by Diane Hoh
On the fire escape, Margaret’s body was seized with a violent tremor. If Liza hadn’t been standing so close their arms bumped, she would have screamed.
“Then,” Brandon continued, “my mom called and she said that Liza’s date for the prom was someone named Lucas Nelson. Don’t know him. Liza never mentioned him to me. So don’t ask me who she’s going with because I can’t tell the players without a scorecard. The thing is, Mitch, the last I heard, she was going with you. Told me that herself. You’re telling me that’s not true? You’re taking someone else?”
Margaret held her breath.
“I am definitely taking someone else. I’m here to pick her up, as a matter of fact. She works over there.” Margaret saw Mitch point toward the store.
“I locked the door and turned off the downstairs lights,” Liza whispered in her ear. “He can’t get in. When he goes around to the front and Brandon goes into the restaurant, you two are history. In the meantime, back inside you girls go. I can’t have them seeing you.”
Liza dragged them both over the windowsill. Beth tumbled to the floor. Margaret staggered over to lean against the wall next to the ironing board, careful to keep it between her and Liza. Stall, she told herself, stall! Mitch won’t give up when he finds the door locked. He won’t!
But she wasn’t that sure. Maybe he’d think they’d got their signals crossed and, after a while, would return to her house.
That couldn’t happen. If it did, she and Beth were done for.
“You don’t have a date?” Margaret repeated, keeping her eyes on Liza, dreading any sudden moves on Liza’s part.
Liza reached down to lift a pair of scissors off one of the shelves, slowly, as if she were in no hurry. “Of course I do. You heard Brandon. I’m going with Mitch.”
“She’s crazy!” Beth cried softly from where she lay on the floor below the window. “She killed Stephanie and attacked you and Kiki and tried to frame me for it, all because she didn’t have a date. No one asked her!” Beth’s upper lip curled with scorn. “No one wanted to take her.”
Liza regarded her calmly. “That’s not true. They all wanted to. But they all assumed I’d already been asked. Because I’ve always gone to the prom. Every prom since I was a freshman. Three seniors asked me when I was only in ninth grade,” she added proudly.
“Yeah, but not this time,” Beth said harshly. “When you realized what was happening, you freaked. And killed Stephanie so you could go with Michael.”
“That is not what happened.” Liza’s voice remained calm. “She just fell, that’s all. And what you don’t know, Miss Smartypants, is that I thought I was going. Until it was too late. Almost too late. I thought Michael was taking me.”
Beth’s eyes widened. “Michael? Michael Danz? But he …” Enlightenment dawned. “You? That was you, stabbing Stephanie in the back with Michael?” She sat up, accusing eyes on Liza. “But you were her best friend!”
Liza waved the scissors idly back and forth. “Best … west … nest … test … crest …” she murmured lazily.
Beth and Margaret exchanged anxious glances.
“… pest!” Liza finished triumphantly. “I thought it was only fair that Michael keep his word to me. But Stephanie refused to let him take me. Then she fell.” Her eyes took on a dreamy look, and she continued to wave the scissors back and forth in front of her. “It wouldn’t have been right for me to help her when she’d refused to help me by doing what was right. Michael promised me.” She looked at Margaret with innocent eyes. “Shouldn’t Steph have seen to it that he kept his word?”
“Yes,” Margaret said sympathetically, “he should have, Liza.” Then, “Why did you leave the Quartet pins on the deck and under Kiki? What was that for? You didn’t leave one at the Dumpster.”
“Well, of course not, Margaret. You were never a part of our little group. Just Stephanie and Kiki, Beth and I. We were our own solid little quartet. At least,” Liza added bitterly, “I thought we were. I left the pins there to remind them of a pact we made once, a long time ago. Leaving one at the Dumpster would have been silly, because you weren’t one of us.”
When neither girl said anything, Liza went on without emotion, “I never meant to hurt Stephanie, really. She was ignoring Michael, so busy with all of her activities, and he came to me one night to cry on my shoulder. One thing led to another and, well, no one else had asked me to the prom because they all thought I’d already been invited and Michael said he would break his date with Steph and take me, so I kept seeing him. “But,” her voice hardened, “he didn’t do it. He didn’t tell her. So I had to.” She stopped waving the scissors. “She didn’t take it very well.”
“Mitch isn’t taking you, either,” Beth said harshly. “He’s taking Margaret. He never wanted to take you, or he would have asked.”
“That’s not true!” Liza shouted, her face changing, twisting with rage, her eyes wide. “I am going with Mitch! He’s waiting for me right now, at my house. I promised him I’d bring my dress and show it to him. Only …” She looked confused. “… only I don’t know where it is. I stole it to put it in your trunk with the others, and I don’t know what happened to it after the accident.” She laughed maniacally. “That was a stroke of luck for me, wasn’t it? That silly accident, with the trunk popping open! I saw the whole thing. I was following Beth, so I could watch when the police searched her trunk. I was parked right up the block when Caroline whipped around that corner and slammed into Beth’s car.” Remembering, her eyes glittered. “I laughed so hard …”
“Liza,” Margaret said evenly, “if Mitch is waiting for you, you should probably hurry. I brought your dress back here after the accident. I knew you’d be needing it. It’s hanging right downstairs, beside the cash register. Go ahead. Take your dress and go meet Mitch.”
For the first time, Liza looked uncertain. “Yes, I should do that,” she said slowly, and turned to replace the scissors on the shelf.
“Meg?” Mitch’s voice, shouting. “You in there? Door’s locked. Let me in, okay?”
Liza gripped the scissors more tightly. The uncertainty gone, she whirled to face Margaret. “Now I remember why I came here!” she hissed. “To get rid of you! If I don’t, you could trick Mitch again, like you did before. Trick him into taking you to the prom when he really wants to go with me.” Scissors uplifted, she began walking toward Margaret. “I can’t let that happen. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“No, Liza,” Margaret said wearily, tiring of the cat-and-mouse game. “Frankly, I can’t. It is just a dance. That’s all it is.”
“Oh, no,” Liza said softly, “that’s not true. It’s much, much more than that. And as for my friends,” she added bitterly, “they were going to go without me. All of them. We’d always done everything together. We’d gone to every prom together. I couldn’t believe they were going to break our solemn pact by going while I sat home alone.”
“Liza, that’s crazy!” Beth cried. “None of us knew you weren’t going! You lied the whole time. You even bought a dress when we did. We thought you were going with a friend of Brandon’s. And look who’s talking about breaking a pact. Were you or were you not seeing Michael behind Stephanie’s back?”
“That wasn’t my fault. It was hers. And I didn’t tell you I didn’t have a date because then everyone in school would have known. They would have laughed at me.”
Beth sagged against the wall, wiping a hand across her eyes as if she suddenly couldn’t see. “We wouldn’t have laughed at you. We would have made sure you had a date.”
“I don’t need charity!” Liza shrieked, her eyes dark with rage. “Haven’t I just proved to you that I can get my own date? Haven’t I?”
“You got the insecticide from Beth’s garage?” Margaret asked, edging closer to the ironing board. It still stood between her and Liza.
“You have to go out on the fire escape,” Liza said unemotionally, leaving Margaret’s question unanswered. “Both of you. Now! With the two of
you out of the way, I’ll be queen for sure.”
Margaret stared at her. “Liza, you can’t be queen. You already were. The rule at Toomey is, no one has that honor twice.”
Liza stared right back at her, her expression blank. “Well, that’s just not true, Margaret. I have never, ever been prom queen. You must have me mixed up with someone else. That’s one of the reasons I have to be sure to be there this time. This is my last chance to be queen.”
Liza’s picture had been in the paper when she was selected prom queen. Margaret remembered it very well. Liza had looked really beautiful.
“No, Liza,” she said forcefully. “You were already queen. You’ve just forgotten.” A risky move on her part, she knew. Would pushing Liza this way snap her back to reality? Or would it just make her angrier?
It made her angrier.
Margaret’s heart sank as Liza’s face reddened, and her eyes narrowed into tiny little slits of hatred. “That can’t be true! You’re lying, you have to be lying! You just don’t want me to go with Mitch, like Stephanie wouldn’t let me go with Michael!”
And then, scissors upraised, she rushed at Margaret.
The ironing board shook as Liza strained against it, reaching for Margaret, the shiny blades poised above Margaret’s head.
Margaret recoiled, forcing her body back against the wall as close as she could get. But she realized instantly what a mistake that was, and instead lunged forward. As she did so, she kicked out with one leg, crying out in pain as her stitches pulled, and slammed her foot against the ironing board’s criss-crossed, wooden legs.
They gave, folding instantly with a groan.
The scissors were no more than a fraction of an inch from Margaret’s chest when the board collapsed. The blades raked a trail of red down Margaret’s left forearm as the ironing board and Liza and the scissors crashed to the floor.
Someone was pounding on the door downstairs.
Ignoring the blood spilling from the gashes in her arm, Margaret scooped up the iron that had fallen with the board and quickly, before a stunned Liza could clear her head, yanked the girl’s arms behind her back and wound the iron’s cord around her wrists.
Then she ran downstairs to open the door.
Caroline, stiff with hurt and anger, was standing there. Mitch, worry in his eyes, was right behind her.
“You are not going to believe this,” Margaret gasped, and let them in.
Chapter 28
ADRIENNE HAD OUTDONE HERSELF. When Margaret saw her reflection in the full-length mirror on her mother’s closet door, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The vivid blue dress had, of course, done its part, performing exactly as Margaret had anticipated. But the hair helped, too, its limpness gone, falling to her shoulders in shiny, softly curled perfection. And the face … was that her face? Adrienne’s light but expert touch had emphasized her best feature, her eyes, but enhanced her other features with her special magic. Margaret knew she looked … well, face it, she looked pretty. Really pretty.
And even if she hadn’t known that then, it would have hit home the minute she saw the expression on Mitch’s face when she came down the stairs and he looked up at her and sounded a soft “Wow.”
Dinner at Impeccable Tastes was wonderful, except for a brief moment when they got out of the car and found themselves facing the Dumpster. But Mitch had taken her arm and hurried her away from there and then everything was all right again.
And now, here she was, moving across the gym floor in Mitch’s arms, smiling, laughing, talking, just like everyone else at the prom. The tables were beautiful, decorated with floor-length cloths and the tiny miniature yearbooks. Framed posters of movies known only for their happy endings were hung on the walls throughout the gym. Bouquets of blue and yellow flowers donated by Quartet’s silent partners from their own gardens joined the tiny yearbooks on each table. Generous of them, Margaret thought, since not one of their daughters was attending the dance. Even Beth, completely cleared of any wrongdoing, had opted not to come.
“She said she’d feel funny,” Mitch had told Margaret when she asked about Beth, “since none of her friends would be here.”
Margaret had asked him, long after the police had taken Liza away and everything had been explained and Caroline had been apologized to until Margaret was blue in the face, why he had never told her that Liza had invited him to the dance.
“I didn’t think it was important,” he had said.
Unfortunately, Liza had.
Caroline danced by in Scott’s arms. He was beaming. Margaret had told Caroline about the phone call, pointing out that Scott must really care or he wouldn’t have embarrassed himself that way. She didn’t pull the turquoise dress from the closet where Adrienne had hidden it until after Caroline announced that she had asked and Scott had accepted.
Okay, so the night wouldn’t be the dance of Caroline’s dreams. But she looked as if she was having a good time. Adrienne had done her hair and makeup, too, and she looked lovely.
A girl named Teresa Connor, whom Margaret knew only slightly, was chosen as queen. The crown seemed to suit her. She stood up on the stage, smiling, her date beside her, and for one small moment Margaret envisioned Beth’s drawing and wished things had turned out differently for Beth.
Margaret and Mitch, hands clasped, were watching, smiling, as the king and queen began the next dance. They were about to walk out on the floor after the first few bars of music, when a stir in the room caught their attention. Margaret was the first to turn around, her eyes scanning the candlelit gym for some sign of a disturbance. When her gaze moved to the doorway, she gasped and her grip on Mitch’s hand tightened abruptly. He turned around.
Liza Buffet was standing in the doorway.
“Mitch?” Margaret asked, drawing closer to him.
“Out on bail,” he said cryptically. “Her father got her out. She’s not going to be charged with murder, just manslaughter, so while she’s waiting for the psychiatric examination, the judge let her go home. Her parents are supposed to be watching out for her. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to ruin your evening. Sorry. If I’d had any idea she’d show up here, I’d have warned you.”
As more people turned to see what was happening, a hush fell over the huge gym. The music continued to play, but the king and queen stopped dancing, as did everyone else. In just seconds, all eyes were on the entrance to the gym.
Though Liza’s dress was black, it wasn’t the pretty dress she had bought at Quartet. Because she didn’t have that dress, Margaret realized. She had left without it that horrible night, in the custody of the police. That dress was probably at the police station, in the evidence room.
The dress Liza was wearing was full-length, long-sleeved and matronly, and at least two sizes too large. It hung on her like a sack, and one shoulder had slipped off, causing the dress to hang at an odd angle around her neck.
That’s her mother’s dress, Margaret thought. Liza is wearing one of her mother’s dresses.
That was not the worst of it, she saw as Liza, a vacant smile on her face, began moving into the room. Something was very wrong with her face. Gorgeous, impeccable Liza had applied makeup with a heavy, disoriented hand. As she drew closer, Margaret saw with horrified awe that her mouth was outlined to nearly twice its normal size with thick, red, greasy lipstick. Her eyebrows were heavily outlined in dark pencil, and thick blusher in an orangey shade had been applied to her entire cheek area on one side of her face, to only the cheekbone on the other side, giving her face as lopsided a look as the oversized dress gave her body.
Caroline and Scott had moved up to stand beside Margaret and Mitch. “Oh, no,” Caroline whispered as Liza walked unsteadily but purposely toward the silent, staring crowd, “she’s wearing a crown, Margaret!”
Liza had placed on the blond hair that badly needed washing and hung lank and lackluster around the garishly made-up face, a homemade “crown.” It looked like the effort of a kindergartner, cheap gold foil cove
ring what was probably cardboard cut into a crown shape, bent into a circle, and stapled.
“Oh, man,” Scott breathed.
One hand holding up the edge of the ugly black dress so that she wouldn’t trip over it, Liza moved daintily toward David Goumas and his date.
“Why, David, you rascal!” Liza said, her voice low and sweet but audible since the band, aware now that something out of the ordinary was happening, had stopped playing. The room had grown as quiet as a library. “Whatever are you doing with this pretty little thing? I was so sure that, with darling Kiki incapacitated, you would be calling me to be your date for the prom.” She smiled up at him, and one hand moved forward to gently stroke his cheek. “I guess you must have thought I was already otherwise engaged, am I right, darling David? I forgive you, I really do.”
The pair remained frozen as Liza moved on to the next couple. One by one, the bizarrely made-up and costumed girl went from couple to couple, smiling, scolding the boys, dismissing the girls with a flick of her finger or a contemptuous smile, speaking only to their dates in soft, sweet tones. When she came to Mitch and Margaret, Margaret instinctively took a step backwards. But she didn’t let go of Mitch’s hand.
“And you, my darling Mitch,” Liza said sternly, shaking a finger in Mitch’s face, “I am having trouble dismissing your treachery. Why, everyone here,” waving a hand to encompass the semicircle of onlookers, “knows that you and I were meant to attend these festivities together, isn’t that right, everyone?” Her eyes behind thick coats of mascara flicked over the crowd and then returned to Mitch’s face. “But I don’t blame you, sweetie.” The smile disappeared and her face darkened. “I know who’s behind such treachery. My so-called dearest friends, who swore they would never betray me and then did, anyway. I have taken care of the matter. Don’t give it another thought. Now that I’m here, though” the smile returned as she gazed up at him with assurance, “you are going to dance with me, aren’t you, Mitch?” Holding the folds of her skirt out around her,” she twirled flirtatiously before him. “I got all dressed up for you. Do you like it?”