I sipped at my soda, trying to prepare my next comment strategically so that it would diffuse the situation that I already feared was going to be sticky: informing Chloe that I had off-campus plans with Nicola without leaving her an opportunity to ask for an invitation to join us.
“Nicola invited me to this thing in Salem,” I announced, suggesting that the plans with Sam and Alex were entirely Nicola’s doing and I was simply a guest, incapable of extending an invitation to guests of my own. “We’re getting permission from our parents to leave for the day on Saturday and go to this witch museum.”
“Well, what time will you be back?” Chloe inquired, immediately sounding cross.
“The off-campus forms only go as late as eight o’clock on Saturdays,” I shrugged. “So, I guess by eight.” I had already told Nicola that there could be no funny business and I had to be back on-campus on time.
“Team Corpse is doing a midnight show in Worcester. It’s going to be crazy. I was able to get pre-sale tickets for all of us because I’m in the fan club, and my mom said she’d pay for us to stay in a hotel in Worcester that night if your parents will sign your off-campus permission form,” Chloe said, looking somewhat excited. “Ramona’s coming. Danielle can’t; her parents’ anniversary is that weekend.”
Chloe’s expression suggested that she thoroughly expected me to drop my plans with Nicola to go instead, with her, to the concert in Worcester. I had never once said that I liked Team Corpse. As always, she just assumed that she could just dictate what we all liked. Next to me, Ramona was waiting for my response. I knew for a fact that she didn’t even like Team Corpse. She liked electronic dance music and classical music because she was in the junior symphony, not that she’d ever find the courage to tell Chloe.
I squirmed in my seat and whirled my fork around in my scoop of mashed, orange butternut squash. Making the case that I couldn’t realistically go to Salem with Nicola and the concert with Chloe was probably my best bet for letting Chloe down gently, I decided. It might have been possible for me to have taken a taxi from Salem to Worcester, I knew, but I also suspected that by Saturday night I would have preferred coming straight back to campus with Nicola to giggle about everything we’d done with Alex and Sam all day. “I don’t know how I’d get from Salem to Worcester in time for the show. Aren’t they far apart?”
“Well, we were going to go earlier, in the afternoon, and see a movie and get Chinese food,” Chloe explained, making it clear that she was expecting me to choose between her plan, and Nicola’s.
“Sorry, I can’t,” I said, fully aware that I was crossing the point of no return. “I already told Nicola I was going with her.”
Chloe calmly set her knife and fork down and blotted her mouth with her napkin, getting ready to royally tell me off. I braced myself for her attack. This was it, the moment I had feared with her, and her reaction was cool and controlled. “She’s not your real friend, you know. If she was really your friend, you’d be over there, sitting with the pretty girls. But she thinks you’re only useful for things they won’t do, like sneaking off campus. You’re a pawn.”
My heart stopped. Like the night Danko had told me no one would ever think I was as pretty as Bijoux, it was completely horrible to hear someone say aloud what I feared worst. Even though I knew Chloe was jealous and I’d had this stand-off coming my way for a while, all this time I’d been telling myself that I would probably hurt her feelings, not have her lash out at mine. The worst of it was that obviously somehow Chloe had heard about Nicola and me ending up off of school property the night of the Fall Fling. Other than Nicola, Taylor, and Ruth, I didn’t know who else could possibly have informed her.
“That’s not true,” I fired back.
“Really?” Chloe challenged. “From now on, you can go sit with her and those stuck-up snobs at dinner time. You’re not welcome here anymore.”
I stood up, staring her down. Danielle and Ramona looked from Chloe, to me, in surprise. I knew better than to expect either of those two mice to stand up for me. “You’re a bossy jerk,” I said simply, and took my dining hall tray up to the rack where we were expected to leave our dishes for the cafeteria staff. Part of me was proud, as I picked up the box containing my boots at the mail room, that I had resisted the urge to tell Chloe off with all of the negative things I had to say about her that had been building up inside of me. But the larger part of me, the one that wondered why Nicola had never invited me to sit with her and Nala for dinner, was pretty sure that I had just committed myself to a long, lonely year of eating dinner at the library out of plastic bags hidden away in my backpack.
Salem went all out for Halloween, as one would expect from the town where the famous witch trials had been held.
Alex and Sam met us at the train station, looking impish and expectant where they waited for us in costume in front of a news stand. We hadn’t seen them since they’d hurried us off the bus in the parking lot at their school, and they were still mystified as to how we’d managed to get ourselves, undiscovered, back to Treadwell. Nicola and I had ridden the train in our costumes, carrying the boys’ suit coats like true weirdos, and the ticket taking agent on the train had told us we looked cute and encouraged us to have a fun day. My heart skipped a beat when I saw Alex; we had been exchanging comments on Friendbook often and by Halloween I had a full-fledged crush. He wore a long-sleeved white polo shirt with a blue collar and a red bandana tied around his neck. Sam, looking really nothing at all like Shaggy, wore a green t-shirt, brown jeans, and carried a ratty plush Scooby Doo doll under one arm.
Alex, the planner of the day’s agenda, had printed out a map of the town and led us straight toward the Witch Dungeon Museum. We posed for pictures in the stocks and giggled throughout an overly serious reenactment of a witch trial. Grown-ups seated near us hated us. During the reenactment, I felt certain that Alex could hear my heart thumping beneath my ribcage because he was sitting right next to me. In the month that had passed since I’d last seen him, he’d grown infinitely cuter in my mind’s eye. Having him finally – after such a long wait – sitting mere inches from me, was enough to make me nearly jump out of my skin.
The four of us walked through downtown Salem, stopping for lunch at a diner where we were surrounded by other customers dressed as witches, mummies and superheroes. Nicola, for once, controlled her wackiness and ordered a turkey burger, sparing the waitress her usual litany of questions about hard-boiled eggs and grilled chicken. She ate most of it without even grimacing, which I assumed was probably difficult for her.
A chill ran through me as we entered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house of seven gables, thinking back just a few weeks to reading Hawthorne’s book, The Scarlet Letter, in Miss Kumar’s classroom at the beginning of the school year. The strange-looking black house on which he had based the book had been owned by his cousins, the Ingersolls, and it was open for tourists to explore. It was supremely weird to cross the threshold and enter a building in which the writer had spent so much time during his own life. I felt like an intruder.
As I always did on tours of historical buildings, I felt like my body was oversized for the small house, with its low ceilings and antique furniture. The tour guide spoke in a hushed voice and everyone else on our tour moved slowly, as if the house was filled with ghosts we were trying not to disturb. Then, the tour guide surprised us all by revealing a secret staircase at the back of a bedroom closet that led up to the attic.
“I’m going to have one of these someday,” Alex announced as the tour group formed a single file line to climb up the claustrophobically small staircase which led to the attic.
The staircase was narrow with a very low ceiling. It was cramped enough that one of the dads on our tour who was close to six feet tall decided refrain from trying to squeeze himself through the space and told his wife and kids he’d wait for them to come back downstairs. I didn’t like the look of that staircase one bit. Even though it was a briskly cool day, the thought of ascending those
stairs and passing through the dark doorway at the top made me break into a sweat.
“I’m going to stay down here, guys,” I announced, trying to sound casual.
“Why?” Nicola asked, eager, as always, to check out anything secret, forbidden or off-limits.
“I just feel kind of dizzy. I don’t want to go up those stairs,” I admitted truthfully.
No one offered to stay downstairs with me, which I had to admit annoyed me. I had kind of hoped Alex would volunteer to keep me company out of concern or a simple desire to stay close to me, but he eagerly bounded up the musty staircase behind Nicola. I lingered in the antique-filled bedroom from which the secret staircase was accessed, pretending to be interested in the etchings framed on the walls. Why exactly the staircase had put such panic into me, I wasn’t sure. I was just imagining the moment when I would have arrived at the top of those stairs and been pushed into the attic, having no way out. My mood was starting to turn dark as minutes passed and my friends remained in the attic without a care in the world for me. I wondered angrily if maybe I had made a huge mistake and should have just gone with Chloe to the concert.
Two hours later, at the Witch History Museum, as we sat on the floor and watched a highly theatrical presentation about the history of the trials featuring wax figures and elaborate lighting, Alex grabbed my side unexpectedly and whispered, “Boo!”
I mistakenly confused this for flirting and blushed happily in the dark. From the outside, this museum looked like a very scary church, and the wax figurines in the show were seriously freaking me out. I was eager for all of the museum-going on Alex’s agenda to be completed, and for us to make our way down to Pickering Wharf for the ice cream I’d been anticipating all day. All day I had wanted Alex to give me some kind of an indication in person that he might want me to be his girlfriend. After so much flirting and commenting on Friendbook, I had kind of been expecting him to fawn all over me on Halloween, and that had definitely not turned out to be the situation until that moment when he grabbed me in the dark at the museum. My blood was running hot. I could see Nicola and Sam sitting noticeably close together, whispering and giggling.
“So, about Nicola,” Alex whispered next to me as the show moved on to the next vignette in its witchy storyline. I could feel his warm breath tickling my earlobe and was hoping he’d kiss me so badly that it took a few seconds for my brain to catch up with my heart and realize that—based on what he was asking me—kissing me was the last thing on his mind.
“Does she really like Sam? Or does a guy have a chance?”
I stared straight ahead, afraid to reply, knowing that if I spoke before I organized my thoughts, I would cry. All of my love for Alex went up in flames in that moment, and instantly turned to smoldering, hateful ash. I was grateful for the lowered lights in the museum theater, and for Nicola being so thoroughly engrossed in the show on the other side of me that she hadn’t heard Alex asking me about her. All the time and hope I had invested into trading notes with him on Friendbook had been a regrettable waste. He didn’t want to be my boyfriend; he just wanted me to help him get closer to Nicola. I was ashamed of myself and felt like a total idiot for not having known from the start that both boys would be after her instead of me.
“I wouldn’t bother,” I finally told him, sending a swift prayer to heaven that the hot tears I sensed forming behind my eyes wouldn’t escape my eyelids. I thought of just how much Nicola was interested in Sam, wanting desperately to not only discourage Alex but make him feel as crappy and insignificant as he was making me feel right then. I wanted to embarrass him for liking her instead of me. Nicola was so into Sam, it was downright geeky. She had been trying to learn how to breakdance to have something in common with him and in the process had revealed to me that she was pretty much the worst dancer in history of bodies moving to music. That Alex would like her instead of me was the biggest boy-related disappointment I had suffered in a long, long time, and since I’d been hoping for weeks that Halloween would turn out to be a big day of romance, I was completely blindsided by it.
This was turning out to be the recurring theme of my life: nice things happened for everyone except me.
“She’s really into him. I mean, he’s really cute,” I added, just to twist the knife a little.
“Yeah, but he’s…you know.”
Against my will I found myself looking at Alex, his eyes searching mine to see if I comprehended what he was trying to communicate without him having to say it. I had no idea what he was trying to imply. Should Nicola not like Sam because he was Puerto Rican? From a lower income family? Simply because his pedigree wasn’t as prestigious as Alex’s? I didn’t ask. Whatever it was that Alex was suggesting, I concluded that he was revealing himself to be a despicable snob. I was instantly starting to hate myself for ever having had a crush on him. And yet even still, if he had tried to kiss me right then, I would have let him. Crushes are complicated things. They don’t just vanish in a matter of seconds. I turned away from him, and turned my attention back to the creepy audio visual show, where a wax figurine of Giles Corey was being stoned to death by an angry mob of other immobile, wax people.
Alex was extra goofy and sarcastic when we went for ice cream, initiating mock fights with Sam and referring to Nicola as Ricola, calling out to her like a Swiss goatherd in the commercial for cough drops. I ate my double scoop of bubble gum ice cream in agony, wishing that an earthquake or catastrophe of similar epic proportions would cause the earth to crack open and swallow all three of my companions. Sam’s stuffed Scooby Doo had been lost somewhere during the afternoon’s adventures, and wherever that plush toy was, I envied it. After leaving the Witch History Museum, all I could think about was getting back on the train and closing my eyes; I had even lost my enthusiasm for ice cream somewhat because it had started getting so cold outside. Chloe was a bossy hypocrite, but I was pretty sure that if I’d gone with her to the Team Corpse show, no boys would have chosen her over me. I was genuinely starting to miss Christie. Boys always preferred her to me, but at least she was aware of how that made me feel. Plus, she always had so many things of her own going on, and Ryan, that did she little to intentionally encourage male attention.
Ignoring Alex, Sam, and Nicola, and their ice cream parlor roughhousing, I dug my mobile phone out of my bag and read the last few texts from Christie that I’d been ignoring for over a week.
Immediately I was shocked, horrified, and kind of shamefully amused by what I’d been missing out on in her life. Her dad had caught her posing nude for Seth Zable. He was thinking about pressing charges even though Seth’s line of defense was that the shoot had been done for the purpose of art. Christie’s dad was even thinking about sending her off to boarding school. I tried to control the swelling of my heart at the mere possibility that Christie might wash up at Treadwell. If I’d learned anything so far that year, it was that I would never be so lucky as to have anything so perfect happen in my life. Crazy Christie. She probably still believed that she and Seth were artistic equals when it was painfully obvious that he was just an old guy who was obsessed with her. Maybe at least now he’d been made aware that she was fifteen, not eighteen, as she’d led him to believe.
Three hours later back on campus, Nicola and I walked toward Colgate in our costumes, concealed by heavy winter coats. The weather had taken on a surprisingly bitter chill after the sun went down. I was introspective and sullen on the train ride home, not that Nicola would have noticed, the way she was blabbing on and on about Sam. On the elevator up to our respective floors, Nicola said, “I know you like Alex, but you should find a different boy. He asked me if I wanted to take the bus to Boston next weekend to meet him for a movie. I told him no, of course.”
I was fuming. Not only had I told him not to waste his time and he had ignored my advice, but Nicola in her insensitive, patent way, had also found a way to rub it in. I pulled the red wig off the top of my head and handed it back to her, saying sharply, “I don’t know where you got
the idea that I liked Alex. He’s a nice guy and all, but he’s so not my type.”
One dumb boy with an absurdly fancy name had been the cause of two of my friendships at Treadwell to fall into ruin in less than one week. When I got back up to my room, I breathed a sigh of relief that Kate was gone for the weekend. I unzipped my white go-go boots and threw them in the back of our shared closet, vowing to never wear them again. Hoping to beat Alex to his computer, I un-Buddied him on Friendbook, never especially wanting to hear from him again.
Just as I was about to sign off, I saw Kristijan’s icon pop onto my screen, announcing that he was available for video chat.
“Buenos noches,” he greeted me, trying out the Spanish he was learning.
It was very late on a Saturday night (or early, for a Sunday morning) for him. As soon as I saw his face, I didn’t feel like falling into bed and crying anymore. It was impossible to want to cry around Kristijan, even if he wasn’t really in the room with me, other than on screen.
“Why doesn’t anyone like me?” I bellowed, and proceeded to relay the whole day’s events to him. I was pretty sure he didn’t understand anything I had told him about the witch trials, since Halloween wasn’t widely celebrated in Croatia and to people in other countries, the Salem witch trials were a pretty obscure piece of American history.
“Why do you even like that guy?” Kristijan asked me. “He seems like an idiot.”
Of course Alex sounded to Kristijan like an idiot, because I hadn’t gone into detail about how charming and funny he had been the night we’d met at the Fall Fling. But there was no point in elaborating on how great he could be at that point; it was just going to make me sadder to remember how much I had liked him that first night of our acquaintance. I already knew from personal experience that continuing to obsess over a boy after he had made it clear he was not interested in me led only to depression.
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