The Princesses of Iowa (15 page)

Sighing, I scrolled through again, paused at the
M
s and pushed the
SEND
button.

It rang three times before she picked up. “What.”

“I need you to come get me.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

It was on my phone, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “Uh . . . no.”

“It’s fucking one in the morning.”

“Look, Miranda —”

“It’s Mirror.”

I took a deep breath and counted to five. “Mirror. Please. I’m at Lacey’s, and I need to get out of here now. Please do this for me.”

She hung up without answering. I took it as a yes.

The night was getting colder, and I was dead sober. I should have taken Jake’s jacket before I ran.

I shifted my weight on the bench and settled my foot on a fallen log. The blood thrummed through my ankle for a moment and then subsided, and after a few minutes the constant throbbing pain began to subside, too. I closed my eyes, leaning against the branchy backrest.

“Tough night?”

My eyes flew open and my hand tightened around my purse. “Who wants to know?”

A dark figure stepped out from the woods and sauntered over. In the faint glow from the picturesque yard lights lining the driveway, he looked a lot like Ethan. But what would Ethan be doing at Lacey’s house in the middle of the night?

“Hello?” I asked uncertainly.

“Hey, Paige.” Definitely Ethan. He stood above me for a moment, as if waiting for some cue. Finally he asked, “Is this seat taken?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, awkwardly sitting up. “Sure, sit down.”

He settled himself next to me, leaving a few inches of space between us. Through a patch of sky above the street, the moon floated, round and white.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You weren’t at the party, were you?”

“In fact, I was,” he said. “Hard to believe, right?”

“No,” I said too quickly. “It’s just — you don’t seem to, um . . . get along . . . with most of these people.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t. But I know Prescott from this summer, and he invited me. I didn’t realize it would be so heavily attended by Willow Grove’s intellectual elite.”

I coughed. “You know Prescott?”

“Yeah, we played Ultimate together. I was taking summer classes at the university. That’s where I met Shanti, incidentally.” He folded his arms behind his head. “When Pres said he was having a party, I assumed it would be on campus, not some high school thing full of stupid jocks and their asinine girlfriends.”

Ethan glanced at me. “Present company not included, of course.”

I shrugged, unable to care enough to take offense on behalf of my so-called friends.

“It’s funny,” he said. “Back in Omaha, my best friend, Aaron, used to wonder obsessively about these parties. Were they as cool as everyone made them sound on Monday morning, or was everyone just reciting some agreed-upon narrative to make themselves feel cooler?”

He glanced at me as if I might have an answer to this question, but I didn’t say anything. Ethan went on. “This was back in like ninth grade, when he and I were the two geeky freshman in a math class full of juniors and seniors. Back then, Aaron would have killed to get into a party like this. We both would have, I guess. Now I don’t really care either way.”

“Huh,” I said. I’d been a part of the popular crowd since middle school, and though we’d always relished the idea that the rest of the school looked up to us, envied us, it had always seemed very abstract. I’d never considered that people
actually
sat at home feeling sorry for themselves because they couldn’t come to our parties. The idea made me feel strange, kind of sad and responsible and helpless all at the same time, like when you looked at pictures of little otters and ducks covered in oil from an oil spill and felt like somehow you should be there, with gloves and a bucket, scrubbing them down one by one, while concurrently understanding that you would never actually do that, you would just stay in your house looking at pictures and feeling sad and hopeless until you couldn’t take it anymore and clicked over to something happy.

“Of course, half the people here tonight think I’m a freshman anyway, so maybe we can still count this as a win for Freshman Ethan.”

He looked at me, seeming to expect some reaction. I gave him a wan smile.

“What about you?” he asked.

I sat up a little straighter, trying not to jostle my twisted ankle. “What do you mean?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Lacey’s my best friend.”

“Okay,” Ethan said agreeably. “Which explains why you’re sitting on a bench at the end of her driveway.”

“I hurt my foot.” I gestured lamely to my ankle, which in the dim light looked like it was already swelling. Great.

“So you’re waiting for your boyfriend to take you home.”

“Well,” I said, and shivered. “Not exactly.”

“You’re cold. I’m sorry, I’m an asshole.” He started to pull off his sweatshirt.

“I’m fine,” I said, but it was too late. He scooted closer on the bench and draped his sweatshirt around my arms.

“Thanks,” I said. His sweatshirt was warm and smelled like campfire. Without thinking, I snuggled into it, catching a trace of a citrusy clean scent beneath the smoky campfire. He was watching me, and I suddenly became keenly aware of his eyes, how dark and rich and endlessly deep they were, deep enough to lose yourself in, and I had a strange, heady sense of falling, and then suddenly I was kissing him.

He was surprised, but he sank into it willingly and kissed me as deep as the dark night woods. I dissolved into the kiss, and the shards of glass in my veins melted back into sand and light.

After an eternity, we pulled apart, and I smiled slowly at him. He reached over, smoothing a strand of hair behind my ear and tracing his thumb down my cheek, my neck, across my collarbone. “You’re so beautiful,” he breathed.

My smile faded. What the hell was I doing? It was last spring all over again: have a bad night, kiss a random boy. I was so stupid.

A moment later, the too-bright lights of Miranda’s old Honda Civic swept the cul-de-sac and stopped in front of us. Gratefully, I grabbed my purse and jumped up from the bench. A flame of pain shot up my ankle, but I kept my voice cool. “That’s my ride.”

“Oh,” Ethan said, rising. “I could have —”

“No, that’s okay,” I said, and hurried toward the car. “Thanks anyway.”

Jeremy Carpenter was sitting in the passenger seat, and I had a moment of total paranoia — he was the editor of the school paper, and for a second I was absolutely convinced that he was spying on me as part of some crazy paparazzo stalker thing, that he would publish pictures of Ethan and me together to sabotage my chances at queen. It took my brain a long moment to realize he wasn’t holding a camera, not even a phone, and then I remembered my sister saying something about doing community theater with him over the summer. So now they were best friends? I didn’t know why a senior would want to hang out with a sophomore, but as long as no one had seen Ethan and me together, I didn’t care enough to try to figure it out.

I opened the back passenger-side door and flung myself inside.

“Hi, Paige,” Jeremy said.

I slammed the door behind me. “Let’s go.”

As Miranda pulled the car around, I looked down, trying not to see Ethan against the dark forest, standing alone.

“Was that Ethan James?” Jeremy asked.

“No!” I said. “It was, um. Some college guy. Just some dude.” I covered my face with my hands and realized I was still wrapped in Ethan’s sweatshirt. “Shit.”

“Rough night?” Jeremy asked sympathetically.

“What was your first clue?”

My sister glanced at me in the rearview mirror, her eyes flicking scornfully from my dress to my hair. “What’s wrong, didn’t enough people tell you how pretty you are?”

“Hilarious.” I leaned down to rub my ankle, which was definitely swollen. It occurred to me that I probably should have taken my shoes off before running away from the party.

Miranda looked at me again, taking her eyes off the road for longer than I liked. “Who said you could wear that necklace?”

I touched it absently. “Mom did.”

“That’s supposed to be
my
necklace,” she said. “Grandma promised it to me.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“Like you care!” she snapped. “Like you’ve ever spent one minute thinking about anyone but yourself!”

“God, Mirror, give her a break,” Jeremy said. “She obviously had a hard night.”

“Whatever,” Miranda said. “Why couldn’t Jake give you a ride home, anyway?”

I shook my head and looked out the window. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“What, did he hook up with someone else or something?”

“Mirror!” Jeremy said.

I gritted my teeth. “What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ do you not understand?”

“You’re so pathetic,” Miranda said. “You and all your friends, your fake little parties, your prancing around to see who’s the prettiest. Your life is basically meaningless, you know? You’re such a phony. You’re such a nothing.”

“Screw you,” I said, but I couldn’t help thinking that she was right. Without Jake, without Lacey, who was I? Nobody. I was an empty, pathetic nobody. I was a stupid little girl who still thought kisses could make things better, when they only made them worse.

“A lame little crown and a picture in the yearbook for losers to jack off to, and that’s seriously your greatest aspiration in life?” My sister’s voice was relentless. “The rest of us are going to get out of here and make something of ourselves, but you? Maybe you’ll be a slutty sorority girl for a few years, and then you’ll get married, spit out some kids, and spend the rest of your life trying to get back to your glory years.”

A teardrop escaped and rolled down my face. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt another tear splash on my collarbone.

“Oh my God, Mirror,” Jeremy said. “I love you to death, but you are being the biggest bitch in the world to your sister right now.”

“Since when are you on her side?” she asked.

He glanced back at me, and I shook my head mutely at him. “I’m not on anyone’s side,” he said. “Just — she’s your sister. Give her a break.”

Miranda took her eyes off the road to look at him. For a long minute, the only sound in the car was the hum of the wheels on the road, until finally she sighed. “Whatever.”

I lay in bed for hours, staring at the black ceiling. Car lights on the street moved shadows of trees across the walls. The night wouldn’t leave me. Nikki’s thin arms — the sad pretty guitar — Shanti at the game — orange flames circled by dark bodies — the warmth of Ethan’s sweatshirt against my bare skin — the bitter tang of alcohol — the blood thrum of my ankle — Prescott’s intent face, bent over his mixing board — the raccoon’s
thump thump
under my feet — cold air against my skin — Jake’s voice — his warmth and scent in the parking lot — his shoulder, pressed against Lacey’s —

The first time he kissed me was sophomore year, the night of Prescott’s graduation party. That afternoon, we were sitting on the bleachers in the hot June sun, trying to stay awake as the idiotic valedictorian stumbled through a speech cribbed directly from
Chicken Soup for the Soul,
when he leaned over and whispered, “Confession.” His breath moved a strand of my humidity-curled hair and I shivered in the heat. We were surrounded by our families, Mrs. Austin’s knees pressed into the small of my back, Miranda fidgeting next to me, but somehow that made it more thrilling, that Jake had words just for me. I leaned toward him, my eyebrow lifted the tiniest bit, and he breathed, “I like you.” I turned to him, squinting and unsure, but he looked shy and pleased, and a smile bloomed across my face like a timed-release flower unfolding. All day his confession moved between us like electricity, and that night in the Lanes’ backyard, under the low bowl of the Big Dipper, he pulled me away from the bonfire and we stood in the misty trees talking about nothing, and then he laughed quietly and I asked, “What?” and he said, “I was just trying to think of an excuse to kiss you,” and I said, “You don’t need an excuse,” and he kissed me.

And tonight? Tonight I imagined him standing under the same trees, whispering to Lacey as she let tears well up in her blue eyes. Had she let herself sink into his arms? Had he kissed her in the wispy moonlight? I squeezed my eyes shut against the thought, shoving my fists into my eye sockets until the screen behind my eyes exploded with stars, yellow and red, and I wasn’t kissing random stupid boys at parties, and Jake wasn’t kissing anyone but me.

I finally fell into a restless sleep around dawn. My dreams were confused, dark shadows against a curtain of red. My phone rang off and on, and its ringtones wove themselves into my dreams, songs I already knew, alarms I couldn’t shut off. Sometime late in the morning, when the sun had already stretched past the end of the bed and pooled on the floor near my desk, my mother shook me awake.

“It’s almost eleven already, sleepyhead! Rise and shine!” Her highlighted hair was pulled into a ponytail, which curled gracefully and patted her on the back.

I rolled away from her, pulling the comforter around my shoulders and clenching it in fists near my face. “Mmarhgh.”