“You seemed as lonely as I was,” he said, and he looked away, his hair tousled by the wind.
The bus rattled and rocked all the way to the Holiday Inn ballroom, which was decorated with different kinds of strings of lights, stars and roses and tiny lanterns. A folk-pop song with a twangy guitar was playing over the sound system, and there were a dozen round tables arranged next to the dance floor. A buffet table held deep trays of food, covered to keep them warm.
She spotted Arianna and her boyfriend, Jacob, already cuddled close at one of the tables, a plate of finger food between them. A hint of movement caught her eye on the side of the room, and she spotted Kate gesticulating wildly to Lynn. Edie blinked. Kate was wearing black pants and a glittery shirt that caught the light when she moved, and Lynn was in a red knee-length dress.
Kate’s eyes found hers. Then looked away.
“Wow,” Edie said. “This is a teen movie nightmare.”
“You said it,” Evan said. “I think I need a smoke. Want to?”
“A little early to bail, don’t you think?” she said.
“I came, I saw, I prommed,” he replied. “We can always come back. Come on, there’s a place I want to show you.”
They ended up a few blocks away, at the boardwalk. The smell of salt and seaweed was on the air, as well as the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke whenever the wind blew just so. The cigarette itself dangled from Evan’s fingers like he was about to drop it, just like Edie’s shoes dangled from hers by their little black straps.
He did put out the cigarette then, smashing it against the inside of a little tin he kept in his jacket pocket. A second later she thought she saw him pop a mint into his mouth, but she couldn’t be sure. She ducked her head to hide a smile and followed him at his gesture. Then he was hopping off the boardwalk, drawing a gasp from her lips and a laugh from his own.
“Don’t worry, there’s a sandbar here at low tide,” he said, and his pale hand stretched out around the boards beneath her. She set down her shoes, hiked up her skirts—all the while sparing a few choice words for boys who didn’t understand how much harder it was to maneuver in a slinky dress than a pair of loose pants—and jumped down.
She splashed a little on the landing, but since her dress was black, it didn’t really matter. She kept her skirt out of the sand, though, draping it over her elbow as she turned to face him. Yes, he had definitely eaten a mint—even from a foot away, his breath was fresh now, with a hint of tobacco.
“If we weren’t in formal wear, I’d suggest we sit down and listen to the waves,” he said. He ducked his head and, to her surprise, blushed a little. Or she thought he did—it was getting dark, so it was hard to tell. “Guess I didn’t think this through very well.”
“You know, it would probably be creepy if you had,” she said, and he laughed, with less control than he usually had, so it came out like a bark.
And she realized, suddenly, that Evan—journal-carrying, smoking-behind-the-shed-on-school-grounds, pep-rally-ditching Evan—was nervous. That for all that he pretended to know himself and what he wanted, he was just as clueless about the whole thing as she was.
So she let her skirt drop to the sand, threw an arm around his neck, and tilted up on her bare toes to kiss him.
She felt his fingers digging into her waist, and the grains of sand between her toes, and the firm pressure of his mouth. Then, at the nudge of a tongue, parting, giving way, the tension thrumming through him releasing. Salt and mint and cigarette. Waves caressing the shore, and the moon now emerging, and she was exactly the daring girl she wanted to be.
“Second phase in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Edie twisted her arms behind her back to push up the zipper on her red dress.
“I got it, don’t dislocate anything,” Arianna said, coming up behind her. She was already wearing her dress, a yellow gown that almost glowed against her brown skin. She had gathered her thick hair into a knot just behind her right ear, and there was a flower pinned there, just as bright as the dress.
Edie’s friend zipped up the dress, and she smiled at her reflection in Arianna’s bedroom mirror. They had picked Arianna’s house for its huge staircase—perfect for prom pictures.
Edie had tried to buy a normal, simple dress, but Arianna had forbidden it. “This is one of the only times in your entire life that it will be okay to wear a huge monstrosity,” she had pointed out, and after a few repetitions, Edie agreed. Consequently, her red dress was a gown, with a full skirt.
And pockets.
She beamed when she moved in it and heard the layers swishing up against one another. Making sure her phone was secure in one of the pockets, Edie followed Arianna out of the master bathroom. A group had gathered at the bottom of the grand staircase, all the boys in their tuxes and the girls in bright dresses in almost every color of the rainbow. They were Arianna’s cross-country teammates, and Edie liked them but didn’t really know them. It didn’t matter—she knew Arianna, and she knew Chris, who was laughing by the door with Arianna’s date, Jacob.
When he spotted her, Chris’s face—if possible—lit up even more, and he broke off his conversation to go to her side.
“Nicely done, Robbins,” he said.
“You too, Williams,” she replied, making a show of looking him over. He did look good. Unlike the penguinlike boys around him, he was in a navy blue tuxedo with black trim, his bow tie so straight it was like he had tied it with a level on hand. And he was holding a white wrist corsage. An orchid.
She grinned as he slipped it onto her, then caught his hand, and squeezed.
“I see you’re committed to this occasion,” she said. “Corsage, nice suit . . .”
“When I was a boy I used to dream about my prom night. . . .” He folded his hands under his chin and gave an exaggerated blink. “And about the gal who would sweep me off my feet, et cetera.”
She mimed throwing up.
“Really, though, my granddad always says cynicism is unattractive in a young person,” he said, a little more seriously. “Well, actually, he says, ‘What do you have to be cynical about, boy? The whole world is at your feet.’ And something about a war, I don’t know.”
“Meanwhile, there’s my mother, who started to warn me against bad prom night decision-making and gave up halfway through,” she replied. “Like, literally gave up. Sighed heavily and went into the living room.”
Chris laughed. They took their place on the steps with the other couples. He stood close behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist. They smiled, stiffly, for the first few shots, and when commanded to be silly, Edie put on a comically deep frown as Chris pretended to collapse against the banister.
Before pulling away, he bent closer to brush a kiss against her cheek. She flushed with warmth.
They piled into a stretch white limousine that took them—in a cloud of vapor from the smoke machine—to the high school, where they got on one of the buses instead. They rode in the back, raucous enough to get scolded multiple times by the chaperone. Edie’s stomach ached from laughing so hard, and they weren’t even at the prom yet.
When they arrived, she and Chris paused in the doorway to marvel at the strings of light that crisscrossed the ceiling, and the luminous gauze that made up the centerpieces of the tables. There wasn’t a soul on the dance floor yet, though the lights were already low and the music was playing. So she knew what Chris was going to do before he did it.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the dance floor. “Someone’s gotta get this started!” he said, by way of explanation, but she didn’t need it. Her cheeks were hot as he pulled her into the empty space, and she felt the eyes of everyone in the room like fingers brushing over her, but then Chris was going through his repertoire of stupid dance moves, trying to get her to laugh with him: the cabbage patch, the shopping cart, the sprinkler. . . .
Edie sighed, bobbed her head to the music, and pretended to be holding a fishing pole. She cast her invisible line, an
d Chris became the fish, flapping wildly as she pulled him in. Then she fell against him, so embarrassed she couldn’t help but bury her face in his shoulder. But it was all right, because in the middle of her spasm of humiliation, Arianna and all her friends had come to join them, and now she was camouflaged by a whole crowd of fools.
It took another song to get comfortable, and then Arianna was spinning in circles around her, and Jacob was dragging a handkerchief across his sweaty forehead, and Chris was trying to teach her how to do the electric slide, even though it didn’t work with the music. She kept tripping over her skirt, and her legs were sticky with sweat, but it didn’t matter, none of it mattered except how widely he smiled at her.
Sometime in the middle of one of those songs where they shouted commands at you—Edie’s favorite, because she didn’t have to think of her own moves—she spotted Kate at the edge of the dance floor, trying to coax Lynn to join her. Kate was in silver—no, not just silver, but a dress made of duct tape that wrapped around her from chest to knee. Lynn was in red, like Edie.
Edie caught Kate’s eye, pointed at the duct-tape dress, and gave her a thumbs-up.
Kate gave her a confused look.
And Edie stepped to the left and turned, as commanded by the music.
The song slowed, and the lights went low, so only the starry strands glowed in a net above them. Chris’s hands found her hips, and she put her arms around his neck. They swayed, leaning on each other to recover from the fever of the past few dances.
She touched her forehead to his, and he was sweaty, his skin radiating heat, but she didn’t mind.
He had made her feel light, for once. So she tipped up her chin to kiss him. He cupped her cheeks, and they stopped swaying. She crushed the corsage against his chest, toying with the buttons of his shirt, with the perfectly straight bow tie.
This was it, she knew. The feeling people meant when they talked about love. And it was so easy to love him, so easy to love the person she was when he was around.
“You look happy,” he said to her softly, over the hum of the music. “For a while, after the accident, it was like . . . like you didn’t feel much of anything. And I didn’t know what to do. But . . . it’s nice to see you happy again.”
It was nice to feel happy again.
But she couldn’t get rid of the unsettling thought: What happens when I stop being happy again?
Kate did not count down her exit from the Elucidation Protocol. Edie jerked from the vision, startled to find herself sitting instead of standing and wearing jeans instead of a red gown. She ran her hands over her arms, feeling bereft. Lost.
Such a weird thing to have in your basement, she thought as she looked around for something to anchor her. Along the far wall were bookcases stuffed with books, sometimes two rows deep. This was a house of curious people. Kate’s parents didn’t even mind her comic obsession. Her mother had even called it a “feminist undertaking.”
Kate stood in front of her and ripped one of the wires away from Edie’s forehead. Her movements were sharp, her brow furrowed. Edie blinked up at her as Kate eased the crown off her head and set it aside. Then Kate took a phone out of her back pocket and thrust it at Edie.
“Here. Take it, it wouldn’t stop buzzing,” Kate said. She folded her arms.
“What is it?” Edie said, still feeling out of it. Had she mumbled something while she was under the influence of the EP? Something about Kate?
“Oh, no, this conversation can wait until you’ve checked your texts. Go ahead,” Kate said.
Edie touched the screen, bringing up the last few text messages. They were all from Arianna.
Arianna: Well?
Arianna: Did you choose a boy yet?
Arianna: Tell me soon, because we need to go dress shopping together.
She looked up at Kate, still not sure what was going on.
“Tell me,” Kate said, her voice shaking. “Tell me we didn’t just break my father’s rules, risk me getting in serious trouble, and potentially damage highly expensive equipment so you could pick a prom date.”
“It’s not . . .” But what? How could she explain that it wasn’t about a prom date, wasn’t about Evan or Chris or dresses or dances? How could she possibly tell Kate about the whirl of panicked thoughts chasing themselves through her brain every second of every day, and the deep ache she felt every time she thought about the future, the past—hell, even the present?
“God.” Kate closed her eyes. “When you agreed to come tonight, I thought it was because you actually gave a damn about me still. That maybe we could be friends again. And now I find out you would take advantage of me like this, for something so . . . so vapid and shallow and—”
“You’re so judgmental, god,” Edie snapped. “If you’re not ragging on me for liking makeup, you’re insulting me for caring about prom. Well, excuse me for not waging some kind of eternal war against The Man!”
“You don’t listen, do you?” Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “I thought we could be friends again! And it’s like you don’t even think of me, don’t even see me anymore, not since . . .” She blinked the tears away. “Do you even like Vim and Vigor anymore? Or did you just come so you could ask me for this?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t even make eye contact in the hallway,” Edie said. “And you must not know me very well if you think I’m just some airheaded idiot who’s agonizing over a prom dress.”
“Just go, okay?” Kate shook her head. “Just go, and choose a boy, and go back to pretending I don’t exist.”
She turned and walked across the basement. Edie listened to her footsteps on the stairs, and above her head, as they crossed the living room. She heard a door close upstairs and knew that Kate would be in her room by now, probably playing music louder than she should, and wouldn’t answer the door even if Edie pounded on it.
So Edie got her bag, put on her shoes, and left.
They had been the last ones at the funeral, Lynn, Kate, and Edie. They helped Amy’s aunts clean up, then sat on the couch in the living room, sucking down the last of what Edie mentally referred to as the funereal punch. All day she had been suppressing the horrible urge to laugh. Everything was funny—the priest’s hobbling gait as he went up to the pulpit, the face Amy’s grandmother made when she cried, the off-balance way the pallbearers carried the casket.
She felt like some of the wires in her brain were crossed to trigger the wrong reactions at the wrong times. As people stood around weeping, she got so angry she thought she might explode, and excused herself. By the time she made it to the couch with Kate and Lynn, she was so exhausted from the wild swells of the wrong emotions that she was numb.
Then Lynn’s parents came to pick her up, so it was just Kate and Edie, waiting for their rides together, and Edie still couldn’t look Kate in the eye.
Kate put down her mug, her hand trembling, and said, in a voice so small and so broken Edie almost didn’t believe it belonged to her friend:
“Do you think it’s my fault?”
She knew why Kate was asking. Because it had been Kate’s idea to drive to the 7-Eleven, and Kate who had been behind the wheel, and Kate who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the drunk driver in time, and Kate whose whole body was shaking now.
Edie threw her arms around her best friend, held her tight, and forced herself to say, “No. Of course not.”
But oh god, maybe she did, maybe she did.
That night Edie opened the Vim and Vigor folder on her tablet and scrolled through the images one by one. Kate had been writing this most recent Protectors story for almost a year. It was longer than most books, and she updated it weekly on FandomWorks. Every time Edie thought about giving it up, she found something that made her hold on—a phrase she recognized, a revelation about a character, something small.
Then a few months ago, she had discovered something bigger.
Kate had always teased Edie for being conventional in her “ships”—the couples she was most roo
ting for in fanfiction, even if they weren’t together in canon. Kate was more interested in nontraditional interpretations of Vim and Vigor—Vim with other women (Transforma, mostly), and Vigor as asexual, or demisexual—and Edie liked to hear about those too, curious about all the possibilities. (Though it had been difficult to explain to her mother why she had so many sketches of two women kissing on her tablet.)
But Edie always went back to Vim and Antimatter, the son of their evil nemesis. The early comics showed them potent in their hatred for one another, almost killing each other every now and then. But then Antimatter’s mother had died, and he started to shift, and the passionate hate turned to attraction. Enemies to lovers—one of Edie’s favorite tropes.
And Kate had written it into her story.
Her Vigor was asexual, of course—that was Kate’s favorite interpretation of all. But Vim and Antimatter were there, in her fic, the one she had been building for a year. It was almost like she was speaking directly to Edie.
That was when Edie started sketching again. Trying to talk back.
Edie paused on a drawing of Antimatter’s gloved hand in Vim’s slender one, their fingers twisting together as something exploded behind them. Maybe she didn’t need to find the right words to say to Kate, or even any words at all.
Edie opened a blank email and attached the Vim and Vigor folder. When it uploaded, she typed in Kate’s email address and wrote “I’m sorry” in the subject line.
Sent.
It was prom night.
Edie twisted her arms behind her back to push up the zipper of her black skirt. It was high-waisted, hitting her right below her ribs, and made of a stiff material that disguised the cell phone and lipstick she carried in the pockets.
She leaned close to the mirror to check the border of her lipstick, which was a vibrant orange-red.
“So you’re really set on that getup, huh?” Arianna said from the doorway, her arms folded.
“Not much choice now, is there?” Edie smiled a little. “Come on. Let’s go make precious memories.”
There were strings of lights across the ceiling, just as she had imagined during the Elucidation Protocol, but none of them were shaped like stars. Instead, they were your standard Christmas light variety, little and twinkling and white. And the centerpieces on the round tables were just white flowers, lilies and carnations. Kind of hideous, actually.
Three Sides of a Heart Page 16