AJ’s guitar. She slouched over to Thalia, pulling her tam lower on her forehead in a fit of hair-anoia.

  “AJ!” Thalia smiled, reaching up to pat a couple of the silver rosebuds in her giant faux-hawk. Allie felt bad lying to Thalia, but she had no choice: Thalia was MC’ing tonight. “Are you ready to go on?”

  Allie nodded and smiled at Thalia with her mouth closed, a knife of guilt stabbing her chest.

  Allie-as-AJ followed the train of Thalia’s Eiffel Tower dress and waited while Thalia turned the music off and took the mic. While Thalia welcomed everyone to the first annual Muse Cruise and started talking about how inspiring it was to be with so many extraordinary girls, Allie tuned out. Spotting the soundboard, she quickly plugged her aPod into one of the output cords. Everything in place, she darted out from the wings and pasted on her best AJ-about-to-sing smile.

  Allie had thought through her plan carefully, but there was one thing she wasn’t prepped for. Being up onstage felt ah-mazing! She let the adoration wash over her, using the ego boost to fuel her courage to go through with the plan. But when she looked at the crowd more carefully, she noticed that almost everyone—everyone but Charlie, Darwin, Mel, and Triple—was making the official Identity Theft symbol, first raising their index fingers to create the I, then crossing it with their other hand to form the T. The crowd was in total solidarity with AJ—and totally anti-Allie, the identity thief who inspired the lyrics.

  Allie held AJ’s guitar in front of her like a shield and blinked away the tears of terror that had sprung into her eyes. Her heartbeat moved from a trot to a gallop, and the adoring crowd in front of her suddenly seemed dangerously close to an angry mob. But just as she started to consider running offstage, her aPod cued up “Identity Theft.” Now she had no choice but to go ahead with her plan, which, she now saw, had seemed a lot easier from the safety of the bathroom stall.

  You can do this, Al. She took a deep breath and began fake-strumming AJ’s guitar in time with the music, her eyes glued to Mel’s face. She could do this, for him. For herself. Instead of letting the audience’s hatred wound her like poison darts, she would use it as fuel. She would channel it into revenge on AJ.

  Allie played along with the song, her fingers expertly faking each chord, her fingers strumming the guitar in ways she didn’t know they could. When AJ’s recorded voice started to sing, Allie grabbed the mic and lip-synched along, not missing a syllable. After a few lines, Allie unleashed her first attack. While recorded-AJ sang, onstage-AJ coughed into the mic. Coughing just once, she returned to lip-synching, shaking her head slightly and twisting her face into a mortified expression. But when Allie scanned the crowd during a guitar solo, everyone was still dancing and clapping along to the song, yelling “Stop Thief! Identity Theft!”

  Nobody even noticed Allie’s lip-synch giveaway!

  When the chorus of the song began again, Allie coughed louder. Harder. This time, she was determined to make people see that “AJ” wasn’t really singing. She doubled over, clutching the mic to her stomach for a second as recorded-AJ kept right on singing. Then she straightened back up and continued to lip-synch as if nothing had happened.

  A tide of anger rippled through the crowd. “She’s lip-synching!” shouted Hannah Hesse in the front row. Allie continued to lip-synch and strum the guitar, but now she did it out of time with the music. She made herself blush and concentrated on appearing flustered.

  “Sorry!” she yelled into the mic in her high AJ voice.

  Soon, the entire audience erupted in booing. The crowd stopped dancing. Now everyone stood there shooting hate-daggers at Allie. Only this time, Allie thought gleefully, they were glaring at AJ. Someone yelled, “Who’s the fake now?”

  Allie ducked as a sandal flew threw the air and nearly hit her in the head. Her plan was officially a success! AJ’s rep was destroyed, and soon people might not walk around the Academy humming “Identity Theft.” It wasn’t so cool anymore, now that the singer was a fake herself.

  As the song ended and the crowd’s booing and hissing drowned out the song’s final notes, Allie-as-AJ burst into fake tears and ran offstage. Yet another thing I know how to do from experience! Allie giggled at the irony—her past unmasking, the most humiliating half-hour of her life, had prepared her for the role of a lifetime.

  Allie ran into the wings and dove for her tote bag. Before the angry mob stormed the stage and attacked AJ, she had to get rid of her disguise. She licked her hand and wiped it across her faux-mole, then ripped off AJ’s dress and hat like they were on fire. She pulled her silver minidress over her head and tugged it down, then bolted to the bathroom to grab her shoes.

  A few minutes later, Allie sauntered casually across the dance floor, past clusters of indignant Alpha girls—all of them dishing about how lame AJ’s performance was—to where Charlie stood with Darwin and Mel.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, blinking her eyes. Hopefully, her face looked as innocent and confused as an amnesiac’s.

  “Babe, you missed it! AJ got booed off the stage. It was actually kind of funny.” Mel was so cute and so sweet, Allie nearly swooned. Those words, out of Mel’s gorgeous mouth, were almost too perfect.

  Allie brought her navy blue eyes to his violet ones. “Really? How weird. I went outside to get some air, and when I came back, her concert had ended. I was wondering why.” She shrug-smiled as if to say, oh well, life goes on.

  Inside, her heart buzzed like a hive of honeybees. Had she really pulled off an AJ takedown and started hanging out with the cutest guy on the island? If this were a dream, she didn’t want to wake up.

  “She must be freaking out right now,” Darwin said, shaking his head. “I mean, I knew she was kind of fake, but I didn’t think she was the type to lip-synch a live show.”

  “Poor AJ. She probably had her reasons.” Allie shook her head as if she sympathized with her roommate, remembering Darwin had always been a huge fan of AJ’s music. Looking at him now, Allie couldn’t believe she’d had such a huge crush on him only a week ago. He was just a bridge boy for her, Allie realized. A boy to get her from one serious relationship (Fletcher) to another (Mel). Allie turned to Charlie, noticing her bestie was standing very close to Darwin—and they were holding hands.

  Allie’s eyes moved from Charlie’s hand to her face. Charlie nodded subtly, her eyes shining with happiness. Then Charlie’s eyes bounced to the stage and back to Allie, and her brown eyebrows shot into the air, silently asking Allie if she’d been AJ only moments before.

  Allie nodded and bit her lip, confessing all of it to Charlie in that tiny gesture. In seconds, both girls erupted into laughter. They grabbed each other’s shoulders and hug-laughed, twirling around, the faces of all the Alphas on the ship spinning past in a blur. Darwin and Mel looked at each other and shrugged as their girlfriends howled in hysterics. Finally slowing their teacup spin to a stop, Allie reached up and wiped a tear from the end of Charlie’s nose.

  Allie sighed, looking out at the island that finally felt like home, at Mel and Darwin walking toward her with smiles on their faces,
and back into Charlie’s smiling coffee-brown eyes. Then she leaned in for one more hug.

  24

  JACKIE O

  BEDROOM

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8TH

  9:26 P.M.

  Skye squeezed the last few drops of moisture out of her hair, flipped her head over, and wrapped a silver towel around her head like a turban. Dressed in plush gold slippers and matching cashmere robe, she was finally starting to warm up after her Olympic-caliber swim to shore. Pulling her comforter around her shoulders, she shiver-shook the last chill from her lithe body and continued telling the Jackie O’s—all of whom had arrived back at the dorm while Skye was in the shower—about her wet escape.

  “Swimming was the easy part. Walking home soaking wet was harder.”

  “Ohmuhgud. You walked all the way here with no shoes?” Allie put her hands over her mouth in horror.

  “I walked to the bubble train,” Skye confessed. It hadn’t been too bad. Luckily, the temperature of the island at night usually hovered around seventy degrees. The only storms they had to face came when Shira got angry.

  “Still,” Charlie said, giggling and shaking her head, “you risked your life to avoid getting busted. You’re the Lara Croft of Jackie O.”

  Skye laughed. “When you’ve been flirting with boys as long as I have, you become a better escape artist than David Blaine. Right, Trip? You did pretty well yourself.” Skye wanted to include Triple in the Muse Cruise post-mortem, but the dance diva had crawled into bed and buried her nose in the giant binder they’d all received when they arrived at the Academy. Triple was thumbing through the Official Alphas Handbook like she was studying for a test.

  “Yeah, all’s well that ends well,” Triple murmured, not meeting Skye’s eyes.

  “Studying Shira’s bible?” Charlie asked lightly.

  “Just trying to wind down and get to sleep, and this boring reading material makes me drowsy.” Triple buried her face deeper in the phonebook-sized handbook with the gold, swoopy A on the cover.

  Whatever, Trip. Skye shrugged it off, assuming Triple was jealous of her dramatic exit. While she was swimming, Triple was cowering on the boat. But with enough time, Triple would learn how to take more risks. Baby steps.

  “You’re the stuntwoman,” Charlie continued, “and she’s the Academy Award–winning actress.” She stuck a thumb out and jabbed it in Allie’s direction.

  “Shhh!” Allie’s face turned red as she motioned to AJ’s bed, where the singer snored quietly, out cold.

  “Ohmuhgud, fill me in,” whispered Skye, beckoning Allie closer.

  Allie leapt up from her bed and sat on Skye’s, followed by Charlie. “Tell her,” Charlie said to Allie. “You will not believe this,” she giggle-whispered to Skye.

  “Does this have something to do with the texts I keep getting?” Skye pointed to her aPod. Luckily, she’d accidentally left it in its charger all evening so it didn’t have to swim in the ocean with her. When she’d arrived home, her inbox was filled with photos and texts, all saying something about AJ lip-synching her performance on the Muse Cruise.

  “Are they about AJ?” Allie asked, her eyes widening.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then yes. That was me. Oops!” Allie shrugged her shoulders and threw her hands up in the air as if she’d dropped a glass or burned some toast instead of pulled off an enormous fake-out to get back at AJ.

  “Wow.” Skye unwound her towel turban and shook her platinum waves out. “She has no idea yet, does she?”

  The three girls looked over at AJ, splayed out in a deep slumber, a thin line of drool spilling down her cheek, extending from her half-open mouth. Allie shook her head sadly and burst out giggling along with Charlie. Skye laughed, too—AJ was all about AJ and had never bothered to make friends with the Jackie O’s. Her songs about Allie might have been catchy, but they were also mean. It was nice to imagine her getting a taste of what Allie had been going through.

  Skye sank back into the pile of pillows on her bed and turned back to Allie and Charlie, when an electric flash in the sky froze the tale of her journey in her throat. Skye’s panicked eyes met Charlie’s brown ones, then Allie’s dark blue ones. All were wide with alarm. Sudden bad weather inside the Alpha Island Biosphere could mean only one thing.

  Shira was on the warpath.

  A few seconds of nervous anticipation ticked by, followed by a crash of thunder that rocked the bedroom hard enough to make the lights flicker. Allie yelped like a newborn puppy, pulling her sweatshirt’s hood up over her head and rolling off Skye’s bed onto the floor. AJ sleep-grunted and flipped over from her back to her stomach.

  “What’s going on?” Skye whispered, turning to Charlie.

  Charlie bit her lip and shrugged. “No idea.”

  “She knows!” whisper-shouted Allie, uncoiling from the fetal position and leaping back onto Skye’s bed. Her eyes were coated in Shira-induced panic-tears. “I’m busted!”

  Charlie shook her head. “No way. Nobody knows it was you.”

  Skye sat up, her spine ruler-straight, sudden fear making her scalp tingle and her ears hot. She snuck another glance at Triple, who continued to read, seemingly unaware of the weather. “Shira must have found out about my swim. I’m toast.”

  Skye looked around the bedroom, taking it all in—the horseshoe-cluster of beds, the glass walls, the amazing closets, and the swirly gold-and-silver carpet that warmed to the touch of cold feet. “I’ll miss you guys.”

  Another crack of thunder ripped through the sky, ushering in a violent storm. Rain pounded down on the domed glass ceiling in ferocious, slanted sheets. Skye squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think happy thoughts, but all she could see was Shira’s disembodied head kicking her out of the Academy.

  Just then, the clatter of footsteps at the door reached Skye’s ears. “Ohmuhgud,” Allie whispered, grabbing both Skye’s and Charlie’s hands. The three girls formed a triangle with their hands and waited.

  They stared at each other as a pair of high heels clomped up the spiral staircase. Skye held her breath. When she saw Thalia’s geometric hairstyle, she exhaled in relief.

  “Girls!” Thalia barked, sounding more like Drill Sergeant Triple than the calm, serene life coach Skye knew and loved. Thalia walked over to the wall and switched off the lights. “‘Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity, and liberty is added eventually by sleep.’ Nietzsche. Time for bed,” she added.

  Allie and Charlie wordlessly obeyed Thalia’s instructions. Triple snapped her enormous binder shut and put her sleep mask over her eyes, instantly looking the part of a rule-abiding Alpha.

  Skye lay back and listened to the pounding of the rain, which sounded like millions of metal tacks hitting the glass ceiling above her. She reached out and grabbed her HAD slipper from her night table, fingering the purple satin as fervently as a nun clutching a rosary.

  Disobeying Mimi just to watch fifteen girls do the limbo for a chance to kiss Taz was so not worth getting expelled. Skye made a silent promise to herself—if she survived tonight, she was going to channel her week of boot camp into a whole new lifestyle. One where dance came first, where she followed the rules and rose to the top. One that was a lot more like Triple’s.

  Thalia disappeared back down the stairs and into her muse quarters. A moment later, the front door of Jackie O slid open a second time. A pair of stilettos clicked on the clear glass staircase, this time sounding more like typewriter keys than horse hooves. A huge bolt of blue-white lightning lit up the turbulent rainstorm above Skye’s head, lighting up the room for a split second just as Shira entered the bedroom, illuminating her wild red waves, her annoyed-looking face, and trench-coated body.

  Skye clutched her HAD slipper tighter under her coverlet and squeezed her eyes shut again. Shira in Jackie O was an image straight out of Skye’s nightmares. It was like Madonna at McDonald’s—out of place and wrong on every level.

  Shira walked crisply to the center of the horseshoe of bed
s, shaking rainwater off a huge folded black umbrella. A drop flew onto Skye’s forehead, but she didn’t dare move to wipe it off. She peered through squinted eyes at Shira’s ice-blue eyes, glowing with anger in the semi-dark room. Ohmuhgud.

  “I know you’re all awake, so stop laying there like corpses,” Shira spat in her Aussie accent. The girls sat up immediately—everyone but AJ, who for some reason actually seemed to be sleeping through their midnight intrusion.

  “And her?” Shira asked the four girls cowering in their beds, waving a hand in AJ’s direction.

  After a beat of silence, Charlie bravely answered. “She’s not feeling well.”

  “Ah. No matter.” Shira nodded, pursing her brick-red lips. “Skye and Andrea, please get up and stand at the foot of your beds.”

  Ohmuhgud!

  As if an electric shock launched her out of bed, Triple shot up like a jack-in-the box and gracefully arranged her feet in second position at the foot of her bed. Skye tried to catch Triple’s eyes, but they were stuck to a distant tree out the window. But even though the diva appeared to be calmly gazing past Shira, her hands trembled at her sides.

  Skye got up and trudged to the foot of her bed, forcing her legs forward. She shivered as a few drops of water escaped her still-wet hair and dripped down her neck, and realized she was still clutching her HAD slipper. Skye stood close enough to Shira now to smell her Crème De La Mer moisturizer. She concentrated on not passing out, waiting for the two worst words at the Academy to be directed to her—you’re expelled. The world-famous Aussie Alpha wasn’t wearing her trademark sunglasses, and her eyes followed Skye like she was an amoeba under a microscope—something inhuman, an oddity to be studied.

  “Mimi gave you both strict instructions not to go on the Muse Cruise. You were to be rehearsing. You were to make the most of your week together and perfect your dancing.” Shira took a breath, pausing, her head swiveling from Skye to Triple and back again, and the fist of fear tightened around Skye’s heart.