The Casquette Girls (20 page)

I sank into my seat, already regretting walking in the room with Thurston Gregory Van der Veer III. The one advantage to sitting in the front row was that if I didn’t turn my head, I couldn’t see the gossiping, glares, or other snide gestures. Adversely, my back felt exposed for anyone to stab, which escalated my paranoia.

My back.

My back was sore where Niccolò had caught me. I could still feel the imprints where his fingers had held me –
they’d better not bruis
e
.

“Before his metamorphosis,” said Sister Cecilia, “Gregor is alienated from his job, his family, his humanity, and even his own body. This is evident when he barely even notices his transformation…”

How could someone barely notice they had turned into a giant bug?

As hard as I tried to pay attention to the lecture on “Guilt and Sense of Duty,” I couldn’t stop thinking about Niccolò. I couldn’t get the image of his bloody mouth out of my head.
More importantly, was I being followed before I bumped into him
?
The thought made me shudder.

* * *

“Welcome to Sacred Heart. I’ve just arrived from Holy Cross – maybe we can figure out this place together?” Mrs. Burg joked when I entered Pre-Cal.

My classmates seemed unimpressed by my instant bond with our math teacher. I chose a seat in the middle, not wanting to insult her by going straight to the back row. I had arrived with plenty of time, but that wasn’t going to make my assimilation any easier. Now I had to fill the awkward minutes before class started. I opened my notebook and began sketching out th
e
Sacré Cœu
r
symbol.

Five girls entered the classroom together.

A gorgeous girl with thick, auburn hair and perfect, creamy skin walked a beat ahead of the rest. I sensed all eyes follow her from the doorway across the room. Dixie Hunter walked directly behind her, talking excitedly. Jealousy plagued me – two and a half hours into the day and Dixie was already hobnobbing with the inner circle?
Had this chick arrived with some kind of popularity manual that I was not privy to
?
Désirée trailed behind them, uninterested in whatever Dixie was babbling about.

I sat up straight.
Would Désirée actually acknowledge me in front of her friend
s
?

The redhead walked straight to my desk. The group followed suit, creating a cloud-like clique hovering over me. Dixie and I were the only ones who seemed surprised by their pit stop.

None of them said a word. They just looked me up and down, probably trying to figure out if they had prejudged me correctly. Désirée rolled her eyes in boredom.

I stood up so I’d feel less like I was being preyed upon.

“Nice bag,” Dixie said in a sweet voice wrapped in bitchy sarcasm.

All eyes went to the black canvas tote hanging on the back of my seat. The girls standing around me were all carrying leather ranging from Vuitton to Hermès. I immediately regretted not unpacking the Chanel bag
ma grand-mère
had bought me in Paris.

No expensive bag is going to make you one of these princesses, Adele.

The redhead touched the canvas and examined the barely noticeable, hand-painted fleur-de-lis – the bag’s only marking.

“It’s from this season’s
Mode à Paris
.
”
She shot Dixie a look of disapproval, and for the second time that day I saw confusion sweep over Dixie’s face.

“That’s Fashion Week in Paris,” Désirée translated for her.

“How’d you come across one?” asked the redhead.

“I went to the
Comme des Garçon
s
show,” I replied as if it wasn’t a big deal, even though it had been the most exciting twenty minutes of my life. I didn’t feel the need to tell her I had actually PA’d the show, or that the stage manager had swiped the swag bag for me as a thank you for the abuse I had suffered during the twenty-two straight hours of manual labor I had contributed for free.

The redhead looked impressed, but the moment was fleeting; I could see her begin to mull over the question of whether or not I was a threat.

“She just got back from Paris a couple of weeks ago,” Désirée said, throwing me a bone.

“
Bienvenue au Sacré Cœur. Je m'appelle Annabelle Lee Drake
.”
She smiled and went to her seat before I had a chance to respond.

Dixie was in a total state of shock at how quickly the tables had turned. I couldn’t help myself and gave her a tiny
don’t mess with me
look, which Désirée caught – she cracked a smile, which felt like a major score, considering the only other time I had seen Désirée smile was around Gabe. As they walked to their seats, she turned to me with a look that said:
don’t say I didn’t warn you about Annabelle Lee.

“That’s the girl who was hanging all over Thurston this morning,” came a voice from behind.

I turned around to find the girl pointing at me.
Hanging all over Thurston? We’d barely exchanged fifty words
!
My pen shot off my desk.

“Sorry!” I said to the pimple-faced boy who handed it back to me.

If they were purposefully whispering loud enough to get a rise out of me, it was definitely working. I closed my eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and focused all of my attention on the logarithmic functions being drawn on the chalkboard.

As soon as the bell rang, I practically skipped off campus, elated to miss the terror that was the lunchtime cafeteria and go to my mentoring session, but I came to a halt when I got to the street – I hadn’t thought about getting home from school without Désirée. The St. Charles Streetcar line wasn’t close to operational. I contemplated calling my father, but I was curious about how the rest of this side of town had weathered the Storm and decided that three miles wouldn’t kill me.

Walking in public wearing the Catholic school uniform made everything feel even more surreal; the fact that I had survived my first day at Sacred Heart only exacerbated the weirdness. The fact that it hadn’t been
that
bad made me nervous, like the calm before the storm. I plugged in my headphones, floated my phone from my pocket, and searched for happy music. By the time I reached the desolate streets of the mostly abandoned Warehouse District, I had already forgotten about the catty girls.

It was easy to identify which houses had residents who had returned post-evacuation. The garbage-collection service hadn’t started back up, so the occupied buildings had mounds of trash sitting outside them on the curb. Dismantled storm boards, fallen trees, uprooted shrubs, piles of ruined sheetrock, moldy furniture, and boxes and boxes of books, clothes, and toys beyond
salvageable – all stacked up in hill-sized heaps twice my height. Even the pop music couldn’t change the sullen atmosphere as I passed by one blighted building after another.

When I arrived at our house, I found that our own trash mountain had grown considerably since I had left that morning. Several jars of dried paint told me that my father must have been cleaning out his studio. I pulled a thick bundle of canvases from the pile and unrolled the top layer. It was a sketch of the Mardi Gras masked ballerina. She always had a certain sadness to her – like she was dancing a tragic scene – but now water had dripped down the canvas and the charcoal had dried in streaks, making her appear to have been weeping.

It made my own eyes well. My father had always been so attached to this piece of work, seeing him let go of it into a giant pile of garbage was not something I could deal with. I rolled the canvases back up and ran up to my bedroom to stash them, not wanting him to argue about me reclaiming them.

* * *

“Dad?” I yelled as I bounced back down the stairs.

Music poured from his studio. I opened the door to find a shirtless guy, who was certainly not my father, ripping down the remaining plaster from the damaged wall.

I tried not to stare, but it wasn’t often I came across a half-naked man in our house. His ratty jeans were covered in splatters of dried paint, and his light-brown hair was just long enough to fit into a tiny ponytail. I was watching the way the muscles in his back moved as he swung the sledgehammer when my father shouted my name from another room and caused the guy to turn around—

“What ar
e
yo
u
doing here?” I asked, hearing the shock in my own voice.

The corners of Isaac’s mouth immediately turned up, and I crossed my arms in an aggressive stance.

“What ar
e
yo
u
doing here?” he echoed.

“I live here!” I wasn’t sure if I was more shocked at finding Isaac in my house or at the tone of his upper body. Either way, I was at a loss for words.

“Nice uniform. I didn’t take you for the Catholic schoolgirl type.” He laughed. “I can’t believe you’re Mac’s daughter.”

What the hell? Isaac is on a first-name basis with my father?

“You expect me to believe this is just a coincidence?”

He held up his hands in innocence, although he didn’t really seem that surprised to see me
. My father walked in from the hallway with two stools from the kitchen. “Isaac, keep your shirt on in front of my daughter, please.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Le Moyne—”

“I told you, call me Mac.”

Isaac grabbed a dirty, white T-shirt and stretched it over his shoulders. I snuck another glance of his chest as I grabbed my father’s wrist and pulled him into a corner. “What is he doing here?” I asked in a hushed voice.

“Good news, I finally found someone to repair the wall. Name’s Isaac Thompson. He’s down from New York City with his pop, working with Habitat for Humanity to rebuild houses. You’ll never believe it, but we’re doing a barter. He’s going to help me fix the wall in exchange for some art lessons.”

“Wait, what?” I felt like I was on another planet.
Isaac has been rebuilding houses?

“He wants art lessons. I figured since we are going to be working on your NOSA mentorship every day, it might be nice for you to have a partner in crime.” He smiled. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Do you know this boy?”

“Apparently not,” I answered, still trying to process this Dr. Jekyll side of him. Isaac put the measuring tape down and looked up at me. My stomach surprised me with a small flutter.

Insecurity erupted.

I ran upstairs to get changed, cursing the stupid school uniform on my way, and quickly came back down in jeans and an old concert tee. My father had cleared off his workbench to simulate a classroom, and Isaac was sweeping up wall crumbles. I took a seat on one of the kitchen stools and tried to hide my disbelief that I was about to start my apprenticeship with Isaac.

When he finished, he leaned on the table next to me and looked me straight in the eyes. “Do you want me to leave?” The vulnerability in his voice hit me unexpectedly.

“Whatever. This day couldn’t possibly get any more random.”

“Famous last words,” he said and pulled the other stool next to me.

A smile twitched my lips. His usual smug attitude had been replaced with… something else. Even though I was glad my father could get the wall fixed, I wasn’t buying Isaac’s innocent act just yet.

My dad stood before us in full metalsmith safety gear: boots, rubber apron, giant gloves and helmet. I’d seen him dressed like this thousands of times, but now it seemed utterly ridiculous. I had to suppress giggles as he droned on for twenty minutes about the importance of safety when working with chemicals and fire.

“I can’t believe you are willingly subjecting yourself to this,” I whispered to Isaac, without moving my head to look at him.

“Whatever, Mac is so cool,” he whispered back.

I rolled my eyes and smiled.

“All right, let’s move on,” my father instructed. He seemed a bit nervous. “Take out your sketch pads.”

“What?” I asked. “Why? Aren’t we going to work with metal?”

“We will. Later.”

“Later? After all of that?”

His eyes pleaded with me to cut him some slack.

I dashed upstairs to get my supplies and, upon my return, found Isaac’s sketchpad lying on the table. Recent café memories flooded back, and I had to sit on my hands to keep myself from throwing it across the room.

Breath
e
.

I
’d never met anyone who stirred such polarizing feelings in me, besides maybe my mother.
Maybe his Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing is rubbing off on me?

My father put one of his sculptures on the table – a two-foot-tall prototype of the ballerina at NOSA.

“I’m going to give you twenty minutes to draw this figure.” He set an egg timer. “I want you to think about proportion and depth perception. Try to draw it as close to scale as you can.”