The Mystery of Hollow Places(42)

This is stupid. I’ll think up an excuse before prom. Play sick, somehow. Or Dad will get me out of it. . . .

Uneasiness simmers in the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t be thinking of prom or pretty dresses or Chad, not when Dad’s been away without a word for six days now. I try to check the time on my phone before discovering it’s dead, then pull Chad’s wrist up to read the digits on his big calculator watch. One hour before Tilly is back from Water Aerobics for the Ancient. An hour and I might have some answers. What’s an hour? I’ve waited six days. I can wait sixty minutes. Besides, he’s not missing, I remind myself. Just searching, like I am.

“How’s this?”

Chad plucks out a dress and dangles it by the hanger. And it’s . . . not terrible. Vintage-looking, but not old-fashioned. Deep red, like wine, with a heart-shape neckline, a high waist, and the kind of full, just-below-the-knee skirt Jessa claims works for sizable thighs. It’s the kind of dress a girl might wear in the old noir mysteries Dad likes. In those movies, a girl is either good, or she’s one of those girls, as Liz Bash would say. Either a Mrs. Maximilian de Winter, or a Rebecca. This is the kind of dress one of those girls might wear when she’s still acting sweet in front of the detective, but we on our couches with our Cheez Doodles know she’s trouble.

It’s a pretty sexy dress. A pretty sexy dress that Chad is holding out to me with one eyebrow raised, and a smile I’ve never quite seen before.

As I stand here considering it, I ask myself, what do I know?

I know I’ve had this Guinness Book of World Records Longest-Running Crush on Chad since fifth grade. I remember the exact night it happened. A girl in Jessa’s ballet class had told her how to summon Bloody Mary, and she wanted to play the game. Even kid-size Jessa was pretty good at getting what she wanted. While she chanted the name three times in the flickering light of a Glade candle, I stayed by the bathroom door, knowing that just outside, Chad had sweetly volunteered to stand guard. Just in case Mary showed, he said. When he rattled the knob violently I screamed, tripped over a wet towel that might’ve been Mary’s grasping, bloodied arm on the dark bathroom floor, and burst out into Chad’s arms, Jessa close behind. Tucked into his then-scrawny chest, he smelled like mint and strange spices at once (toothpaste and boy deodorant, I later realized). That was it. The die was cast.

I have never asked a guy out in my life. Haven’t even slipped one a “Do you like me? Circle yes or no” note. Lee Jung asked me to be his girlfriend, and Jeff Keating asked to kiss me behind the bounce house at the low-budget Sugarbrook fair that goes up in the mall parking lot each year, and A.J. Breen, the only boy to write me love letters, slipped a cartoon drawing of me drinking a milkshake into my Trapper Keeper in middle school, asking me to sit with him at lunch. But I never asked anything from a guy. What’s the upside? The possible outcomes as I see it are:

1) I’ll like them but they won’t like me, resulting in pain.

2) We’ll go out and I’ll realize I don’t like them and have to dump them, resulting in pain.

3) We’ll go out and I’ll end up really liking the boy, only to have him dump me for Cassie Pavia, who stands at the electronic pencil sharpener in front of Josh Davis’s desk with her hip popped while Josh moans, “Cassie, you’re killing me with that body.” Result: Pain.

I mean, how are two people ever supposed to like each other the right amount in the right way at the right time? Impossible.

But I also know that Chad Price is looking at me with big green eyes and one dimpled cheek, his blond hair fuzzed from pawing through racks of fabric, all of this making me warm and misty, and he’s offering me a beautiful dress that I want him to see me in. Are these random occurrences, or fate? Unconnected dots or a constellation? And isn’t this what I’m supposed to be doing?

Having faith?

For once, don’t be tough, I tell myself. Be brave.

I snatch the hanger away. “I will try this on if, if . . .”

“If?”

I inspect the crisp red fabric, the size (seems right), the fifty-five-dollar price tag (about forty more than I wanted to spend), the stitching along the neckline (like he believes I’m fascinated by the construction of this dress). “If you put on a suit and come to prom too.”

His smile wobbles, confused.

“Just, if I have to go, I don’t see why you get off. You’re my accomplice in this.” I stare at the dress in his arms and wonder if he can sense the breath trapped in my body.

“I can see I’ve been tangled in your web of lies,” he says, grinning again. “Yeah, I’ll go.”

I sweep off to the fitting rooms, keeping it together pretty well. But as I kick my boots and jeans off and slide into the gown, the fist of my heart unclenches, and maybe it’s the blood flowing again, the air pumping in and out of my lungs (so much air, I can’t get enough of it! And it all smells wonderful!), and I know I shouldn’t, but I feel so light. I’m a mayfly on the breeze. A balloon. A beam of moonlight. A sun.





FOURTEEN


While we wait in my car for Tilly Donahue’s return from elderly water aerobics, the sky spits freezing rain that blurs the windshield. The last real clumps of snow beside the storm drains glitter dangerously; fresh ice will make for a thrilling drive home. But it’s dry in the Civic, the heater sputtering heroically onward, and Chad and I are playing the picnic game.