Inevitable and Only(35)

“And?”

“And, well, I think I kind of invited her to go with us. With the four of us.”

“Won’t that be awkward? Fifth-wheel-y?” Raven frowned.

“We can find her a date, right?”

“Sure, I mean, I’m surprised no one’s asked her yet. New girl in town, plus that hair, plus that body—”

“Raven!”

“What?” she said. “Your sister’s hot.”

“My sister,” I echoed.

“God. That still … sounds so strange.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say to that. We observed a moment of silence for the demise of my formerly sisterless existence—or, my former existence in which Raven was the closest thing to a sister I’d ever needed.

Huh. I looked at Raven. Was she jealous of Elizabeth?

No, Raven would’ve told me if she felt that way. She never minced words. Besides, how could she possibly be jealous of someone who was causing so much stress in my life? It wasn’t like Elizabeth and I were staying up late watching movies and painting our toenails, or having deep conversations, or any of the things Raven and I did together.

I dismissed the thought. “So I’ll ask her tonight if she has a date yet. If not, maybe we can—oh.”

Elizabeth was coming down the hall toward us, walking next to a tall blond guy in a soccer jersey. Who was holding her books and asking her something that seemed to be making her uncomfortable. She tossed her hair and forced a smile, nodded, said something. He smiled back, handed her the stack of books, touched her on her shoulder, and spun away, walking like he had springs on the bottoms of his shoes.

“Guess she does have a date,” Raven said, her eyebrows almost touching her hairline. “That sure didn’t take long. And, wow—Sam Shotwell?”

“Yeah, well. As you predicted, right? I’ll see ya.”

And I went down the hall toward the administrative offices to meet Mom, hoping Elizabeth hadn’t seen us standing there watching.

Stop it, I told myself. You’re going to the Fall Ball with Farhan. Your one true love. What more could you ask? And besides, you have no claims on Sam Shotwell; you only did a couple of stupid acting-class exercises together. So what if he grinned at you once or twice? You should be ashamed of yourself, trying to hog all the guys for yourself. Who do you think you are, anyway?

Sometimes, no matter how hard I pushed “stop,” that stupid loop just wouldn’t shut off.



At least I had Friday to look forward to. Friday afternoon, the whole drama class plus the rest of the Much Ado cast and crew piled into a school bus and drove down to the Shakespeare Theatre in DC.

None of us ever got to ride on real school buses, the cheddar-colored kind. We did have a small Fern Grove bus (white with the school insignia painted in green) that picked up some students who lived farther away, but almost all the younger kids got dropped off and picked up by their parents, and the older kids took city buses—or drove themselves. I sat with Micayla near the back, and we exhausted ourselves singing stupid school bus songs for a while—“The Wheels on the Bus,” “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer” (which we changed to mead, then Red Bull, then Gatorade, and then it wasn’t funny anymore). Finally Robin stood up at the front of the bus, clapped his hands, and said, “People. Don’t make me throw any students out the window. It’s against the code of ethics in my contract.”

So we stopped singing and watched the Beltway creep by outside the window. There’s no such thing as speeding, or even driving at the speed limit, during rush hour—which, in the Baltimore-DC metro area, is actually four hours.

“How are the costumes coming along?” I asked.

Micayla sighed. “I don’t know. Peg wants us to do a cross between Shakespearean and contemporary—like, contemporary outfits with period pieces thrown in here and there. She said it’s a simple comedy, not a political play, so there’s no reason to try to say anything political using the costumes. She hates when people overpoliticize the comedies.”

“‘Does this say anything?’” I murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, just a quote. The first play Dad and I ever saw together, years ago—A Man for All Seasons. There’s this Everyman character, and he wears all black, and he comes onstage by himself to talk to the audience and complains about his costume. ‘Is this a costume? Does this say anything? It barely covers one man’s nakedness! A bit of black material to reduce Old Adam to the Common Man.’ Isn’t that fantastic? We’ve been quoting that line ever since.”

Micayla stared at me. “You remember lines from a play you saw years ago?”

I shrugged. “Well, like I said, we’ve been quoting it at each other.”

“Girl, no wonder you’re on stage and I’m not. I can barely remember how to get dressed some mornings.”

I checked out her outfit today—she was dressed up for the field trip, which for Micayla just meant regular clothes with minimal amounts of paint spilled on them. But instead of tying her hair back with a scarf or bandana like she usually did, she’d swept her long braids into a pile on the top of her head, stuck through with a couple of thin paintbrushes.

“Anyway,” she continued, “Peg wants us to sew as much as we can from scratch, so at least it’ll be good experience for me. And maybe I can use some of the clothes for my portfolio. Not that I want to do textiles or fashion, but it can’t hurt to be well-rounded.”