“Didn’t hear you complaining at Christmastime,” Matt says on our way to homeroom.
“That’s because it was Christmas,” I say, “which, as everyone knows, is the best of all holidays.”
“On behalf of Halloween: like hell it is, but I’m with you on this one. The dance committee went a little bonkers, and all this over a sham holiday.”
“Why is it sham holiday?”
“Because it’s totally made up.”
“All holidays are made up, if you think about it.”
“Yeah, but Valentine’s Day is the worst of them. The whole idea is to express love, right? Why do we need a special day for that? A special day that pressures people to shell out good money on candy and cards and flowers and jewelry to prove how much they love someone?”
“Why, indeed?”
Matt frowns at me. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say in mock innocence. “I’m simply thinking it could also be a day that inspires certain people to express their repressed affections for certain other people.”
“Like who?” Matt says.
Oh my God, he’s serious. “Like you, you dope.”
It takes Matt a couple of seconds to get it. Man, this kid’s thick sometimes. “Come on, I told you, Sara and I are just friends.”
“And yet, you’re obviously still pining for her.” He shrugs. “And she obviously feels something for you, otherwise she wouldn’t bristle every time you drool over another woman.”
“I do not drool over other women.”
“Oh, there’s drooling. My point is, you’re both saying there’s nothing between you, you’re just friends, but that’s not how either of you act. Tell me, have you ever actually asked Sara out on a date?”
Matt stops outside our homeroom door. “I was going to, once. It was right before her, er...you know...manifested. I’d been working up to ask her out, then she had her breakdown. After that, I don’t know. Time never felt right.”
He’s leaving something out, but I don’t push. “Maybe the time is right now,” I say. “Never know unless you try.”
“What if she says no? How can we be friends after that?”
“Matt, if your friendship with Sara falls apart after that, it’s not much of a friendship.”
I see it in his eyes: something clicks into place. Score one for Carrie the Matchmaker.
If only I could work my magic on myself.
This may come as a surprise, but I’ve never had a real boyfriend. During my Dark Period — when I shut my true persona away so I could better fit in with the beautiful people at my old school — I referred to a couple different guys as boyfriends, but that was never anything more than an empty title. I didn’t love either of them, and they sure didn’t love me; I was their arm candy, their personal hottie (and, if I’d let them, their first sexual conquest), and nothing more. In my old circle of friends, these pseudo-relationships began and ended at a moment’s notice, with the involved parties trading partners frequently. That was how much any of us truly gave a crap about one another.
Nevertheless, it’s coming up on Valentine’s Day, the first one in a few years when I haven’t been with someone, and I can’t deny I’m feeling a little lonely.
Shake it off, girl. Valentine’s Day with a fake boyfriend is worse than Valentine’s Day with no boyfriend. Of course, the whole thing would be easier to endure if I didn’t have longbow-toting cherubs mocking me from every wall of the computer lab.
“Speaking as a member of the dance committee, I want to disavow any involvement in creating the crimson nightmare that is our school,” Malcolm says, waving a finger at a trio of Cupids ganging up on the clock like primitive hunters converging on a kill.
“Ha! You failed to stop it,” I say, “so I’m holding you responsible.”
“Hm. Guess that puts me at a disadvantage, then.”
“How so?”
“I was wondering if you’d want to go to the dance with me, but if you see me as an accomplice in this crime against good taste...”
What did he say?
He’s looking at me. He expects an answer. I should answer.
“Go to the dance with you?”
That’s not an answer, idiot!
“Uh, yeah. I know we don’t really hang out outside of school, but I thought, you know...um. Sorry, I didn’t think this through past the asking you out part.”
“No, no, that’s okay, you, uh, you caught me off-guard, is all.”
“Surprise.”
To say the least. He’s right, we don’t have anything outside of school — heck, outside of this classroom, so why would he ask me out? Why not one of his cheerleader friends? Not like any of them would turn him down, the way they shamelessly fawn all over him.
(Maybe, dummy, because you’re not a vapid, pandering bimbo like them.)
“Okay,” I say.
He smiles. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“For real?”
“What, are you having second thoughts?”
“God, no.”
“Good.”
“All right. It’s a date.”
Yes it is.
I have a date.
I hope everyone else’s day is going this great.
A groan rises from Mr. Daschel’s students as he utters the words no high school student ever wants to hear from their gym teacher: “Hit the floor for dodgeball!”
“Yes!” Missy says, pumping a fist.
“You may be the only teenager in America who looks forward to dodgeball,” Sara says, sliding off the bleachers to join her classmates in their slow march to the far side of the field house.
“That’s because I’m the Queen of Dodgeball,” Missy says. “I am the queen and the gymnasium is my kingdom, you may bow before my greatness.”
“Such a freak,” Amber Sullivan mutters.
“Shut up, Amber,” Sara says.
“I can like dodgeball if I want,” Missy says.
“And I can think you’re a freak if I want,” Amber says. “Free country.”
Of the many varieties of dodgeball known to student-kind, Mr. Daschel prefers the version he calls “poisonball”: two students stand at the edge of a defined space, in which the other players stand. The pitchers throw their balls into the group, and anyone struck leaves the field to join the pitchers. The game progresses until one player remains. The pitchers get ten throws to eliminate the last student standing.
“Ready to defend your title, kid?” Mr. Daschel says to Missy, who has yet to be tagged out.
“The queen is ready to retain her crown, my loyal subject,” Missy says with an imperious wave of her hand.
“Into the field with you, then.”
Sara’s strategy is simple: get hit early, join the pitchers, take out Missy’s competition. Sara is the first to leave the floor.
The field dwindles quickly at first, the students forming too thick a clump for the balls to pass through easily. The pitchers’ throws become more targeted as the herd thins, yet the hits come less frequently. Missy uses her reputation to her advantage; each pitcher wants to be the one to end her streak, so they target her exclusively, and she expertly draws their throws into the remaining players, eliminating them one by one, until, once again, she stands alone.
“Ten throws to take down the reigning champion!” Mr. Daschel announces.
Unimpeded by other bodies, aided in secret by her superhuman reflexes, Missy dances, weaves, ducks, evades, and spins around each flying ball. Ten throws later, she remains —
“Queen of Dodgeball!” she crows.
Sara calls out a warning as Amber, in a moment of pure spite, hurls a ball at Missy’s head. The warning comes too late; the ball finds its mark, bouncing with a hollow, rubbery pwong off the back of Missy’s skull.
In the moment before Missy charges, Sara feels a wave of emotion explode from her — not anger, or hatred, or even that very specific rage born of an unexpected indignity, t
he kind that runs hot and fast and fades as quickly as it rises, but something so purely primal that it robs Sara of breath as might a physical blow to the gut.
Mr. Daschel, as stunned as anyone, hesitates before pulling Missy off the gritty gymnasium floor, off the form curled into a fetal position. Missy spits a final profanity at Amber, then as suddenly as the rage erupted, it vanishes.
“Missy, get changed and go to Mr. Dent’s office,” Mr. Daschel says. “You too, Amber.”
“Okay,” Missy says. A characteristic bounce in her step, she heads off to the locker room, slowing long enough to say to Sara, for her ears only, “Bitch had it coming.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Stop. Missy said what?” Stuart says.
“I know,” Sara says, “I couldn’t believe it either.”
“She snapped, just like that?” Matt says.
“Not just like that, no. I mean, Amber provoked her, but I’ve never seen Missy, you know, attack someone.”
“At least not someone who wasn’t trying to kill her.”
“Yeah, but Amber’s been picking on Missy since, like, the day she moved to Kingsport,” Stuart says. “Maybe this was the last straw or something.”
“Or...” I say.
“Or?”
“Astrid told us to keep an eye out for any unusual behavior. I’d say this counts.”
“No. Missy got fed up with Amber’s crap and overreacted, that’s all.”
“Maybe.”
“I think we should let Astrid know,” Matt says.
“It was a one-time thing, man,” Stuart says, growing agitated, “and she hasn’t been acting weird at all otherwise. Has she?”
Admittedly, no, she hasn’t, but, “Better safe than sorry, don’t you think?”
“All right, so let’s assume this was an after-effect of being possessed,” Sara says.
“Which it wasn’t,” Stuart says.
“What’s Enigma going to do about it? If she could fix it in the first place, she would have, right? So what’s to be gained by telling her about this?”
“I don’t know,” I confess.
“Then there’s no point in telling her. And besides, Missy’s fine,” Stuart insists.
I don’t like it, and neither does Matt, but there’s no arguing with Stuart on this one...and he does know Missy better than the rest of us. Maybe he’s right.
We agree to loiter in the library until Missy gets out of detention. En route, we bump into Gerry Yannick and Angus Parr, Kingsport High’s answer to Crabbe and Goyle. We try to skirt by them, but they form a rather effective two-man wall.
“Hey, Hauser,” Parr says. I brace for a crapstorm about Amber and Missy’s scrap, but instead he says, “Hear you’re going to the dance with Mal.”
I can almost hear my friends’ eyebrows shooting up into their hairlines. Lucy is gonna have some ‘splainin’ to do.
“That’s right,” I say. “Is that a problem?”
“Problem? Hell, it’s about time you ditched these losers and started hanging out with cool people,” Angus says, adding to Matt and Stuart, “unless you two homos are going to the dance together.”
“Wow. Calling us gay? That’s the best you can do?” Matt says, unfazed. “It’s always sad when a once-great artist uses up all his A-material.”
“Dude, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. And if I was gay, I could do a whole lot better than him,” Stuart says, jerking a thumb at Matt.
“What do you mean, you could do better than me?”
“Look at me, man. I’m a catch.”
“And I’m not good enough for you?”
“Hey, you’re my best friend and all, but you’d be a lousy boyfriend.”
“What? You’re crazy, I’d be a great boyfriend.”
“Pft. Please. You need to work on your sensitivity issues a lot if you’re ever going to be boyfriend material.”
The truly hysterical thing about this conversation: they’re not staging it to mess with Gerry and Angus. Nevertheless, it’s more than enough to put off the jocks, who trade bemused glances before pushing past us.
“So,” Sara says. “Malcolm Forth, huh?”
“Yeah...”
She grins. “Nice.”
“Oh, yeah, flirting with the enemy,” Matt sneers. “Real nice.”
“What enemy? Malcolm’s a nice guy. He’s not like those two,” I say, waving after Gerry and Angus.
“See, he’s the kind of guy I could bring home to meet Mom and Dad,” Stuart says.
“Oh, shut up,” Matt says. “Carrie, if Malcolm is so great, why is he friends with Gerry and Angus and Amber? Huh? They’ve got to have something in common, right?”
“They do have something in common: the football team, and that’s it,” I say. “Malcolm doesn’t hang out with them outside of football season.”
“Yeah? Sounded to me like the team’s going to be one big happy family at the dance.”
“If only I had my own group of friends to go to the dance with,” I say. “Why don’t I?”
That one lands hard. Too hard, in fact; my zinger not only stops Matt cold, the shrapnel catches Sara and Stuart, who suddenly can’t look me in the eye. It never occurred to me that Matt wasn’t the only frustrated wallflower.
Dammit. I hate it when I outsmart myself.
SIXTEEN
Fortunately, all was forgotten as quickly as ever, and once Missy escaped detention, she and Sara were happy to join me at the mall for some dress shopping (the boys were perfectly content to go to Matt’s house and fire up the PlayStation until homework time, and I was perfectly content to let them).
“I’m surprised you don’t already have something you could wear,” Sara says, flipping through a rack of little black dresses with a distinct air of longing in her eyes. If there is any justice in the world, we’ll be coming back later this week to help Sara pick out something that isn’t a hoodie or a Baja or a sweatshirt.
“I threw out most of my party wear before we moved. I’d outgrown it all,” I say — by which I mean, I realized that I’d been dressing like a cheap tramp, and was so disgusted with my trashy wardrobe I pitched it all in a fit of retroactive embarrassment.
“You should get a red dress because it’s Valentine’s Day,” Missy says, considering a fire engine red number, “unless you think everyone’s going to be wearing red because it’s Valentine’s Day, then I think you should do something else. That’s not red. Or pink, ‘cause pink’s ugly.”
Hm. She sounds completely normal — which, under the circumstances, qualifies as a little strange.
“You seem to be in a good mood, Muppet,” I say, “considering how badly your dad’s going to freak when he finds out you got detention.”
“Yeah he is,” she mopes.
“Should be grateful all you got was a day of detention,” Sara says. “You looked like you were going to tear Amber apart.”
Missy shrugs. “Betcha she’ll leave me alone now.”
Missy was right on that point: on the few occasions Amber and Missy cross paths in the halls, Amber all but burrows into the wall trying to put as much distance as possible between them. Not the best way to establish détente, but at least Amber isn’t making any effort to get back at Missy.
On a happier note, I found my dress for the dance at the first store I checked, a sexy silver job — sexy, yet conservative compared to my past standards: the hem comes to just above the knee. Bonus: I already have a pair of shoes that match, so no need to spend money there.
(Yes, I know these are petty concerns. I know I should be more worried about Missy’s inexplicable violent mood swing, or that we haven’t heard from Astrid or Concorde all week, or even the fact that Matt never manned up to ask Sara to the dance, but dammit, I’m going on my first real date in forever, and I’m going to be self-centered tonight.)
Sara and Missy have come over for the pre-show that is my primp and preen routine, not so much to assist but to engage in girl talk and, I think, live vicariously through me
.
“So, is this a full-blown date date,” Sara asks, “or are you going straight to the dance?”
“There was talk of a light dinner first,” I say as I unroll my hair from its fat curlers; I’m going for waves here, not a perm. God, I’d look ridiculous with a perm. “I guess there’s going to be a lot of food at the dance, so no need to pig out in advance.”
“Okay, dinner first. And after the dance...?”
“Sara!”
“Well...”
“Jeez, you sound like Mom. Except not so suspicious and disapproving.”
“What do you mean?” Missy says.
“She got all squirrelly when I told her I had a date,” I say. “Started grilling me about Malcolm, what we were doing, where we were going, what time I was leaving, what time I was coming home...”
“Sounds like business as usual to me,” Sara says.
“The song was the same, sure, but Mom sounded...I don’t know. She was really intense. It wasn’t the normal interrogation routine. I thought for a minute she was going to tell me I couldn’t go.”
“That would have sucked,” Missy says.
“No kidding.”
“If you don’t mind me playing devil’s advocate,” Sara begins.
“Advocate away.”
“Considering what you told us about your last few, uh... romantic interests, let’s call them, your mom has decent reason to worry about who you’re going out with.”
“Yeah, but I’ve gone so out of my way to prove to her I don’t hang out with people like that anymore. I mean, you guys are nothing at all like my old friends.”
“Because we’re awesome,” Missy says.
“Exactly. So why would she think I’m going back to dating punks and losers?”
“Because moms worry about their daughters,” Sara says.
“Dad wouldn’t be that way.”
Sara casts a skeptical eye my way.
Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women Page 11
