Frozen Beauty

by Lexa Hillyer

  She pedaled past Devil’s Moon, a café that served as the nicest place to go out to eat in a ten-mile radius. Tessa remembered what a big deal it had been when Mike Caprio had taken Lauren Tallerman there for a date last year. Everyone had whispered barbarically about the ways in which she may or may not have repaid him for it—but then she’d started going out with Chris Remos shortly thereafter, and the rumors quickly fizzled.

  Currently, a family of four was seated by the window, squabbling over a late meal.

  Tessa was about to cross Bunting, when she stopped short—an old man had rounded the corner and walked right into the middle of the road. He was facing down, scanning the ground as though looking for something he’d dropped.

  “Mr. Donovan?” she called out.

  He lifted his head and squinted. She hadn’t seen him around in a while, and in the dim light of the nearest street lamp, he seemed older than she’d remembered, his wrinkles deeper, his eyebrows more . . . scattered.

  Tessa hopped off her bike. “Do you need help with something?”

  He was still squinting at her and still standing in the middle of the road. She tried to wave him over, but he shook his head and went back to whatever he was searching for.

  “Mr. Donovan?” she asked, approaching slowly. It was dangerous out here on the road.

  He looked at her again. “Sarah.”

  “It’s Tessa. Let’s move off the road, okay?” She tried to take his arm, but he pulled it away, staring at her hand, the one with the engagement ring.

  “Don’t touch me, Sarah. You’re dead.”

  A chill shook her.

  “It’s Tessa Malloy,” she repeated. “You know . . . knew . . . my sister, Kit. Remember?”

  He stared at her. “She woke up. Talia sun and moon.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head again. “Never mind. Just a story. She started to wake up, but—”

  Thankfully, Diane Donovan popped out of the supermarket just then, pushing a cart. She didn’t really glance Tessa’s way, just wrapped an arm around Liam and began helping him back toward the parking lot down the road a bit, muttering to him. “Why did you get out? I asked you to wait in the car.”

  Tessa wanted to say something, to help, maybe, but Mrs. Donovan looked so frazzled, her gray hair wispy and frayed around her face. She wondered what they’d been through since last weekend—since Patrick had gone missing. Were they worried about him? Had the police questioned them?

  After she watched Diane tuck her husband into their car, Tessa got back on her bike and rode the rest of the way to Jay Kolbry’s house, trying to shake off the mystery of Mr. Donovan’s mumblings. Because that’s all they were.

  And yet.

  She dropped the bike against a tree at the foot of Jay’s long driveway and walked up the gravel path, fidgeting with her gray sweater, suddenly worried that these faux leather pants were squeaky and everyone in the party would be able to hear it. But then the strains of music and laughter reached her, and she realized how ridiculous that thought was.

  No one would notice her—like usual.

  For a second, she wished she could be like everyone else—could just be. Could come to a party and lift her arms into the air and dance for hours, and then, sweaty and happy, stumble toward a boy, alone in the dark, behind a set of stairs, against a wall, with the music still too loud—loud enough to drown out her thoughts. She wished she could have an arm around Boyd, even if he was just knuckling her head or bitching about his dad’s drinking or joking about Chizhevsky. She wished she could tell him how she felt, wished she could say, That kiss was real. I meant it. I felt it. I don’t regret it. Do you?

  But that kiss had led to him, out on the road during a snowstorm, fighting with Kit. It had led to . . . this: Tessa, on a mission to find out why her sister had really died.

  She kept walking. Because the alternative was to stop moving, and stopping might mean lying down and giving up.

  Sleeping Beauty. “She woke up,” Mr. Donovan had said. Tessa felt like she was the sleepwalker. She needed to snap out of it. She needed to wake up.

  She needed to find out what Kit had been doing at Jay Kolbry’s Halloween party—to retrace her sister’s steps, feel what it had felt like to be her. And maybe, maybe, gain some insight into what the hell Kit had been thinking this past fall, as she spiraled further away from them and further toward that terrible night that changed everything. The night that could never, ever, be undone.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Before

  12/10

  Dear Diary,

  I’m trying to write in you more because Mom says being bored means you have no inner resources or something. And also that I should spend less time online and apply myself to life instead. So, life, here’s my application.

  It’s Saturday morning and I’m bundled in this plaid blanket scarf from last year’s line at Lupine (which completely clashes with my Pink pajamas and hoodie), just sitting here at the kitchen counter, drinking swampy old coffee and staring out the window. I just saw a row of wild turkeys stalking through our side yard. They are so ugly, I swear, it’s gross. All bald and wobbly. ANYWAY. I can’t believe it’s only two Saturdays before Christmas. Today we had our first snowfall. Mom managed to shovel her way into the car bright and early to pick out a tree, and since my room’s at the front of the house, the sound woke me up.

  It is freezing out. My mom always keeps the heat way too low, complaining about the bills. I wish I’d slept over at Mel’s last night—Mrs. Knox keeps the thermostat set to seventy-three all the time and you have to crack a window just to stay sane. It’s so cozy there. We could spend hours online stalking everyone at school and trying on outfits and falling asleep with our latest rankings of people in our grade on crumpled notebook paper underneath our pillows.

  But, no.

  There haven’t been any sleepovers in a while.

  No offense, Diary. I like you and all, but you are no substitute for human company.

  I want to text Patrick, but it’s too early.

  I would bother Tessa, but she’s such a porcupine in the morning, so I guess I’ll bother Kit, even though she hates me and judges all of my decisions.

  Wish me luck.

  Lilly knocked softly and, after a few seconds, lightly nudged Kit’s bedroom door open. Kit was fast asleep, her poetry journal spread next to her on the bed, her arm draped over part of it. A pen with its cap off lay wedged into the binding.

  Lilly started to leave, then thought again and stepped quietly into the room. She approached the bed, grabbing the pen and re-capping it.

  She wasn’t trying to spy on Kit’s journal. She was just trying to protect Kit’s fluffy white bedspread from a potential ink stain. That she happened to see some of the lines in the notebook was just a coincidence. Even in my sleep, it said, it’s clear that you were never mine to keep. But the word clear was crossed out, with a caret inserting plain instead.

  She leaned a little bit closer, and that was when Kit woke up with a start.

  “Hey, what are you—” Reflexively, Kit grabbed the notebook and closed it, hugging it to her lap.

  “I was just seeing if you were awake,” Lilly said hastily, stepping back.

  Kit let out a breath. “You scared me. I was trying to sleep in for once.”

  “You don’t have volunteering?”

  Kit shook her head, looking a little distressed. “Nope.”

  “Are you okay? Do you have a headache?”

  “No. Yeah. No, I’m fine. Why are you up this early?”

  Lilly shrugged. “Mom went to get a tree.”

  Kit sighed, and she didn’t exactly smile, but her eyes softened. “All right, I’m getting up. Just give me a minute.”

  “Okay!” Lilly said, trying to keep the enthusiasm from her voice. She was still working on the whole eagerness thing.

  She went back to her room to get dressed, weirdly excited. She’d always loved tree decorating. She liked tradi
tions in general.

  As she was slipping on a striped sweater, Tessa burst in, wearing leggings and a ripped T-shirt, her pale hair in a tangle around her face. “How come Kit’s crying in the bathroom?”

  “Huh?”

  Tessa put her finger to her lips. “Come on, listen.”

  Sure enough, the bathroom door was closed, and they could hear sniffling, along with running water.

  Lilly looked at Tessa with concern. She shrugged, and Tessa shook her head as if to say I have no idea either.

  Lilly pulled Tessa into her room. “I woke her up to help decorate the tree.”

  “What tree?”

  “Mom went out to get one. She seemed a bit . . . I don’t know. Stressed-out. Kit, that is. She fell asleep writing in her poetry thingy. Love poems. Not that I was reading them.”

  When Kit emerged moments later, her eyes looked faintly red around the edges, but nothing Lilly would have otherwise noticed.

  “Everything okay?” Tessa asked casually.

  “Me?” Kit said. “Yeah, of course. Will one of you help me pull down the attic ladder?”

  Silently, the three of them got to work unfolding the rickety trapdoor at the end of the hall, near the entrance to Kit’s room, and setting up a chair so they could reach the ladder. Tessa climbed up first and handed boxes down to Kit, who passed them to Lilly, who ran them downstairs to the living room.

  Even though they weren’t talking much, Lilly still felt oddly happy. There was just something comfortable about going through the same motions they’d gone through every year. No matter what happened, no matter what changed, certain things were constant.

  While they were unpacking the stockings, Lilly’s phone buzzed. It was a text from Mel.

  The outfit worked! You should’ve seen his face.

  Lilly snorted to herself.

  P.S. Sex is really not that big of a deal.

  Lilly shook her head and went back to the box in front of her. She wasn’t sure yet what to reply. The dismissiveness of the text made her sad, but then again . . . did she actually want more details?

  “What?” asked Tessa.

  “It’s just Mel,” Lilly said, suddenly wanting desperately to tell her sisters everything that had been going on. “She, um . . . she . . .”

  “What?” Kit prodded.

  “She did it. She had sex. With Dusty.”

  “What!” Tessa screamed. “Bratty little Mel? How did that happen?”

  “Hey, Tess, just because she beat all of us to the punch doesn’t make her a brat,” Lilly said. “Anyway, she bought this sexy outfit from Lupine to seduce him, and I guess it worked.”

  It was Tessa’s turn to snort. “Sexy outfit?”

  “This bra set. It’s actually really pretty. It has this tiny silver charm on the—”

  “Why are you so quiet?” Tessa cut in, nudging Kit. “This is a big deal! It’s like a rite of passage or something.”

  “What, that someone we know has had sex?” Lilly asked. “Lots of people have. Just because we’re a house full of pathetic virgins doesn’t mean the rest of the world is waiting around.”

  “Ow,” Kit interrupted, pulling her finger out of an ornament box and sucking the tip of it. “I just pricked myself on one of these.”

  Lilly stared at her, thinking of the lines from her journal: Even in my sleep, it’s clear plain that you were never mine to keep. Who had she written that about?

  “Have either of you ever, you know . . . gotten close to doing it?” She blushed, unable to stop thinking about Patrick, how he touched her, how he kissed her. She had definitely thought about it—about sex—even though they were nowhere near that step . . . yet. But of course, how could she tell her sisters that? Not after Kit had butted in and told her to stay away from him.

  Tessa and Kit were blushing also. The three of them didn’t talk about sex very often, if ever. It wasn’t really a dinner-table conversation topic.

  Tessa shrugged. “Not me. Saving myself for the more civilized world of college.”

  “What about you, Kit?” Lilly asked, trying to conceal the edge to her voice.

  Tessa laughed. “Come on, Lilly. Leave her alone. We all know Kit’s not that kind of girl.”

  “Exactly what kind of girl do you mean?” Lilly demanded, folding her arms. “Why don’t you let her answer for herself? Kit?”

  Kit’s face was the color of a roasted tomato, and she was staring hard at a toy soldier in her hand. Finally she looked up. “What? You know the answer. Everyone knows the answer.”

  “See?” Tessa said with a satisfied I-told-you-so sigh.

  “Whatever,” Lilly said, disentangling a set of clear lights.

  By the time they were done unpacking all the boxes and hanging up all the stockings over the mantel on the same nails from last year, they heard the car pulling into the driveway.

  Lilly pushed through the screen door and ran into the yard, through the falling snow, in her rubber-soled slippers—the ones she’d begged for last Christmas, just like Mel’s. Tessa came outside behind her and helped hold open the door while Lilly and their mom carried the tree inside, losing a bunch of needles in the process. Kit had the tree stand ready, and they managed to secure the tree into it, even if it was leaning at a slight angle, Tower of Pisa-esque.

  The next couple hours were spent wrangling lights and tinsel and ornaments onto the tree, with intermittent breaks for scrambled eggs and cinnamon buns. It was the first time in the last few weeks that Lilly hadn’t had to fight the urge to stop in the middle of whatever she was doing to text Patrick.

  However, in the afternoon, Tessa went upstairs to get ready for her shift at the Deviled Egg, and Kit retreated to her room to study—apparently, Mr. Green was encouraging her to enter some writing competition—and their mom announced she had to do some holiday shopping online. Lilly was left alone in the living room—the snow still fell outside the window, and a thin layer had begun to stick. She restlessly flipped channels on the TV, glad she didn’t have a shift at Lupine but also feeling agitated, like she was trapped inside an itchy wool sweater, except the sweater was life.

  She couldn’t get it out of her head that Kit was upstairs working away. She’d be a famous writer one day, and what would Lilly be?

  “Don’t you have any passions or projects, Lil?” her mom asked through the open door. She was sitting in the kitchen with the clunky old Dell laptop. “You could use something to focus on.”

  Lilly sighed, trying not to snap. She was right, in a way. Kit had literature and poetry. Tessa had biology. “Mom, we can’t all be like Kit, okay? Anyway, I have plans with Dar,” she lied. “I should probably go get ready.”

  “I just think you all have the potential to do great things. . . . We all have a calling in this life, and maybe it’s time you start to find yours.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, flopping off the couch and huffing up the stairs. She’d heard enough. She was the loser of the family—message received, loud and clear.

  In her room, she called Dar. “Wanna hang out today?”

  Dar cleared her throat. “Hey. Sure. What do you want to do?”

  Relief flooded through Lilly’s body. For some crazy reason she’d started to believe that Dar really didn’t want to spend time with her anymore. “Cool! I don’t know. Wanna meet at the diner? If I hurry I can catch a ride over with Tessa.”

  “Okay,” Dar replied. “I’ll be there in like twenty minutes or so.”

  “Awesome.”

  Lilly threw on her black jeans and a beaded sweater that was holiday-ugly-chic, then leaped into her boots and hollered as Tessa passed her room to head downstairs. “Wait, I’m coming with you!”

  “Boyd’s driving,” Tessa said over her shoulder.

  They piled into Boyd’s truck—he was already waiting behind the wheel. “Malloy Family Chauffeur, at your service,” he said, saluting them.

  Lilly bit the inside of her lip as Tessa and Boyd began bantering about random school stu
ff. She still felt weird around Boyd, remembering the night of the Halloween party. How he’d confessed to liking Kit.

  You were never mine to keep. Could Kit’s poem have been about Boyd? Whatever was going on between them, it was clearly tense, and secretive, though Lilly still couldn’t figure out why. And lately she’d been so caught up in the whole Patrick thing that she hadn’t really taken the time to think it through. You were never mine to keep. Did someone else like Boyd too?

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll join Lilly and start the bio while you work. I could use a pancake,” Boyd was saying to Tessa when Lilly’s ears perked up.

  “I’m actually, um, meeting Dar,” she told him. “We’re supposed to talk about, ya know. Girl stuff.”

  Tessa snorted and informed Boyd, “Their third Musketeer just got her cherry popped.”

  “Tessa!” Lilly swatted her arm. “Gross.”

  “What? It’s true. Sexist, I guess. But still true.”

  Boyd laughed. “All right, all right, I know when I’m not wanted.” His tone made Lilly cringe inside—he sounded just a little too cheerful, like he was trying to act as though everything was normal. They’d never had to try around each other before. Their friendship with Boyd had always been natural and easy. But things had gotten so different since the start of this school year.

  She and Tessa hopped out of the truck, and Lilly barely waved a thanks at Boyd before hurrying through the cold parking lot toward the diner entrance, its big red neon THE DEVILED EGG sign making the gathering snow on the ground pink.

  “Thank god for you,” Lilly said just a few minutes later when Dar rushed in from the cold, snowflakes still sticking to her scarf and her thin, staticky hair, and took a seat across from Lilly in her window-side booth.

  “Me?” Dar said, unwinding her scarf. “I suck, but okay.”

  Lilly couldn’t help but notice her collarbones making sharp lines under her V-neck sweater. “You don’t suck. I’m so glad you’re here. There’s so much to discuss.”