Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (5 page)

“
You look great,” Dante said. “You should stop worrying about it.”

“
I spent twelve years of my life with these people.” She pushed the mirror back in place. “I don’t know why, but it still matters what they think about me.”

For an answer, Dante leaned over the parking brake and gave her a kiss. Claire began it with one eye half-open, but by the end she had surrendered to the feeling of his lips, surprisingly soft, on hers. It was Dante who finally broke apart. He gave her a cat’s slit-eyed smile of pleasure. “We’d better go and get a room before somebody yells, ‘Get a room!’ at us.”

Claire’s car was parked in the acres of parking lot that Ye Olde Pioneer Village Inn. Despite the names, the complex wasn’t run by the descendants of pioneers, though, but by the last living remnants of the Tequamish tribe. One-hundred and fifty years ago, the white man had decimated the Tequamish through broken treaties and the simultaneous introduction of smallpox, measles and firewater. The Tequamish had fought back valiantly, but to no avail. Now, through Indian casino gambling, their sons and daughters had found a belated revenge. It was easier, less messy and a lot more profitable to separate the white man from his wallet than his scalp.

Dante nodded at the hotel. “Should we go check in?”

“
Sure,” Claire said, giving him a smile that felt forced. She had just caught sight of someone she was sure was Jim Prentiss sauntering into the lobby, his hands in his pockets. Alone, she couldn’t help noticing. How would it feel to face her long-ago lover with her new one at her side? Would Jim even care when he saw her? Would she? She felt as nervous and awkward as the day the bus had first dropped her off before the doors of Minor High.

“
You haven’t moved,” Dante pointed out.

“
I’m just wondering if people will still be divided into the same groups.” Actually, she had decided to give Jim a head start. She didn’t feel quite up to staring into those yellow-green eyes of his.

“
So what groups were those?”
“The jocks,” Claire said, ticking them off on her fingers. “The nerds - those were the smart people who weren’t embarrassed to carry a HP calculator on their belt in a zippered case. The hoods - you know, the people who smoked pot and cigarettes and had zero plans to go to college.” She felt a flash of disloyalty as she thought of Jim Prentiss, who had more or less fallen into this category. “We called the farm kids goat-ropers. Oh, and then there were the theatre people, like my friend Jessica. We thought it was really funny to call them thespians, because it nearly rhymed with lesbians. And of course there were the popular people - the socs.” She pronounced it
so-shas
. “They were mostly the ones whose parents had money because they were doctors or lawyers or architects.”

Claire shifted in her seat as she remembered longing to be just like them. With money, she could have dressed just like they did, in clogs and a pair of wide-legged San Francisco Riding Gear jeans (with the bottom edges rolled up, unhemmed). Old white tennis shoes and stiff dark jeans from Sears, Roebuck, hadn’t exactly cut it. With envy, she had watched the socs laugh at jokes she didn’t get or talk about vacations spent surfing in Hawaii or seeing
Chorus Line
on Broadway. Dante, on the other hand, had grown up in New York City, and fit in easily with friends whose families owned mega-corporations. She hoped he wouldn’t find Minorites, with their pretensions to sophistication, too laughable.

“
Which group were you in?” Dante prompted, and Claire realized she had been silent for a long moment.
“Not any group, really. I was smart enough to be a nerd, but I worked after school instead of attending meetings of the math club.” It hadn’t really been a choice, although Claire didn’t tell Dante how much they had needed the money from her job.

They got their bags from the car, with Dante carrying the bulk of them. He hadn’t said a word about how much she had brought, even though she knew three suitcases for a three-day weekend were too much.

Behind the hotel was a ten-foot-tall wooden stockade fence. Above the pointed stakes she could see the Ferris wheel lifting people up into the air in rocking suspended cars, as well as a half-dozen other rides that looked a lot less gentle. Faint screams trailed behind the roller coaster riders as they did a corkscrew loop. Claire swallowed as she looked at the Tilt-O-Whirl, remembering an unfortunate picnic at Oak’s Amusement Park that had begun with four beers and ended with her riding the Tilt-O-Whirl and praying to God to let her die.

They passed three or four other couples in the parking lot as they walked toward the hotel, but Claire didn’t recognize any one. Either they had come for the casino gambling and not the reunion, or they had all changed a lot since high school. When she wasn’t looking at the other people, Claire automatically scanned the parking lot for vanity plates. She found a

RKNROL and a TOUCHE, which someone had illegally defaced by adding in a painted accent mark.

Dante nudged her shoulder, and when she looked up at him, he gave her a reassuring smile. Even if Claire were uncertain about herself, she could relax a little when she looked at Dante. His white T-shirt contrasted nicely with his dusky skin and his curly hair as black as a crow’s back. How could she feel insecure when she had Dante on her arm?

“
Hey, Warty! Warty!” Heads turned as the cry cut through the parking lot. Claire froze. What was worse - to acknowledge this greeting or ignore it? Finally she turned and saw Jessica galloping toward her. How could Jessica have done this to her? Hadn’t she seen that Claire was with a man who wouldn’t understand this once humorous reference to their youth?

“
I had a little skin condition in second grade,” Claire murmured quickly to Dante. She couldn’t look him in the eye.

As soon as Jessica caught sight of Dante, she skidded to a stop. Claire could practically watch her childhood friend grow up before her eyes, going from a giggly eight-year-old to a sophisticated thirty-eight in an instant. She wore silver-colored silk shantung capris and a matching boat-necked top with three-quarter-length sleeves. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Claire felt instantly dowdy.

“
Well, well - who’s this?” Jessica smiled up at Dante with eyes as blue as a summer sky. Her thick black hair was cut close to her face.

Dante put the bags down and shook Jessica’s hand while Claire made introductions. “Jessica McFarland, this is Dante Bonner. Dante, Jessica. Jessica used to be on
Until Tomorrow
.”

“
Until I was in a plane crash. Or at least my character was,” she explained, directing her attention to Dante. “They had the whole cast involved in a mid-air collision. Some of the characters were killed off, some were severely burned. My character was one of the ones who died. Even if my character had lived, they probably wouldn’t have kept me playing the part. When the bandages came off, voila, you had a whole new cast of young actors willing to work for scale.”

“
But didn’t the new actors look a look a lot different than the old actors?” Dante asked.
Jessica shrugged her small shoulders. She was only five-foot-two - a full eight inches shorter than Claire. The longer Claire stood next to her, the more she was beginning to feel wider, taller and sturdier. “They just explained that the plastic surgeons did the best they could. Some of the new cast even had different color hair than the people they were replacing. I don’t know how they expect the audience to believe that that happened because of plastic surgery!” She shook her head, then smiled. “But the whole thing has really turned out to be a blessing, because it’s freed me up to do theatre.” She gave the word an English spin.
Thee-uh-tuh
. “I was just saying to Meryl the other day that dying has proved to be the best career move I ever made.”

Claire’s mind filled in the blank. Could Jessica mean Meryl Streep? “So you’re acting in plays now?” The longer she stood next to Jessica, the more she felt hulking. Monstrous. When she was in high school, she had longed to be the same size as Jessica. To be diminutive. To shop in the petite department. To wear size five shoes. She had wanted to have boys be able to pick her up and twirl her like a baton.

Jessica’s answer was a snatch of song, “Give my regards to Broadway.” After a bit of soft shoe, she dipped low for the bow. As usual, Jessica had drawn an audience. When she raised her head, five or six people broke into a patter of applause. A radiant smile lit her face. She bowed her head again before turning to pull open the door.

In the round lobby, they were greeted by a huge wooden bear that appeared to have been hastily carved with a chain saw from a single pine trunk. Jessica had fallen into an animated conversation with two of the women who had watched her mini-act, so Claire and Dante went up to the check-in desk. It was fashioned of plastic logs, and the young woman behind it wore a poke bonnet and a long calico-printed dress.

“
Montrose, Montrose, Montrose,” the woman said, tapping her teeth with the butt end of a white ballpoint pen. “Where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah - I have a package for you.”

“
A package?”

For an answer, the woman slipped a small padded manila envelope in Claire’s hands. It bulged in the middle, filled with something hard that was a little smaller than a closed fist. The outside of the envelope was bare, except for a printed label reading, “Claire Montrose, Minor High Reunion, July 1.” There was no return address - but then there wasn’t any stamp, either.

“
Who left it for me?” Claire asked, but the only answer she got was an uninterested shrug, the woman’s mind already turning to the growing line behind them. After handing back Claire’s credit card, she stepped from behind the counter to summon a bellhop. Claire saw that the feet peeking from underneath her pioneer dress were shod in aqua-colored Nikes.

Dante and the bellman loaded their bags on top of his cart, and then they followed the cart to the elevator. Claire still carried the little package. The bellman’s breeches and shirt were fashioned of Ultrasuede, and a matted synthetic coonskin cap sat on top of his head.

The hotel had been fashioned in the shape of a wagon wheel. The hub corresponded to the circular shape of the hotel’s lobby. The spokes were long blocks of rooms, three stories tall. Once the bellman opened the door to their room, Claire saw the covered wagon theme was carried over to the interior decoration. The room was lit by a sort of chandelier fashioned from an ersatz wagon wheel. The canopy on the bed was designed to mimic a covered wagon. But the decorator’s ingenuity only went so far. The TV still looked like a TV, the phone looked like a phone, and when Claire poke her head in the bathroom, she was relieved to find a toilet instead of a two-hole privy.

The bellman palmed Dante’s tip and left. Claire slipped her thumb under the envelope’s flap. “Maybe it’s our name badges,” she guessed. She shook the contents into her hand.

Out tumbled a heart-shaped wooden box a little smaller than Claire’s palm, hand-carved from dark-red wood that glowed under the light. The top was decorated with three freeform curlicues and a simple flower. On the left side was a silver hinge. Claire thumbed it open. Inside, glued to the bottom, was a picture she recognized right away, since it had only been a few weeks since she looked at it with Charlie. Aside from her alphabetized photo, it was the only other picture of her that had run in the annual. Whoever had put the photo in the box had scissored Claire from the group of forty or so members of the National Honor Society that had surrounded her. The photo showed only Claire, sitting cross-legged on the ground.

Dante looked over her shoulder. “Why did someone send you that picture? What does it mean?”

“
I don’t know. It’s from my annual.” She pointed at the edge of a coat behind her, the slice of another arm on her left. “These are other people from the Honor Society.” She looked inside the envelope. “There’s nothing else. No note or anything.”

Dante said in a singsong voice, “Someone’s got a crush on you.”

“
I don’t know. Do you really think so?” Claire felt a secret thrill. “I wonder who it could be?”

“
Did you have many boyfriends in high school?”

“
Only a couple. And I can’t see any of them doing this.”

“
So it’s a secret admirer then?”
“I guess so. So I’ll have to wait until someone ‘fesses up.” Claire put the heart-shaped box back in the envelope and set it on the nightstand.

“
So what’s first on the agenda?” Dante sat on the edge of the bed and bounced experimentally.

Claire ignored the hint. “Tonight there’s what they are calling a mixer in the Hoe-Down room. The dress is supposed to be Western casual, whatever that means. I’m sure the guys will all just wear jeans, but I don’t know what the women are supposed to wear. Do you think I could get away with a denim skirt and a white T-shirt?”

“
I’m sure anything will be fine. People are going to want to see you, not what you’re wearing.”

Claire thought to herself that Dante, who usually understood women, for once was completely wrong. She was sure that all the other women there would be checking out everything from body fat to marital status to income levels. But instead of arguing with him, she said, “I’m too nervous to think about eating. If you’re hungry, why don’t you go ahead and order from room service. I’m going to take a shower before I change.”

In the bathroom, she regarded herself critically in the mirror. Her confidence in her appearance fizzled. She was a mature woman now - so why did she feel like the person looking back at her was still an insecure girl?