The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(35)

I flee to the food, take up a glass of spiced wine, and think about a pastry as well but decide I’d rather not risk spilling something down my front. There’s a knot of women standing by the dressing room staring at me, and when I look back at them, they all duck and giggle, and I hate these girls. I hate them so much. I hate the way they giggle, and look at me when I don’t, and then it feels as though I’m being laughed at and they’re all in on it and I’m not. It’s my whole childhood, being sneered at by watery girls for a joke I didn’t understand because I was reading books they could never understand.

For a woman who boasts that she doesn’t give a fig what anyone thinks of her, I certainly have a lot of party-related anxiety.

Max seats himself upon my hem and looks up at me with his drooping eyes. The white spots above them make him look grotesquely expressive. “You have very nice eyebrows,” I tell him, and give him a flat-handed pat to the head. He licks his lips, then goes on staring at my glass. Of course, the moment I get around other females my own age, I end up socializing with the dog.

“Well, don’t you look aggressively miserable,” someone says, and I turn. Johanna has extricated herself from her harem and come to stand beside me at the window. Max leans into her, his tail thumping happily between her backside and mine.

“It’s a nice party,” I say.

“It is,” she replies, reaching down to massage Max’s head. “So why do you look like you’re having your teeth pulled? What’s the matter?”

“I’m just . . .” I consider lying. Saying I’m tired from my trip or ate something at supper that didn’t agree with me. But a strange sort of instinct sets in when I meet her eyes. I used to tell Johanna everything. “I’m so bad at this,” I say.

“At what?”

“This.” I flap a general hand at the room full of women. “Talking to girls and socializing and being normal.”

“You’re normal.”

“I’m not.” I feel like a wild animal in a menagerie, ragged and feral and unsocialized among all these women who don’t tip over in heels or itch the powder off their face. As Sim proclaimed, a crocodile in a cage full of swans. “I’m prickly and off-putting and odd and not always nice.”

Johanna takes a macaron from the buffet table and licks a dab of filling off her finger. “No one’s good at these things.”

“Everyone here is.”

“Everyone is faking it,” she says. “Most of these women don’t know each other—they likely all feel just as misplaced and awkward as you.”

“You don’t.”

“Well, it’s my party.”

“But you’re good at this,” I say. “You always have been. That’s why people liked you back home, and not me. Girls like me are meant to have books instead of friends.”

“Why can’t you have both?” She takes a bite of her macaron, then tosses the rest to Max, who, in spite of how large an area his mouth covers, misses it entirely and has to chase it down under the table. “I think you need to give people a chance. Including yourself.” She reaches out and puts a light hand on my elbow. “Promise me you’ll stay tonight and at least try to have a good time.”

I run my tongue along my teeth, then let out a sigh through my nose. I feel like I owe this to her. And also am completely maddened by that. I do not enjoy being beholden, so perhaps it’s best if I pay off this debt as quickly as possible. “Must I?”

“And you have to talk to at least three people.”

“All right, you’re one.”

“Three people you don’t already know. Max does not count,” she says, reading my mind.

“If I talk to three people, may I then leave?”

Her head cants to the side, and I can’t tell if her smile actually saddens or if it’s simply the angle. “Are you really that desperate to be away from me?”

I look away, to our reflections in the glass, made black by the darkness. It feels like looking through a window into a shadow version of ourselves, the girls who could have existed if Johanna and I hadn’t fought. Maybe, if things had gone differently, I’d be here as an attendant at her wedding, invited and wanted and not kicking my feet in the corner. Or maybe we’d neither of us be here. Maybe we’d have run away together long ago, gone to find her mother who had left her and her father when she was a child, or found a world of our own, away from all of this.

“Miss Johanna!” someone calls, and we turn as a very blond, very pretty girl with a very narrow waist comes over to us. She wraps an arm around Johanna’s stomach from behind and cuddles into her neck. Max leans into them both. The girl looks up at me with enormous blue eyes. “Who’s this?”

“This is my friend Felicity Montague,” Johanna replies. “We grew up together.”

“Oh, in England? You’ve come from so far!” The girl holds out her hand to me over Johanna’s shoulder. “Christina Gottschalk.”

With her hand in front of her stomach and out of Christina’s sight, Johanna holds up a single finger and mouths to me, That’s one. I almost laugh.

Christina gives me a smile I’m not sure I believe is genuine, then turns her face back up to Johanna. “I have to give you a scolding.”