by Sarah Kuhn
Fuck it. I didn’t want to think about any of this. I just wanted to go back to my own room.
“I’m not worried,” I said, trying to project confidence. “I want to take her down.”
He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking about it. And I’m not sure I want you to.”
“Why not? Because you have such a deep, personal connection to Maisy Kane after your big meeting?”
“What?” He looked confused.
“Because it was so fun to sensuously eat strawberries off the perfectly manicured fingertips of a demon princess? Who, in case you’ve forgotten, is totally evil and totally our enemy?” I knew I sounded ridiculous, but I couldn’t seem to stop the words from spilling out of my mouth. Why wouldn’t he just let me leave?
“No, of course not. The whole experience could best be described as pure torture.”
“Then how come you looked like you were having fun?”
“I was merely trying not to antagonize her. Why are you acting this way?”
“I’m not acting any way. I—”
“Are you jealous?”
“Yes.” The word shot out of my mouth before I could stop it. I forced myself to relax my shoulders. “Which is stupid since we have much bigger concerns right now. And anyway, we’re not even together. Not like that.”
He looked confused again. “Yes, we are.”
“No. We’re just using each other for orgasms. We agreed on that.”
His face darkened. “And clearly things have changed.”
“No, they haven’t!”
“Evie—”
“We agreed! And we’ve never discussed changing that agreement.”
“We spend every night together.” His voice was low and controlled, but I could hear the anger percolating there. “We have intellectually stimulating conversations. I have observed details about you that are intimate but not sexual: the fact that you eat cereal at all hours of the day, for example. The evidence suggests that we—”
“Evidence?!” I gaped at him. “You can’t use ‘evidence’ to determine dating status! That may work for tracking demons and tracking fire powers, but it doesn’t work for this!”
“You’re jealous because I was seen in close contact with another woman,” he pressed. His eyes were locked on me with such intensity, I had to take a step back. “And I’m jealous of your longstanding friendship with Scott because he is another heterosexual male who—”
“Scott? How can you be jealous of Scott? We only slept together that one time—”
“You slept together?” His face darkened further. “Recently?”
“No, at prom, and . . . you know what, it doesn’t matter!” I snapped. “None of this matters. This is just sex and you can’t use some scientific algorithm to make it into something else!”
“It’s already something else!” He grabbed my hand and pulled it to his chest. His heartbeat slammed against my palm. “And I don’t understand why you’re so dead-set on insisting it’s not. You are the most stubborn, pigheaded, infuriating—” He stopped, trying to get ahold of himself. He squeezed my hand and I felt his heartbeat speed up. “I don’t want you to participate in the karaoke contest because I’m worried Maisy has something big planned for that night. That something terrible is going to happen to you.” He squeezed my hand again and there were so many emotions swirling in the dark depths of his eyes, his gaze pierced me like a physical shock. “And I can’t bear that thought, Evie. I can’t.”
His voice cracked on that last word. My heart smacked against my breastbone over and over and over again. I was still anxious and nauseous and I felt like I was going to throw up all over him and my brain was screaming at me to run, run, run.
“It doesn’t matter what you can or can’t bear,” I said, trying to hold myself together. “You don’t get to make this decision for me.”
“I know that—”
“And anyway, I can’t be distracted by all this . . . stuff right now.” I wrenched my hand away. “I have to focus. If Maisy does have something planned for that night, I need to be ready. This stupid fucking karaoke battle is important.”
“It is important. That’s why we should talk about—”
“No, we shouldn’t!” I stomped toward the door. “There’s no ‘we’!”
“Yes, there is!” he bellowed.
I stomped back to my bedroom and pushed open the door to find Bea arranging a series of large spreadsheets on an easel, all of them displaying rubrics of data on which karaoke songs should and should not find a place in my performance.
“There you are,” she said, clapping her hands together. “So first we have to talk about how Maisy owns the boy band repertoire. Don’t attempt anything in that wheelhouse.”
Anger was still churning through me. “Not even One Direction?” I said.
Her eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “Especially not One Direction. She’ll annihilate you. The songs you choose matter. This isn’t just about you taking down Maisy the Demon Princess. It’s about how you take her down. That’s the story that will spread far and wide and be documented on every form of social media. Aveda Jupiter has been gaining an international audience ever since ‘she’ got a fire power. That means you’re essentially performing on an international stage. You’ve got to have a sense of showmanship. And that means . . .” She trailed off, frowning. “Evie. Are you crying?”
“No,” I said automatically. I lifted a hand to my face. It was wet. “Oh, shit.”
I crossed the room and slumped onto my bed. “Keep talking. I seem to be having some kind of allergic reaction. Maybe it’s the rain.”
She left her spreadsheets behind and sat down next to me, then laid a tentative hand on my arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, my voice robotic. “Let’s just keep going with this karaoke discussion.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You’re my sister,” she said. “We’re supposed to talk about stuff, even when it’s stuff you don’t think is appropriate for my supposedly innocent ears.”
I couldn’t seem to process anything she was saying. My anger was dissipating, but I still felt sick. She jabbed me in the arm.
“Talk to meeeeeeeeee.”
Any confessional resistance I might’ve once possessed had been thoroughly destroyed in the last two weeks. So that was all it took to get me to start yammering.
“I had a fight with Nate. But I was feeling weird before that. Kind of sick. Anxious. Possibly hungover.” I scrubbed a hand across my face. “Maybe I need to throw up.”
Bea chewed her lower lip. “What was the fight with Nate about?”
“Nothing. Everything. You’re too young for me to talk about this.”
She gave me her best Tanaka Glare. “I’ll be seventeen in a few days. And don’t forget about my birthday breakfast. I still haven’t heard back from Dad, but you have no excuse for not being there. Now. Answer the question.”
I bit my nail off. “It was about whether we’re dating or just, um . . .”
“Having sex?”
I nodded. It sounded pretty dumb when you said it out loud like that.
“But you said you started feeling gross before that?” Her expression was so deadly serious, I had the deranged urge to laugh. Beatrice Tanaka, Feelings Detective. “What were you talking about when the weird feelings started?”
I thought about it. I’d woken up feeling a little gross. And despite my best efforts, I’d managed to totally freak out about the Big Maisy Takedown Plan. But my cocktail of bizarre emotions had taken off sometime between those two things. Right before he’d shown me the stone.
What on Earth had we been talking about?
“His bed,” I said, replaying our inane conversation. “He wants to get a new bed. I have no idea why that would make me anxious.”
Bea smiled smugly. “Sounds intimate.”
“Talking about furniture while fully clothed? Doesn’t seem as intimate as some of the other things we’ve done.”
“Oh em gee, that is way more intimate!” She gave me a look. “Nate is a creature of extreme routine, Evie. Just look at his wardrobe. And he’s talking about buying a whole new piece of furniture?”
“His bed is really small . . .”
“And he wants a bigger one so you can fit in it!” she crowed. “Like, fit in it all the time. That’s what freaked you out. And that stoked the fires of your whole dating-slash-not dating fight.” She clapped her hands on my shoulders and gave me an intense look. “I knew this would happen. He looks exactly like the guy in that movie you and Aveda used to watch.”
“The scientist? In The Heroic Trio?”
“Yes.”
He did. How had I never noticed it before?
Oh, God.
Bea’s grip on my shoulders tightened. “So first, once you let your emotions come out after shoving them down for so long, your body figured out it was attracted to him. And now your body’s taken the next step and figured out you really like him. For more than, like, sexual purposes. So your brain’s trying to catch up. That disconnect probably made you react to him in a super irrational way.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but she kept barreling on.
“And your anxiety over the Maisy battle is just adding to your stress on top of everything right now, all your emotional stuff. Which probably made your reaction even worse.”
“How do you know I have anxiety about—”
“Well, of course you do. The whole demon princess situation is super scary and you’re trying to deny it’s scary rather than just accepting that it’s okay to be freaked. That you should be freaked.”
I slumped over, resting my forehead on my knees. I couldn’t even begin to process the thought of Nate and I existing beyond our just orgasms arrangement.
Why couldn’t I do that?
“Evie.” I felt her hand on my back. A rush of warmth washed over me, making me feel momentarily soothed.
Unfortunately, then she started talking again.
“I know sometimes you think you can get rid of feelings you don’t think you should be having,” she said. “I know because I do it, too. Like with Mom. I still feel sad sometimes and it’s like, why? I shouldn’t still feel this sad. It’s been almost five years. I should be moving on. But just because I think that in the most logical part of my brain space, it doesn’t make me less sad.”
My heart clenched. “Bea . . .”
“You’re scared. If you let yourself care about someone too hard, they might go away. They might die or leave, like Mom and Dad.” She rubbed my back and I felt that rush of warmth again. “That’s not gonna stop you from caring, though. So you might as well give in.”
I lifted my head and looked at her. She was still ultra-serious, trying to gauge my reaction. “You sound so smart,” I blurted out.
She gave a long-suffering sigh. “I’ve always been brilliant. I got all As this semester without going to class once.”
I should have scolded her, but curiosity got the better of me. “How?”
“I homeschooled myself.” She grinned. “I called the school and pretended I was you and I informed them I have a very rare and contagious disorder and I needed to be quarantined all semester. They sent me my work, I sent it back. I aced all the tests and did extra credit in math. The end.”
“A generic and extremely sudden ‘disorder’? They bought that?”
She shrugged. “Schools have to be super-sensitive nowadays. Otherwise I could totes sue them for discrimination. Against my disorder.”
“But . . . but . . .” I spluttered, not sure what to address first. “Don’t you miss your friends?”
“I don’t have any friends. Well, not at school. Not anymore.” She looked down at the bedspread. “Aveda’s my friend. And Lucy. Scott and Nate.”
I scrutinized her. Even after everything that’d happened with Mom and Dad, I’d always assumed she’d stayed the same: popular and selfish, the tempestuous life of the party. But now I saw that she was nearly as lost as I was.
She was kind of a mess, too.
“Mom would be proud of you,” I said. “Balancing school with a real job and managing to kick ass at both? Pretty awesome.”
A small smile crept over her face. “Does that mean I can still have my disorder next semester?”
“We’ll see.” I squeezed her hand and left the rest of my thought unspoken.
If there is another semester. If I manage to keep Maisy from totally destroying the city and all.
“For now, why don’t we talk about that song list?” I said. “And my showmanship.”
She hopped up and trotted over to her spreadsheets. “So are you gonna go for it with Nate? ’Cause you should. Let him buy the bigger bed.”
That heady stew of feelings was still swirling around in my stomach. I wasn’t sure of anything and I especially wasn’t sure of that.
“I can’t believe I just talked to you about all that.” It was an artful dodge of her question, but it was also the truth: for the first time, we’d spoken as something other than enforcer and inmate. I’d acknowledged that she was growing up. And much as I hated to admit it, I was probably going to have to keep doing that.
“I can believe it,” she said. “So. Ready to get started?” She gestured to her spreadsheets and looked at me hopefully, purple-streaked cap of hair listing to the side.
This, I realized, was what I’d miss if the world suddenly weren’t there. Her looking at me like that, as if I was actually capable of fighting a demon princess and saving us all.
Maybe I was. In any case, I had to try.
I took a deep breath and felt something resembling strength take root in my veins.
“Okay,” I said, “tell me more about the boy bands.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I’D LIKE TO be able to say I took the mature route. That I took Bea’s words to heart and untangled my feelings and conveyed them to Nate in a calm, precise, thoroughly grown-up manner.
Instead, I avoided him for two whole days.
I claimed I was busy, I was stressed, I had to spend all my time on the seventy-three “essential vocal warm-ups” Bea had assigned me. And when he looked back at me with a flicker of hurt in those dark eyes, I pretended I didn’t notice and walked away.
Yeah, I took pretty much the most immature route available to me.
I didn’t avoid all my actual feelings on the matter, though. I allowed my anxiety and uncertainty and fear to flourish, to build and swirl and roil, and then I channeled all of it into practice fireballs. So there was that.
Anyway, my future relationship status seemed like kind of a silly thing to be consumed by when I had more pressing concerns. City-saving, demon princess-busting concerns. We hadn’t uncovered any new information about the stone with the mysterious changing number. It had stayed at 1, though, so at least Maisy hadn’t gotten her claws into any new humans. Presumably. There was nothing left to do but kick her ass at karaoke.
“Remember: showmanship.” Bea rubbed my shoulders as she murmured last-minute words of encouragement in my ear, as if I was a championship boxer and she was my cigar-chomping coach. “Maisy has her fanbase, but you’re the city’s hero, its beloved daughter. San Franciscans feel like you belong to them.”
“Don’t I know it,” I muttered, scanning The Gutter.
The place was packed. Bea’s social media blasts appeared to have worked their magic, as had Maisy’s increasingly contentious blog posts. “Aveda Jupiter clearly needs to be taught a lesson in humility,” she’d noted in one of them. “Rest assured, I have been practicing my karaoke shiznitz like a mofo.”
The usual seniors were in
attendance tonight, but Maisy’s hipster crowd was also well represented, a tight cluster of girls in cat-eye glasses and dudes wearing little straw hats, all of them ironically drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. I caught a glimpse of Shasta’s bangs in the mix. We still didn’t know how—or if—she was involved, but Lucy had vowed to keep an eye on her during the proceedings. The hardcore Aveda junkies were crammed into another corner, many of them wearing gigantic T-shirts emblazoned with comic book logos. Giant Dude from the Whistles incident was there, his braying laugh cutting through the crowd noise. The usual tables and chairs had been cleared to the side to create space for a makeshift dance floor.
My plan still had a key flaw I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around: Maisy was going to have to fully show her demon side before I could retaliate in any way. Otherwise it’d just look like I was attacking a poor, helpless human. I was going to have to goad her into showing all her supernaturally evil colors. And I didn’t know how, exactly, to do that.
To counter Maisy’s boy band extravaganza, Bea had put together a slate of sassy lady empowerment themes. The grand finale was an extended version of TLC’s “No Scrubs,” a dizzying showstopper that required me to sing all three parts, harmonize with myself, and sort of rap.
My crew was stationed all over the room, being various degrees of helpful. Lucy darted through the bar, checking for signs of demon activity. Nate and Scott stood a few feet away from me: heads bent, locked in conversation. Nate was gesticulating emphatically about something. I wondered if he was talking about me. The ache I didn’t want to acknowledge swelled around my heart. I shoved it down hard.
Best to save all my emotions for the show.
“Hey.” Aveda hobbled up next to me on her crutches. Because she had to be glamoured as something, she was glamoured as me. No one cared if Aveda’s trouble-making assistant was injured, though I noticed a few of Maisy’s fans giving her the stink-eye. The effect was disconcerting as she smiled my smile, then took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “You’re gonna do great, okay?”
“Thank you.” I’d ducked into her room more than a few times the past couple days when I’d been avoiding Nate. We’d talked about all manner of inconsequential things and pulled out our old yearbooks and taken a trip down Bad Hair Memory Lane. We’d even watched The Heroic Trio a couple times on her iPad. It had been nice.
