Bookishly Ever After (3 page)

I took in his jeans and white t-shirt with ‘Ghost’ stamped in faded letters across his chest. So perfectly Dev. One of my torques slid loose and I shoved it back up my arm. “Maeve from
Golden
.” He stared at me blankly and I added, “It’s a book.”

“Oh.”

“It’s really good. It’s been on the New York Times series bestseller list already for thirty weeks. And it’s going to be a movie.” In my head, I could practically hear Em telling me to stop right there, but I couldn’t help it. “It’s about a girl who falls in love with a leprechaun.”

His eyebrows rose. “A leprechaun? Like, the little Irish people leprechauns?”

Hearing him say it, leprechauns really did sound ridiculous. “Well, kind of. Only they’re not little, they’re warriors. And hot. And Maeve is supposed to use her powers to save the world but she’s almost found out by the evil fae…” My voice drifted off. “Uhm, it’s actually a lot cooler than that, I swear.”

“I’ll take your word for it. It’s a nice costume, whatever it is.”

“Thanks. Um, so’s yours.” I watched as he turned back to untangling strings of twinkle lights. “Need help?”

“Yeah. Just hold this for me.” He dumped a tangled ball in my hands and started walking with the untangled end to stretch the string of lights along the bleachers.

While he was walking, Em came up alongside me and poked me in the arm. “Arrrrgh, whatcha think you’re doin’, matey?” she said softly in the worst pirate accent on the planet.

“Helping Dev with the lights.”

She shook her head at me. “You’re supposed to be sitting your green glittery butt next to Jon, picking out the best lighting gels for tonight. Not playing Tinkerbell to Dev’s Peter Pan.”

I blinked at her. Sometimes Em made no sense. “What
does Peter Pan have to do with lights?”

“A, you look like a fairy farted on you with all that glitter, b, you’re wearing green, and c, blinky lights.” She shook her head. “This isn’t a book. Guys aren’t going to come after you. You have to get your flirt on.”

“I know that life isn’t a book—”

“And that’s why you need to put yourself out there.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but was interrupted by a loud yell coming from about a quarter of the way down the gym. “Can the two of you pause for a second in talking about how hot I am and start untangling? This gym isn’t going to light itself up.”

I stuck my tongue out at Dev and tugged at the cord coming from the ball in my hands, careful to not break any of the bulbs.

“Oh, and your scintillating presence isn’t light enough?” I said with a smirk before turning to Em. She looked from him to me with an unreadable expression on her face. “What?”

She shook her head. “‘Scintillating?’ Who says that?”

“People in AP English. Along with words like ‘limpid’ and ‘epaulets.’”

“Well, Miss AP English, finish that up quick and then get to work with Jon. I’m getting my remedial English butt back to my English as a Second Language project.” She waved her hook at me and then sauntered across the gym to the DJ booth.

A sharp tug brought me back to the ball of lights in my hands. “Do I need to crack a whip to get you working?”

“Bossy,” I called back with a laugh, but continued unraveling.

The gym did look magical. With the lights dimmed and the twinkle lights in place, you could barely make out the rows of bleachers that lined the two long walls. Floodlights covered in blue gels projected onto the tarps that hung in front of both basketball hoops for a watery effect. And kids in costume, mostly recycled from previous Halloweens or precycled for the coming Halloween, gave the crowd on the dance floor a mostly surreal effect.

I leaned against the bleachers, my fingers itching to pull out my e-reader. As the gym filled, my dress was too hot, too heavy, too different. More than half of the girls dancing were wearing skimpy outfits that barely passed the school dress code and the other half were in the usual witch, vampire, or fairy types of costumes. No one wore anything close to what I was wearing. Plus, Kris never showed up. This had been a really stupid idea.

I took a deep breath. Maeve wouldn’t care.
Maeve
would be proud to stand out. I straightened up, tossing my hair back like she always did right before facing the dark fae.

“Was that a twitch or something?” Jon stopped beside me and propped himself on a part of the bleacher that we hadn’t been able to push all the way in earlier. He was really tall and lanky and if he hadn’t been sitting, I’d have to crane my neck to look at him. He reached out to touch the thick waves of hair that fell to my waist. “Is that real?”

“Clip-in extensions.” I tried tossing them again and gave up. “That was supposed to be a really cool shampoo commercial moment,” I informed him, trying to sound flirty-ish and not like I just wanted him to go away so I could go back to being a fly on the wall.

He laughed, one of those laughs that showed too much of his teeth. “Cute. You really took the costume thing seriously, didn’t you?” I recognized his costume from his project on Socrates in World History. He’d shortened the robe’s sleeves, though, and I could tell Em had totally exaggerated about the ROTC pushup thing.

“It’s from this book—” I stopped and nodded when I saw his eyes start to glaze over. “Yes. Yes, I did.” Unlike Dev, Jon didn’t seem to want to hear about it.

“Whatever, it looks good. Em told me to come over here and force you to have fun. Why aren’t you dancing?”

Of course Em told him I was here. I hoped my shrug was cool and unconcerned. Maeve-like. “I’d rather watch.” After seeing some of the couples on the dance floor, there was no way I was going out there. I think I’d die if someone tried to grind against me. Worse if I got reprimanded by the monitors patrolling the dance.

“Oh.” His smile dropped from toothy to close-lipped and he looked from me to Em, who was across the room making dance-y twirly motions at us with her arms. “Maybe when they change up the music?”

I stopped trying to shoot daggers with my eyes at Em and made a noncommittal sound. He apparently wasn’t
going away any time soon. Silence fell between us and I shifted from foot to foot. Talk. We should talk. I tried to smile up at him.

“So, um, did you see the new mascot uniform concepts for next year?”

He screwed up his face. “How much more can they screw up a muskrat? If we had a decent mascot, it would be one thing, but muskrats?”

“True. They don’t really strike fear into the hearts of our rival schools.”

“Yeah.” Another too-long pause filled the air around us. I heard the bleachers squeak as he shifted his balance, then he hopped off. “You want to go get a cupcake? I heard the snack table is actually decent this time.”

Em was still waving at us while slow dancing with the foreign exchange student. Maybe going to the cupcake table with Jon would make her happy.

“Sure.” I followed, awkwardly holding onto his sleeve to keep from being separated while we navigated through the crowd.

Just as we reached the three point line, the music changed abruptly. The twang of a sitar filled the air. “Is that—” We stopped and I laughed as Dev slid out on his knees into the center of the floor and started to sing. “What is he doing?”

The whole gym froze and stared as, one by one, other people broke into dance, their voices joining in with his.

“You’re effin’ kidding me. A flash mob?” Jon laughed and shook his head. “Leave it to the theatre geeks to come
up with something like this.”

“Even better, a Bollywood flash mob. This is awesome.” Some of the girls from the dance team twirled by in matching genie-like outfits. More and more people joined in, mostly theatre, the school choirs, and the dance team. Even some of the chaperones got into the dance until they were a solid formation making patterns across the gym floor. Jon started pulling me towards the cupcakes again, but I swatted at his hand. “I have to see this.”

“C’mon. This is the best time to go. Everyone’s watching right now.”

I ignored him. Some of the teachers had jumped into the dance.

“Look at Mr. Hayashi. I didn’t know he could move that fast,” I said as I tried to ignore Jon’s insistent tugging and kept my focus on the dancing AP History teacher. “I really want to see this.”

Then Dev was in front of me, dragging me away from Jon and onto the dance floor while still keeping in his character of a crooning Bollywood hero. He twirled me right into the center so my skirts flared around me in an impressive circle of green chiffon. “Uhm, Dev,” I said between my teeth, feeling my face grow supernova-hot, “I can’t dance. And I don’t know—”

His lips quirked upwards and he winked at me before breaking into the next round of lyrics:

“Your hair like fire, eyes like embers,” he lip-synced, finger tilting up my chin and amused eyes meeting mine,
“soul like a blaze burning through the room.” His arms gestured dramatically at me and the dancers as he sang. He pulled me in, wrapping his and my arms around me, “I am captivated, drawn in, a moth to your flames. Your fire is my doom,” and twirled me out again. My embarrassment melted away and I laughed at his exaggerated and cheesy movements.

As the chorus broke out again, he squeezed my hand. “Thanks, Phoebe,” he said softly. With another twirl, I fell right into a chair on the edge of the flash mob, as if I had been perfectly choreographed into the dance. Em looked down at me with a grin. “You looked good out there, Pavlova.”

“If you put that online, I will kill you.”

Em didn’t even bother to hide the fact that she was still recording the whole thing. “I won’t have to. Someone else will.” She tugged teasingly at the ribbon on my sleeve. “If it makes you feel any better, Dev did a good job of making you actually look desirable. You might get an Internet stalker or two out of this one.”

I twisted my nose up at her. “That’s comforting. Did you know about this?”

“No. He probably planned it the week I had to miss the theatre club meeting. Jerk. I could have gotten a better view of you actually dancing for once if he’d bothered to tell me.” She wiggled her phone at me. “Thankfully, with my ‘get to the front of a crowd’ superpower, at least I got some awesome blackmail material.”

I reached up to grab at her phone. “Let me see—”

She held it out of my reach and gestured towards the dance floor. “No way. Besides, look, he’s got Ms. Alexander out there now.”

When I turned around, he was promenading the little blonde gym teacher through an alleyway made by the other dancers. She was laughing so hard that she could barely stay upright. “Okay. That’s proof that Dev is absolutely certifiable.”

“Wanna take a guess about who he picks as the brunette?”

“Brunette?”

“Don’t you recognize it? It’s that song from the movie we watched at your house a few weeks ago.
Viraag
? The one where the guy dances with girls with different hair colors?”

Em was right—this was the point in the song where the movie guy had switched to dancing with the heroine, who was a brunette.

“Funny how he picked a song from this movie.” Em said, sounding a little distracted, “He didn’t seem to know about it when you were raving about it in band.”

“I guess we inspired him to check it out.” I giggled as Dev dramatically dropped to his knees and waved Ms. Alexander away like he couldn’t look at her anymore.

“Maybe.” She paused and narrowed her eyes, looking from me to Dev and back at me again. Then, she shook her head and said, “I guess Dev found English lyrics or something. Too bad it screwed up wherever you and Jon were going, but I think this was worth it.”

Jon. Oops.
I craned my neck to see him standing on the
opposite side of the gym.

“About Jon. I—”

“Huh? What about Jon?” Em let out a whoop as Ms. Alexander gracefully bowed her way out of the flash mob.

“Nothing.” I twisted the dangling end of my rope belt around my fingers like a one handed cat’s cradle. “I don’t think he cares if I’m over here,” I mumbled into my lap.

Em didn’t even hear me over the roar of the crowd. “Oh, no. He didn’t.”

I looked up to see Dev dragging our practically bald Vice Principal dead center of the dance formation and the shock made me immediately forget about Jon and lack of sparks.

“Mr. MacKenzie? No way. He’s going to get suspended. And then Ms. Osoba will kill him for screwing up band practice.” A ripple of laughter ran through the crowd as Dev reached up to ruffle the little that was left of Mr. MacKenzie’s hair while singing about “waves of brown, deep as night.” It was just so ridiculous I couldn’t help but join in with a giggle that made my side hurt.

To my utter amazement, the vice principal joined in the last part of the dance.

“Holy cupcake, he knew. He had to,” Em said over my shoulder. “There’s no way—”

Dev slid off on his knees, landing next to us as the song ended. He grinned up at Em, apparently catching the end of her words.

“Never underestimate the power of the musical theatre club,” he said with a wink before standing and taking a
mock bow. “I’m not stupid enough to screw around with MacKenzie.”

“With your grades, you can’t afford to,” Em joked and he rewarded her with a wide grin. “I’m mad you didn’t ask Pine Central’s greatest actress to join in, though.”

Dev shrugged, poking her in the arm playfully. “I figured you’re too much of a diva to want to share the spotlight.”

Em put her hand to her chest like she was wounded. “That hurts, even if it’s probably true.”

As people passed by, clapping him on the back or congratulating him on the ‘epicness’ of the whole flash mob, a few weirdly even congratulated me. “I didn’t—” I protested, but there were just too many of them. Even people who I didn’t know were telling me I did an awesome job. As soon as the worst of the crowd dispersed, Dev pat my shoulder. “Sorry for dragging you out like that, but the line needed a redhead. I figured you wouldn’t kill me. Or fall in love with my heartfelt but swoonworthy acting.”

“That didn’t sound egotistical at all,” I shot back at him as I stood and straightened out my skirt. “But, it’s okay. I think I’ll forgive you if you promise to never do that to me again.” A smile escaped past my faux-annoyed expression.