Frozen Beauty

by Lexa Hillyer

Hours flew by as they broke down the entire Mel and Dusty situation—Dar posited an interesting theory, which was that Mel wasn’t even that into Dusty but was using him to rebel against her mother, and also, he was popular. At least popular-ish. Then Lilly told her everything about the fling thing with Patrick and all about the rumors and speculations, and she even admitted that she found out Patrick had been writing some of Dar’s papers for her. “But don’t worry,” Lilly quickly added, “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  Dar nodded, saying that she wasn’t sure if he was right for Lilly, but then again it wasn’t her place to say. Then she told Lilly that her dad was dating someone new who was, like, half his age and how he’d tried to set up a dinner for them all to meet and it had been the most awkward event of her life, and how her mom was basically losing it and saying she wanted Dar’s dad back and the divorce had been a mistake, he had to see it now.

  It all sounded heavy and it started to make sense to Lilly why Dar had been so stressed and out of it lately. The thing about Dar’s mom was that she was kind of delusional. She’d named her daughter Darcy because she’d been wanting a boy and had romantic notions of naming him after the hero in Pride and Prejudice, so even after Dar was born a girl, she apparently just couldn’t let go of the fantasy. Although Lilly hadn’t read it, she’d seen the movie—it was one of those stories where the normal girl gets the hot rich guy in the end. Also, the oldest sister was supposedly all perfect and kind, while the youngest sister was basically treated like a huge slut. Which was one of the reasons Lilly didn’t plan on reading it.

  Anyway, Dar’s mom basically idolized her dad in just the same way and totally hadn’t seen it coming when he’d told her he wanted a divorce, even though it had been obvious to everyone—especially the neighbors and Dar’s friends—that their marriage hadn’t exactly been harmonious.

  And even though Dar passed on sharing a tuna melt—their usual—she did order a whole basket of fries to split, and Tessa served them a free side of cheese dip, and Lilly was pleased to see Dar put back at least her share of the fries if not more, laughing and opening up and acting like the old Dar, the normal Dar, even getting a smear of ketchup on the side of her face and wiping it off with the back of her hand. “Let’s get more!” she announced, and Lilly thought that maybe things were going to be okay. Maybe they always had been, and she’d just lost perspective. This was the problem with keeping secrets—you ended up in your own bubble where everything you were worried about got magnified way out of proportion.

  After a second basket of fries and a shared milkshake, Dar groaned and clutched her stomach. “I gotta get home. My mom’s forcing me to watch White Christmas with her and she’ll probably threaten to slit her wrists if I’m late, which would be funnier if I were actually exaggerating.”

  “Got it,” Lilly said, getting up to give her a hug. Despite their giant meal, Dar still seemed breakable in her arms. “I’ll pay for the food. I’ve been doing windows for Lupine so, basically, I’m loaded.”

  “Thanks, babe,” Dar said.

  “Is she picking you up?” Lilly asked as Dar stuffed her hands into mittens.

  “Nah, I’m just gonna walk.”

  “In the snow?”

  Dar turned to face her. “I’ll be fine. Love ya, Lilly.” Then she made her way toward the door and Lilly watched as she pushed out into the darkness cocooned in eerie pink light.

  On Sunday, Patrick texted her. Meet me at the corner of your block.

  “I’m going out!” she hollered cheerfully, and after touching up her concealer and lip gloss, she practically skipped down the street. It had been a good weekend. The new Christmas tree twinkled through their front window.

  He was on his motorcycle wearing a ratty old hat and scarf that looked like they probably belonged to his great-uncle, his helmet under his arm. The winter air made his cheeks look pink and boyish.

  “Where are we going?”

  He shrugged, and she hopped on the back, taking the spare helmet and sucking in a sharp breath as he revved the engine and started off. She wrapped her arms around his body, feeling lucky, trying to take in his smell even with the cold wind stinging her face. She didn’t want to let go.

  They ended up at the clearing out by Devil’s Lake, which lay iced and brown beneath a white-gray sky. In the snow, the woods were basically abandoned.

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  He shrugged again as he parked the bike and helped her off. “What do you want to do?”

  What she wanted to do was make out. Instead she replied, “Build an igloo?”

  He laughed. “Okay.”

  It took awhile—there were only about four inches of snow layered on the ground—and by the time they’d built the walls, around two feet high, Lilly’s hands had gone numb inside her gloves. She sat down in the narrow space between the snow walls and took off the gloves to blow hot breath onto her fingers.

  Patrick grabbed her hands in his own and rubbed them to warm them up. “It still needs a roof,” he pointed out, scanning their work.

  “Don’t be so literal,” Lilly replied, pulling him toward her.

  They fell back into the snow and started kissing, his lips a mix of hot and cold against hers, the snow coming down around his dark, messy hair. She pulled off his goofy hat, laughing, and they kissed some more. The back of her head was chilled against the ground, but her body was alive with heat, and as she looked up at Patrick’s face for a second, she was struck by the sudden discovery that what was happening now might in fact be the very thing she’d been looking for forever without knowing it.

  She didn’t want to even think the words falling in love because if she did, somehow, maybe this would all dissolve into the snow around them, come down like a collapsed igloo and blow away.

  So she said nothing, just clung to his jacket.

  After a while, they were simply too cold to keep kissing. He rolled over onto his back next to her, knocking over part of one of the walls with his elbow, and sighed.

  They both stared at the sky, blinking against the soft, icy flurries.

  “I just—” Patrick said suddenly.

  “Hmm?”

  “I just wish this could, like, not end.”

  Lilly swallowed hard. People didn’t say they wished things didn’t have to end unless they thought things did have to end.

  As heady and amazing as she’d felt just moments before, Lilly was now full of a slow, cold dread. She blinked hard. It wasn’t like he was trying to break up with her. Was he? They weren’t even together . . . or were they?

  Finally she got her voice back enough to say, “Speaking of, I should probably get home before I die of hypothermia out here.”

  “Okay,” he said, his voice a whisper.

  He drove her home in silence, and it was all she could do to not cry as she walked back to her door, feeling like she was dragging a heavy secret behind her, a blanket of shame.

  It wasn’t until Monday that Lilly heard the news, from Mel. The morning bell hadn’t rung yet. Mel was waiting for her on the front steps of the school, wearing a puffy parka and a hat with a pompom on top. She grabbed Lilly’s arm, her eyes wide with alarm. “Did you hear?”

  “Hear what? About you and Dusty? All I know is what you texted—”

  “No, not about me and Dusty. About Dar.”

  Lilly’s heart froze. “What about Dar? I just saw her on Saturday. We met at the diner and—”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  “What? Why? Is she okay? What happened?”

  Mel just shook her head. “She ate, like, three pizzas or something. I don’t know. An old Halloween-size jumbo bag of Skittles. Her mom found her passed out on the bathroom floor covered in her own vomit.”

  “What? Is she sick?”

  “She’s not sick, Lilly. She’s anorexic. Well, my mom says it’s a mixed diagnosis. Anorexic with occasional bingeing-purging tendencies or something like that. It’s horrible. The doctors say she can�
��t even leave the hospital until she’s gained twelve pounds. Did you know she was under ninety?”

  “Ninety pounds? How is that even—”

  “Possible? I don’t know. I thought she was skinny. But she’s always in those sweaters. Oh, I don’t know, Lilly, how didn’t we see it? Did we see it? I mean, her own mom didn’t even realize it.”

  Lilly stared at Mel and shook her head. Of course Dar’s mom hadn’t noticed—she lived in a dream, in a snow-globe world where the normal girl gets the hot rich guy and marriages last and daughters don’t fall apart, or if they do, they’re rescued. “No.” She cleared her throat. “I guess we didn’t notice. Or if we did, it wasn’t enough.”

  “Yeah,” Mel said. Her face looked different to Lilly, then. Lilly thought how far apart they’d become in only a month or so. Mel had barely told her anything about losing her virginity. About what was going on between her and Dusty. She had a sudden chill. What else wasn’t she seeing?

  “Hey,” Lilly said. She put her hand on Mel’s arm. “Are you okay, though?”

  Mel started to cry.

  “What? What is it?” She hugged Mel, but Mel kept crying. “What happened? Are you and Dusty all right? Do you regret . . . anything?”

  Mel sniffled against her shoulder. “I just . . . we should have seen. There’s so much people don’t know, Lilly.”

  “What do you mean? What else don’t people know?”

  Mel stood back and wiped her face. “Nothing, it’s fine. It’s just been a lot. Listen, sleepover soon, okay?”

  Lilly nodded, and then the bell rang.

  Mel headed inside for class, but Lilly remained on the stairs outside, feeling stuck, even as a flood of students pushed past her. She kept picturing Dar laughing and gossiping with her like normal at the diner. Was it normal, how she’d ordered that second basket of fries? Should Lilly have said something? Should she have said something before then? Weeks ago, or at the start of the school year, when she first thought Dar looked thin?

  When was the right time to start worrying about someone?

  Could she have stopped it from getting this bad?

  All this time, she’d felt pushed away, left out, like her friends didn’t need her. What if they needed her more than ever and she was just too blind to see it? What if she’d been sleeping this whole time and was only just now waking up?

  It had been snowing steadily since the weekend, and as the flurries floated around her face, melting against her lips and eyelids and cheeks, the lines from Kit’s journal came back to her once again, like a clue, like something else she should have paid attention to—and maybe she still could, before it was too late.

  Even in my sleep, it’s plain that you were never mine to keep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Now

  FEBRUARY 11

  AS SOON AS TESSA ENTERED Jay Kolbry’s house, she was overwhelmed by the noise and chaos. Adelia Naslow stumbled past her, shouting at another girl Tessa couldn’t see. The house was crowded. Most of the people there were seniors she didn’t recognize. She counted maybe six other juniors, and she was pretty sure most of them were cheerleaders or girlfriends of senior guys. Some of the seniors looked vaguely familiar—she’d probably seen them hovering around Jay and Olivia in the cafeteria and school halls, or at the occasional football games she’d been forced to watch from a distance while practicing throwing Milk Duds into Boyd’s mouth from three bleachers away.

  She nearly got corralled into a game of beer pong but managed to dodge the flying Ping-Pong balls and push her way through the crowd to the kitchen. Jay was not in there.

  She moved through several rooms, unable to find him, and finally reached a sliding door. It was hot and loud and she needed air. But a guy was leaning on the glass door.

  “Can I?” she asked, gesturing. As he stood aside, she slipped past him into the yard.

  “It’s raining out there,” she heard the guy say. “But, whatever.”

  Outside, an old wooden swing set hung soggy and limp; the cracked plastic swing, purple on yellow rope, sparkled with rainwater. She looked around at the emptiness of the yard, swiveling the sapphire ring around her finger nervously.

  The sliding door closed behind her, and she realized the guy who’d been leaning on it before had followed her outside. He stood next to her, hunched, even though the rain was hardly heavy, and took a sip from a big red cup of beer.

  He cleared his throat. “Too much fun in there, huh?”

  “What?” She turned to him. Realized he seemed older, like maybe nineteen or twenty.

  He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Too much party in the party, am I right? Needed a breather?”

  “Guess so.”

  “You friends with Olivia? I know you’re not in Jay’s crowd.”

  “Kind of. Well, no, not really. You?”

  “I’m Jay’s cousin.”

  She nodded. The yard was damp now, seeping slightly into the sides of her red boots. “Not really friends with anyone here.”

  The guy cocked his head. “So why come?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to, um, see for myself. What it was like . . .”

  The guy nodded. “I’m Alex, by the way.”

  “Katherine.” The name slipped out before Tessa could take it back. She wasn’t sure why she’d said it, and she felt her cheeks reddening.

  “So, Katherine, do you often show up at parties where you don’t have any friends?” He gave her a side grin.

  She couldn’t really tell if he was flirting with her, and whether it mattered. She was too startled by hearing someone else refer to her by her sister’s name. “No, not often,” she answered finally. “My, um, sister came to one of Jay’s parties last year, though. The Halloween one.”

  Alex nodded again. “Yeah, I was here for that. That party was killer.”

  Tessa looked at him, suddenly interested. “Did you see her there? Slightly taller than me, blond also, green eyes? I think she came by herself. But maybe not.”

  Alex shook his head. “I’m sure I’d remember another lone blonde like you.”

  “She was dressed as Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “Who?”

  “A poet, I think. I don’t know.” The mist was starting to soak into the thin fabric of her sweater. “She was wearing all black. I guess I’m just wondering because I wanted to know . . . what she was acting like.”

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t recall her, but who knows? It was probably crowded.” He offered her a sip of his beer, but she declined. “Where’s your sister tonight, then?”

  Tessa looked around, as if the mangled shrubbery lining Jay Kolbry’s yard might help her come up with an answer. “She’s. She couldn’t . . . she can’t be here. Listen, I need to go.”

  “Hope to see you around, Katherine,” he called after her as Tessa stumbled past and headed back into the house.

  She found Olivia and Jay in the kitchen. “You guys . . .” She felt panic rising in her throat as she tugged on Olivia’s sleeve. “Hey, you guys, did . . . do you remember my sister being here at the Halloween party this year?”

  “Oh, girlfriend,” Olivia said, a look of pure pity flashing over her. “What are you doing here, babes? And you’re all wet—”

  She tried to put her arm around her, but Tessa backed out of the kitchen, then swiveled and marched into the living room, where a bunch of people sat cross-legged on the floor, a messy stack of playing cards scattered between them, clearly in the midst of a raging game of Asshole.

  “Hey. HEY. You guys. Do—did any of you know my sister? Kit? Katherine Malloy? Did you see her at the Halloween party here?”

  “We’re in the middle of a game, dude,” someone said, but then looked up. “Oh, man, it’s you. I’m sorry! I mean, I, uh, wow, yeah.”

  “Were you all at the Halloween party?” she demanded, unfazed. The music blared loud in her ears.

  “I was,” said another girl. “But that was, like, months ago. Are you ok
ay?”

  They were whispering now. That’s the girl. Her sister. Yeah, the one who—

  She couldn’t take it anymore. All these people just going on with their lives, just partying and hanging out casually, as if the world hadn’t halted in its tracks a week ago. Kit’s death meant nothing to them, did it? It was just a thing to gossip and wonder about. It didn’t matter. How was it possible? How could it be that something could be so devastating for some people, and not even touch others? It didn’t seem the universe could accommodate it.

  A bad feeling was sinking in now. She started to stumble from the room.

  It was the feeling that this had all been a massive mistake—not just showing up at this party, but her assumption that Kit really had come to the Halloween party in the first place. What if that too had been one of Kit’s secrets? What if she’d only said she was going to Jay Kolbry’s house to throw them off the scent of her true plans?

  Her throat was tight and her head was hot. This was stupid. This was wrong, all wrong. She was all wrong.

  Tessa pushed her way out of the room and toward the front hall.

  On the way she bumped shoulders with Alex.

  He reached out to steady her. “Hey, Katherine, leaving so soon?”

  “I’m not—let go of me. Let me go,” she repeated, trying to spin away toward the door.

  “Hey, hey, it’s cool,” someone behind her said.

  Tessa swiveled, and there was . . .

  “Mel?”

  She felt turned around, disoriented. Mel seemed flushed, her eyes darting.

  “What are you doing here?” they both said at the same time.

  Mel huffed. “Come on, I can’t talk to you here . . . like this.”

  Tessa didn’t know what she meant. Why had Mel come? Did she really not care either? Even after their talk beneath the bleachers . . .

  “Seriously, why are you here—alone?” Tessa asked Mel as soon as they had ducked into a quiet room. She looked around. It appeared to be a den with old video game controllers scattered across the floor. A huge, oily stain spanned the far corner of the carpet.

  “Are you following me or something?” Mel asked back, fidgeting with her pockets.