Red Girl, Blue Boy: An If Only novel (If Only . . .)

by Baratz-Logsted, Lauren

“I hope you’re right.”

  “You know I am. Now tell me: How’s the campaign trail going otherwise? I hope you’re not eating too many extra dinners. You know that extra salt can wreak havoc in terms of facial puffiness when you go before the cameras . . .”

  And so we continue for another hour, talking about the same topics we’ve been covering on a regular basis for most of my life. Not once does my father ask just what it is at school that has had me so busy. Which is a relief, because at least I don’t have to lie or sort-of lie to him. Still, it would be nice for a change if he were to show a healthy interest in whatever I might be doing outside of the campaign.

  I do feel a bit guilty. Maybe, just like the loss of the Willfield Academy mock election was my fault, I’m also to blame for whatever is going wrong with the polls? Maybe, if I’d kept my eye on the prize like I was supposed to, maybe none of this would be happening?

  But then, as we get off the phone and I see my Toto costume, I remember that tomorrow night I’ll be going on the first public date of my life and with a boy I actually like.

  And it hits me:

  For the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, I actually want something just for myself.

  DREW

  It’s not often in a guy’s life that he gets to have a Cinderella moment: the transformation of dressing up in something wholly different and going someplace to be with a special someone, knowing that when the clock strikes a certain hour it’ll all be over with. But that’s exactly what’s happening tonight. Only in this case the someplace is the masquerade ball at Kat’s school and the ending won’t be at the traditional fairy-tale hour of midnight but at eleven, when the ball is scheduled to end. That’s when we’ll have to go back to hiding out.

  But until then? Having our first chance to do something in public together as a couple, even if we have to hide behind costumes?

  That’s magic.

  • • •

  I wish I could pick up Kat instead of the other way around but that’s not how this particular story goes. We have to rely on Kent to drive us. He’s the only one who knows what’s going on; plus, he’s the only one with a driver’s license. I’m not sure what Kent thinks of all this, but when he picks me up at the end of the driveway and I climb into the back of the limo, he’s perfectly courteous. Climbing in is not as simple as you’d think given the bulk of the Tin Man suit.

  Still it’s worth it, because there’s Kat waiting for me, looking totally adorable in her Toto costume. I mean, I’m not sure she actually looks like Toto, what with all those colored streamers attached to her puffy suit and hood, and that gold makeup all over her face with whiskers drawn on. Maybe she misunderstood and thought I said the Cowardly Lion? But she is adorable.

  “Hello, Mr. Kent,” I say, on my best behavior. “Thank you for driving us, sir.”

  “Mr. Kent is my father,” Kent says, eyeing me sternly in the rearview mirror. “Just Kent’ll do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And no ‘sir’ either.”

  “Okay . . . Kent.”

  Still eyeing me in the mirror, he puts the car in gear.

  I’d like to tell Kat how great she looks, how excited I am about the night to come, but it’s too awkward with her Secret Service agent right up front. I wonder how well he can see the road given how steadily he’s eyeing me in that mirror.

  So I do the one thing I can do. I reach out and take one of Kat’s hands, squeezing the fingers beneath her costume furry paw with one of my own hands, covered with silver makeup.

  There are cars pulling up to the drop-off lane in front of Willfield Academy, but Kent pulls around to the back of the school. Even if we’re in costume, Kat says this particular limousine would be very recognizable to the other kids arriving and we don’t want to give the game away.

  It’s amazing all the little details you have to think of and bases to cover when you’re trying to get away with something.

  “I’m not sure I should be doing this,” Kent says, putting the car in park, “aiding and abetting you two.”

  “Well, we appreciate it, sir.”

  “What did I tell you about that? Just don’t get into any trouble and be sure to be out here by eleven.”

  “I’ll take good care of her.”

  He gives me one last glare in the mirror before nodding curtly. “Be sure you do.”

  And then it’s like we’re released. As Kent leisurely moves to get out of his seat, I open my door, haul myself out, and hurry around the car so I can get there first to open Kat’s door for her. All of which is easier in theory than in practice in a Tin Man costume.

  Holding the door, I reach down and grab hold of Kat’s outstretched paw to help her out.

  “Nice move,” Kent observes.

  “Thank you.”

  With one leg back in the car he adds, “Be sure to keep it up.”

  Before I can offer reassurance on that front, he slams the door, but then opens the window. “Remember what I said,” he says. “Be out here by eleven sharp, because I’ll be waiting. And if you’re not out in time?” He glares at me. “I’m storming the place.” The window shuts before I can respond.

  Kat laughs. “He’s just being overprotective.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sorry. Did that bother you?”

  “No. It’s kind of nice to think of someone looking out for your best interests when I’m not around.”

  And it is. From what Kat has told me, it’s not like her dad pays much attention to her interests—not unless it somehow affects one of his campaigns—and she doesn’t really remember her mom.

  “I’m glad you’ve got him,” I say.

  “I’m glad I’ve got you,” she says, slipping her hand into mine.

  We walk around to the front of the school to join the line of ticket holders waiting to get in. Even though Kat’s in costume, it’s tough to take my eyes off her. But when I finally do, I notice something unexpected.

  “Um, Kat? Why does everyone else look like they just stepped out of a Shakespeare play or some episode of Masterpiece with masks?”

  I’m still laughing as we tumble into the gym with the rest of the crowd.

  “Weren’t you the one who said,” I say, laughing so hard it’s tough to get the words out, “that Willfield Academy just likes to call things by fancy names and that the masquerade ball was just a fancy name for a regular costume party? Well, look around you, Kat: I’m pretty sure this is a masquerade ball!”

  She looks around us.

  “Are you sure,” I say, “that you didn’t get it mixed up with what they do for Halloween?”

  People are staring at us like crazy—we look so out of place—and yet, I don’t care. I’m with Kat. And anyway, with these costumes, no one can tell who we are.

  “I didn’t know,” Kat says. And that’s when I notice the look of dismay on her face, beneath her sparkly gold makeup. “I’ve never come to one of these things before.”

  “It’s okay, Kat,” I say.

  “It is? You don’t feel ridiculous?”

  I shrug and smile. “Of course I feel ridiculous. But so what? No one even knows who we are. And if they did? Still, so what?”

  She smiles then.

  “You know,” I say, “I hate to break this to you, but between the face makeup and the furry thing over your head, you look more like a lion than a dog.”

  “Oh, great. Well, thanks. You know, it’s not easy making your own costume.”

  “No, it’s not. Dance with me?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come on.” I take her paw and gently tug her toward the floor, where all the dukes and duchesses are gyrating like crazy to some fast song. “It’ll be fun.”

  “I don’t know how to dance. I’ll look silly.”

  “Seriously?” I laugh, using my free hand to indicate my Tin Man costume. “You think that dancing is what’ll finally make us look silly? You don’t think that ship has already sail
ed?”

  “Didn’t I just mention that I don’t know how to dance?”

  She may sound like she’s resisting but her feet are slowly following me.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret I learned,” I whisper, “from back when I was younger and my friends and I used to stand at the sidelines at dances.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Everyone’s self-conscious, everyone worries that other people will see them looking silly. The truth is, everyone is so worried about how they look themselves that no one is really looking at you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Plus, another thing I learned from watching. Guys who dance? They have a greater chance of getting kissed at the end of the night.”

  Kat throws her head back and laughs and then she starts to move. A part of me would like to say that she’s a natural. The truth? She dances even worse than she sings. I mean, she looks positively ridiculous. I imagine we both do. And the few times I look around, when I can tear my eyes away from her, I see that despite what I said about other dancers being too wrapped up in themselves to notice what anyone else is doing, a large percentage of the people around us are staring at us like: Who let these two in?

  But so what?

  Let ridiculousness reign.

  The night progresses.

  And we do all the normal school-dance things. Except, you know, our way.

  When we get out of breath from all the fast dancing, we hit the refreshments table. Since Kat has trouble grasping a cookie herself—you know, paws for hands—I hold it up to her mouth so she can take bites, popping the last bite into my own mouth just in case I got silver makeup on it and the silver makeup is toxic. I may not be dressed like one of these masquerading dukes all around me but at least I can be as chivalrous as one.

  And then, more dancing.

  It’s not until a slow song finally comes on that I look up at the clock on the wall and see that it’s five minutes to eleven.

  “Last dance!” the DJ calls.

  How did that happen?

  I look down at Kat and hold my hands out to her, and she takes them with her paws. Then I pull her close, or as close as I can with the Tin Man costume. This is where I’ve wanted to be all night. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for: being out in public with my girl, dancing with her in my arms.

  Soon, this moment will end and the clock will strike and we’ll have to go back to where we were before: hiding in the shadows.

  But right now, this is enough.

  It’s better than enough. It’s fantastic.

  When Kent pulls up in front of my house, I think again how I wish things were different and our parents weren’t, well, competing against each other on a national scale. If I had my license, not only would I have been able to pick Kat up for the dance, but I’d be dropping her off now too, doing the clichéd thing of walking her to her door.

  I can’t believe I’ve turned into a guy who wants to be a cliché. But there you have it.

  Things aren’t different, though, and that means it’s Kat walking me to my door instead. Past the bushes, the house in front of us mostly dark—Mom’s on the road campaigning, the twins are no doubt asleep, and my dad is who knows where.

  But that’s okay, because when we get to the door I do something I’ve been dying to do all night. I push the hood of her costume back, letting her blond hair tumble free. I put my silver hands in her hair and draw her in close until my lips touch hers.

  I’ve been wanting to do this for so many hours, I don’t care who sees me do it.

  Okay, I suppose only Kent can see, and hopefully he’s looking away, but still.

  Because as good as the night has been so far, this moment is even better—her hair in my hands, my lips on hers, Kat kissing me back.

  I’m so caught up in the moment that I’m startled when Kat pulls away.

  “Did you hear something?” she asks.

  I’m so distracted by her I can’t hear anything, unless it’s the sound of my own racing heart. “Like what?” I say, still distracted, lowering my face toward hers, aching to kiss those lips again.

  But she remains stiff in my arms.

  “It sounded like rustle followed by snick and then another snick,” she says.

  I force myself to concentrate, to listen for a moment, but there’s nothing there.

  “Do you still hear it?”

  “No,” she says, shrugging before adding what may be the most romantic words I’ve ever heard in my life, words that tell me that she’s the one person in the world who knows exactly how I feel right now, “it must have been the pounding of my own heart.”

  I kiss her again.

  I wish this moment could go on forever.

  KATIE

  “Ugh! This makeup—I don’t think my skin can breathe under it!”

  I’m back in the limo, being driven away.

  “Then it wasn’t worth it, Miss Katie?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I sigh. When I close my eyes, I can imagine the feel of Drew’s lips on mine, his arms around me tight, claiming me as his. “It was so worth it.”

  DREW

  Not only have I become a cliché, but I’m a romantic fool of a cliché, because, yes, I walk into the house on cloud nine. There’s nothing that can spoil my mood, I think, as I shut the front door behind me. Nothing can spoil this night.

  That’s when I hear my dad’s voice call out from his office: “Drew? Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” I call back.

  I follow the trail of the few lights that have been left on back to my dad’s office, finding him in his usual spot: behind his desk with the back of his laptop facing the door.

  I wonder how I’m going to explain my strange costume to him, but in the end I don’t have to. Because after he looks at me and mutters a “What the . . .?,” he stops, his voice catching.

  “Dad? What is it?” I ask, fear setting in. Are those tears in my dad’s eyes? I’ve never seen him cry before. “What’s wrong?”

  That’s when he turns the laptop so that it’s now facing me and I can see what he’s been looking at.

  “Drew,” my dad says, “I swear, it’s not true.”

  KATIE

  I don’t know how I manage to get to sleep, but I do and have only the finest of dreams. And when I wake on Saturday morning? It’s to the glorious sound of the phone ringing, followed by Cook yelling up the stairs for me.

  I nearly trip over my feet in my effort to race downstairs, skidding to a stop in front of Cook, who’s holding the landline out to me.

  Landlines—what a wonderful thing.

  “It’s that boy who calls sometimes,” Cook says.

  As if I need to be told who it is, I think, smiling inside as I take the phone from her.

  “Hello?” I say, so eager to talk to Drew, so eager to hear him say that he had as good a time as I did last night.

  But first my greeting is met with a long moment of silence. And then: “How could you do it?” a voice I barely recognize says.

  “Excuse me? Drew?”

  “Who else would it be? Who else . . . trusted you?”

  Immediately I’m on the defensive, even though I have no clue what I have to be defensive about. “What are you talking about?”

  “The news. Haven’t you seen the news yet?”

  “No. I just got up.” There’s a sense of foreboding in my stomach and it just keeps growing. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “As if you don’t know.”

  “But I don’t! Drew, what is it?”

  “It’s all over the news. Some ‘unidentified source’ ”—Drew endows these last two words with more venom than I’ve ever heard two words endowed with— “has told the press that my dad is cheating on my mom.”

  “That’s horrible! What kind of awful person would do such a thing?”

  Another moment of silence. And then somehow, even more venom:

  “You.”

  And now I’m horrified on an entirely dif
ferent level.

  “You can’t possibly think—”

  But I get no further because he again snarls, “I . . . trusted you,” only now, sickeningly, I know what he means. “You were the only person I told—so who else could it be?”

  “Someone else, anyone else, it just wasn’t—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Katie.”

  I can’t speak. I’m not Kat anymore?

  “I trusted you. I believed in you. But all the while you were just setting me up to get info for your dad’s campaign. Not using the info right away? That was a move of sheer brilliance. You waited until I fell for you, so you could cause the most damage. Maybe you even thought I’d never guess it was you. But since I told no one else, who could it really be?”

  After all the years I’ve spent helping my father write campaign speeches—after the thousands upon thousands of words I’ve written in the cause of persuading others to our point of view—in the end, when I open my mouth to defend myself, no words will come.

  Then I hear the worst words of all:

  “Good-bye, Katie. I never want to see you again.”

  DREW

  I know that was the right thing to do, that I had no other choice.

  So why does it hurt so bad?

  KATIE

  This morning I woke with such clarity of purpose: knowing things were solid between me and Drew, eager to talk to him on the phone because this thing—us, together—has become the best thing in my life.

  But now?

  It’s like I’m moving in a fog, placing the landline on the foyer table, and starting the slow trudge back up the long flight of stairs.

  Then I think: Wait a second. I’m a Willfield. Willfields don’t take things lying down. Willfields meet challenges head-on!

  Maybe, I don’t know, Drew’s wrong somehow. Maybe he read the story incorrectly. This has to be a mistake. It just has to be.

  I race back up the rest of the stairs to my room, turn on my computer, and defy my father’s ban: I access the Internet, hoping against hope—like Truman defeating Dewey (even though Truman was a Democrat, it’s still a great analogy for this)—that this can all still turn out okay.