Chapter 11
Hayden and I are the last ones out of the limo. All the girls stand around in little groups on the school steps eyeing me. I wiggle in my four-inch heels, fidgety because the way the girls look at me I feel like I’ve forgotten something.
Boys huddle in a circle on the sidewalk outside of the high school like they’re cooking up something big. And the girls crowd around me. I own this. I keep saying over and over in my mind. This is me having the best night of my life and nobody, not Adrianne or Ally or Brad or Trina or anything I might say or do that’s different than everyone expects is going to spoil it for me.
“So, Roxie, you feeling alright?” one girl says, I wish I knew her name.
“No, way?” another adds. And then there’s this sort of critique of me that goes around the circle of girls I’m with.
“You look so washed out.”
“Yeah, you know if it were me...”
“I’d have done something more with my hair...”
“I’d have worn makeup especially the way that tangerine washes you out. I mean you look like you’ve just gotten over the flu or something.”
“Here girls, let’s go fix her up,” a girl smiles and digs her claws into my arm wanting me to follow her.
“I like the way I look,” I say. But I’m in a herd and the herd sweeps me away. I look over my shoulder to try and catch Hayden’s attention. When I do, he just smiles and nods, like everything is ok and I get this feeling everything won’t be.
“Roxie, don’t you trust us?”
In the pit of my stomach I don’t. I like being part of a pack, but this one is a stampede.
We walk through the gymnasium door and practically crash into a huge, real palm tree. Everything is palm trees and miniature Christmas lights and fountains and waterfalls. Homecoming’s One Enchanted Night with an enchanted island theme.
We duck into the girl’s bathroom, all done up with white towels and little bottles of perfume and makeup and a velvet sofa.
“You can’t win the crown looking like this.”
“No you have to look, regal,” one girl says.
“Perfect,” says the other one.
“Yeah, we’ll make you over,” Ally says.
Finally a familiar face. You’d think I’d know everyone here, right. But dodos don’t really know each other. We’re invisible. Even to each other. So I barely know any of the girls. Ally pulls out her mascara, and the tension leaves my body. I decide everything will be all right. I take a deep breath and sit at the round, velvet bench by a large mirror where another girl stands and finishes her final coat of lipstick. She halfway-smiles on her way out.
Another girl has a brush with thick black liquid on it, eyeliner. “Look up,” she says.
I blink and blink. I trust Ally because she’s Ally and it’s genetically impossible for me not to trust her, even if she’s just a shadow. So I do what they say. I blink when they tell me to. Try not to when they tell me not to. I don’t like being patted and poked. I don’t want any more makeup. And when I stand to look in the mirror, their eyes go wide.
“Um, Ally...” a girl says, pointing to the back of my dress.
Ally peeks over my shoulder. “Take your dress off,” she says.
No. Cinderella never takes her dress off.
“Guess someone’s visitor came a little early.”
“What are you talking about?” I say the only one not in on their joke.
“You know, Aunt Flo?”
Then Ally says it in a way that I totally understand, “Roxie, here.” Ally holds this long thing in a paper wrapper out in front of her and it takes me about two seconds to figure out what it is. I take it in my hands. My heart sinks to my knees and I turn around, slowly. An oblong, red stain breaks the spell like Cinderella’s chimes at midnight. This dodo can’t win. Even on Planet Popular.
I wrap the dress around me, walk over to the sinks and grab a paper towel. I put down the feminine supplies, what my mom calls them, and run the towel under water. I pat the red spot on my dress and lose my breath when I can’t quite reach and my eyes tear up. I’m mad and humiliated all rolled up into one. I mean the most beautiful dress I could ever imagine, ruined. I miss my mom.
This doesn’t happen to Homecoming Queens. Planet Popular is turning out to be The Planet of Horrors. And just then little sharp pains make me want to throw up.
“Bet you’d kill for a brownie right about now, huh?” one girl says laughing.
Every one of those cheesy period TV commercials replays in my head. The ones I’ve mostly ignored. And now I am one of those commercials––Don’t let this happen to you on the biggest night of your life.
Of course it never would happen to you if I wasn’t a freaking thirteen-year-old in a seventeen-year-old body. And then part of me is like, finally. Ally had gotten hers. And I always thought it was weird that it took me so long to get mine. I thought I’d be the last one in my class. But now that it’s here and I’m living the nightmare of it, I never want to get it ever again.
The only one not laughing is Ally. I don’t know if it’s because she actually cares about me, or if she hates seeing her most popular best friend go down in a ball of flames on the biggest night of her life––unpopular by association.
Then a girl, a very beautiful girl, another girl I don’t know walks into the bathroom. She’s our age, and takes my hand and leads me out of there. Away from the mascara toting, laughing girls and down a dark hallway. I pull away from her. I don’t want anyone to see me in my red-stained dress. No one. Especially Hayden. She holds out the message in the bottle. Yeah, that message from that bottle. And doesn’t say a word.
“Who are you?” I say.
She doesn’t answer and instead she brings me to a smaller bathroom, the Faculty bathroom, just down the hall. She hands me a bunch of things in paper wrappers and says, “Go take care of yourself,” in a way that makes me think that I can.
I step into a stall and swing the latch to lock myself in and take a deep breath. Her manicured hand reaches over the stall and waves a little, wordlessly begging for the dress, so I slip out of it. I don’t want to give it to her, but I do. I mean what am I going to do just sit in the faculty bathroom all night? Naked. In a bathroom stall. Really? And just like that, on the night I would be Queen of The Peacocks, I want to curl up and die.
Her hand reappears above the stall with a wet towel and a dry one. I use everything she gives me to take care of myself and I feel fine. I think all of this is going to change me epically but, it doesn’t. Even though I don’t know how to use the feminine supplies, I figure it out. It all works out fine, except for the whole I’m-not-wearing-any-clothes part.
“How did you get that map?” I ask trying to take the focus off of me sitting naked in a faculty bathroom stall freaking out about Hayden and what those girls will tell him about me. Peacock Roxie has about as many beautiful dresses as I have pairs of jeans at home. Hayden could get me another dress. I’d be high maintenance, but no big deal, I’d still get to go to my one and only Homecoming Dance. I’d live like a peacock for one night. All wasn’t lost. Not quite yet.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” my rescuer says.
“The map,” I say.
“I wasn’t holding any map,” she says, slipping me another dry towel over the bathroom stall. I flip the towel out in front of me and it’s bigger than I expect, like a bath towel. I wrap it around me, shivering. I feel the night slipping away. I unlock the latch and step out of the stall.
She turns on some water at the sink. She looks like Lola. “Better get this washed so it doesn’t stain,” she says, handing me my dress.
Yuck. I take a few steps closer to the sink and hold the stain under the water and realize I’ve left my purse in the limo. I so suck at being seventeen. I see the map lying on the counter beside the sink and I pour over it. “Where did you find this?” I say not taking my eyes off the map.
“O
h, that? It’s a treasure hunt. Victoria came up with it. If the King and Queen find the treasure then the students donate fifty percent of the money raised from the dance to their favorite charity. Adrianne coordinated it.” The way the Lola-look-alike talks, it’s like she’s a teacher at the school.
“Charity?”
Adrianne?
“Yeah, like blind people or homeless people or hungry people.”
“Does it have to go to people?”
“No.”
I wring the dress out and set it on the counter. And I wash my hands over and over. I take a paper towel and when the girl doesn’t leave I say, “So now what? Am I supposed to go out there in this towel?”
She smiles and looks in the mirror.
I’m a hideous mess of overdone eyeliner and an over-made up face that looks like a mask next to my white neck. How could those peacocks have done this to me?
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” I say meeting her gaze.
I reach for another towel and work to scrub all the makeup off. The red marks I make from rubbing around my eyes adds to their puffiness from my tears and makes me look more like a red-eyed tree frog than a Homecoming Queen.
“Those girls your friends?” she says staring at me in the mirror.
I don’t know what to say. They are mean. Seriously mean. But, I’m seriously not knowing anything about this life and kind of depend on them to get me through. Kind of how it really is when you try to survive middle school. I guess high school isn’t that different. I’m flying blind. And maybe that’s what I really am anyway. Blind. Wanting only one thing––to be a peacock, no matter what the cost, no matter how high the price. I stare at my so-not-peacock self in the mirror wondering if I’ll ever see my real family again. Wondering if I’ll ever get to live these four years over again, for real, in an un-peacock obsessed state. A single tear falls down my cheek.
I pick the map up off the counter and remember. The moonlight. My attic. The desert island. The Oath of Secrecy. How I have to find the treasure. Find what Adrianne failed to find. One up the peacocks back home.
I tighten the towel around me.
Ally runs into the bathroom, breathless.
“Here,” she hands me a pair of jeans and a skin-tight top. I don’t grab them right away. I don’t know why. I just sort of freeze.
“They’re yours. I got them out of my locker. Don’t worry, they won’t make you look fat or anything. You lent them to me when we worked the cheerleading dunk tank at Oakdale Days this summer. I just never got them back to you.”
And I must look suspicious or something, but honestly I don’t really know what I am.
“Don’t worry they’re clean,” she says.
I flip the jeans out in front of me. They’re totally not my style, thin legs and a tight fit. I don’t even want to try to put them on. But I head back into the stall and latch the door and all I keep hearing in my head as I put the jeans and t-shirt on is my mom explaining the whole thing to me. Warn me, is more like it. About the cruel trick nature pulls on teenage girls. My words. These are Mom’s––I’m a woman now. I sure don’t feel like one. I feel like a little girl who doesn’t want to grow up. Evah.
I want to be a real peacock, one that will never, ever have to deal with blood and embarrassment and boys and being a woman. This is the single strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. Well, being thirteen in a seventeen-year-old peacock body, and having the hottest date to Homecoming comes a close second. And I know when I walk out of the bathroom and back into the gymnasium in my jeans and my plain white t-shirt, everyone will know how I’m really a dodo. And they’ll know about what happened to my dress. And one thing I’m starting to learn about peacocks, they don’t like it if you’re different. Even a little bit different.
So I leave the stall, Ally holds the bathroom door for me and I take a step into the hallway, magically transformed, back into a dodo again. To face everyone I was about to convince I’m Queen of The Peacocks. Now, stripped of makeup, standing in my ripped jeans and tight white t-shirt, there isn’t any way I can stand out more. I walk down the hallway and when I reach the gym entrance, surrounded by real palm trees and real sand drifts, all the peacocks huddle around the four double door entrances to the Peacockfest.
“I heard she was in an accident,” one girl says.
“Maybe we should take the vote again.” I hear a guy say.
Hayden lurks just beyond the peacock huddle but I avoid him by ducking inside the gym. The light dims inside the huge, cold basketball-court-turned-enchanted island. The dance floor is polka-dotted with a few couples. When the DJ announces the band, Hayden steps inside the gym, just a few double doors down from me, rubbernecking. Looking everywhere but beside him. I don’t want him to see me like this. I want him to remember me all tangerine and feathery, peacocky and beautiful. There’s a tug at my arm.
“Here’s your copy,” the beautiful girl in the red dress who helped me in the bathroom says. And she shoves the map with the X and the seven weird words into my hands. When I look up, Hayden’s standing right in front of me. His eyes bluer than I remember them, the color of peacock feathers.
“What happened?” he says.
I look down at what used to be my fabulous dress and see my huge boobs in the white t-shirt and feel more myself than I ever have, except when Hayden kissed me on the lips.
“I’m a dodo trying to be a peacock. I’ll never be anything but a dodo,” I say, walking back through the gym doors, out into the hall and I head for the exit, not caring anymore. Not caring about peacocks and being perfect and impressing doppelgangers. Not knowing what to do to set things right. With each step I hatch my plan.
“Stop. You have to tell me what happened?” Hayden says.
“You really want to know, Hayden? Really?” I say.
“Yes, Roxie I do,” he says, giving me my white, fluffy feather purse. He takes my hand in his and we walk together. I glance down at my still-amazing feet, my pretty white-and-crystal shoes, and I clench my ball of white, fluffy feathers so tight I don’t even see where he and I are going. When he lets go of my hand he holds the door to the limo open and says, “We have one more stop to make.”
One more stop. “Where?” I say all frantic, like there’s something to be afraid of.
“Back to your place,” Hayden says. I guess he sees the question in my eyes and isn’t going to let it go unanswered, “I bet you have another dress up there somewhere,” Hayden says.
“Yeah.” I say with a smile and we slide into our seats in the limo.
I peer out the window and watch the high school’s lights fade away on our drive down 55th street. What am I going to tell Hayden? That he’s really out with a thirteen-year-old who wants to be a peacock so bad she risked everything––including never seeing her family again. That she’d never been kissed until he kissed her. That little, square foil packages terrify her. That somewhere along the way, she turned into a woman.
“Roxie,” he says putting his arm around me. He leans in close. His lips on mine, I close my eyes because I want to remember everything I can’t see. The beat of my heart and the way his hands aren’t warm or cold. The way they move over me and pull me in closer. His tongue slips inside my mouth and it isn’t icky this time. It’s like we’re playing with each other but in a different way and I lose my breath when tingles shoot down my back in waves, in the same places he touches me.
“I’m not who you think I am,” I whisper when I can.
“None of us are,” he says and smiles. “So who are you tonight, Roxanne?”
“A peacock.” I smile. Since I don’t totally gross Hayden out, maybe we can still have a great Homecoming Dance. Even if the peacocks do a re-vote and I don’t wear the tiara.
“I don’t need to go home,” I say.
“Yes, ma’am,” the driver says all official.
Hayden smiles. “I’ve got a pair of jeans in my football locker. We’ll be castaways. Deal??
??
“Deal.” We shake on it like we both just bet a million that we can still pull this date, this night off.
On our drive back to Oakdale High, I feel more me than ever. In a limo. With a hot guy. The hot guy. Even if I’m lousy at being a teenager, even if I don’t know much about being seventeen, I do know a friend when I’m with one and I think I know a good kisser too. Hayden is both.
Hayden gets out of the limo first and gives me a hand. I clip-clop my way back through the gymnasium doors. We walk hand-in-hand down the red-carpeted lobby. And my heart pounds to our footsteps. All is well. Nothing. Absolutely nothing could ever ruin this night. And we step into the gym where the DJ blares Rihanna’s SOS.
Out of the corner of my eye I spot a dark shape. A person. Staring at me and Hayden. Watching us. A girl. My stomach falls to my knees. But when I look again she’s gone.
“Did you see that?” I ask Hayden.
“See what? Where?” he says doing a quick glance around. “Hey I’m going to change real quick.” He kisses my forehead and lets go of my hand.
“There was a girl, over there,” I say, trembling.
Hayden turns his head in the direction of my outstretched arm. He follows my pointed finger to the hall just outside the gym, where there’s a bunch of palm trees with little white lights wrapped around them.
“You’re just freaked out. It’ll be OK. I’ll be back in a second.” And he runs out of the gym.
I can’t shake the creepy feeling I have as I walk around. It’s something I’ve never felt before. I’m only halfway there, halfway-listening to people talking, halfway-understanding what people say to me. There are loads of beautiful girls in beautiful dresses talking in the back of the gym, kind of lining up around the snack table. The way they’re all huddled together it’s like they’re sharing the juiciest gossip ever. I know, because that’s what I am. The only girl in jeans. The only girl with no makeup on. The only girl, alone.
And it’s crazy, but I wonder if I’ll see Hayden again. Like this, boyfriend-girlfriend. Or, if somehow I’ll all of a sudden wake up and be back to my old-self. Away from the ridicule and glaring eyes and cackling pretty girls. I clutch my beautiful purse. It sort of reminds me of Cinderella’s glass slipper. The one thing she had to hold on to, to prove what happened to her was real.
I don’t want to leave Hayden, the seventeen-year-old Hayden, behind. He’s my first boyfriend, in a weird four-years-in-the-future-type way. I want to stay in this world forever.
Ally leaves the bevy of peacocks and walks up to me.
“So you’re wearing, that?” she says.
“Yeah, I think it’ll be a new trend in the future. You know, donating what you would have spent on nails, hair, a dress, shoes and a limo to the needy.” I half-smile. I’m doing everything half-way right now. I can’t describe it but that’s what it feels like. Half of everything.
Ally kind of looks me over, up then down. “What are you trying to say, you don’t believe in any of this anymore? Oh, ok, then.” And she isn’t knifing her stomach. She’s thin. Way too thin. I like the dodo Ally better.
“No, I do. I did. I mean, it means everything to me. Really. You have no idea. But, I just realized something.” I stop myself.
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” she asks in a tone that tells me she doesn’t really care what I say next.
“I don’t need to be a peacock any more,” I say.
“What?”
And every muscle in my body tenses when I see my brother Mitch walk up to Ally and me on the very edge of the dance floor. He stands right beside me.
“Who are you?” Ally says, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s Mitch,” I roll my eyes. Guys don’t really change that much from seventeen to twenty-one. He’s rocking designer jeans he could never afford before.
“Who?” Ally’s eyes go wide.
Which is weird because she should know Mitch. I mean, if all the people who were never popular are all of a sudden popular here, why wouldn’t she? Ally’s just spacing. Majorly spacing. She runs off to be with her guy, Blaine. Gorgeous, yes. Nice, no idea. I mean they can’t all be mean, can they?
Adrianne walks by, right behind Mitch.
“Come on Roxie, we’ve got to get the hell out of here,” Mitch says.
“Where’d you come from?” I ask.
“Somebody had to come and save your butt,” he says, all regular like he isn’t a peacock at all.
“I don’t need saving.” My back arches and I sink down into myself feeling smaller and smaller, more like his little sister. His thirteen-year-old little sister in a seventeen-year-old body. I don’t need Mitch helping me. “How’d you get here? You look, different.”
“No time. And yeah, you want to talk about different? You should see yourself at home,” he laughs.
“What are you talking about?”
“Lola warned Adrianne. But she wouldn’t listen.”
“Warned her about what? Exactly.”
He shakes his head. “Returning. Which you should never have done. You’ll never get back home alone.”
“Oh, now I get it. You’re here to save me? I don’t need saving!”
He looks down, running a hand through his hair. His eyes dart from one side of the gym to the other.
“How do you know where I belong?” I say, staring at Hayden who’s talking to Ally. And I’m twisting inside hoping she doesn’t say anything against me.
Mitch leans over and it’s creepy when big brothers do that, and he whispers in my ear. “Because of what I found in the attic. They didn’t tell you that part of it, did they?”
“What freaking part?”
“What gets left behind when you go,” he says.
“And what is that, exactly?”
“When I walked into the attic, I found I had a puma for a sister.”
A puma.
“You’re a freaking Puma. Pacing. In a circle,” he says.
“Sure.” Like I said, no one can drive a sister more crazy than a brother who teases her all the time.
“Your animal spirit. That’s what gets left behind. And pumas don’t like to lie around and wait.”
“Animal spirit.” I crack up not believing that Mitch, Mr. Physics, believes in animal spirits. “Did you fall down and hit your head or something?”
“Mom and Dad called the zoo. The zookeepers are on their way. If we don’t get back now, they’ll move you, and if they move you one of three things can happen––don’t ask, because it’s Lola that knows all the ins-and-outs of this stuff. But once they move you from the attic, you’ll either be stranded here forever or you’ll be a bridge. Trust me you don’t want to be a bridge. And, once they cage you, things will get even worse. Damn Adrianne. She just couldn’t let it go.”
“Let what go?”
“What she left behind.”
“What?”
“All I can tell you is, shadows are jealous.” He lowers his voice and takes a step closer to me. “Extremely jealous of us. Of real people.”
When he says real people shivers crawl up my spine.
“They know they’re shadows, the same way you and I know we’re human. And they want more than anything to leave this world. They’ll do anything to leave this world. Anything.”
“What’s a bridge?” I say.
“We have to leave. Now!” Mitch grabs my hand and we walk-run out of the gym.
“Wait a minute.” I jerk my hand out of his.
Two strong arms wrap around me and Hayden kisses me on the cheek. “What’s up? Who’s this guy?” he says like he doesn’t think much of the competition.
“Just some Student Union geek,” I say. I reach into my back pocket and pull out the map. I’ll take care of my own problems and don’t need anyone saving me. I can save myself.
“Let’s go.” Mitch says like he’s talking to a woman now.
I sort of stand up straighter.
“Roxie?” Mitch squ
ints his eyes like he has trouble seeing.
“Yeah,” I say. I’m taller than him in my heels. Weird.
“Roxie, can I talk to you for a minute?” Mitch pulls me away from Hayden before I say OK, but I try and break free. If these are my last moments with Hayden, I don’t want Mitch pulling me away from them.
“Listen, I’ll leave here a lot quicker if you just tell me what Adrianne left behind,” I say.
“We don’t have time for this garbage. Now I know you’re having your little fun.”
“It’s not like that Mitch.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what it’s like,” Mitch says but I only half-hear him because Ally runs over to Hayden who looks super-hot in his tuxedo jacket and jeans, rugged and beautiful, and more than anything I want to hug him again. “Life as you know it will be over,” Mitch says.
“Well maybe I never liked that life to begin with,” I say.
Mitch’s eyes go kind of moist. And it takes my breath away. At home we barely tolerate each other.
“Why do you care?” I say.
“Because, I know something you don’t know,” he says.
“Really, well, I know something you don’t know,” I fire back.
“Ok, listen,” He puts his hands in his pockets.
“What?”
“No matter what...” he runs a hand through his hair. He eyes sparkle a little bit when something catches his eye. Make that someone. “I’ll die.”
“What are you talking about?” My heart freaks out and all my memories go back to everything we’ve ever done as brother and sister.
“It’s no big deal. We all die.” He kind of says die like it’s my fault. And maybe it is. But he seems to know for certain.
“You know when?”
“I’m telling you because I know you won’t remember when we AP home.”
“I don’t want to AP.”
“I know.” And by the look in his eye he really does know.
“I’m staying here,” I say catching Hayden’s stare.
The band stops playing and I notice the music for the very first time because of the look in Hayden’s eyes. And I think about how we danced on my birthday and how my party seems so-forever-ago. Hayden walks up and takes my hand and says “It’s time.” He smiles and I wonder what he’s talking about. Whether it’s time to stay or time to go. I wonder if he’s in on this too.
I take his hand and even though I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt I feel like a princess. We work our way through the formal, beady-eyed crowd and wind our way to center stage. I probably would have been able to hear the gasps of all the people on the dance floor if my heart didn’t beat so loud.
“Welcome Red Devils to our One Enchanted Night Homecoming Dance. I can see that our King and Queen, always originals, have taken the theme to heart this year,” Mrs. Bradley says nodding to us, still rocking her signature longish skirt and matching blazer with the same big smile she’d always had, unless she had to boot someone to detention. Some things in this world are remarkably the same. She was our principal at middle school. I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding at the sight of her.
“Drum Roll please,” Mrs. Bradley says. “The votes have been counted and it’s official. The King And Queen of our Enchanted Island are Hayden and Roxie. Congratulations, kids.”
She hands me a crown and I place it on Hayden’s head. He places a tiara on mine. And I can’t speak it’s such a perfect moment. The most peacock moment of my life. It’s impossible to feel like a dodo in a tiara.
“And now, dance with your King and Queen and their court, before the treasure hunt.”
I should have paid attention to who was named to the court and the drama of us all hitting the dance floor together, but Hayden takes my hand in his and we walk down the steps of the stage and onto the dance floor. The band plays Lullaby by The Cure, complete with a lead singer who’s a Robert-Smith look-a-like, a very 80s Robert Smith look-a-like. And no one but Hayden and I exist in the world.
“Remember when you played this song for me for the first time?” he says.
I remember like it was yesterday. Because it freaking nearly was. And I can’t believe he remembers if this is some alternate universe. If he’s a shadow. A jealous shadow.
“Hayden, how do you remember that?”
“It was the night I knew I first had a crush on you, it took me about four years to get up the courage to actually ask you out. I think it’s a little harder with friends, you know?”
He leans in and gives me a peck on the cheek. A small, little kiss that means everything. And his crown bounces a bit of white light into my eye.
I jump a little. Because Hayden’s popular back home and he’s popular here and that doesn’t make sense. But I don’t care about it, or Mitch, and what Mitch said, and where I am, and whether or not I’ll ever see my family again. My worries fall off of me like a big sack I’ve hauled for miles and finally drop at the side of a road. And all I feel are my heartbeats. And all I imagine is kissing Hayden again. He pulls me in and hugs me, my cheek warm against his chest.
I look up into his eyes, he bends down low and just before he’s about to put his lips on mine, a light bounces off his crown again, into my eyes.