Belle of the Brawl (17 page)

Allie’s eyes moved from Charlie’s hand to her face. Charlie nodded subtly, her eyes shining with happiness. Then Charlie’s eyes bounced to the stage and back to Allie, and her brown eyebrows shot into the air, silently asking Allie if she’d been AJ only moments before.

Allie nodded and bit her lip, confessing all of it to Charlie in that tiny gesture. In seconds, both girls erupted into laughter. They grabbed each other’s shoulders and hug-laughed, twirling around, the faces of all the Alphas on the ship spinning past in a blur. Darwin and Mel looked at each other and shrugged as their girlfriends howled in hysterics.
Finally slowing their teacup spin to a stop, Allie reached up and wiped a tear from the end of Charlie’s nose.

Allie sighed, looking out at the island that finally felt like home, at Mel and Darwin walking toward her with smiles on their faces, and back into Charlie’s smiling coffee-brown eyes. Then she leaned in for one more hug.

JACKIE O
BEDROOM

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8TH
9:26 P.M.

Skye squeezed the last few drops of moisture out of her hair, flipped her head over, and wrapped a silver towel around her head like a turban. Dressed in plush gold slippers and matching cashmere robe, she was finally starting to warm up after her Olympic-caliber swim to shore. Pulling her comforter around her shoulders, she shiver-shook the last chill from her lithe body and continued telling the Jackie O’s—all of whom had arrived back at the dorm while Skye was in the shower—about her wet escape.

“Swimming was the easy part. Walking home soaking wet was harder.”

“Ohmuhgud. You walked all the way here with no shoes?” Allie put her hands over her mouth in horror.

“I walked to the bubble train,” Skye confessed. It hadn’t been too bad. Luckily, the temperature of the island at night usually hovered around seventy degrees.
The only storms they had to face came when Shira got angry.

“Still,” Charlie said, giggling and shaking her head, “you risked your life to avoid getting busted. You’re the Lara Croft of Jackie O.”

Skye laughed. “When you’ve been flirting with boys as long as I have, you become a better escape artist than David Blaine. Right, Trip? You did pretty well yourself.” Skye wanted to include Triple in the Muse Cruise post-mortem, but the dance diva had crawled into bed and buried her nose in the giant binder they’d all received when they arrived at the Academy. Triple was thumbing through the Official Alphas Handbook like she was studying for a test.

“Yeah, all’s well that ends well,” Triple murmured, not meeting Skye’s eyes.

“Studying Shira’s bible?” Charlie asked lightly.

“Just trying to wind down and get to sleep, and this boring reading material makes me drowsy.” Triple buried her face deeper in the phonebook-sized handbook with the gold, swoopy A on the cover.

Whatever, Trip.
Skye shrugged it off, assuming Triple was jealous of her dramatic exit. While she was swimming, Triple was cowering on the boat. But with enough time, Triple would learn how to take more risks.
Baby steps.

“You’re the stuntwoman,” Charlie continued, “and she’s
the Academy Award–winning actress.” She stuck a thumb out and jabbed it in Allie’s direction.

“Shhh!” Allie’s face turned red as she motioned to AJ’s bed, where the singer snored quietly, out cold.

“Ohmuhgud, fill me in,” whispered Skye, beckoning Allie closer.

Allie leapt up from her bed and sat on Skye’s, followed by Charlie. “Tell her,” Charlie said to Allie. “You will not believe this,” she giggle-whispered to Skye.

“Does this have something to do with the texts I keep getting?” Skye pointed to her aPod. Luckily, she’d accidentally left it in its charger all evening so it didn’t have to swim in the ocean with her. When she’d arrived home, her inbox was filled with photos and texts, all saying something about AJ lip-synching her performance on the Muse Cruise.

“Are they about AJ?” Allie asked, her eyes widening.

“Uh-huh.”

“Then yes. That was me. Oops!” Allie shrugged her shoulders and threw her hands up in the air as if she’d dropped a glass or burned some toast instead of pulled off an enormous fake-out to get back at AJ.

“Wow.” Skye unwound her towel turban and shook her platinum waves out. “She has no idea yet, does she?”

The three girls looked over at AJ, splayed out in a deep slumber, a thin line of drool spilling down her cheek, extending from her half-open mouth. Allie shook her head sadly
and burst out giggling along with Charlie. Skye laughed, too—AJ was all about AJ and had never bothered to make friends with the Jackie O’s. Her songs about Allie might have been catchy, but they were also mean. It was nice to imagine her getting a taste of what Allie had been going through.

Skye sank back into the pile of pillows on her bed and turned back to Allie and Charlie, when an electric flash in the sky froze the tale of her journey in her throat. Skye’s panicked eyes met Charlie’s brown ones, then Allie’s dark blue ones. All were wide with alarm. Sudden bad weather inside the Alpha Island Biosphere could mean only one thing.

Shira was on the warpath.

A few seconds of nervous anticipation ticked by, followed by a crash of thunder that rocked the bedroom hard enough to make the lights flicker. Allie yelped like a newborn puppy, pulling her sweatshirt’s hood up over her head and rolling off Skye’s bed onto the floor. AJ sleep-grunted and flipped over from her back to her stomach.

“What’s going on?” Skye whispered, turning to Charlie.

Charlie bit her lip and shrugged. “No idea.”

“She knows!” whisper-shouted Allie, uncoiling from the fetal position and leaping back onto Skye’s bed. Her eyes were coated in Shira-induced panic-tears. “I’m busted!”

Charlie shook her head. “No way. Nobody knows it was you.”

Skye sat up, her spine ruler-straight, sudden fear making her scalp tingle and her ears hot. She snuck another glance at Triple, who continued to read, seemingly unaware of the weather. “Shira must have found out about my swim. I’m toast.”

Skye looked around the bedroom, taking it all in—the horseshoe-cluster of beds, the glass walls, the amazing closets, and the swirly gold-and-silver carpet that warmed to the touch of cold feet. “I’ll miss you guys.”

Another crack of thunder ripped through the sky, ushering in a violent storm. Rain pounded down on the domed glass ceiling in ferocious, slanted sheets. Skye squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think happy thoughts, but all she could see was Shira’s disembodied head kicking her out of the Academy.

Just then, the clatter of footsteps at the door reached Skye’s ears. “Ohmuhgud,” Allie whispered, grabbing both Skye’s and Charlie’s hands. The three girls formed a triangle with their hands and waited.

They stared at each other as a pair of high heels clomped up the spiral staircase. Skye held her breath. When she saw Thalia’s geometric hairstyle, she exhaled in relief.

“Girls!” Thalia barked, sounding more like Drill Sergeant Triple than the calm, serene life coach Skye knew and loved. Thalia walked over to the wall and switched off the lights. “‘Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and
fraternity, and liberty is added eventually by sleep.’ Nietzsche. Time for bed,” she added.

Allie and Charlie wordlessly obeyed Thalia’s instructions. Triple snapped her enormous binder shut and put her sleep mask over her eyes, instantly looking the part of a rule-abiding Alpha.

Skye lay back and listened to the pounding of the rain, which sounded like millions of metal tacks hitting the glass ceiling above her. She reached out and grabbed her HAD slipper from her night table, fingering the purple satin as fervently as a nun clutching a rosary.

Disobeying Mimi just to watch fifteen girls do the limbo for a chance to kiss Taz was
so
not worth getting expelled. Skye made a silent promise to herself—if she survived tonight, she was going to channel her week of boot camp into a whole new lifestyle. One where dance came first, where she followed the rules and rose to the top. One that was a lot more like Triple’s.

Thalia disappeared back down the stairs and into her muse quarters. A moment later, the front door of Jackie O slid open a second time. A pair of stilettos clicked on the clear glass staircase, this time sounding more like typewriter keys than horse hooves. A huge bolt of blue-white lightning lit up the turbulent rainstorm above Skye’s head, lighting up the room for a split second just as Shira entered the bedroom, illuminating her wild red
waves, her annoyed-looking face, and trench-coated body.

Skye clutched her HAD slipper tighter under her coverlet and squeezed her eyes shut again. Shira in Jackie O was an image straight out of Skye’s nightmares. It was like Madonna at McDonald’s—out of place and wrong on every level.

Shira walked crisply to the center of the horseshoe of beds, shaking rainwater off a huge folded black umbrella. A drop flew onto Skye’s forehead, but she didn’t dare move to wipe it off. She peered through squinted eyes at Shira’s ice-blue eyes, glowing with anger in the semi-dark room.
Ohmuhgud.

“I know you’re all awake, so stop laying there like corpses,” Shira spat in her Aussie accent. The girls sat up immediately—everyone but AJ, who for some reason actually seemed to be sleeping through their midnight intrusion.

“And her?” Shira asked the four girls cowering in their beds, waving a hand in AJ’s direction.

After a beat of silence, Charlie bravely answered. “She’s not feeling well.”

“Ah. No matter.” Shira nodded, pursing her brick-red lips. “Skye and Andrea, please get up and stand at the foot of your beds.”

Ohmuhgud!

As if an electric shock launched her out of bed, Triple shot up like a jack-in-the box and gracefully arranged her
feet in second position at the foot of her bed. Skye tried to catch Triple’s eyes, but they were stuck to a distant tree out the window. But even though the diva appeared to be calmly gazing past Shira, her hands trembled at her sides.

Skye got up and trudged to the foot of her bed, forcing her legs forward. She shivered as a few drops of water escaped her still-wet hair and dripped down her neck, and realized she was still clutching her HAD slipper. Skye stood close enough to Shira now to smell her Crème De La Mer moisturizer. She concentrated on not passing out, waiting for the two worst words at the Academy to be directed to her—
you’re expelled.
The world-famous Aussie Alpha wasn’t wearing her trademark sunglasses, and her eyes followed Skye like she was an amoeba under a microscope—something inhuman, an oddity to be studied.

“Mimi gave you both strict instructions not to go on the Muse Cruise. You were to be rehearsing. You were to make the most of your week together and perfect your dancing.” Shira took a breath, pausing, her head swiveling from Skye to Triple and back again, and the fist of fear tightened around Skye’s heart.

She thought of her mother’s face when she heard the news, of Natasha’s beautiful, mournful Russian features collapsing in disappointment over her only daughter ruining her chance to make it to the top as a dancer. She thought of her father sighing with disappointment, and tears sprang
into her eyes. She thought of herself, twenty years from now, working as a ballet teacher for kindergarten girls in Westchester, her dreams discarded like a pair of ripped tights, and she swallowed hard.

She’d brought this on herself—on herself and on Triple!—all because she’d wanted a little fun. The fact that she’d ruined not just her own life but Triple’s, too, made her snap out of her pity party. She needed to fight. No, she needed to something even harder than that. She needed to beg.

“Shira, please,” Skye started, her voice cracking with tears. “It was all my idea… ,” she admitted. “Triple didn’t want any part of it,” she added. It was the truth. If that meant she had to go home, at least she would go with her head held high.

Skye looked over at Triple, who stood tall, her eyes dry. A faint smile played on her plump lips. Thalia padded quietly up the stairs, holding a rolling suitcase in her arms. She set it down silently in front of Triple.

“Wrong bag,” Triple informed her. “You meant to bring Skye’s bag.”

“Everything’s in order, Andrea,” Shira snipped. “You’re going home. Skye will be staying.”

“What?” Tears sprang into her gold-flecked eyes. “I don’t understand!”

Neither did Skye.

“It’s simple, really,” Shira smiled, twirling her folded umbrella like a baton. “Shall we tell them what happened tonight?”

Looking into Shira’s eyes, Triple folded like a card table, collapsing on her bed in a fit of tears. Skye’s mouth fell open in a shocked
O
as she looked from Triple to Shira, waiting for an explanation.

Shira walked closer to Skye, nodding at Charlie and Allie, who had gotten out of bed to stand next to Skye for moral support. “Andrea was caught by Mimi on the cruise, and she did the worst thing an Alpha can do. She tattled on Skye to save herself.” Shira’s red hair blew off her face, as if a wind machine were permanently blowing at her. “Skye, you proved you could
improve
, that you’re willing to work hard. But Andrea was unable to learn what she needed to learn, which was how to be a good friend. Backbends can be taught, but backbones cannot.”

Skye, Charlie, and Allie all nodded silently, absorbing Shira’s words.

“It’s not fair!” Triple wailed. “I’m the best student here!”

“Life isn’t fair,” Shira snapped. “That’s the great secret. Think about it on your PAP ride back to Chicago.”

“Michigan!”

“Whatever.”

Skye giggled internally. She felt lighter than a helium
balloon, as if she might float away. Her guilt over the Muse Cruise escapade evaporated like the steam on her morning latte.

“Well, I must be off. I have forty-seven more girls to kick out tonight,” Shira sighed, flipping up the wide collar on her trench coat. “I warned them not to let boys get in the way of their studies and their friendships.” She shrugged.

Skye was smiling so hard that her cheeks hurt.

“Andrea—Triple—” Thalia stepped out of the shadows of the room holding Triple’s coat. It was black leather fringed in fake fur. As fake as Triple herself.