Charm and Consequence (5 page)

“Hmmmm.” I nod and then he executes an especially energetic twirl that knocks the air out of me for a second.

“So-did Endicott tell you about me getting kicked out of Pemberley?”

“No,” I reply. “We don’t always talk that much.…

He laughs again and this time there’s a sharpness to the sound, like metal striking metal.

“You’re definitely better off that way,” he says.

“He seems pretty harmless,” I say, and Jeremy scoffs and extends his arms to hold me at a distance for a moment so he can gaze at me. I try to look back at him without blushing but focus mainly on his chin. Much safer than those eyes.

“‘Harmless’?” he repeats. “I don’t know about that. But who wants harmless anyway?”

Across the room I can see now that Michael is at a table with his parents—and mine are there, too. They are all watching me. Only my mother is smiling. Michael looks worried for some reason.

“That’s Michael Endicott’s grandmother, over there, giving me the stinkeye,” Jeremy tells me.

I look over to where he’d nodded his head to find a thin, grim figure in black eyeing us with cold hostility. She is tall, like Michael, and elegant, with perfectly straight white hair that swoops across one shoulder and three strands of pearls around her neck. She looks like an angry little phantom.

“Why give us the stinkeye?” I ask.

“It’s for me, believe me.”

“Because you cut in on her grandson?”

“Because she’s one of the big trustees at the Pemberley School and because I was kicked out of there.” He seems mildly amused by this, and keeps his eyes on her, smiling, at her, like a dare.

“But wasn’t her grandson kicked out, too?” I ask as she approaches us, walking surprisingly fast on her spindly legs, like one of those little seabirds darting across the sand.

“Thanks for the dance, Duchess,” he says with a wicked smile and a sweeping bow. “But I gotta bounce.”

I improvise a sort of curtsey and smile at him.

“Thank
you
good sir,” I say in my most gracious lady-of-the-manor manner.

“Tell Endicott I didn’t mean to offend,” he laughs as he walks off, taking his time, waving to someone at one of the tables and chuckling to himself.

I smile weakly at the old lady and walk over to Michael’s table, where he is sitting alone now, and say, “Thanks for the dance.”

“It’s not something I do often,” he says and traces a finger down the side of his glass of punch when I sit down.

“Yeah, I could tell,” I laugh, and he looks at me, startled, for a second, and I realize that I have insulted him. “I’m just kidding. If I’m on
So You Think You Can Dance?,
the subtitle is
No, honey, you can’t
.’”

“Jeremy seems to think he’s Lord of the Dance, though.” He’s smirking as usual, but there’s something wary in his dark eyes now, which seem to be trained on me in a way they haven’t been before, and it’s unnerving. I pick up a stray coffee spoon and ponder it as if the scrollwork on the handle were the most fascinating piece in the history of cutlery.

I ask, “Don’t you mean ‘Wrentham’? Isn’t last-names-only the Pemberley way?”

“Yeah, well, neither of us is at Pemberley now, are we?” He keeps looking at me steadily and something in his bright black eyes makes me swallow hard.

I want to ask him why he had to leave Pemberley, to ask him what happened, and not just because it’s been the buzz of the LHS hallways since he started school back in September. I’ve ignored all of the rumors until now but I realize I really want to know, but not as gossip fodder. I want to know the story because I want to know something real about him, to figure out who he is, exactly, and the urge to ask is almost overwhelming, like a sneeze that you really want to come out but just sort of burns in your nostrils for awhile. But I ask instead, “So … did you hand in your Hamlet paper today?”

“Yeah. I meant it when I said you had an interesting take on Ophelia, you know.” He’s still looking right at me, almost through me now. He looks like he wants to ask me, or tell me, something, too.

“Thank you…?”

“The stuff about her being a pawn, her being used by people–that seems important to consider,” he tells me, his eyes reaching out for me and I feel my heart lurch into a higher speed. I can’t shake the feeling he is trying to tell me something without saying it, but I have no idea what it is he wants to say. Or if I want to hear it.

“Um,
I
thought so,” I say.

“Right. Because, obviously, nobody should use someone else for their own ends…”

I agree, and then it hits me. “Oh my God,” I cry out, then slap my fingers over my mouth. “Do you think I used
you
somehow tonight?”

Now Michael looks completely confused.

“No–what? What are you talking about?
I
asked you to dance, didn’t I? How did you
use
me?”

“I don’t know,” I sigh. “I’m just trying to follow the conversation–there seems to be a subtext to it.”

He sort of sighs through his nose then and shakes his head.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says.

“Okay. What
did
you mean?”

He frowns and his mouth starts forming a word but then snaps itself back into a scowl again. He ducks his head slightly and says, “Nothing. I didn’t mean …Who you dance with is your business, but I’d advise against doing anything else with Jeremy, okay?”

“What else would I do with Jeremy? Not that it’s any of your business–we agree on that, at least—”

Darien Drake comes over then and takes the seat on the other side of Michael, looking like a fairy tale enchantress, with her sleek blue-black hair and deep plum satin dress.

“Come on, Michael, let’s dance,” she coaxes, placing a slim ringed hand on his arm and looking up at me with a Persian cat smile. “Georgia won’t mind, will you?”

“Of course not,” I say, but I
do
mind, actually, because I feel like I snapped at him again and pushed him away when I really wanted to know what he meant about Jeremy. When Michael looks back at me as Darien leads him onto the floor I feel like I’m going to cry and I have no idea why and it all seems so exhausting suddenly. When my dad comes over and asks, “Are you tired, Georgia? Should we call it a night?” I practically run to the coatroom where my mother is waiting and talking to someone from one of her clubs. I’m at the car and buckled up, ready to go, in ten seconds flat.

Tori doesn’t get home for another hour or so and says, “Hey, George,” as she sits on her bed and kicks off her shoes. “That turn you took with Jeremy on the dance floor was like something out of a movie.”

“
Carrie
, maybe.”

She rolls her eyes and gets up to change into her pajamas.

“Jeremy
is
gorgeous, isn’t he?” she prompts but I don’t say anything. Climbing into her bed, Tori ventures, “Michael didn’t look too happy about your dancing with Jeremy.”

“Actually, he seems to think that
dancing
with Jeremy is permissible. Which is awfully big of him, considering the depths of his passion for me, evidenced weeks ago when he ran away screaming at the very idea of going to a movie with me.”

“He
did
ask you to dance.”

“He was being polite.”

Tori just laughs and rolls away from me toward the wall with its yellowing flowered wallpaper.

“Do you usually think that Michael is especially polite?” she teases.

“No,” I admit. “That’s why I’m confused.” I consider telling her about the weird feeling I had that Michael was trying to warn me about Jeremy, but it’s been so long since I told Tori anything important I wasn’t sure how to do it. Plus, I wasn’t sure what to say.

I’ve never felt like this about anybody before. So irritated but, yeah, I’ll admit it, attracted, too. I don’t know how I would even explain this to Tori so she could make sense out of it. How could I expect anyone else to do that when I can’t do it myself? Plus she spends all of her free time with Trey now, as they surf the glorious golden wave of love at first sight together. She’d probably think I'm crazy if I told her what I’m feeling. Or tell me I’m making everything too complicated. As usual.

***

Between the night of the dance and Christmas vacation, not much happens. We spend Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house in Cheshire, Connecticut, where my mom grew up. Afterward, back in Longbourne, my mom is busy volunteering with some other Newcomers Club housewives at the children’s hospital in Netherfield and trying to learn to knit some things for them. Baby blankets, I think. I meet Shondra and some other kids once at a movie at a mall outside Netherfield, and I see Jeremy in the hall a couple of times. He always grins and calls out, “Hey, it’s the Duchess” or “What’s up, Dutch?” but he keeps walking with whatever posse is trailing him. And then it’s Christmas vacation and everyone explodes out of the school on the last day like it’s a prison break. And if there were anything crucial that Michael had wanted to impart to me on the night of the Harvest Ball, he seemed to forget all about it. A couple of times in class I almost asked him but I couldn’t come up with a natural, jokey way to say it so that he wouldn’t think I was obsessing about it. Especially since he seems as casually disinterested as ever, enough to make me wonder if I dreamed the whole conversation in the first place.

We spend Christmas at my dad’s parents in Scranton, where we listen to a lot of Dean Martin and Nat King Cole holiday CDs and eat a lot of cookies. My sisters and I even drag my dad’s old sled out of the garage and bomb down the hills like nutcases until we are too cold and wet to stand it any more. But we only stay two days because Dad has to fly to San Francisco for some conference.

It’s all really uneventful until, back in Longbourne on a lazy housebound day in a snowstorm, I come into our room to find Tori hunched over the computer. I can tell she’s been crying.

“Still no message from Trey? It’s only been two weeks,” I say.

“No. But I did get another message from Willow.” She sniffs back her tears and wipes her cheek with the back of her hand. The silver bracelet Trey gave her for Christmas catches the desk lamp light.

“Wait—
another
message from Willow? Email?”

“Facebook.”

I sit on the bed and absorb this.

“You
friended
Willow Harper? Why? The girl
laughed
when you broke your ankle.”

“Because she asked me to. And it wasn’t broken.”

Over her shoulder I read Willow’s message about what a great time she and Trey are having on the slopes and how they meet some evenings at superfabulous nightspots in town.

“She is obviously trying to torture you,” I conclude. I know that back in early September, Willow had had a big “welcome to town” party for Trey, hoping he would fall into her arms that night, but when Tori twisted her ankle on the Harpers’ terrace, Tori fell into Trey’s. That did not make Willow happy. And clearly Willow does not concede defeat so much as bide her time.

“Why doesn’t
Trey
message me, at least once?” Tori asks quietly.

“I’m sure it’s
not
because he’s forgotten you because he’s having such a glorious time in the mountains with Willow Harper. Though that is exactly what Willow wants you to think.”

Tori considers this for a moment and chews on her lip. I’ve never seen her like this. Tori is usually self-assured, like she has always known who she is and what is important to her.

“What if he
is
with her?” she asks quietly.

“Oh,
please
! That is im
po
ssible.”

“Is it? Maybe they belong together. Her family is so much more like his than ours is–”

“Tori, listen to me. Anyone can see how Trey feels about you, how he looks at you, talks to you, and talks
about
you. You two are a legendary couple in the halls of Longbourne High.”

“Well, he’s not in Longbourne now,” she grouses.

“So? So we don’t have a summer house and a ski chalet and a pond with big fat koi fish.” I sit on the floor beside her chair and take her hand. “Do you really think, for a second, that any of that makes a difference to Trey?”

She shakes her head silently.

“You could check the snail mail. Maybe he sent a postcard.”

She stands up from the computer.

“It’s all yours,” she says as she leaves the room.

“And don’t forget that mail is all backed up with the holidays,” I call as she walks down the hall and I log in to my own account.

There’s a virtual Christmas gift from my friend Allison back in Boulder and a friend request from some guy I must have known in elementary school when we were living in New Jersey. I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup now if I had to. I check his Friends List and it is suspiciously long. My theory is that some people on Facebook invite everyone they have ever met, just so that everyone will see their Friends List and be stunned by their (virtual) popularity. You’re supposed to rethink them–`Oh, gee, he must be cooler than I thought because look at how many people love him!”–which is just sad, really. Still, I accept the request. I can delete all the messages he sends and request fewer status updates from him, right? This reminds me of how few people Michael has on his Friends List and I wonder for the first time if that’s not because he is snotty but because he just doesn’t want to be bothered with all of the surprising complications in virtual relationships, which could actually be quite sensible.

A few days later I get a good Facebook message, though–Jason Antin from my Spanish class is having a huge New Year’s party since his parents are out of town for the weekend. I decide that Tori needs to go to take her mind off of Trey and she agrees. Cassie and Brick might drop by on their whirlwind social tour of all the basements and rec rooms of Longbourne’s finest jock families, but Leigh has her Purity Ball that night, of course. (Without Dad. Alistair’s dad will stand in for him instead.) The whole idea is nauseating, and, honestly the New Year’s party I’m dragging Tori to could be equally awful, a bunch of drunk kids I barely know in someone’s McMansion, but Tori needs to get out, and it is far worse for me to sit home alone with the cats on the biggest social night of the year.