Homecoming Masquerade, The (17 page)

R
ockwell Transport had assigned
a man named Julien to be the driver of Nicky’s limo. Julien was well-mannered,
impeccably dressed, well-trained for his job, and a little bit short. It was
that last part, his height, that made Julien of interest to Nicky as she
pondered ways she might quickly turn Art Tremblay from foe into friend, and
before intermission had ended, Nicky ran out into the parking lot and had a
brief conversation with Julien. She outlined a plan to him, a plan where
Julien, of all people, had a role to play in Nicky’s mission tonight.

Now, as Nicky stepped in front
of Art, putting her hand in his and beginning the dance, she thought about
Julien, and hoped he was in position. Nicky had told him to line up at 10:15.
It was 10:20 already, and Nicky’s dance with Art was just beginning. Hopefully
Julien would be patient, as Nicky’s plan for him didn’t start until her dance
with Art was over.

Nicky pulled close to Art,
creating points of contact between them at the chest and hips. It was a much
friendlier posture than she took with him on their last dance. Art’s white
shirt was meant to have a tuxedo jacket on top of it. Without that jacket, only
a few millimeters of cloth separated Art’s skin from Nicky’s. Her hand on the
small of his back, Nicky allowed her fingertips to dance ever so slightly. When
she spoke, she did it in a quiet voice, close to his ear, so her breath tickled
his cheek.

“I’m guessing Jill was sharing
my little story,” she said.

“She was.”

“It benefits both of us. You
understand that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. It’s a lot to
process. Are you really telling everyone that it was my idea to crash into
Rosalyn?”

“I’ve only told a few people. A
few well-placed people. I’m letting them do the rest. By the end of the night,
everyone will think one of Kim’s most trusted allies has left her for me.”

“You might have signed my death
warrant.”

“Only if Kim wins. I don’t
intend to let that happen. With your help, I can jump way out in front on this
one. The minute people think Kim might lose, they’ll leave her in droves. She
doesn’t have any real friends, Art.”

The music was heavier on this
dance, with a rhythm that landed hard on the downbeats. It was mesmerizing,
even a little erotic.

“Do you think you might be a bit
overconfident?” Art said. “The contest is about more than the school. Kim’s
family is so connected in this town.”

“So is yours,” Nicky said. She
put some force into the words. It was time for Art to grow a pair and realize
that he didn’t have to be Kim’s whipping boy. As she spoke, she moved her hand
up his back, allowed it to rest on the nape of his neck.

“My dad is friends with Galen
Renwick,” he said. “This is going to get tricky for me.”

“You father’s friendship with
the Renwicks ended the moment I pushed you into Rosalyn. Kim was so disgusted
with you. That girl’s temper is short and she holds a grudge like you wouldn’t
believe.”

“I know all about it,” Art said.
“You totally screwed me.”

“No. You were trying to screw
me. I was just looking out for myself. Now I’m looking out for you too. You
know the part of the story Jill and Annika liked the best?”

“The part where you told Kim she
missed.”

“Yes, and I told them it was
your idea. Art, if we were telling people the truth about what happened, then
you would be the guy who got pushed around by a girl. You would be the guy who
spends hours and hours in the gym but still wasn’t strong enough to push me
into Rosalyn. But we’re not telling that story. Now the story is that you are
the guy who had the courage to pull one over on Kim Renwick. And, like it or
not, there’s no stopping it now. The story is out. Why even try to deny it? The
minute people hear that it was your idea, they think you’re a badass.”

“All of that is for nothing if
Kim wins.”

“She’s not going to win. You and
I can make sure of that. Quit thinking about her and look at what’s right in
front of you, Art. Kim wants to use you. I want to partner with you. I was sad
when you tried to push me into Rosalyn. I was hoping you and I could work
together.”

She pulled even closer, pressing
her cheek onto his.

“I want you to come to my party
tonight,” she said, allowing a hint of weakness in her voice, a hint of
begging.

“I don’t even know you,” Art
said.

“But I want to know you. I was
excited about getting to know you before our little incident tonight. I saw you
at school – it’s clear that you take care of your body. I like that. I like
that a lot.”

“It’s not that easy. Kim is
going to be so pissed. People don’t do well when Kim is pissed at them.”

“Those days can be over tonight.
You and I can end the Renwick reign of terror over this school, over this whole
town. Art, you should see the look on people’s faces when I tell them you
betrayed her. They’ve been under her thumb forever, and your bold move tonight
has given them hope. Kim is only as powerful as we allow her to be. People are
ready to leave her, but they’re scared, just like you. Someone has to stand up
to that bitch. I think you’re the one to do it. You’re popular, you’re rich,
your family is one of the most respected in town, and you’re smoking hot. Art,
you’re the one they’ve been waiting for.”

Nicky could tell that the
‘smoking hot’ line had worked. Art’s whole body seemed to expand upon hearing
it, like he was a flower and Nicky’s words were the morning sun. Art had worked
and worked in the weight room so he could hear compliments like this, and Nicky
imagined he rarely got them, if ever.

Because the truth was, Art was
not smoking hot. Sure, he had a great body, and his face was handsome enough,
but underneath it all was a frightened little boy. Art’s father had so
thoroughly screwed him up, Nicky doubted he could ever recover.

Whatever. Not her business. She
was working him right now for one reason and one reason only. His money. Art
Tremblay was rich enough to be a big player, and Kim had taken him for granted.
Kim had grown too accustomed to pushing Art around. She never thought in a
million years Art would have the courage to leave her.

“This all sounds great, but what
happens when Kim’s dad comes to my house for one of his infamous little talks?”
Art asked.

“Your family has nothing to
hide, and if there is any family that could stand up to the Renwicks, it’s
yours. Kim’s dad thrives on messing with people’s personal info, but do you
honestly think he could mess with your father? Your father is a security expert
for the immortals. He hasn’t left anything to chance.”

“Yeah, I guess so. But my dad—”

“Your father will understand. He
doesn’t want you to support Kim, he wants you to support
the winner.
”

“He doesn’t even know who you
are.”

“I’ll come to your house
tomorrow and introduce myself.”

On that line, Art shut up.
Having a girl wearing black come to his house, by herself – for once, Merv
Tremblay would be impressed with his son. Nicky had him now. She just needed to
reel him in.

As the music came to an end,
Nicky sped up their dancing, moving with intent towards the door.

“What are you doing?” Art asked.

“Relax,” Nicky said. “I’m not
going to push you into anybody this time. I have a friend waiting just outside.
I’ve asked him to help us with something.”

When the music finished, Art and
Nicky were right by the front door. As Art gave Nicky his concluding bow, Nicky
opened the door, and found her driver, Julien, waiting patiently outside. He
had removed his black coat and now held it out for Nicky to take.

“Thanks,” Nicky said, taking the
coat from Julien and immediately closing the door behind her.

Nicky put a flirtatious smirk on
her face and went back to Art.

“Hold out your arms,” she said.

Aware that she had drawn the
attention of the ballroom, Nicky slid Julien’s jacket over Art’s shoulders. It
was such a little thing, but she could tell it meant so much to him. Fully
dressed again, Art could rejoin the party with confidence. He was no longer the
lone white shirt in a room full of black jackets, and perhaps he was beginning
to understand that his life didn’t have to be over just because he had angered
Kim Renwick. Perhaps he was coming to see that he didn’t have to be Kim’s
little toady, that this was a moment in his life where he could choose to be
something better.

But even with all this
opportunity in front of his face, Art was the sort of guy so driven by fear he
might let it all slip away and go crawling back to Kim, begging for
forgiveness. Nicky had to make sure he got it, and if he didn’t get it, that
everyone else in the ballroom got it for him. Before they parted ways, with the
whole class still looking at them after Nicky’s little jacket delivery stunt,
she leaned in close and gave Art a kiss on the cheek.

“Now everyone knows you’re with
me,” she whispered to him. “My party’s at the Hamilton. See you there.”

O
n the north side of the
ballroom stood the front entrance. None of the immortals would come in that
way. Too visible.

On the east was a hallway that
led to a study and a library. Sometimes Sergio entered the ballroom through
this hall, but none of the other immortals did.

The south side of the ballroom
was connected to the kitchen which led to the servant quarters. It would be
uncivilized to enter through that side. The immortals were in formal wear and
coming out to a party that honored them in all their glory. Entering through a
servant area would sully their splendor.

No, the eight immortals who had
recently finished their hunt outside now entered the ballroom through an
archway on the west wall, the same that led to the art gallery. Per their
custom, Renata led them inside in single file, her bright red hair now in sharp
contrast to the dark blue evening gown she had chosen. Melissa, feeling
underdressed in her red strapless dress, followed close behind.

Renata was wearing an outrageous
necklace. A diamond lattice in the shape of a spider web that hung from the
nape of her neck and across the bare space of her chest. In the center was a
black onyx with eight tarnished silver legs. The whole thing created the effect
of a black widow in its web, living on Renata’s chest. It was a stunning,
over-the-top display piece of the kind Renata would never have worn in the old
days. Renata used to go with understated looks at Homecoming, looks that
Melissa not only appreciated, but tried to emulate.

But when her bond with Chad came
to an end, Renata’s sense of style died with it. Now she enjoyed wearing
ridiculous showpieces like the spider necklace. Now she teased her hair so it
exploded in a flaming pyre of red that clashed loudly with her blue dress. Now
she wore a gold and silver mask, with a long, sharp nose and a flurry of
gemstones around the eyes.

The thing about Renata’s outfit
was that most of the students wouldn’t even see it. The immortals entered the
ballroom with such stealth that they went unnoticed. They were a trickle of
water flowing into a lake. Even when they dressed in eye-popping getups like
Renata’s, the students rarely saw them. They were conditioned not to. An
immortal could slide in and out of view whenever she chose, using her charms to
ensure the people all around didn’t see her unless she wanted them to, and at
Homecoming, the immortals didn’t want to be seen. They wanted to observe the
students, to cut in on their dances and toy with them, to laugh at how easy
they were to manipulate, but not to dress up and be admired by them.

No, Renata wasn’t thinking of
the Thorndike students when she donned her bright, bold colors. She was
thinking about the other immortals, her sisters and brothers in the clan who,
for many years, saw Daciana wear similar outfits to Homecoming. And while
Daciana never commanded the others to be more conservative in their garb, there
was an understanding that Daciana had to be the most stunning, the most
colorful, the most beautiful. She was the queen, after all.

And tonight, Renata was playing
the queen in Daciana’s absence. She was dressing as loudly as she could, and
daring someone to challenge her on it.

Melissa wanted to call her out
but knew she couldn’t. That incident in the woods was all the conflict Melissa
could handle in one night. If push came to shove, Renata was willing to take it
all the way to the bitter end. Melissa wasn’t. She didn’t want to fight, and
she certainly wasn’t ready to die. She just wanted things to go back to the way
they were.

Knowing that wasn’t going to
happen, Melissa sought comfort in those things that remained unchanged. Things
like the ballroom. Wood paneling and sculpture, golden trim, gemstone-adorned
backsplashes along the walls, and the classic parquet floor that Melissa
herself had once danced on as a human, so many years ago.

Homecoming always made her
nostalgic. There had been so much promise when she stepped onto the floor as a
high school senior. She was a girl wearing black. She was competing for the big
prize. She would live a life of eternal glory or die trying. She would right
all the wrongs in her life, she would become one of the rich and powerful, and
no one would ever mess with her again. It was such an amazing year, such an
incredible time.

Now, many decades later, the
truth of it had set in. Whatever meaning Melissa had hoped to find in
immortality wasn’t there to be found. The fears and insecurities of her human
self went away, but they were quickly replaced with the fears and insecurities
of an immortal. Her fear of growing old was replaced with a fear of becoming
irrelevant. The world was constantly changing, but she was not. Every new
generation of kids was so different than the last, and it didn’t matter if she
changed her hair and her clothes, if she learned the new idioms, if she adapted
to new technologies – she was still Melissa Mayhew, born in 1950, crowned Prom
Queen in 1968, made master of the Farm and all its slaves shortly thereafter.
Her parents were dead. Her classmates were old. Her body was unchanging, as was
her soul. She was stuck in the past.

Still, she took comfort in
ritual and tradition, and at Homecoming she had her routine to follow. That
routine always began with the biggest guy in the room. This year, it was some
oaf named Brian Kingsbury.

Melissa slid her way in between
Brian and the girl he was dancing with, cutting in and dismissing the girl.
Brian had to look down nearly a foot at Melissa. His head might as well have
been in heaven for the look on his face.
Yes, you dunderhead, I’m an
immortal and I’m going to dance with you.

In the summer of ’66, Melissa
went on a date with a boy named Marco Clemente. He didn’t go to Thorndike, but
rather, to Van Buren High School on the north side of town. He wasn’t at all in
Melissa’s social class, but she didn’t care. She met him at the shopping mall,
he took an interest in her, he was gorgeous beyond belief, and they went out to
the drive-in together.

Melissa was so naïve. The term
“date rape” wasn’t invented in 1966. Back then, what Marco did to Melissa was a
common occurrence, and girls weren’t supposed to make a fuss about it. If you
went to the drive-in with a beautiful boy from a north-side high school, what did
you expect?

Seven weeks after her date with
Marco, Melissa had to fly to Mexico City to see a doctor and undo what Marco
had done to her. Her parents arranged it all. Melissa flew out on a Saturday
morning and was back home by Sunday night. She never told her friends about
Marco, and her parents agreed not to send a gang of thugs to teach him a lesson
(though her father was prepared to do so).

Melissa waited it out. She
entered Coronation. She won. She became immortal and, at Senior Prom, she
feasted on a girl named Jacqueline Harris. The next night, she went to the
north side of town and allowed her nose to guide her to Marco. She found him at
the drive-in, working on another girl in the back seat of his car. Melissa
broke the window with her fist and pulled Marco out with one hand.

“Hello, Marco,” she said. “I’ve
come to kill you. I suggest you run.”

She played with Marco like a cat
with its mouse, chasing him into the night, ensuring that his last hours on
this earth were full of terror and regret. For three hours she made him run,
and when he was able to run no more, when he collapsed onto his knees in front
of her, she made him beg for mercy.

“Please,” he begged. “I’m so
sorry, Melissa. Please forgive me.”

“That’s all I needed to hear,
Marco,” she said, then she bit into his neck.

It was all the vengeance a girl
could want, and it felt good, for a time. But like everything else in an
immortal’s existence, the novelty eventually wore off. In an admittedly
pathetic attempt to recapture that delicious but fleeting feeling of vengeance,
Melissa had developed her own Homecoming tradition in which her first dance was
always with the biggest guy in the ballroom. She found the big guy, cut into
his dance, and proceeded to mess with him.

As the most skilled hypnotist in
the Samarin clan, maybe in the world, she felt like it was her prerogative to
get into the heads of these boys and bring them down to size. She told herself
it was in honor of all girls everywhere who got treated like objects, but she
knew better. She knew that the real reason she held up her tradition was
boredom. She had righted the great wrong of her youth on her first night as an
immortal and now she had an eternity with nothing better to do, so at
Homecoming, she looked for new and creative ways to punish the big, burly guys
whom nature had taught to be bullies.

The first time, in 1969, she
nabbed a towering boy named Walter Grayson and convinced him that his new
purpose in life was to make the world a better place for little people. Walter
Grayson went on to form a lobbying group on behalf of midgets and dwarves, and
dedicated the rest of his life to the cause.

In 1970, the boy she danced with
was a brute named Mickey Carlisle, who stood to inherit one of the largest
fortunes in Washington. For Mickey, she put a little time bomb in his head,
telling him that on New Year’s Day in 1990, he was to give all his money to
charity and move to Africa to build a school. Sure enough, on January 1, 1990,
the entire Carlisle fortune was given away and Mickey Carlisle disappeared,
never to be heard from again.

Technically, what she was doing
was against the rules – Daciana only wanted the clan using mind control on
their slaves and in situations approved by her – but Melissa was so skilled a
hypnotist that no one ever knew. Sometimes, as with Mickey Carlisle, she set
her commands to take effect so far in the future that no one could possibly
connect the strange behavior with a few minutes of dancing twenty years in the
past. Other times she made her subjects conform to the commands in secret, so
that no one would ever know there was strange behavior at all. Such was the
case with Gordon Henley, a tall kid with spikey hair she had danced with in
1987. Melissa told Gordon he had a strong desire to sip at household chemicals
when no one was looking. Gordon Henley slowly poisoned himself over a ten-year
period. Neither the doctors nor his family understood why he grew sicker and
sicker, and, when he died, only Melissa knew his true cause of death.

On this night, as she danced
with Brian Kingsbury, a secret neurosis like the one she had given Gordon
seemed more appropriate than some time-released oddity. She had an amusing idea
in mind, one that had made her smile all summer long.

“Do you like to look at me,
Brian?” she asked.

Brian nodded eagerly, and as he
did so, he went in and out of eye contact.

“Don’t use your head to speak to
me, use your voice,” said Melissa. “Tell me again, do you like to look at me?”

“I really, really do,” said
Brian.

“Good, then look right in my
eyes, okay? Look in them so deeply you forget that we’re both wearing masks,
that we’re both dancing at Homecoming, that we’re both anything at all. Forget
everything in your world except my eyes. Can you do that for me, Brian?”

“Yes ma’am.”

This was a good connection.
Brian was a particularly easy subject. If she wanted to, she could tell his
brain to make his heart stop beating and he would drop dead then and there.
Fortunately for Brian, Melissa was in the mood for something a little more playful,
especially after that strange encounter with Renata out in the woods.

“Brian, as of this moment, you
are a passionate, militant nudist,” said Melissa.

“What’s that mean?” asked Brian.

“It means you love to be naked.
You feel like it is the body’s natural state, and you’re never truly
comfortable unless you are naked. Clothes make you unhappy, Brian, so the fewer
the better. But you know that the rest of the world doesn’t understand your
desire to be naked. You know that they aren’t as enlightened as you are, so you
keep your clothes on when you are in the presence of others who don’t
understand the beauty of the naked body. Do you follow me, Brian?”

“Yes. I want to take my clothes
off right now.”

“But you won’t, will you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am in the ballroom
and people can see me. They don’t understand my desire to be naked. They don’t
understand the beauty of the naked body.”

“That’s right. But when you are
alone, or when you are with other nudists, you can be naked as much as you
want. Do you know where you can find other nudists, Brian?”

“I don’t know where. I wish I
knew. Can you tell me? I want so bad to be naked.”

“You will have to research,
Brian. You will have to learn where you can go to be with your people. And as
soon as you graduate from Thorndike, you will go be with them, even if it means
you have to give up everything else. Your inheritance, your career, your life
in DC – you will give all of that up to be a nudist.”

“A passionate, militant nudist,”
Brian added.

“That’s right. And remember
Brian, nudism is your secret until you are with other nudists. No one else gets
to know about it.”

“I will not tell anyone about my
passion for the naked body.”

“We’re almost done dancing,
Brian. I’m going to count backwards from five. When I get to one, you will
remember none of this conversation. You will never know that your desire to be
a nudist came from me. To you, it will seem like a piece of you that has always
been there, but that didn’t come to fruition until now.”

“I am, and always have been, a
nudist.”

“Good, Brian. 5...4...3...2...1.”

“I really do like to look at
you, Melissa,” Brian said.

“I know you do.”

Melissa stretched upward with
her neck and gave Brian a soft kiss on the lips, just enough to drive him
crazy, then she turned away and disappeared into the crowd. For the rest of the
night she would cut in with whomever she pleased, allow them to fawn on her,
then, at the moment her dance partner was insane with lust, she would leave him
and move on to someone else.