My heart pounded, and my face was hot. My body trembled. I could hear the ocean. When I noticed it, she did, too, and held up a finger.
“You hear that? The water? No one knows if it ate me alive or not.” She said it with a singsong voice like she was keeping a secret from a child, saying the last few words with a seductive, dripping relish. It was like the whole thing was a game to her. “Doesn’t that already make me more interesting than you? If or when I come back…can you imagine it?” She rocked backward onto her heels, a smile stretching across her face. “I could walk up there right now, take back Max, and have a world of people who know me and love me thrilled to see my pretty face again.”
I was colder than ever, and her words were making my head spin. I felt like I was being hypnotized.
“And what will that mean for you?” she went on. “No one here likes you. They all whisper about you. Not because you’re interesting, mind you, but because you’re just this sad little thing who wishes she was better. Everyone can see that.” She suddenly adopted a look of sympathy. “Your friends back home don’t even miss you, do they? You’ve barely heard from them, I bet. Is that right?”
I had thought this before but refused to believe it.
“Well,” she went on, “it looks like no one really needs you at all, do they?”
She laughed, and as she did, chills ran from my toes to the back of my neck. I could hear voices. Becca looked up, toward the door. The light went out. I gasped, and finally felt in control of my body again. I heard the door slam open. My heart pounded. I was sitting up and the blanket had fallen and gathered at my feet on the dusty floor, and I didn’t even know since when.
The ocean was crashing outside, and my ears filled with the pounding of that and my heartbeat. I felt paralyzed, unable to stop my fingernails from digging painfully into the rough upholstery of the couch.
Noise was still coming from somewhere by the door, but I had no idea of its source. Then, quite suddenly, the light came back on.
And beneath the bulb stood Max.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOTHING WAS MAKING SENSE.
He saw me, and I watched as he inhaled sharply with surprise. “What are you doing down here? I went up to your room, but you weren’t there—I looked in the study room…why did you come down here?”
I could hardly speak. “I came down here to… I was just… I had to get out of my room and…and—what are you doing here?”
Words were tumbling fast from my mouth before I could form them. I stood, on weak legs, and looked around for Becca. She was nowhere. I glanced at the floor, where Becca had stamped out her cigarette. There it was. I resisted the urge to pick it up and see if it was still hot.
“We just wanted to come down and hang out I guess…are you okay?”
“What?” I whispered to myself as I looked at it. I looked helplessly back at Max.
His expression became one of concern, and he stepped back to open the door. He spoke to someone outside. “Just one second, I think I see a rat.”
I heard a few girls shriek. Max walked over to me. “I’m really sorry about earlier, Blake told me she told you…” He trailed off, as he saw the expression on my face. “What’s going on? Something else is wrong.”
“I don’t kn-know, I just…I can’t. I—” I was trying to gain control of myself, but I couldn’t breathe. It was like that feeling you get when you’re sobbing so hard that your lungs take in breaths you’re not prepared for.
“Come with me.”
And I did. He put his hand on my lower back and guided me.
I trusted him. I didn’t care where we were going or who was outside, I felt better that he was there. That was crazy, since I didn’t even know him, but it’s how I felt.
My static breathing slowed some, and I could take deep breaths. I coughed some of the dust out of my lungs as I walked outside. The usual people were there—Madison and Julia, clutching each other’s arms as I walked out hand in hand with Max, Blake, wearing a glittering tiara, and Cam in a gold crown. There must have been some kind of king and queen thing like at homecoming. They both looked at me with concern, and then to Max. Johnny also looked at him and asked, “She okay?”
I gave an embarrassed shrug and waved away their concern. “I’m fine. Not feeling well.” Other people whose names I kept forgetting were there, all talking to each other and looking at me like I’d just been dragged from the sand beneath their feet. I couldn’t look at them. I realized, as I looked ashamedly down at my feet, that they were bare. I didn’t remember when I’d taken off my shoes. I remembered Becca’s words about how everyone talked about me because I was just a “sad little thing.” This was a perfect example, I supposed.
Lonely, friendless, barefoot new girl, with no identity more specific than that. They’d never see me as anything but that. And I was really starting to fear that maybe that’s all I was. I’d always been the star of my own story. But not at Manderley.
Max said nothing, only giving a nod to the others, and then directing me firmly up the stairs.
“You’re freezing,” he said, when his warm hands touched my cold skin. He put his coat around my shoulders. “Not to be too cliché or anything.”
I clutched the jacket closer and summoned a faint smile but said nothing. He led me inside and to the library, which was open.
“This was locked earlier, that’s the whole reason I went down to the boathouse.”
“Shouldn’t have been. But I don’t know, I’ve never tried to break into the library in the middle of a ball before.” Max gave me a small smile and gestured for me to go in.
He led me to the senior study room, and then turned on the fire.
“You want to sit?”
I nodded and sat on the couch. He sat across from me in a chair.
“So…” he said. “What happened down there? You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
I cringed and stared into the flames. “I didn’t even think about whether anyone would be going there tonight.”
“How long were you down there?”
I shrugged. I really didn’t know.
“I was rude, I’m sorry.”
“No, please—” I didn’t want him to explain it.
“But Blake told you?”
“Yes. She told me. I didn’t know when I—” Furious humiliation filled my chest. “Dana suggested it.”
“I figured it was something like that.”
I tried to smile, but it didn’t work, and I just ended up taking a deep breath and looking at him. “I don’t know what everyone’s problem is. I realize I could never compare to B-Becca.” I had never sounded so pitiful. I’d never talked about myself like this. I’d never felt like this. “But everyone could stop telling me…Dana yelled at me about it the other day....”
I wanted to be honest, but instead I was just coming off as whiny. I didn’t feel like I could explain quite what it had felt like when Dana had said what she had. Or what dream or ghost Becca had just told me.
“You’re nothing like her.”
“Yeah, I get that.” My bitterness was not fully disguised. I bit the inside of my cheek anxiously. The whole “you’re not better or worse, you’re just different” response was not making me feel any more confident. “I don’t know. I just wanted to get away for a little while, I guess. And then I fell asleep or something.”
Or something. That was the only explanation. But it had been so incredibly vivid. Her smoke had made me cough. I’d smelled her. I’d heard her voice. Can you do all that in a dream? Obviously so, I guessed, but it still left me with a creepy feeling. But her cigarette had been on the ground…it could have just been left there from some other time, I supposed. But…
“It just felt like she was there,” I said out loud, without meaning to. I quickly looked up at Max.
“What?” he asked sharply.
I shook my head, regretting what I was about to say. “I don’t know. I fell asleep. I had a d-dream or whatever…
and she was there. Becca was there.”
There was a pause. “You’ve never even met her.”
“Obviously. It was strange. I could hear her talking to me, and she was just…right here.” I held my hand in front of me to show how near to me her stupid, flawless skin had been. “She was chilly…just icy. The way she spoke, that is. And she smelled like…she smelled like cigarettes and liquor…but then this perfume that sort of made the other smells more agreeable.”
Max’s jaw clenched. “What was she saying?”
I shook my head. “Nothing important.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I don’t even remember. I just know I was startled when you… I could have sworn the light had been on when I fell asleep.”
“It’s an old boathouse. It hasn’t been used in years, I’m sure the wiring is just faulty.”
I bent over onto my knees, mentally exhausted. I heard Max rise, and then felt him next to me. He pulled me by my shoulders so that he was holding me against his chest. He was warm, and I was cold.
“You’re fine.”
I wished I could believe him. The silence that came between us was comforting and still. He ran his hand over my hair for a few minutes, until we both finally drifted to sleep. It was the best rest I’d had since before I found out I was going to Manderley.
I awoke hours later to Max whispering my name and giving my shoulder a light squeeze.
“We should go,” he said quietly. “If we’re caught out of bed like this, we’ll get in trouble.”
The idea of getting in trouble had been appealing since I arrived. Getting expelled and having to go back home seemed like a win-win for me. But all of a sudden it didn’t sound so good.
We walked out into the silent halls, and walked to the girls’ dorm door. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. Somehow it wasn’t awkward at all.
When we arrived at the door, I glanced at Max and smiled nervously.
“Thanks,” I said. “For…you know, whatever.”
He smiled back. “Don’t worry about it. I hope you feel better.”
“I do.”
The moment changed, suddenly, as we both knew we were finished talking. He leaned in and put a hand on my neck, then kissed my cheek. I felt it turn hot.
I opened the door to go, and then spewed the question I hadn’t even known I was going to ask.
“Do you think…she might have been there?”
His face turned to stone. “No, of course not. Just a dream.”
We caught eyes. He looked very serious, and he looked like he was going to say something and then changed his mind. He held up his hand and said, “I’ll see you later on.”
I wished I hadn’t asked. But it was too late.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE NIGHT OF THE HALLOWEEN BALL. FINALLY.
Becca had ordered her Marilyn Monroe dress online a month ago, and couldn’t wait to wear it. Now finally, her hair was curled, the red lipstick on, the beauty mark in place, and the eyeliner had given her that sultry look. She looked in the mirror and seethed.
She was just bland, bland and more bland. Plain hair, plain skin, plain eyes, plain everything. She was boring to look at. Not like Dana, who looked like Cleopatra even though she’d been talked into going to the ball dressed as a witch.
Dana had asked Becca to help her get ready. So now her hair was straightened, her eyes were rimmed with dark liner and she was wearing the same red lipstick as Becca. But she looked too good. And Becca was torn between making her look good to show how she, Becca, could turn an ugly duckling into a swan, and making her look worse.
“Almost finished,” Becca said, grabbing her eye shadow kit. Green. She filled the blush brush with it and powdered it onto Dana’s face. She couldn’t go all-out green, but just enough to take her pristine skin to a slightly sickly level.
“What are you doing? Is that green?”
“You are a witch don’t forget.”
Now, one more thing and Dana would be finished.
Becca drew a big spot on her nose and used other colors from her eye shadow kit to make it look as wartlike as she could.
“Okay, you’re all set.”
“Can I look?” Dana said, standing. It was hard not to laugh as she smiled, having no idea there was a big black dot on her face.
“Um, sure.” She really hoped Dana didn’t object. She still looked good, but hopefully with the green tinge and wart, she’d look at least a little less pretty than Becca.
But Dana just laughed when she looked in the mirror. “I look like a witch, that’s for sure.” Her smile ruined the ugliness.
“Come on, we have to go.” Becca turned and marched out of the bathroom. She dropped her things off on her bed, and they were on their way.
Tonight, Becca was determined to make everyone sure that Max and she were in love. She knew exactly how.
When she met him in the dining hall, she smiled broadly.
“You look very handsome.” Becca reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
Max smiled, too, and kissed her back. “You, too.”
“Although it’s kind of a vague costume. Who are you again, just anyone from the fifties?”
He looked down at his suit. “I guess.”
“If you weren’t wearing a fedora it would be impossible to tell.”
He laughed and put an arm around her. “Let’s go.”
They were stopped and asked to place their vote for king and queen at the door. Becca voted for herself and Max. She leaned over to him and saw that he was voting for Cam and Blake.
“What are you doing? Vote for us!”
“You can’t vote for yourself, that’s stupid.”
“Everyone is going to.”
“No, I’m not voting for us.” He laughed and dropped it in the box.
Her plan wouldn’t work if they didn’t win. She seethed quietly and dropped in her own ballot.
“Do you think we’re going to win?” she asked happily a moment later, squeezing his arm. “I hope we do. I really do. We are the cutest couple, obviously.”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up, usually it’s a senior couple who gets it.”
“Well, I’m not giving up hope. Everyone knows we’re perfect together, so…”
Max was barely listening to her prattle on. But Johnny had caught her eye. She looked away quickly, and pulled Max on.
“God, Max, can you just stop?”
“Am I really the one that needs to stop?”
“What do you expect from me, to be standing by your side all night and never talking to anyone else? Seriously, Max. I can talk to other people. That’s what I was doing. Talking. I don’t see why you can’t trust me.”
Her heart was pounding. She’d been around the back of a column with Johnny. She’d known it was risky, but she couldn’t help it. Not that anything had happened. Johnny had refused, saying it was “wrong” or whatever. She couldn’t believe he was still saying it.
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