The Last Beautiful Girl

by Nina Laurin

  “You know what?” I say. “If you think this is so lousy, why don’t you go? We’re going to do the rest of the shoot without you.”

  “Isa, come on.” He breaks pose and stands up straight.

  “You think this is pointless, meaningless, and just Instagram fodder for likes. You made that clear. Why did you even bother? You say it was for me—well, just because you have some kind of weird obsessive crush on me, and I’m not reciprocating, it doesn’t give you the right to put down what I do.”

  I hardly noticed how I got up from my chair and walked over until only a few feet separate us. I’m animated by a strange, visceral anger. Where did it come from? And those words? What on earth possessed me?

  Anger flashes through his eyes, and the tendons pop in his jaw. “Me? A crush on you? Seriously, Isabella? Is that what you think this is about?”

  “Oh, you think I don’t know that you hang around the house after dark? Yeah, well, I do. I saw you on the very first night.” What the hell am I saying? The words tumble out as if of their own free will. How did I know it was him? I guess I did, from the beginning. “Creepy, much?”

  He looks disgusted. He rips the hat from his head and tosses it into a corner. “You,” he says, “are crazy. You’re all crazy. You say this is some kind of historical project, but, the truth is, you don’t even care. You don’t know the history of the place, and, even if you did, it wouldn’t matter, because all you care about are pretty pictures and Instagram likes. I’m disappointed, Isa. You’re not the person I thought you were.”

  As he heads to the door, he strips off the costume jacket and throws it on the floor.

  “See you tomorrow,” he says. “In history class. Just don’t count on my help anymore when you daydream through the lecture. And I wonder what would happen if I told your mom there is no assignment.”

  “Don’t you dare!” I shriek, but the door is already swinging closed behind him.

  “Do you want me to go talk to him?” Alexa asks, putting an emphasis on talk like she’s going to break his kneecaps or something.

  “No,” I say. “To hell with him. We can finish the shoot with just me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it true?” Sara speaks up. I give a start, having forgotten that my newly acquired mini-me was there. “That he came here to stalk the house?”

  I’m overcome with an inexpressible feeling. Like Sara accidentally, without knowing, touched on something that I should definitely know about. “I—think so.”

  “Of course it’s true,” Alexa snaps. “Did you see his reaction? Creep. Do you want me to report him to school authorities?”

  “No need,” I say. “Let’s just keep shooting, okay? And forget this even happened.”

  “That’s right,” says Alexa. “All that anger—looks great. Use it.”

  Nineteen

  Nick Swain doesn’t go down the stairs to the exit. As soon as the door closes behind him, he takes a decisive turn in the opposite direction. He steps quietly—this isn’t his first foray into this territory. But he can’t explain it to Isa. He can’t explain it to anyone, because they’ll all think he’s crazy. They’ll try to lock him up, and he’ll have to go on the run.

  Just like Desiree.

  So, he climbs the stairs to the fourth floor, silent and swift. The tall double doors beckon at the end of the hallway. His heart starts to beat a little faster. He draws a decisive breath and crosses the distance.

  As soon as his hand brushes against the ornate door handle, the door whispers open. It’s all too easy, he thinks, and the gut feeling that screams danger at him grows stronger. Almost too strong to ignore, but ignore it he does.

  Inside, there’s no light, since the only window, as he knows, has been bricked up. All he can discern are the dark rectangles of paintings on the walls. After a cursory scan with the light from his phone, he finds the professional lamps Alexa brought and switches one on.

  With light, the place looks simultaneously more and less spooky. All those faces of Isabella—they seem to be looking at him, their flat, painted eyes riveted on him, following his every move jealously like a spurned lover.

  She will never fade. As long as these paintings hang here, in all their glory and beauty, as long as they are seen—she will never fade.

  He gives a violent shake of his head to get rid of the unwelcome thoughts. She’s long dead, he tells himself. These are just pictures. Nothing, and nobody, is watching him.

  In the center of the room, just outside the bright circle the photo light makes, sits an array of trunks, big and small, and Isabella’s various things are scattered all over the place. He feels a stab of cynicism at how carelessly the girls treat their supposed idol’s belongings.

  Looking around, he has no trouble spotting the small, discreet door in the corner. But, as he starts to make his way over, his shoe hits something that clatters loudly. He cringes at the sound that rockets like a gunshot, but seconds pass and no one comes looking for the source of the noise.

  Only then he looks down. It’s a carved wooden box that he tripped over. The fragile latches and lock broke off the lid. He crouches and scoops the contents back into the box: more costume jewelry—at least, he thinks it’s costume. Stones that size, if they were real, wouldn’t be gathering dust up here for the better part of a hundred years.

  It sure looks and feels real, though. One brooch in particular catches his attention: it’s a cameo in a heavy gilt frame. He holds it up to the light, and the frame’s intricate designs come into focus. Cherry blossoms, swans with impossibly long, curved necks, and, at the top, a calligraphic number 6.

  The center of the cameo is some kind of woven design that gleams dully. Silk?

  Nick runs the pad of his thumb over it, and understanding races through his nerves and up his spine. Still disbelieving, he stumbles to the spotlight and looks again.

  It’s not silk. It’s hair. Human hair. Light brown, with pale streaks of what might once have been auburn.

  He’s stricken speechless. Even if he wanted to scream, he doubts he would have been able to. He runs back to where he left the broken jewelry box and rummages through the items: rings, brooches, pendants on what might at first be mistaken for a silk-woven cord. The hair all looks similar but different in subtleties of tone and texture.

  Human hair jewelry, he remembers, was a Victorian thing: a mourning ritual, creepy though it was.

  Who would Isabella have been mourning?

  He upends the box, and its contents spills out onto the floor. At the top of the pile of Victorian relics, something gleams, too new and shiny to belong.

  His hand trembles slightly as he picks it up. A necklace adorned with a giant bead in a particular shade of blue, named lapis after the stone the pigment was once made out of.

  Recognition races through him as he holds the necklace up to the light.

  For the first time, he feels truly terrified.

  Twenty

  Nick Swain can go straight to hell. The photos were a huge hit on our Instagram. We’re quickly approaching fifty thousand followers. Fifty thousand. Chew on that, Nick. Would fifty thousand people follow something purposeless and meaningless?

  We already decided what the next shoot is going to be. My mom just reopened the house’s library at the other end of the second-floor hallway and said it was safe to use. It’s going to be our most ambitious shoot yet.

  The day of the photo shoot starts out uneventful. Honestly, I can’t wait for it to end, even theater class. I think Kendra might be noticing that I’m not at the top of my game, because, lately, she’s been giving me weird looks. I mean, there’s been such a major shift in usual dynamics that you’d have to be queen of denial not to notice.

  “Isa,” Kendra says in that careful voice as soon as the final bell rings. Everyone around me gets to
their feet and stampedes out. Nick pushes past me without so much as a backward glance. I might as well be a telephone pole. “Do you have a couple of minutes? I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Um, to be honest, I kind of have to go,” I say. That’s not true. Taylor texted me to say she might be a little late to pick me up, so I have time to kill.

  “It won’t take a moment,” Kendra says lightly. And that’s when I get it: it’s one of those things that’s only meant to sound like a request.

  “Okay.” I cross my arms. It’s hard not to get a little defensive.

  “I’ve visited your Instagram account,” Kendra says once it’s just us. I throw a sideways glance at the door, which is half-open, and spy Alexa’s black dress through the crack. She’s eavesdropping. “Well—not your account, but that project of yours. It’s very impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But—you know it’s not enough to get you the starring role in Dorian Gray, right?”

  This comes out of nowhere, throwing me off-kilter. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I just don’t want you to confuse popularity and talent, that’s all,” Kendra says. “It’s no secret that you haven’t been doing your best in class lately. I know you want to play Sibyl Vane, but, for that to happen, you must step up your game and really bring it.”

  Um. Hello? What’s wrong with this picture?

  “I don’t want to play Sibyl Vane,” I say slowly. The dark swarm descends, blanketing my vision. “I’m going to play Sibyl Vane.”

  “Casting hasn’t been announced yet, Isa.”

  “Oh, come on. Who are you going to cast? Ines? She can’t act her way out of a paper bag. And you know it. And everybody knows it.”

  “Isa,” her tone grows colder. “We don’t talk like this about our classmates in my workshop.”

  I gulp. The darkness fades a little, and heat creeps over my face. Maybe I blabbed too much. What was I thinking?

  Kendra sighs. She must decide to try a different approach, because I can see the shift in her body language and expression, plain as day. Now she’s leaning in, conspiratorial, like we’re friends and she’s not almost thirty and my teacher. “Okay, I’ll admit. I had you in mind for Sibyl Vane from the start. Because, no point in denying it, you have oodles of raw talent and the kind of universality that an actor can’t do without. Don’t tell the others, but, yes, I’ve been favoring you.”

  “I think everybody noticed,” I say. “I think they’ve noticed on Mars.”

  If this rattles her, she gives no indication. “But you can’t expect to just show up at the performance and be amazing without any practice or effort. Even the most talented of us have to work at it.”

  Oh, there’s a few things I could say to that. But I stop myself. The clock inches forward, and I have things to do, so I must appease her to get her off my back. “Fine,” I say. “But I’m marking your words. You want me as Sibyl in the play.”

  “Yes,” she says, beaming with relief.

  “I’ll do my absolute best,” I say. “Scout’s honor.”

  And with that, I skip out into the hall, where Alexa is waiting. We both collapse in laughter, trying and failing to keep it quiet.

  “Do you need a ride home?” Alexa asks. “Or are you going to wait for your mom?”

  “I’m not going to wait, that’s for sure,” I say. “She can wait. I’m coming with you. But, before home, can we stop at one place?”

  * * *

  When I do get home, I realize I’m alone in the house. Taylor must still be waiting in front of the school like a loser. Well, so what? Does she think I don’t remember how she just forgot me that time?

  And, anyway, it’s better to have peace and quiet for what I’m about to do. I head upstairs to the bathroom and close the door behind me, even though it’s not necessary since I’m home alone, then inspect myself in the mirror.

  No point in being modest—I look pretty damn amazing. I forgot the last time I had a blemish or a stray eyebrow hair. And, now that I’m seeing myself from head to toe, reflected in the giant mirror with its ornate frame, I notice that I don’t clash with it nearly as much as before. It’s hard to explain. Sometime between then and now, I began to look like I belong.

  Even my clothes are different. Not sure when it happened but most of my so-called outfits migrated steadily to the back of my closet. I’m wearing a lot of black these days. Maybe it’s Alexa’s influence rubbing off. Today I’m wearing a sweater with a velvet skirt, and the spinel earrings that tortured Sara’s earlobes.

  Only one thing isn’t right.

  But not for much longer.

  I grab a towel from the rack and throw it over my shoulders, then get to work.

  * * *

  “Your hair.”

  Taylor gets home late—she must have been waiting for quite a while. But the first thing she does when she gets home isn’t yell at me. She looks at me with big round eyes, and the only thing she seems to manage to choke out is, Your hair, Isa!

  “What? It’s not like I shaved my head. It’s my real color.”

  As close to my real color as I could find at the drugstore’s hair dye section, anyway. It turned out even nicer than I thought: a rich, deep auburn with shades and dimension. You’d think I did it at one of the pricey celebrity salons in Brooklyn and not with a $10 box of dye that I shoplifted from Walgreens.

  “It’s nice,” Taylor says. “But—I thought you were super into your pink hair.”

  “I was,” I say with a shrug. “But you can’t have pink hair forever.”

  “It’s to look more like her, isn’t it?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Isa.”

  Sure enough, she is watching us from the small portrait that hangs in the hall. A simple portrait, where she’s wearing a deep indigo dress with a tall collar and a cameo brooch where the hollow of her throat should be. The brooch has almost more detail than her face, which is in soft focus, like an eighties glamour shot.

  We should re-create this portrait, I think. I’m sure the brooch is in her things somewhere.

  “I’m talking to you!” Taylor explodes. Oh. Right. I almost managed to forget she’s there. Happiest five seconds of my day.

  “Yeah, it’s to look like Isabella. Is something wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What it means is that Ines’s parents emailed your dad this morning.”

  I feel like I’ve been sucker-punched—it’s so sudden and so treacherous. Come to think of it, her text this afternoon sounded a little off…but to be scheming with Ines’s parents behind my back? That’s just—unforgivable.

  “Apparently, her classwork has been slipping, and then she got lip injections without asking for permission. And they think it’s the influence of you and your project.”

  “I didn’t march Ines to the clinic and force her to shoot a gallon of filler into her lips, Mom.”

  “But I think you’re getting a little too obsessed with appearances.”

  “Obsessed? Now I’m obsessed with appearances?” an incredulous laugh escapes from me. “Wow, that’s really something else. Come on, Mom. We both know you hated the pink hair. So, if anything, you should be happy.”

  “I didn’t hate your pink hair!” Just like that, Taylor goes on the defensive. And no wonder—I’ve attacked one of the cornerstones of her identity, her cool-mom status. “I always let you play around with your appearance, because I know how important it is—”

  “—for self-esteem, yeah, yeah. But you hated it. I could tell when I first got it. I wish you’d just yelled at me like a normal person instead of lying and pretending you were, like, totes cool with it. Because nobody believed you, anyway.”

  “You do whateve
r you want with your hair.” Taylor’s voice becomes cold. “As long as it’s not the extent of your whole personality.”

  “And as long it doesn’t get Dad’s precious donors angry,” I say. “Anyway, I was thinking of cutting Ines out of the project. She’s starting to be a little too much. Doesn’t like sharing the spotlight, this one. So you should be happy.”

  With that, I turn around and go to my room, ignoring Taylor calling my name.

  My hair causes a real furor at school. Okay, not just my hair. For my first day as a redhead again, I decide to go all out. In one of Isabella’s trunks, I find a simple, off-white linen dress with a gauzy top layer of lace and a plunging neckline. It takes a couple of minutes of playing around with it and a few safety pins to turn it into this boho off-the-shoulder number. Over it I wear one of her black lace shawls. I skip makeup except for some lip and cheek tint—I don’t need anything else because my skin looks great.

  I catch incredulous looks as I walk from the gate to the school doors. When I glimpse myself in the glass, all my nascent doubts come apart. I don’t look weird or dorky. I look freaking phenomenal.

  And I can read the same thought in everyone’s looks as I walk into my first class of the day. Alexa is gazing at me with admiration; Sara practically has stars in her eyes.

  Only Nick is pretending like he doesn’t even see me. Which is really his problem, because he’s the one who looks crazy while all the eyes are fixed on me.

  Well, at least until our teacher walks in. “Isabella, you can’t wear that at school.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s against the dress code.”

  “What part is against the dress code?” I ask innocently. “My shoulders are covered, and so are my legs. In fact, I’m more covered up than anyone here.”

  The teacher gives me a venomous look but leaves me alone. The good news is, by lunch, I’m something of a legend. Everyone stops me to ask where I got these clothes. Sorry, guys, but you can’t copy me by heading to H&M. My sympathies.