I pulled on a grin. “Sounds good then.”
“Perfect!” she replied with a smile that could’ve lit the moon. One that made me wish I’d ever seen a similar expression on her brother’s face, made me wonder if he ever had had a similar expression. And if not, what it would take to get him to stop being so uptight all the time. Just the thought of it was exhausting.
“I don’t know how you talked me into this.” I laughed as I ended up splayed over the arm of the couch for the third time. The couch I should’ve been nowhere near, because we’d pushed it and all the other furniture clear across the room to make space for Sera to teach me a dance routine.
“I don’t know either, but it was the best idea ever.” She’d collapsed into a pile of giggles on the floor. A graceful pile of giggles in an adorably stylish dance outfit complete with gray ombre tights. My cross-country garb was laundry-day unchic. A pair of striped green leggings with a Haute Dog shirt I’d had to retire from store-wear because it had gotten holey. More holey than I’d realized, because I hadn’t planned on sneak peeks of my fuchsia sports bra shining through.
I twitched it back into semirespectability and said, “I warned you that I wasn’t coordinated.”
“My stomach hurts from laughing.” Sera paused to catch her breath and dab at her teary eyes. “I thought you were exaggerating.”
“Not even a little.” I peeled myself off the sofa and stretched to make sure that all my parts were still functional. It didn’t look complicated when she did it. And that was the best part of this—getting to see how mind-blowingly good Sera was at dance. And watching her laugh. Her giggle—which was really the only way to describe her mouselike noises—curled into a cackle once she really got going, doubled over and hiccuping.
“We should stop before you get hurt. Or break something.” She sniffed and pressed her lips together, still hiccuping. “I’m going to get us some water.”
“Good idea. Maybe I’m not really that bad. Maybe I’m just dehydrated.” I kept my face deadpan and watched Sera’s eyes grow wide, but I could only hold the expression for a moment before cracking into a grin.
Her echoing hee-hee-hic! floated back down the hall as she trailed off toward the kitchen.
I set about trying to reassemble the topsy-turvy family room, pausing now and then to attempt at least part of the routine. I could do the individual pieces. Could step left, right, back and forward. My arms floated up and down—not as gracefully as Sera’s, but they were capable of the movement. I could pivot and swing my hips.
I heard footsteps behind me. “Where does this lamp go?” I asked, still trying to combine a hip thrust left with an arm swing right.
“By the end table.”
I froze. Arm still extended, hip still pushed out. I didn’t want to turn around. Maybe if I stayed facing the back wall, Fielding would just go away?
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” I told him. “I checked.”
I sounded like a petulant child. I braced myself for his retort. A very justified “I live here” or “You’re in my house.”
Instead he said, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
His words weren’t accusatory—they were almost apologetic. It was his tone that made me stop posing like some sort of awkward flamingo and turn around. Now the only part of me that looked like a shrimp-loving bird were my super-pink cheeks. And the swatches of equally pink sports bra making an appearance through my shirt’s extra ventilation. “Sera was, um—trying to teach me to dance.” I fluttered my arms in some sort of doofus gesture that apparently was supposed to indicate dancing but really probably looked like a chicken trying to fly. In case it wasn’t pathetically obvious, I added, “I’m not very good.”
I ducked my chin and waited for the ridicule I knew him to be so talented at administering. I’d served myself up on a platter—all that was left was for him to feast on my humiliation.
“I hope she’s more patient teaching you than she was when she tried to teach me.”
“What?” The word bubbled out on a surprised laugh. “Sera tried to teach you to dance? You let her?”
“It was one time.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “And let’s just say I hope you’ve got more rhythm than I do, because she was not impressed, and I was doing my best. Honest.”
I pressed a hand to my mouth, because if he wasn’t going to laugh at me, it wasn’t fair to laugh at him—but oh, I wanted to. “Can I get a demonstration?”
“Absolutely not.”
“That’s okay,” I told him, peering up through my eyelashes. “I’ve got a pretty good imagination.”
Now he was full-on laughing, and I was grinning. “Are you picturing me dancing? Stop! I forbid it.” But instead of looking threatening, he did a mock leap as he returned a throw pillow to the couch. And looked super pleased when my grin dissolved into helpless chuckles.
But, gah, wait a minute. Was this flirting? Was I flirting with him? The peering, the banter, the prancing. When I stopped laughing and took him in as a whole, he was wearing the type of smile I’d wanted to see on him for so long. One that was open and warm and made it feel like the sunrise was tracing its way up my skin, leaving a path of heat behind.
“So that’s what your smile looks like,” I said. Because my brain had lost its filter. Or I’d just gone and lost my whole dang mind. As soon as I called attention to it, his smile fled, like that stupid groundhog on February second. Six more weeks of arctic chill. Which was a crime against humanity, because his smile was that beautiful. I wanted to commission Rory to capture it in a painting. One I’d hang on the back of my bedroom door and study all night.
Wait. No. I forced myself to think just kidding, in case he could read my thoughts. Because I was a mistake. This wasn’t going to happen.
“Merrilee.” His face and voice had gone serious. He was always so serious. I wanted to be a reason for him not to be so serious all the time. It felt like a challenge I could accomplish. One that would be worth the effort. Make him guffaw, make him joke, make him fill his mouth with marshmallows and do the Hokey-Pokey and run through lawn sprinklers and ride the park swings after sunset . . .
“Merrilee,” he repeated, interrupting a perfectly good mental montage to ask, “Would you like to meet Fitz?” I stared at him blankly. “My dog?”
I blinked slowly. “Your dog’s full name is Fitz Williams?”
The corners of his lips twitched. “I guess? I can’t say we call him by his ‘full name’ that often.”
“Fitz Williams?” I squeaked. Because hadn’t he read Pride and Prejudice? Didn’t he know . . . I shook my head.
“No, you don’t want to meet him? He’s somewhere around the house.” Fielding turned away and cupped his hands around his mouth, “Fitz! Not that he ever comes when he’s called.”
His house.
I choked on a gasp or my tongue or the idea. Because the pieces clicked. And they kept falling, like a row of dominoes that were going to lie flat and reveal a message that read: Hey, idiot, did you catch on yet? All the ideas I’d been repressing. It wasn’t just his dad being Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or Rory as maddening as Lydia. It wasn’t just my kinship with Lizzy. It wasn’t just his dog being named Fitz-dangit-Williams. Like Fitzwilliam Darcy. The parallels hadn’t stopped with his declaration and emailed letter. They’d continued into the section I was reading—when Lizzy and Darcy are accidentally reunited while she’s on vacation with her aunt and uncle. When she agrees to tour his ancestral mansion, Pemberley, after being reassured he isn’t home.
Spoiler alert: he is.
“Are you okay?” Fielding asked, stepping closer and crinkling his brow. But not with criticism—with concern. The two looks were so different, and the current one disarmed me. I didn’t want to be disarmed. Or charmed. I wanted him to prove me wrong. “Has Monroe bothered you any more?”
“No.” It came out as a whisper. Monroe had completely ignored me. But I’d seen him a third time that day. Sitting by Rory
in Convocation.
“No? To which question.”
“Both.” Though they were related. Monroe’s sudden disappearance from my life . . . What if that wasn’t a good thing? Not that I wanted him back—gag—but Pemberley, Fitzwilliam . . . a missing scoundrel. One who’d said he’d find “another Capulet”—could that be code for another Bennet sister . . . aka another Campbell? Because, if so, there was a whole separate Pride and Prejudice plot thread I could only pray was not being replicated right then.
“Merrilee?” Fielding held out a hand, but I backed away.
“Don’t do this.”
He stepped backward. “What am I doing?”
“Don’t be nice to me now,” I begged. “Don’t go Darcy.” The crinkles on Fielding’s expression had transformed again. Now they were confusion. I wanted to create a map of all his expressions. Figure out the alchemy of earning the smiles and soft gazes. Except. Gah. No. I hadn’t even finished the book!
“Merrilee, I—”
“I need to go. I think I need to go?”
“Are you sure you’re okay? Can I do anything?”
I groaned and remembered one of the last Darcy-Lizzy details I’d read. “Promise you won’t invite me fishing!”
“That I can promise,” Fielding said. “But I really don’t understand what’s happening right now.” He was all concern, his hands fisted on his shirt like he was trying not to reach for me—totally oblivious to the fact that he was crushing wrinkles into those starched sleeves.
“I’ve got to go.”
“So, I figured you might be hungry, and since Eliza’s not here to tell us sugar content—oh!” The dishes on Sera’s tray clattered as she stopped short. Her eyes darting from her brother to me and back again. Taking in the fact that we were both frazzled. And while I may frazzle easily, I’d never seen him rumple.
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I told her, bending down to scoop my sweatshirt off the floor and trying to orient myself so I could remember which doorway lead to the front hall where I’d left my satchel.
“What did you do, Fielding?” She set the tray on a table and stomped toward him, hands on her hips and eyes furious.
“I honestly haven’t got a clue.” He turned from her to me. “But I sincerely apologize.”
“You didn’t—” I pivoted between them both. “He didn’t. Nothing. It’s me. I just—I figured something out.”
“You don’t need to defend him,” Sera protested. “I know he’s been perfectly awful to you since you started here. You’re such a jerk, Fielding. Why do you have to ruin everything?”
“He really didn’t!” I protested. “He’s been nothing but kind today. Truly.” I crossed fingers over my heart and gave her my most earnest basset-hound look. “Sorry.”
I curtsied and exited. Because why not? Why not be awkward and make a strange situation even stranger? As my feet pounded across the quad toward the library, my brain raced even faster.
I didn’t know how the story ended, but I knew what happened right after Lizzy’s visit to Darcy’s house. If Fielding was in fact Darcy and my life was a parallel to Pride and Prejudice, there was a more immediate danger than whatever was making my heart thump crazily at the thought of Fielding.
Because it was suddenly painfully obvious: Monroe wasn’t Romeo. He never had been. He was Wickham. And what happened next in the book was that Wickham, Lizzy’s ex-suitor, turned out to be a scoundrel—a truth that Darcy had revealed in his letter. A secret that Lizzy had kept secret. And because of that secrecy, Wickham was able to run away with her youngest sister. How many times had I compared mine to Lydia?
“Rory!” I burst through the heavy double doors of the library and bellowed her name across the oak shelves, marble floors, and stained-glass windows. My shout hung in the silence like dust motes and old-book smell, and I should have cringed under the ensuing scrutiny, but instead I was busy searching for my baby sister.
I exhaled when I spotted her at a side table. She was trying to duck behind a book. Her hands cupped across her forehead as she covered her eyes in a pose Lilly and I called “the ostrich.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” I modulated my voice to a much more reasonable volume as I approached her table. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“What?” she demanded, sinking still lower in her seat. “What do you want?”
“Um.” My skin began to prickle with the eyes of so many eavesdroppers. “To see you?”
She rolled her eyes and slammed her books and notebooks into an angry, lopsided stack. “Is Dad here?”
I glanced at the clock. “Not for another five minutes.”
“I was studying,” she seethed. “And you just—you humiliated me. Why do you have to make everything into such a spectacle?” As she crammed her books into her bag, a yellow paper fell out. I only had time to read “Academic Warning” before she scooped it up and shoved it back in her front zipper pocket. She leapt up and stormed past me out the door.
I caught up with her on the front steps—which was really ideal. It gave us a bit of privacy to have the whole Stay away from Wickham—I mean Monroe conversation. But her body language didn’t exactly scream, “I’m feeling chatty!” Before I figured out my opening—I mean, how do you tell your sister she plays the role of the fool in your life story?—Dad pulled up.
“Shotgun,” I said weakly, but she ignored me, stomping down the steps and yanking open the front door. Even the way she clicked her seat belt sounded angry.
Except as soon as Dad asked her a question about her art project, she practically bloomed into a fountain of art lingo. Mediums and textures and lighting and shadow and all sorts of things that made sense and were important to her but weren’t any language I spoke.
My head was full of Pride and Prejudice. I’d left off with Darcy and Lizzy at the Lambton inn. Lizzy had received a letter from home and been inconsolable, confessing to Darcy that Wickham had run off with her youngest sister—ruining her reputation and that of the family. Darcy felt “wretched” as he watched Lizzy’s pain.
A day ago, I would never have dreamed it, but seeing the crinkle-cut concern Fielding had worn so nobly today . . . I could see him looking wretched. I could see him wretched with worry over me—and the image was warm, like sitting in a sunbeam with a lap full of dozing puppies. But that didn’t mean it was worth Rory’s ruin. Why had she been sitting with Monroe at Convocation? Why hadn’t I pulled a Monroe and climbed over benches to stop it?
I had to prevent her from making a major mistake.
Which meant we needed to talk. It meant that Rory needed to shut up about perspective and proportion and Dad needed to hurry up and get us home.
It also meant I should probably prioritize finishing the book. Because as quickly as my heart spun and composed and imagined endings, my mind rejected and refused them. My thoughts and feelings were such a tangle of contradictions and conflicts and gah, why did Fielding have to be so kind today? Why was that last glimpse of him—standing there in his wrinkled sleeves, watching helplessly while Sera berated him and I spouted nonsense and acted in ways that confirmed every one of his first judgments—why was that so endearing?
Why hadn’t I listened better to Ms. Gregoire, and why had Eliza been wrong? Eliza wasn’t ever supposed to be wrong. She had science on her side. And according to her, that always trumped imagination.
Apparently not.
“Merri, you getting out of the car tonight? Or just going to camp out until it’s time to head back to school Monday morning?”
“Huh?” I looked up to see Dad grinning from his open car door. He was standing on the driveway. We were home, and I needed to do a Wickham intervention. “Oh, thanks for the ride.”
I bolted from the backseat and ran into the house, calling a greeting to Mom as I toed off my sneakers and dashed up the stairs. I caught up with Rory in the hallway, snagging her arm and dragging her backward into my room as she squawked and protested. “What are you doing? What is wrong w
ith you? Merrilee!”
I slammed my door shut behind us and leaned against it, ignoring the heads of the pushpins that were digging into my back as I trapped her in place. “We need to talk.”
“Have you lost it?” Rory shook her short hair out of her face and glared down at me. Her hands were ridiculously strong from the clay work she did, and it was taking all my strength not to let her pry me out of her way. “If this is about that academic warning, I’m not talking about it with you, and don’t you dare say anything to Mom and Dad.”
“Oh, we will talk about that. But not right now.” I set my feet wider and pushed my back even more firmly against the door. Since I was probably already going to have pin-shaped bruises, I’d at least make sure she heard me. “I need you to stay away from Monroe. I know he’s handsome, but he’s not—he’s not a good guy for you.” He wasn’t a good guy for anyone, but I couldn’t go into all that right now. Nothing about her death looks and pinching fingers communicated that she’d be open to hearing me get vulnerable and confess how badly he’d treated me. “He’s really a jerk. You have to believe me.”
Her eyes and lips thinned to sharp lines. “What are you talking about?”
“I know things.” I nodded like a bobblehead. Bookish things, but about a book she hadn’t read, so there was no real need to complicate that by trying to explain. “And Ms. Gregoire agrees with me.”
“You know things? And one of these things you know is that I need to stay away from Monroe? And you discussed this with our English teacher? Well, guess what, Merrilee? Regardless of what you think you know, I don’t spend all my time pining after guys who are in love with you.”
“Guys? I’m talking about one guy. I’m only talking about Monroe. I only have one ex.” Except there was also a dark-haired, dark-eyed, not dark-hearted boy who’d recently confessed to some feelings. . . . “Have you been reading my email?” No. I’d logged out. I knew I’d logged out.
“Oh, get a clue.” Rory’s voice had dropped to whisper-angry. Which was the apex in the hierarchy of her rage. Typically when she reached this point, I wanted to be as far away as possible. She glanced behind me at the balcony—like maybe she was considering making a break for it via that exit. Or maybe studying the house next door? It made me wonder, not for the first time, if her childhood crush on “Twoby” was really past tense.
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