“We’re dressed pretty well for being common scullery maids.” Mom laughs.
Dad tugs at his cuffs. “I wouldn’t say Principal Walker enjoys punishing you. People do strange things out of fear. He fears if he lets up on you at all, other kids will try these stunts and he’ll lose control.” He stops fiddling with his suit and looks at me, putting his hands on my cheeks. “It’s the reason I watched you so closely, sweetheart. I was afraid, but God doesn’t give us a spirit of fear.” He gazes at my mother and smiles at me. “It’s when I worried that I really might have lost you, that’s when I learned what real fear is. It’s like your mother trying to protect you from the truth about my health. But we learned that everything else, even my daughter burning down a friend’s house, is survivable. Fear doesn’t change a thing.”
Mrs. Webber comes out of the guest bedroom wearing a white organza dress with a side of ruched ruffles on the left. It seems so strange to see such a vision of classic elegance emerge from our tacky, baby blue bathroom. The months in our home have taken their toll on her once flawless beauty, and her smile is clipped. “Are we ready?”
“You look beautiful,” I tell her.
She pushes my hair back. “You’re sweet, Daisy. You’d better get dressed. It’s nearly time to go.”
“I’m wearing what I’m going to wear.” I look to the clock, then down at my peasant blouse and jeans. “No sense wasting a dress on working. It’s not as though I’m going to fit in.” But as I look around me, I see I’m the only one who feels that way. My mom opens the hall closet and pulls out my dress, the beautiful flamingo organza gown with the Victorian clip.
I rush to the closet. “What happened? Did you find another one?” I clutch it to my cheek and brush it against me like a baby blanket. “Oh my goodness, like buttah! Mom, where did you find it? Did you get it at Goodwill?”
“Goodwill? Find another one?” Mrs. Webber laughs. “Your mother made that! She took the clip off the old one, of course, but that’s a better dress. The stitching is practically couture. Your mother is incredible.”
“It’s well-constructed,” Mom says humbly. She leans into my ear and whispers, “I sewed in a little padding. You know, up top.” I run into my room, slip into the dress, and look at my reflection in the mirror. I let the light fabric twirl, and it clings in its swingy, feminine way. I pat the spongy chest my mother stitched in, and I grin. She gets it. She finally gets it.
My reflection fills me with melancholy. There’s something so lonely about looking your best and knowing there’s no one at the other end to care. “This is it,” I tell the mirror. “The night I waited for all year.”
I emerge from my room to find everyone waiting for me. “The car’s here,” my dad says.
“The car?”
“Mr. Webber rented us a limousine. We’re going in style.” My father hooks elbows with my mother and me and allows Claire and Mrs. Webber to exit the house first.
“You’ve grown up a lot this year,” my mom says. “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart.”
Walking into prom with my parents is the ultimate in humiliation. At least I thought so until Principal Walker greets us at the top of the stairs. “Well, I do hope you won’t make me regret allowing parents to chaperone tonight.” He winks. “Claire and Daisy, why don’t you come with me? I’ve got the perfect job for you two.” He holds out two handheld instruments. “These are Breathalyzers. Your job this evening will be to make certain everyone coming up the stairs and gaining entry into our prom is perfectly sober, and then they’ll walk to the next station, where security will inspect their handbags and camera sacks.”
I grab the small black device. “I don’t know how to use this,” I tell him.
“Clearly.” He holds it up. “Breathe into it like this.”
Claire pipes up. “I cannot believe I’m here. No date, my dad present, now I’m testing people’s stinky breath? When’s the punishment going to end?”
Mr. Webber stands beside her. “Claire, what did we talk about?”
“But I didn’t know I’d be doing this. What about swine flu? SARS? Is this safe? Can you make us do this?”
Mrs. Webber gives her a dirty look. We both take our stations behind the makeshift entry table draped in our school colors of blue and gold. Our parents leave us to attend to the dance floor; their job is to ensure there is no grinding or inappropriate dancing. If there was ever a job custom-made for my father, there it is.
Greeting my peers with a Breathalyzer in their face is akin to giving them the opportunity to pummel and abuse me. It’s like a hall pass.
I’m fine for a while, giggling with Claire about certain dresses, until Chase appears next to Amber Richardson. She’s wearing an aqua princess gown with sparkles and a full skirt. Somehow my punishment was fine until seeing Amber and Chase. It seems their sin was no different from mine. They were at the party. Amber was where she didn’t belong, and yet I’m here with a Breathalyzer and she looks like Cinderella.
“Does Cinderella rent her dress out?” Claire asks Amber. “Did you get the glass slippers? Or were they extra?”
“Very funny.” She smirks. “I suppose if I couldn’t get a date, I would have spent more money on my dress too.”
They pass their tests and we push them on. I spin around and watch them go. “Good riddance to them both.”
“You all right?”
“I’m fine. As long as he’s not really dangerous, it’s fine. All I can do is pray about it. I’m not perfect, but neither is he. I suppose I made Chase up in my mind—for the most part.”
“You girls are done,” Principal Walker says as he walks over. “Claire, you’ll be working with your mother in the photo booth, and Daisy, you’re in the ballroom with your parents, chaperoning the dance.”
“Whoopee!” I say, spinning my finger.
“It’s that kind of attitude that put you here in the first place.”
The ballroom centers around the parquet dance floor. Round white café tables with gold and white balloon arrangements hug the floor’s edges. As I walk through the crowd, I hear my name often.
“Daisy!”
“Way to go, Daisy.”
Kim Fisher, a brilliant math mind and pom-pom girl, smiles in her puffy baby-doll skirt. “We know what you did, Daisy,” she yells over the blaring music.
“Me?”
“Turning off the gas. Your father told everyone.”
I look at my father, who is dancing like a spastic panda with my mother.
“I didn’t . . . I—”
“I turned off the gas.” Chase comes up behind me and whispers in my ear.
I blink rapidly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You thought I was drugging girls, remember?”
“I saw you come out of the house. You didn’t have time to turn off the gas.”
“But you didn’t see me turn it off, did you? It was on the right side of the house, near the garage. Go check it if you don’t believe me. Before I took off, I turned the handle. It didn’t take but a second.”
“I’m so—”
“Don’t bother, Daisy. If you don’t know me better than that, you never will.”
“You let Max—”
“I tried to protect my future. I’ve put a lot into this, Daisy. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice I’ve made, but you know I had my reasons.” He stalks off toward Amber, and I feel as invisible as I’ve always felt at this school. It doesn’t matter who is right. It never did. Chase and Amber are popular and therefore right, and I’m not.
I walk toward my father and “grind patrol.” He and my mother could use a little chaperoning themselves. Ick.
“Daisy?”
I spin around so quickly, I lose my strappy silver sandal. “Max!” I’m breathless.
“Diaz, get lost before I call the cops.” Chase is behind me again.
Max holds up his iPhone, which has a picture of Chase at the party that night, a wall of flames behind him. “Go ahead, ca
ll them. I can prove you were in that house.”
“That’s Photoshopped!”
Max puts the phone back in his jacket pocket. He takes me in his arms and whisks me off to the dance floor. I feel like a feather in his embrace, my heart lighter than air. “You’re here!”
“The photographer Claire hired, he was my cousin.”
“So not Photoshopped?”
“Not Photoshopped.” He stops dancing and pulls out his phone again. “He also managed to catch this.”
I feel as if I could fly. “It’s you and me on the porch. The only good memory I have from that party.”
“We’re dancing the tango,” he says. “Look at the determination on your face. You’re ready to tango.”
I giggle. “I am ready to tango.”
He nods toward my father as the music stops. “Then come with me.”
I pull against him. “No, what are you doing?”
“Show me you’re not perfect, Bellissima. Tango in front of all these witnesses. Do it poorly, but state your claim.”
“Oh, I’m not perfect, Max. If that party proved anything, it’s that I am so far from perfect, it’s not even funny.”
“Prove it to me, then.” He leads me to the dance floor with his arm outstretched, and I am lost in his eyes, which seem to see inside of me. “I looked at this photo for months, wondering if you could have been acting, playing me to win Chase’s affections, but I saw such raw honesty in your eyes. I couldn’t believe it of you. You didn’t have it in you to deceive me, Daisy.”
“I didn’t.” I take the rose from my bodice, unpin it, and grab Max’s lapel in my hands while he circles his arms around my waist. I slide the pin through his jacket. “Consider this staking my claim.”
The band launches into the familiar tango, and Max pulls me up on stage. I hear the crowd cheering for us below, and I start to look, but he launches into the dance of his native land, and I never allow myself to watch anyone but Max. I turn toward the crowd, but he pushes my chin and attention back toward him.
“Will you watch them? Or live your life?”
I practice the swinging leg move he taught me and hear the students whistle. I even hear my dad yell, “Go, Daisy!”
I never see anyone but Max. His guidance is sure and my heart is pure, not cluttered by things that don’t matter. “Bible college,” I tell him when his forehead is pressed against mine. “I’ve been rethinking it.”
“You’d make a perfect pastor’s wife.”
“You know, I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
He touches the purity ring my father gave me. “I looked at that photograph again and again, and dreamed of this ring and the day it would be mine. With all the t’s crossed, of course.”
I have no idea what my tango looked like, I only know the night was truly perfect.
Acknowledgments
A book is a compilation of so many people’s efforts. Since I first met editor Lonnie Hull DuPont (in the late nineties at the Mount Hermon Writers Conference), I have wanted to work with her. Our schedules both finally meshed, and this book is the result.
Working with Lonnie and her team was as great as I knew it would be. Twila Bennett, thank you for the beautiful cover choices and the thought behind the art. Janelle Mahlmann, thank you for keeping me on track and ahead of the game plan. Jessica Miles, you went above and beyond the call of duty with your galley fixes. You are all fabulous to work with, and I consider it an honor.
And finally, to my agent, Lee Hough, for putting up with my loud, rushed cell phone calls from soccer game bleachers and whirring coffee shop lines—and anywhere else you happened to catch me during my kids’ hectic schedule. Your flexibility is most appreciated.
Kristin Billerbeck is the bestselling author of several novels, including What a Girl Wants. A Christy Award finalist and two-time winner of the American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year, Billerbeck has appeared on The Today Show and has been featured in the New York Times. She lives with her family in northern California.
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