Bookishly Ever After (Ever After #1)(6)
“Helping Dev with the lights.”
She shook her head at me. “You’re supposed to be sitting your green glittery butt next to Jon, picking out the best lighting gels for tonight. Not playing Tinkerbell to Dev’s Peter Pan.”
I blinked at her. Sometimes Em made no sense. “What does Peter Pan have to do with lights?”
“A, you look like a fairy farted on you with all that glitter, b, you’re wearing green, and c, blinky lights.” She shook her head. “This isn’t a book. Guys aren’t going to come after you. You have to get your flirt on.”
“I know that life isn’t a book—”
“And that’s why you need to put yourself out there.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but was interrupted by a loud yell coming from about a quarter of the way down the gym. “Can the two of you pause for a second in talking about how hot I am and start untangling? This gym isn’t going to light itself up.”
I stuck my tongue out at Dev and tugged at the cord coming from the ball in my hands, careful to not break any of the bulbs.
“Oh, and your scintillating presence isn’t light enough?” I said with a smirk before turning to Em. She looked from him to me with an unreadable expression on her face. “What?”
She shook her head. “‘Scintillating?’ Who says that?”
“People in AP English. Along with words like ‘limpid’ and ‘epaulets.’”
“Well, Miss AP English, finish that up quick and then get to work with Jon. I’m getting my remedial English butt back to my English as a Second Language project.” She waved her hook at me and then sauntered across the gym to the DJ booth.
A sharp tug brought me back to the ball of lights in my hands. “Do I need to crack a whip to get you working?”
“Bossy,” I called back with a laugh, but continued unraveling.
The gym did look magical. With the lights dimmed and the twinkle lights in place, you could barely make out the rows of bleachers that lined the two long walls. Floodlights covered in blue gels projected onto the tarps that hung in front of both basketball hoops for a watery effect. And kids in costume, mostly recycled from previous Halloweens or precycled for the coming Halloween, gave the crowd on the dance floor a mostly surreal effect.
I leaned against the bleachers, my fingers itching to pull out my e-reader. As the gym filled, my dress was too hot, too heavy, too different. More than half of the girls dancing were wearing skimpy outfits that barely passed the school dress code and the other half were in the usual witch, vampire, or fairy types of costumes. No one wore anything close to what I was wearing. Plus, Kris never showed up. This had been a really stupid idea.
I took a deep breath. Maeve wouldn’t care. Maeve would be proud to stand out. I straightened up, tossing my hair back like she always did right before facing the dark fae.
“Was that a twitch or something?” Jon stopped beside me and propped himself on a part of the bleacher that we hadn’t been able to push all the way in earlier. He was really tall and lanky and if he hadn’t been sitting, I’d have to crane my neck to look at him. He reached out to touch the thick waves of hair that fell to my waist. “Is that real?”
“Clip-in extensions.” I tried tossing them again and gave up. “That was supposed to be a really cool shampoo commercial moment,” I informed him, trying to sound flirty-ish and not like I just wanted him to go away so I could go back to being a fly on the wall.
He laughed, one of those laughs that showed too much of his teeth. “Cute. You really took the costume thing seriously, didn’t you?” I recognized his costume from his project on Socrates in World History. He’d shortened the robe’s sleeves, though, and I could tell Em had totally exaggerated about the ROTC pushup thing.
“It’s from this book—” I stopped and nodded when I saw his eyes start to glaze over. “Yes. Yes, I did.” Unlike Dev, Jon didn’t seem to want to hear about it.
“Whatever, it looks good. Em told me to come over here and force you to have fun. Why aren’t you dancing?”
Of course Em told him I was here. I hoped my shrug was cool and unconcerned. Maeve-like. “I’d rather watch.” After seeing some of the couples on the dance floor, there was no way I was going out there. I think I’d die if someone tried to grind against me. Worse if I got reprimanded by the monitors patrolling the dance.
“Oh.” His smile dropped from toothy to close-lipped and he looked from me to Em, who was across the room making dance-y twirly motions at us with her arms. “Maybe when they change up the music?”
I stopped trying to shoot daggers with my eyes at Em and made a noncommittal sound. He apparently wasn’t going away any time soon. Silence fell between us and I shifted from foot to foot. Talk. We should talk. I tried to smile up at him.
“So, um, did you see the new mascot uniform concepts for next year?”
He screwed up his face. “How much more can they screw up a muskrat? If we had a decent mascot, it would be one thing, but muskrats?”
“True. They don’t really strike fear into the hearts of our rival schools.”
“Yeah.” Another too-long pause filled the air around us. I heard the bleachers squeak as he shifted his balance, then he hopped off. “You want to go get a cupcake? I heard the snack table is actually decent this time.”