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“What promise?”
“Don’t worry what anyone in this gym thinks about you except for me. I’m the one you’re with. I think you’re beautiful. That’s all that matters. ”
His words stirred something deep in my chest and I found it hard to breathe, let alone maintain eye contact. I looked down at my white sandals and wiggled my toes, wishing we’d never come to prom. A warm hand cupped my chin and Bridger angled my face up to look into his eyes.
“Do you want to leave? We can go to a movie or something. ”
I nodded, relief flooding me.
“Okay. I have one favor to ask first. ”
“What?” At this point, I’d grant him just about anything.
“One dance. ”
My eyes flickered past him, to the crowded gym. To the other students.
“Please?”
“Okay,” I whispered, though the word scraped out of my mouth.
Bridger led me onto the dance floor and everyone stared. Girls snickered and pointed at my dress.
“That is the cheapest dress I’ve ever seen,” someone called. “Where’d you buy it? The Wal-Mart clearance rack?” Bridger’s hand tightened on mine. “This is prom, not a church picnic,” someone else called. Bridger’s hand tightened more.
He stopped in the middle of the dance floor, right beneath the biggest disco ball, and took me in his arms.
“Don’t listen to them,” he said. “And if you don’t want to see their faces, just look into my eyes. ”
I nodded and stared into his dark eyes, trying to find the pupils in the irises, but it didn’t matter. Sure, I couldn’t see the other students. But I could still hear them.
“… embarrassed to be seen with her. ”
“So shoddy, especially next to O’Connell. ”
“I hear he doesn’t have to rent his tux. He owns it, and it’s Armani. ”
“The least he could’ve done is buy a halfway decent dress for her. ”
I closed my eyes and laid my head on his chest. One of his hands left my back and moved to my ear, gently pressing the voices away. So he could hear them, too. My heart seemed to double in size at his small gesture and I smiled.
Yeah. I might have been wearing the wrong dress. And the wrong shoes. And I didn’t have a teeny, sequin-covered purse to clutch. But when it came to a date, I had the best one in the entire room. I lifted my head and looked into his eyes again.
He smiled and my gaze moved to his lips, to his white teeth. I licked my lips and prayed he’d kiss me good night.
“Not so bad anymore, is it?” he asked.
I bit my bottom lip and looked back into his eyes. “No. Not bad. ” The song ended and I let go of Bridger, ready to bail. Prom was way overrated. But his arms tightened and he pulled me closer.
“One more song?” he asked. I looked around the gym. For the most part, I’d been forgotten. I put my hands back on his shoulders and got lost in his eyes. More than one song passed, and if the other students were talking about me, I couldn’t hear them over the music and my drumming heart. My gaze moved between Bridger’s eyes and his mouth. Once, when I’d been staring at his lips so long I could almost imagine how they’d feel on mine, he leaned closer to me and his lips parted. My eyes met his and we stopped moving to the music. But then he looked away and stared toward the doors we’d come in through. His hands left my lower back.
“Bridger?”
“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. He took me in his arms again, gazing into my eyes. We swayed to the beat for half a song and then he slowed, no longer moving to the beat, his eyes far away. He tilted his head to the side and I wondered who he was listening to. Who was verbally beating me to a pulp this time? I strained my ears but couldn’t separate one voice out of them all. Bridger frowned and he stopped dancing.
He took a step away from me and said, “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Want some punch or a cookie or anything?”
“No, I’m—” Before I could finish, he turned and wove his way across the dance floor, disappearing through the door that led into the main part of the school. “—fine. ”
I folded my arms over my chest and stood in the middle of the dance floor, waiting and trying not to make eye contact with anyone. But I could hear them.
“Look, he couldn’t stand her dress anymore. He ditched her. ”
“Dude, O’Connell’s got more guts than you could string on a fence—he left her on the dance floor. ”
I tried to shrink out of existence. When that didn’t work, I dodged dancers and found a shadowed place close to the refreshment table to disappear. The song ended and another started. And then another.
Finally, when more than twenty minutes had passed with me skulking in the shadows, I went to the door Bridger had left through and entered the dark school. The loud music muted as the door closed behind me.
I stood with my back to the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust. And when they did, I started down the long, empty hall.
The hidden moon did little to light the window-lined hall, seemed to create more shadows. My sandals echoed with every step I took and my heart started to pound. I caught myself jumping at nothing and looking over my shoulder more than once.
“Bridger?” I called as I approached the end of the hall.
A dark shape moved up ahead, framed by an inky window. I stopped walking and squinted.
“Bridger?” I whispered.
A female chuckled. She stood and the eerie gray window silhouetted an ample Cinderella ball gown.
“Who’s there?” I asked, taking a step backward.
“You’re not so tough in the dark, are you. ” The person moved away from the window and a swishing sound followed her.
“Danni?” I guessed.
“Uh-huh. ”
I turned to go back the way I’d come. There was no way I wanted her to know I couldn’t find my date.
“If you’re looking for Bridger, he left,” she said. So much for her not knowing.
“You’re so full of crap,” I said, my feet slowing.
“I’m serious. He ran out of here like his dad’s car was on fire. Go check the parking lot if you don’t believe me. ”
“He wouldn’t leave without telling me,” I said, but my statement sounded weak, even to my own ears. I wiggled my toes in my cheap sandals. Would he leave without telling me?
“He would if he knew about your past. ”
9
I ran back to the gym door, shoved it open, and pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring their condescending looks and mocking remarks as I searched for Bridger. Not finding him, I burst through the doors leading outside and gulped the cool, damp air.
I trotted through the parking lot to where Bridger had parked the red sports car. And found an empty parking space.
Tears filled my eyes and anger burned in the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t angry with Bridger, though I had every right to be. But I was too busy being furious at myself for caring about him. Mad that I’d started to count on his interest in me making life a little bit nicer, because now that things would be going back to not so nice, I’d feel the difference every single day.
I looked down at my inappropriate dress and hated myself for wearing it, for giving in. Yanking the tulips from my wrist, I chucked them across the parking lot as hard as I could.
My anger mixed with the pull of the moon and the hair on the back of my neck bristled. My nails began to sharpen. Bring it on, I thought, reveling in the fact that my stupid Wal-Mart dress was about to get shredded.
I stepped between two cars and crouched. My skin shrank and squeezed against muscle and bone. I gasped and fell forward on my hands and knees. My ribs expanded and the dress strained against them. The fabric, unable to withstand the pressure, ripped noisily and the dress hung limply against my shoulders. The night sounds intensified and my brain filled with sharp, primitive instin
ct. The change was complete.
But something was different. I tasted every scent on the air—new things growing, a distant skunk, a hundred different scents of car air freshener, rain trapped in the clouds. My eyesight and sense of sound weren’t as acute as normal, either. I looked down at my paws and whined. I wasn’t a tabby cat. I had big, black, furry paws and short, blunt claws.
Even though my brain flowed with dog-instinct overload, my appearance was a shock. Since the very first change I had always been a cat. But tonight, judging by my shaggy black-and-white-spotted coat, I was probably the spitting image of Mrs. Carpenter’s border collie, Shash.
I turned my nose to the sky and inhaled. The desert smelled alive despite its lack of vegetation, as if it held secrets in its dirt, air, even rocks. Another smell mingled with the desert’s scent and my stomach rumbled. I trampled my prom dress and left it, torn and filthy, in the parking lot, and ran to the cafeteria Dumpster. With my front paws braced against the Dumpster’s side, I inhaled, drooling over the thought of eating rotting corn dogs and Tater Tots wriggling with maggots. If I could just jump high enough …
Desperate to withstand the temptation, I started running again. As I passed from the school parking lot to the suburbs, I knew a dog was going to start barking, as if our minds were connected. The night exploded in barking and howling. A flicker of worry danced in my mind. What if the other dog attacked? But then the night called to me.
I ran with a grace and agility no human can understand, past houses and farms and into the uninhabited desert. Even in the tar-black, fog-coated night, I could sense each tree as I approached it, could leap over fallen logs and fly over uneven ground. Cactuses and sage grabbed at my fur, poked me, tried to find flesh, but my fur kept me protected.
When the clouds dropped, releasing a deluge of fat, soaking drops, I hardly noticed. My outer fur shed the water before it came close to my skin.
Rain turned the dusty desert to a bed of mud. With my nose to the saturated ground, I continued exploring, discovering new scents—coyote, fox, snake, human, and dog. Once or twice I even overlapped my own scent.
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