“I don’t think you missed much, Sasha. It sounds like parading all the princesses in front of the prince so he could wave yes at one and no at the next?” Mallory asked. “I thought that kind of ended in medieval times.”
“Kind of,” Sasha said cheerfully. “When I was little, though, I thought that was the thing. I used to wrap my mama’s robe around me and pretend I was at my cotillion. All the little girls did.”
“Did your ... uh ... mama have one?” Mally asked.
“Well, yeah. Her daddy had money ‘til he drank it all up. Mama got married three times and every time to a richer guy,” said Sasha. “None of ’em had any use for me though. Or my sister.” A shadow that struck Mallory’s heart passed over Sasha’s pretty face. Then she was all toothpaste smiles again. “Keep working on that walk. To be beautiful, y‘all gotta suffer! That’s still true! But you guys are so naturally skinny you don’t have to worry about every bite ending up on your butt, but y’all still gotta walk like a swan!” Sasha mimed a pageant-girl glide.
“Untrue!” Mallory said with a laugh. “About the calories. I eat like a draft horse, yeah, but I run it all off on the soccer field, and Meredith ... I guess you could say she’s an athlete.”
“She’s a terrific athlete. You guys should switch some time, and y’all try cheerleading, Mally. You’d be worn out!”
“I should, but I’ve promised to shoot myself first,” Mallory said. Merry didn’t blink. She was accustomed to her twin’s cheer chauvinism.
“Who’s your date for the formal?” Merry asked. “This dress is for the formal, right?”
“I asked Sawyer Brownlee. Do you know him? What a sweetie. He’s like a gentleman, kind of. Almost like back home.” Sawyer Brownlee was a neighbor of Merry’s friend, Neely. He’d probably taken lessons to waltz and used the right fork at dinner, Mallory thought, unlike Drew, who should put on a raincoat before he ever lifted a fork to his mouth. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow morning when I come to take care of that little pumpkin! I’m so glad Owen’s all better!”
Just then, all three girls noticed Carla Quinn just a few feet away near a free-standing display of Valentine’s Day teddy bears and little trucks with chocolate hearts inside.
“Hi Carla,” Sasha said. “Doing some shopping?”
“Well, my daughter just wants gourmet chocolate now,” Carla said sourly. “And clothes, clothes, clothes. These remind me of my little boy.”
“How old is he?” Merry asked. “I never knew you ...”
“I have to run,” Carla said and stalked away.
Sasha looked at Mally and Merry. Sasha asked, “Carla is completely hostile! Why does your mom like her so much?”
“She’s a good nurse, my mom says,” Mallory answered. “Owen likes her.”
“Personally, I think she’s weird,” Sasha said. “But your mom knows best. ”Well, I have to find something or other here! See y’all later.”
As Sasha walked away, running her fingertips experimentally over the shoe styles, Mallory stepped out of the pair she’d tried on.
“You win, ’Ster,” she said to Merry. “I stood there all that time, and I didn’t fall out of them. I’ll practice ball first, step, ball first, step. I’m suddenly very tired of all these choices. Let’s go eat. Please?”
“One more stop,” Merry said. “You can’t be all decked out without a smoky eye or something.”
At the makeup counter, Merry used the deft skill of a surgeon to swiftly select exactly the right combinations of creams and gels and tints for her twin. “Let’s get a free makeover!” Merry suggested.
“Enough, Mer,” Mallory said. “I have product fatigue.”
“Oh, fine. Who gets tired after less than an hour of shopping? It’s like being on a date with a dead person.”
“You should know,” said her twin. “I’ve never seen one. At least, walking around.” Meredith rolled her eyes. Because she saw deep into the past, she had, at various points in her life, seen people whom she described to her sister as “technically dead.” Mallory never understood the qualifier “technically,” but Merry never really wanted to talk about it. It raised questions about religion that Merry told Mally she wasn’t sure she could answer to a certainty, at least at this time in her life.
“I wish you could see ghosts,” Meredith said thoughtfully, as she went on subtly dabbing different shades onto her sister’s cheeks, giving the impression to passersby that there were two identical people, one of whom was mute. Mallory stood like a mannequin but widened her eyes in mock horror. “It’s not like you think. They’re interesting. I’ve been seeing ghosts even more lately. Keech innis,” she continued, switching into their own language as a sales associate passed by and raised both eyebrows. When Mallory heard what her twin was saying, which translated to “in our house,” her eyes widened in alarm.
Mallory asked, “Can I move my lips now?” Merry nodded, satisfied.
“In our house? You’re seeing ghosts more in our house?” Mally asked. “More ghosts or more often?”
“Not just our house,” Meredith went on calmly. “I see them other places too. I must say, you look nice. People wouldn’t know it was you. I do have a gift. You can barely tell you have makeup on.”
“So I’m paying fifty-six dollars for something people can’t tell I have on,” Mallory said. “We were talking about ghosts, Mer. Where in our house and where else?”
“Well, obviously, I see them in cemeteries, when we pass a cemetery,” Merry said.
“At night?” Mally asked.
“Don’t be a twit. As if ghosts care if they come out in the daytime or at night,” Merry said. The sales girl was openly listening now, but Merry was beginning to enjoy both the salesgirl’s and Mally’s discomfort. Their history meant that Mallory usually “saw” the harrowing things—the acts of cruelty and danger that lay ahead. And though Merry was not in the least afraid of ghosts, she knew other people were, if only because the unknown was always more ominous than anything someone could think up.
“What are they doing?” Mallory asked then. “In the cemeteries?”
“In cemeteries, what do you think? Just sitting around talking. On the street, the same thing we are, except obviously they’re looking for something we don’t see. I saw a man once last year looking down into the little lake thing at the golf course by Grandma’s house and then up at the sky, and I realized he must have been looking for a house that used to be there before.... I don’t know how long before. And I saw a woman come down from the ridge, in her nightgown, in bare feet, in the snow, but not walking on the path.”
“Do ... do you want some, uh, samples?” said the salesperson.
“You bet,” Meredith said, as the girl, who was probably in her twenties, stuffed a bag chock-full of moisturizers and little cologne sprays. “Thanks and bye now.” The girl rushed away in the storage area.
“She just wanted us to leave,” Mallory said. “What if she tells someone?”
Meredith smiled. “I used to worry about that but ... imagine what they’d think of what she said.”
“I guess,” Mallory said, smiling too. “But I want to hear more about this, Mer.”
“Fine. I just don’t want to talk about immortality because I don’t know if ghosts are memory impressions or really souls.”
“Well, I’m curious about the ones in our house but for now, lead me out of this temptation and deliver me to pizza, Meredith,” she said. “I feel faint.” As they walked, Mallory said, “There’s Sasha again.” Sasha was still in the shoe department, with at least fifteen boxes lined up and pyramided beside her stockinged feet. “What she said was funny. Like she wants to be a nurse and a professional and get scholarships, but you can tell she wants to marry a rich guy, too.”
“Being a nurse is a very good path to that,” Merry said, waving to Allie and Erika, who were headed toward them down the mall. “Nurses marry doctors.”
“What about Mom? She married a soccer player with bad knees who h
ad a degree in American literature! If Dad were a doctor, we wouldn’t be giving up our mother seventy hours a week!”
“Then Dad is the one who got lucky. Of course, by the time she’s rich, we’ll be out of college. We’ll have to survive on our own, without our mother’s help. I’m going to have to marry a rich man on mah own, y’all,” Merry said, mimicking Sasha. “Don’t you think I’m charming enough to be the fairest in the land?”
“You’re so deep, Meredith,” Mallory said. “What’s a vixen like you doing without a date for the formal?”
They passed the mall fountain and could detect the steamy, awful-wonderful smell that issued from the collision of Latta Java and Pizza Papa on the far end of the mall.
“You know, we should stop quick and get Dad a birthday present while we’re here,” Merry said. Tim’s birthday was in April and so was Adam’s. Adam was easy. He’d gotten an iPod for Christmas, and the girls went in together on a fifty dollar card for him to fill it with songs. They drifted over to the CVS store and debated on buying Tim an electric toothbrush, reading on the package that it was good for “aging gums.” They agreed it was kind of a cold present, which reminded them of the time that Tim had given Campbell a Crock-Pot slow cooker for their anniversary—in which she had, the next day, planted a cactus. Their father hadn’t even dared to bring it up.
They began to run to meet up with Allie and Erika and, an hour later, had demolished a Monza Four Cheese pizza bought on discount from Drew. By the time they finished, the mall was about to close. Allie’s mother was there to take her and Erika to the gym class they’d enrolled in on Sunday nights to improve their tumbling. Merry often said—in a pretty conceited way—she was glad to have learned her tumbling when she was six. The twins waved through the window of Pizza Papa to Drew and then jumped on the red bus that was just pulling up to the stop.
As they put their packages into the rack and settled into seats, Meredith suddenly punched her sister hard on the bicep.
“What was that for?” Mally demanded.
“For telling me I’m a loser because I don’t have a date for the formal! ‘I’m not defined by that’—that’s what you’d say,” Merry said.
“You could have fooled me,” said Mallory. “Anyhow, I’m sorry.... Speaking of that, what are you going to wear for a coat if you wear something sleeveless? With our luck, there’ll be a foot of snow that night. You’ll look great in Stella McCartney with a parka.”
“You can wear Mom’s old opera cape. Grandma can take it up a few inches. Neely’s lace dress is long-sleeved,” Merry began, and then stopped in the middle of her sentence. She had only ever seen pictures of old movie stars like James Dean, but the boy standing under the streetlight at the gates of the Deptford Mall looked like all those pictures. His hair was cut short on the sides and fell forward in a long blond twirl onto his forehead. His hands jammed into the pockets of a beat-up brown leather jacket, he slouched against the light post, next to where flowers bloomed in the spring. When the bus rolled past, he looked up, and Merry thought she had seen the face of an angel. He wasn’t big, maybe only six or seven inches taller than Merry, but she could see how his shoulders filled out the jacket. It was, however, his eyes, blue as seawater even in the half-darkness, and the unendurable loneliness in a single look that made Merry dizzy. They had just begun the forced march through Romeo and Juliet that every sophomore class did, along with comparisons between Shakespeare and writers such as Christopher Marlowe. Meredith had decided she would name one of her five kids Christopher Marlowe and call him “Kit,” as Shakespeare had called his friend. Now she murmured, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”
“What? Why are you suddenly repeating song lyrics?”
“Poetry. Look at that boy, Mallory. Isn’t he the hottest boy you’ve ever seen, counting Drew, counting anybody?”
“What boy?” Mallory stared from the bus window. It was past dusk, now truly dark. Mally had trouble seeing anything through the window, which had evidently been an easel for a little kid with sticky handprints.
“Are you blind? Right there, under the big old-fashioned light,” Merry said. “Look, right back there. Don’t stare. Just look.”
“It doesn’t matter if I stare or if I don’t,” Mallory said, glancing at her sister. “There’s nobody there.”
“Now he’s gone! I told you to look. Didn’t you see the boy in the leather jacket, Mal? He was so gorgeous. He even walked sexy.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Mallory said. “Except you’re hallucinating. The only person in the whole parking lot except us is old Mr. Highland, that guy who lives down the street from Aunt Kate. I think it’s Mr. Highland. The one carrying the big black garment bag? Oh, the tedium of living in a small town. I’m going to college in ... London or ... Indiana or someplace where I’ll never see the same person twice.”
“I’d see this guy twice. I’d see this guy twice a day. I have to find out who he is,” Meredith said. She flipped open her phone. “This is a job for Neely Chaplin.”
That was a bulls-eye, Mallory thought. Although only a year ago, Neely had been one of those uprooted urban blossoms, no one had put down roots more quickly. Neely had a kind of knack for social activism: She had cultivated the network of her and Merry’s friends to unearth and spread gossip so quickly, she was like a twenty-four-hour news service. And although all the girls routinely got in trouble for rampant over-texting, it was Mallory’s opinion that Neely had opposable thumbs that had evolved even beyond the ordinary video-game-playing teenager. As she told her twin, if there were a text-typing competition, Neely would medal in every event.
That was what Merry was counting on.
THE BOY IN THE BROWN LEATHER JACKET
Don’t talk to men,” Neely told Meredith as they leaped down, grinning like fools, from their respective pyramids.
“What did I do?” Merry asked Neely through closed teeth, as she dipped her shoulder and flipped her hair forward in the first steps of the last quarter of the half-time cheer dance they were practicing after school. It was four days after Merry and Mally’s shopping trip.
“You ruined my perfect record of finding out everything about any cute boy anywhere anytime if he’s within a five-mile radius,” said Neely. “At least I failed so far.”
“So you don’t know who he is,” Meredith said, dropping into a split and madly waving her hands above her head.
“Are you sure he didn’t just come through on a bus and leave?” Neely asked, as the two of them jumped up and retreated to a corner to wait for the music to signal their final tumbling run.
“No, he lives here. I’m sure,” Merry said. “Neels, I’m shocked. This is your ... your art. Your gift.”
“The problem is not me or my lack of talent. It’s that I don’t have enough information. I need vital statistics. Height, weight, hair color, preferred method of dress,” Neely said. “Not he’s just so hot and cute and wears a jacket.”
“Okay, well, he’s got blond hair ... long,” Merry said. “Really long in front, like almost as if it would cover his eyes if it were wet.”
A sharp note sounded on the whistle. “I’m very sorry to interrupt your chat, girls,” Coach Everson said. “But I was hoping we’d actually finish this practice tonight. Let’s take it from the last sixteen bars. Please.”
After practice, Neely ran off to study with her tutor for her Latin final and was then gone after lunch on Friday taking the test at the private school in Kitticoe where her parents had arranged for her to study three afternoons a week. Ridgeline offered only Spanish and German. Convinced that Neely would be a doctor—or a lawyer like her father—the Chaplins had insisted she study Latin since eighth grade.
So Meredith had to content herself that she wouldn’t be able to share more about the boy with Kim, who was staying over at Neely’s along with Meredith after the dance on Saturday.
Forty hours. It wasn’t really that she truly wanted her best friends to start a text campai
gn about him, Merry realized. She knew she would see him again. All she had to do was wait and be. But waiting was nearly impossible. Meredith just wanted to talk about him and not, for some reason she didn’t understand, with Mallory.
All those hours.
Meredith thought she would count every one of them by the hands on the clock.
As she dressed for the dance, Meredith didn’t know how short the time would really be. And she didn’t know how short a time it would be until she wouldn’t need—or even want—anyone’s help when it came to the mystery boy.
STRANGER AT THE DANCE
“Look at all my beautiful girls,” Campbell said on the night of the formal.
Campbell included Sasha, putting an arm around her shoulders, and the twins didn’t mind. After all, Sasha had worked that very morning, taking care of Owen (Luna, who disdained any school function, would come later when Campbell left for her night shift). Their father was still at the store and would be until nearly midnight because of the After-Christmas Crazy Sale at Domino Sporting Goods—which lasted until about March 1, when the town workers finally got around to taking down the lighted snowflakes and signs that read PEACE.
Because she basically had no family, Sasha had no one to make a fuss about her formal or take her pictures. She hadn’t complained, but her predicament went to Campbell’s heart. Sasha seemed so touched by the attention that she showed up early. She went up to the twins’ room, where she stood in her crinolines, and with a few twists put Meredith’s stick-straight hair up into a froth of loopy curls. The crinolines were almost as wide as the twins’ attic bedroom, but Meredith couldn’t believe how beautiful her hair looked.
“How’d you learn to do this?” she asked Sasha.
“Oh, just fooling around,” Sasha said.
Then she slipped her pale, jonquil-yellow strapless gown over her head, and she really did look like something from some old-time movie the twins’ mother forced them to watch at the Belles Artes Theatre to make sure they didn’t grow up “uncultured.” She looked, in fact, like Cinderella, right down to shoes with Lucite heels, each of which had a yellow rose in it.