Invaded (Alienated, #2)(80)
Honestly? Cara thought her friend would be very cold in that dress. “Um, the color looks great with your skin.” And given how easily it’d slip off at the end of the night, Eric would love it.
“I’m gonna try it on.”
Cara followed to the dressing rooms, where a young soldier balanced a stack of folded jeans on one arm. He made an apologetic face. “I did the best I could, but it’s redonk over there. I didn’t know if you wanted cropped, boot-cut, straight-leg, skinny, flared, low-rise, high-waist, or jegging.” He leaned in, shell-shocked. “And that’s just the cut. Then there’s dark wash, medium vintage—”
“That’s okay,” Cara interrupted. “I’m sure one of these will work.” She took the pile of denim into the fitting room and emerged ten minutes later with three pair of jeans that fit and one pair she could actually afford. Suddenly the L’eihr uniform didn’t seem so bad.
“Ta-da!” Tori sang, opening her dressing room door. She hitched up her gown and strode to the three-way mirror, then began checking out her butt from different angles. “Nice, huh?”
She really did look nice. Overly exposed, yes, but tame compared to what some girls would be wearing. Cara gave a teasing wolf whistle and checked the price tag. Her mouth dropped open. “Did you see this, Tor?”
Satisfied with her reflection, Tori turned from the mirror and strutted back to her dressing room. “Yep.”
“You’re gonna drop this much on a gown you’ll wear once?”
“I’ll put it on my card,” Tori said, as if she weren’t spending real money that way. “I need shoes and a bag, too. What do you think about strappy nude heels?”
By the time they reached the shoe department, Cara thought strappy nude heels were as unnecessary and overpriced as the plastic-wrapped gown draped over Tori’s shoulder. Cara lifted a butt-fugly leopard-print platform pump and gasped at the price sticker affixed to the sole. Maybe if humans didn’t spend so much time and money on useless crap, they wouldn’t need the L’eihrs to save the world for them.
“Cute,” Tori said, nodding at the monstrosity in Cara’s hand. “You should try ’em on.”
“Yeah. Or not.”
Tori wrinkled her brow and studied Cara over a display of sandals. “Retail therapy isn’t working, is it?” She set down a glittery clutch and nodded toward the exit. “Let’s go. Time for that triple chocolate meltdown.”
“Dig in.” From the other side of the table, Tori pointed her spoon at the plate between them. “If you let me finish this by myself, I’ll never fit into that kick-ass dress I just bought.”
The mere sight of hot fudge pooling out from the center of a gooey chocolate cake was enough to turn Cara’s stomach, but she took one for the team and shoveled in a bite. She swallowed as quickly as possible before washing out the taste with unsweetened iced tea.
“What the hell?” Tori asked. “It looked like you were chewing razor blades.”
“Sweets make me kind of sick now.”
Tori’s black brows shot up. “You’re not preggers, are you?”
“No,” Cara said with a humorless laugh. “Zero chance of that, trust me.”
“Huh.” Tori chewed the inside of her cheek and stared at their dessert. “The mall was a bust, and chocolate isn’t working. This leaves us with only one option…”
“Oh, no. Not Magic Mike.”
“Then give me an alternative. Tell me what’s going to make you smile.”
That was a good question, but Cara didn’t know the answer. She thought back to the last experiences that had brought her joy—snuggling with Vero, mastering the intermediate track, glimpsing the colony for the first time, placing her hand in Aelyx’s strong grasp.
Cara sighed and poked at the cake. “Nothing on Earth.”
They fell silent for a while, fidgeting with bendy straws and silverware, until Tori said what they were both thinking. “You’re different now.”
“Yeah, I am,” Cara said. And she had a feeling things would never be the same as before the exchange. She peeked up from beneath her lashes. “But I still love you.”
Tori’s face broke into a bittersweet grin. She reached across the table and took Cara’s hand, her touch somehow both familiar and foreign. “Right back at’cha. That’ll never change.”
Cara flipped open the AP physics textbook she’d found in the bottom of her closet. If she wanted to apply to Dartmouth, she’d first have to make up the work she’d missed, and what better opportunity to catch up than during spring break? As she pulled her Einstein packet from her backpack, it occurred to her that she’d probably lost her valedictorian rank when she’d fled Earth.
She supposed that douche canoe, Marcus Johnson, would graduate at the top of the class. The old Cara would have devised a plot to reclaim her title, but the new Cara couldn’t bring herself to care.
“Valedictorian,” she muttered to herself. “Whoop-de-friggin-do. I’m the Chief Human Consultant to the most powerful woman in the universe.”
Or rather, she was.
She turned to the chapter on Einstein’s theory of relativity and began skimming the text, but then she realized that the advanced physics she’d learned on L’eihr transcended her AP science class. Cara closed her textbook. It had nothing to teach her.