Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  For DSK

  WELCOME TO WILLOW POPULATION 4, 218

  PROLOGUE

  LOOKING BACK NOW AT THE night of Olivia Richmond’s birthday party, my original expectations for the night were so innocent, they were pitiable. It was the second week of our junior year of high school, a week before the Fall Fling, and the most pressing issue on my mind was whether or not a cute boy would ask me to go to the dance.

  Violet had suggested that we play a game, and it seemed so simple. There were no rules to learn, no cards to deal, no need to split into teams.

  She hadn’t mentioned that in her game, she was always the winner.

  Or that playing could cost you your life.

  CHAPTER 1

  UM, HELLO. YOU DID NOT mention that Henry would be home this weekend,” Candace said, interrupting Olivia’s sidewalk monologue about her pursuit of the perfect dress for the Fall Fling. The search had begun over the summer. Olivia could picture it in her head, and after having heard her detailed description twice during our after-school trip to the mall, we could all picture it in vivid detail too. The dream dress was the color of vanilla buttercream frosting, not so yellow as to be summery, less formal than a homecoming gown, and not so white as to be bridelike. Ecru would do, or eggshell, or any pale variation on white that would show off Olivia’s glamorous tan, obtained by rowing each morning at summer camp in Canada. Even my daily runs in Florida beneath the blazing sun hadn’t rewarded me with a tan as dark as Olivia’s.

  We were walking to the Richmonds’ house from the bus stop a few blocks away. Our plan was to sleep over at Olivia’s house that night to celebrate her birthday, and the straps of my overnight bag, which I’d carried with me to school that day and afterward to the mall, dug into my shoulder. It was the first week of September, and although I’d known Olivia, Mischa, and Candace my entire life, I’d only been hanging out with them since the beginning of the semester. There was no way I would have been invited to any of their birthday parties during our freshman or sophomore years, and I was highly aware that my admission into their group and consequential new popularity was due to the complete transformation I’d undergone over the summer. Just as I was still getting used to boys who’d never looked at me before suddenly checking me out, I was still getting to know my new circle of friends.

  Olivia was the last among us to turn sixteen, but none of us had our own wheels yet that September. Mischa shared a car with her older sister, who seemed to always have custody of it. Candace’s divorced parents were denying her access to wheels until she picked up her grades when report cards were released at the end of the semester, one of the few things upon which they agreed. Taking the bus home from the mall was hardly desirable, but it was less nerdish than having a parent pick up all five of us in an SUV curbside outside Nordstrom. We were in high spirits that afternoon after having slurped down sugary lattes at the mall, dropping our parents’ money on earrings and paperback novels just to have purchased something to carry back to Olivia’s house. Leaving the mall empty-handed felt strange and wasteful. I had bought a pair of chandelier earrings I thought might be cool for the Fall Fling, if any boy were to ask me within the next week.

  Olivia looked down the block toward her house, where Candace’s eyes had spotted Henry’s blue pickup truck in the driveway. Olivia’s angelic button nose wrinkled, and she put one hand on her hip as if objecting to her older brother’s presence within the three-story house. “Ugh. I didn’t know he’d be here,” Olivia replied.

  “Who’s Henry?”

  Violet Simmons was new in town. Only a girl who had moved to Willow over the summer could be ignorant of Henry Richmond’s identity.

  “My brother,” Olivia informed her with disgust.

  “Her totally hot brother,” Candace added. Candace had a big chest and a loud mouth. Her last name was Cotton, which was abundant reason for every kid in class to crack up whenever a substitute teacher read roll call in homeroom and announced her name as Cotton, Candy. She wasn’t as pretty as Olivia, but from a distance if you kind of squinted at her when the sun was shining in just the right way, you might believe it if she told you she was a runway model. During my two weeks as an inductee into Olivia’s popular circle, I had been endlessly amused by Candace’s gravel-voiced musings and observations. Candace suspected that Mr. Tyrrell, the biology teacher, was probably a good kisser. She had been suspended from school for three days at the tail end of our sophomore year, back when I was still the old version of McKenna, for getting caught by Coach Highland under the bleachers during gym class with Isaac Johnston. Candace said exactly what she thought, and even though she was hilarious, I was a little terrified of her. It was likely that Candace thought about nothing but fooling around with boys, every second of every day.

  “You are so gross, Candace.” Olivia rolled her eyes.

  But Candace wasn’t alone in thinking Henry was hot. I’d had a crush on Henry Richmond since just about the second grade, way back when it was still the custom in our small town to invite every kid in your elementary school class to your birthday party. Henry was two years older than Olivia and had just started college at Northwestern. He was majoring in sociology with the goal of getting into law school after undergrad. I only knew all this because I had practically committed every single photograph and mention of him in my yearbook to memory. Last year, it was likely that Henry had never even noticed me any of the times our paths had crossed in the hallway at school, when he was a graduating senior, already accepted at Northwestern with a generous scholarship, and I was an unremarkable sophomore. It was just as likely that if he had noticed me, he never would have remembered me as a chubby-cheeked second grader sitting at his parents’ dining room table, singing “Happy Birthday” in the dark to Olivia when she turned eight.

  “I think it’s sweet! He came home for your birthday,” Mischa said. Mischa was the complete physical opposite of Candace. Mischa was petite and nimble, the school’s star gymnast, with perfectly straight, thick brown hair that hung down her back to her waist, heavy and glossy. She was sharp-tongued and chose her words carefully, but in our two weeks of fast friendship I had gotten the distinct feeling that there was always a storm of thought going on behind her eyes.

  “He did not come home for my birthday,” Olivia corrected Mischa. “He’s probably home because of his stupid foot.”

  Henry had been on the school’s tennis team, bringing Willow High School its only state title in tennis in over twenty years. He had played most of his senior-year season on a stress fracture in his fifth metatarsal, and only after he won the championship in Madison did he go to the doctor and start hobbling around the high school in a soft cast. At graduation, he crossed the stage on crutches and Principal Nylander slapped him proudly on the back. I only knew this because I’d been at graduation, even as a lowly tenth grader, as part of the color guard team. I’d held my huge white flag throughout the entire commencement exercise in the hot June sun, watching Henry Richmond, a little in awe of his height, his auburn hair, his twinkling green eyes.

  I would be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty excited about Henry’s presence in the Richmond household the night of Olivia’s slumber party. As we approached the house, where we’d be setting up camp in Olivia’s carpeted basement for the night, my heart actually began to flutter at the prospect of catching a glimpse of Henry. Of having a chance to peek into his bedroom.

  As we marched across the Richmonds’ front lawn, all carrying our shopping bags from our mall excursion in addition to our backpacks, the glass storm door of the house opened and Henry stepped out onto the Richmonds’ front porch.

  “Well, look who’s finally home! It’s the birthday girl,” Henry called out to us. The keys to his truck dangled from his
index finger.

  “Why are you back, nerd?” Olivia asked him, thwacking him with the backpack she pulled off her shoulder. He deflected it expertly, accustomed to their lifetime together of play fights.

  “I wouldn’t have missed your little princess party for the world,” Henry teased, looking us over. I felt color and heat rising in my cheeks under his gaze as he reviewed us, a collection of the prettiest sixteen-year-old girls Willow High School had to offer. Surely he knew Candace and Mischa from their years of friendship with Olivia. He was probably, at that very moment, realizing that one familiar face was missing from his sister’s gaggle of giggling friends: Emily Morris, the redhead with the big pout, had moved to Chicago over the summer.

  “Yeah, right.” Olivia smirked. “So, where’s my present?”

  “My presence is your present,” Henry joked. “And besides, your birthday is tomorrow. So even if I had brought you back something really cool from campus, you’d have to wait until the morning to find out.”

  I thought about the silver earrings in the shape of ribbons that I had brought with me, wrapped and tucked away in my backpack to give to Olivia in the morning as a gift. I’d spent the majority of the money I’d gotten from my grandparents and relatives for my own birthday on them.

  “Meanie.” Olivia replied.

  “Henry, you already know Mischa and Candace. This is Violet, and McKenna,” Olivia said, nodding her head at each of us as she made our introductions.

  “McKenna,” Henry said, repeating my name, looking me over from head to toe with those green, green eyes. In the months that had passed since Henry had graduated and school had let out in the spring, I’d gone to Florida to stay with my dad and his wife, Rhonda, who was a registered nurse. She had helped me lose the twenty pounds of baby fat that had kept me shopping at plus-size stores throughout junior high and the first two years of high school. When I’d returned home to Wisconsin, my mother had studied my new appearance and had finally relented about the cost of contact lenses. I was glasses-free for the first time since the third grade, when it had been determined that I was nearsighted. According to Olivia, I was practically unrecognizable. Her opinion probably should have offended me, but because I knew she thought I looked amazing, I was flattered by it.

  “I remember you. You live over on Martha Road, right?”

  This sudden attention from him was enough to make me stutter and stammer. If I had known when Olivia first asked me to spend the night at her house that Henry would be there, I might have chickened out entirely and made up an excuse about needing to go out of town with my mom.

  “Yeah,” I managed to reply. The fact that he knew which street I lived on probably shouldn’t have surprised me; the year that I was eight, everyone knew where we lived. Everyone used to drive past. But I guess I was surprised that he still remembered, even after so many years.

  “Cool,” Henry said, nodding without smiling. There was a moment of awkward silence, when I feared that all of us except Violet were thinking the same thing. It was the reason Henry might have remembered me since childhood, something no one in town spoke of often, and something I preferred not to think about much. Thankfully, no one said a word.

  You’re McKenna Brady, that girl . . .

  “I have Packers tickets for tomorrow,” Henry announced, breaking the silence. “Me and Dad are going to the game after my radiology appointment.”

  “I knew it,” Olivia said to all of us. “See? He’s getting X-rays. He doesn’t even care that it’s my Sweet Sixteen.”

  “I can’t help it if football season happens to start on my little sister’s birthday,” Henry teased. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mom dispatched me to run some errands in town.”

  It was almost six o’clock on a Friday night, the early September summer sky a lazy shade of periwinkle. The weather was still aggravatingly warm, a dry kind of warm that made it impossible for me to focus in class because my brain was convinced that it was still summer break. It was warm enough that Olivia had instructed all of us to bring bathing suits to her party just in case we felt like jumping in the pool before dinner. I wondered if that was still on her mind—that dip in the pool—because although I had worn my new bathing suit a few times in Florida while down at my dad’s condo, I had never worn it yet around people who I actually knew in Willow. The thought of debuting it in front of Henry thrilled me, and made my heart beat dangerously fast. My weight loss was recent enough that I still kind of couldn’t believe my own eyes when I looked in the mirror. It always kind of felt like at any given moment, the pounds could just appear back on my frame unexpectedly. The Richmonds were wealthy, or at least financially comfortable to the extent that I was pretty sure Olivia’s mom didn’t clip coupons out of the Sunday paper for dishwashing liquid and frozen low-cal dinners like my mom did. It was safe to assume that there would be a cute economy car with a bow on it in the Richmonds’ driveway waiting for Olivia in the morning. I found myself fighting a sudden surge of jealousy. I’d turned sixteen in July, and I’d known with certainty even months before my own Sweet Sixteen that there would be no car provided to me by my parents.

  As the engine of Henry’s pickup revved behind us, Candace muttered, “When it’s my birthday, can your brother be my present?”

  * * *

  An hour later, as we all floated in the pool and conversation had once again returned to the upcoming dance, I watched distractedly as dark, angry storm clouds rolled in from the south. I was lingering in the deep end of the pool, treading water, keeping one hand on a pink floating lounger and one eye on the glass sliding door that led to the Richmonds’ living room. My friendship with Olivia was too fresh for me to ask for any information about her brother, and I was too insecure in my own new attractiveness to think I might stand any kind of shot with him. For all I knew, Henry had resurrected his high school relationship with Michelle Kimball, the girl he had dated throughout his junior and senior years. I had heard they’d broken up at the start of the summer, knowing they’d be going to separate colleges in the fall. Michelle was good friends with Amanda, Mischa’s older sister, so I assumed it was best to keep my interest in Henry suppressed.

  “We’re going to Bobby’s after the dance, definitely,” Mischa was saying, drawing my attention back to the girls in the pool and away from the possibility of the door sliding open and Henry stepping out onto the patio. “Amanda and Brian are driving me and Matt. Is Pete going to have wheels?”

  Violet perked up at the mention of Pete’s name. I doubted that anyone at school had clued her in yet to the fact that Olivia and Pete were practically an institution. They’d been into each other since fourth grade. If there was any guy in all of Willow who was definitely off-limits, he was the one. Violet must have figured out by the night of the party that being befriended by Olivia was the equivalent of winning the social lottery. Showing interest in Pete or challenging Olivia’s status would have just been foolish. Our town was so small that it wasn’t as if there were many other girls who would want to hang with you if you had Olivia, Candace, or Mischa as an enemy.

  Mischa was extremely fortunate in that Amanda was a senior who happened to be dating the captain of the varsity football team. Even though Amanda was always putting their shared car to use, Mischa never had to walk to school or ride the bus because Amanda drove her everywhere. Amanda’s own popularity had poured the foundation for Mischa to follow in her footsteps. Amanda had been the captain of the junior varsity cheerleading team and that year was the captain of the varsity team, as nimble and athletic as her younger sister.

  “That’s the plan,” Olivia mused lazily, watching her own long, platinum-blonde hair fan out in the water. Pete was a junior, like us, and had just turned sixteen and gotten his license. His parents had bought him a black Infiniti, and he rolled into the parking lot every morning at school like a king. Bobby’s was the one and only twenty-four-hour diner in town, the place where cool high school kids congregated after school and football games. Even the
McDonald’s and KFC in Willow closed at ten o’clock at night. Before junior year, I had never had the nerve to step into Bobby’s other than on a weekend morning with my mom for breakfast.

  “So, what’s the plan? Should we drive together? My stepdad is going to freak if I tell him I’m driving with Isaac alone,” Candace said. She was sprawled on her back on the other floating chaise lounge, one that was an aquamarine shade of transparent blue, letting her arms drift across the surface of the water. Candace, for all her boy craziness, sort of had a boyfriend. Isaac, the guy who had been partially responsible for her sophomore-year suspension, was a senior that year. He played defense on the football team and was a big guy with a booming laugh. I would have liked him immensely if it weren’t for the fact that as recently as five months earlier he had teased me callously about being a “dog” and a “cow.” So far, during my junior year, he hadn’t dared to utter a single insult at me. That was the power of being pretty, I was finding: not having to constantly dread childish insults being lobbed at me. Isaac wasn’t very bright, which seemed to bother Candace, even though she wasn’t exactly being invited to join National Honor Society either.

  “Well, we have to figure out what these two nerds are going to do,” Olivia said, nodding at me and then at Violet.

  Violet and I exchanged glances across the length of the pool, both momentarily hating each other. Neither of us had a boyfriend, or any solid prospective dates for the dance. Because my attractiveness was so new, boys who had known me since kindergarten weren’t sure what to do with it just yet. To them, I was still McKenna Brady, the smart girl, the girl liked by parents and teachers, the girl with glasses and braces who had lived through that thing back in third grade. I could have no way of knowing if any of them were ever going to work up the nerve to be the first boy to acknowledge that I’d changed by asking me out, even though I was all too aware of their eyes on me in the hallways at school. I could have taken matters into my own hands and asked Dan Marshall, a somewhat friendly junior whose locker was next to mine, or Paul Freeman, who had offered me his algebra notes when I’d been out sick for a week at the end of sophomore year. But asking either of them to be my date would be like an admission of defeat.