Don't Touch (25 page)

“No.”

“You did. I didn't understand till later. You should have given me the benefit of the doubt, Caddie. You should have
talked
to me.”

“Yes.”

“What about?
What
should you have talked to me about?”

It's an interrogation, and I'm choking.

“About . . . about Peter. About you understudying . . .”

She shakes her head. “Wrong answer. God, you can be such a fake, Caddie. You're always faking something.”

“I don't . . . mean to be.” My words are thin, throat tight—I'm going to lose Mandy and everything that comes with her. “I've been having a lot of problems in my family.”

“You and I both know that's not your only problem. You don't like being touched,” she says. “That's why you're wearing the gloves.”

Zap!
Mandy's zapped me—the water in me is a superconductor. I twitch.

“It took me a while to see it, but I'm not an idiot, Caddie. What I don't get is why you won't talk to the person who's supposed to be your best friend.” She goes still. “You don't trust me, Caddie, and you know what? I don't think I trust you.”

If she sounded mad, that would be one thing, if she were saying it to dig at me, but she's not. She looks sad and confused.

“Mandy, I'm sorry I've been strange.” I'm afraid to go to her—I'm so dizzy, the floor will tip—we'll go plummeting into the black.

She shakes her head like it doesn't even matter. “It was dumb of me to think we could go back to being best friends like we were. Things change,” she says. “It is what it is.”

She leaves me alone in the pool of light, one tiny piece of solid world with dark all around. I drop, press my face to the cold, tilting floor, and try to stop spinning.

After that, Mandy mixes it up at lunch and sits on the opposite side of the table from me and close to the end.

Livia gives her a look the first time—that's Hank's seat—but Mandy plays oblivious.

“What happened to the seating chart?” Hank asks when he shows up and finds Mandy in his place.

“We don't have assigned seats,” Mandy says irritably.

“Well, yeah, we sort of do.” He's already pulled a chair up to sit at the end between Livia and me, making Livia beam.

Usually the guys end up at one end of the table, the girls at the other, with the “couples”—Mandy and Drew, Livia and Hank—at the middle, but the turnover leaves Mandy's seat open when Peter arrives. If the change-up surprises him, it's a happy surprise. I shift closer to Hank's end.

Peter sets his tray down and sits with his knees almost touching my legs. “You figured out your costume?” he asks.

My first thought's of Ophelia. “They'll tell us what to wear, yeah?”

“Halloween,” Mandy says. Her face is tense, purposefully free of expression. Actual Halloween's not till next week, but Mandy's party is on Saturday.

“Oh, right. No, I don't know.”

“I'm going as a vampire,” Oscar says. “You could be my thrall.”

“I don't think so,” Peter says. With everyone watching, he lifts one of my gloved hands in both of his. This is the definition of PDA, and my nervous system's shooting off fireworks. But the party, of course, the party would be the perfect time and place to solve our . . . “problem.”

Peter bats my hand back and forth. It doesn't hurt, but the threat is there. If Peter brushes my gloves the wrong way, they'll scrape off, take my skin away with them.

Mandy's eyeing me. Her expression's impenetrable, but her lips purse in question.

Peter lays my hand down on the table. I catch my breath, but my hand still pulses.

“You're still coming to the party, aren't you?” Mandy asks. “It would be weird without you there.” I hadn't thought about not going, but we
are
fighting. Now that she's asked, I wonder if I shouldn't be going.

I can't read her, but because they're all looking at me, I say, “Of course.”

Mandy nods, one firm twitch, and goes back to her salad.

April is at rehearsal on Friday.

She stays the whole time and sits halfway back.

Nadia doesn't say anything about it, but I know April's there to replace me, in case. Mandy said no, so if it comes down to an emergency, Nadia will lift April's punishment and let her perform in my place.

My tears are so close to the surface. They come easily when we work the breakup scene, when Peter—Hamlet—says, “I did love you once.”

“Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”

Peter touches me, holds me close and then shoves me away, like at the audition, and if it makes me clench or gasp, that's good for the scene and good practice. I have to be able to touch him, not just through clothes . . . in a kiss.

Tomorrow night.

“What's going through your head right now?” Nadia asks when we get to my soliloquy.

“I'm losing him. I'm losing him, and I can't do anything to fix it.” It's easy for me to believe I'm losing him. I am—will—if I can't get myself under control.

“Yes! In fact”—she hops up onstage and kneels beside me, looks out over the audience where she means for me to see Hamlet in my mind's eye—”all those things she says about him, how he used to be, use those to bring him closer to you. Try that.”

“But they won't stick.”

“Exactly—for every good thing you remember, there's the truth of what you've just seen. You're trying to hold on to something that's gone. Try as hard as you can. That's the tragedy here because no one can do that.”

“But it's so sad!”

She laughs. I'm afraid she's going to squeeze me into a hug. She squints at me and says, “I knew I cast you for a reason. You understand something about loss.”

“I've lost some things. I don't know if I understand—”

“Well, Ophelia doesn't either. She's in the middle of it. So that's perfect.”

Perfect.

Except that Ophelia's a wreck. She loses too much—and she sinks.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

My hoop skirt keeps trying to escape from under the dashboard and smother me. Between the dress's boned corset and my seatbelt, I can barely breathe.

This is what I get for not planning a costume. At the last minute, Mom called my older cousin Jess who used to be a Southern Belle docent on a historical plantation tour. I said no to the hat and parasol and added a shawl to protect my arms and shoulders. I'm hoping my makeup and hair steer it away from Scarlett O'Hara and toward my goal: Dead Prom Queen.

“Your first academy party,” Mom squeals as we near Mandy's drive. “How exciting!”

So exciting, my hands won't stop shaking. My heart wants to make a career change and work for a hummingbird.

“I told your father that going to this school would change the direction of your whole life.”

“The direction of my life” hinges on such tiny, fragile moments: What if Mom had said no when I asked to audition for the academy? What if she'd told Dad instead of keeping it secret? What if I bombed the audition? What if I never, at the age of six, saw my first play? Things can change in an instant—might be changing right now—and I won't even notice until later when I look back and say, “That night. That's the night when things changed.”

“I'm proud of you, Caddie,” Mom says. “I'm proud of you for asking yourself what you want in life and going after it. That's something I'm still learning how to do.” I can hardly look her in the eyes. If she knew how lame I'm being, how close I am to losing everything . . .

She says, “I admire you, sweetie,” and her eyes are wet at the corners, and I have to look away.

Lit up from below, Mandy's house looks like an unstormable castle, a real Elsinore. I expected a lot of people, but not this many—cars are stacked all the way up the drive and line the street for a block or more in both directions. I make Mom drop me at the street and I trudge up the drive, careful not to let my skirt drag.

My people should be here, people I know.

As soon as I go around back to the pool, there's a high-pitched scream from Hank and Livia and a guttural, “Ha-ha!” from Oscar. An eerie glow from the aqua-gold pool lamps catches the undersides of their faces. Splashes of light and shadow shift so my friends seem insubstantial, half-there. But they rush at me, proving themselves real. Oscar bounds to me in two steps, and Livia hauls Hank after her by the arm.

Livia and Hank both wear togas, hers green, his gray. Livia's clearly Medusa with plastic snakes woven into her braids, and Hank's “stone.” Hank planned ahead for the cold with a gray fur cloak, but Livia wears her green peacoat over her toga, which kind of undermines the scary.

Oscar . . . well, true to his word, he came as a vampire, but I guess he really wanted a thrall. There's a blowup doll hugging his neck.

“Ew,” I say.

“Girls dig vampires,” he says. Oscar reaches for me, ready to pull me in for a hug. My hoop skirt and his doll form a buffer between us, but I still have to sidestep him.

“I'd hate to make your girlfriend jealous,” I say.

“Oh, Bethany? It's cool. I think she's bi.”

He makes the doll reach toward me, but she comes undone and he's suddenly like a kid with a broken toy, begging Hank to fix it.

Livia reaches for one of my gloved hands. “Did you plan your costume around these?” she asks.

“Not exactly.”

“I bet you'd wear them in the water if it were warm enough for swimming.”

She's smiling, but I don't like the questioning tilt of her head.

“Um, hang on. I should say hi to Mandy.”

She's on the far side of the pool, a classic witch with some serious cleavage. I squeeze between the pool chairs and the kids who've drunk themselves warm enough to stick their feet in the water. Mandy steps away from a group of seniors to greet me. “I was afraid you weren't coming.”

“Sorry. I had to take care of some stuff for Mom first.”

“Well, you're here now. Dead prom queen?”

I nod. Apparently the tiara and dripping blood did their work.

“Drunk driving accident?” she asks.

“I was thinking more serial killer on a rampage?”

“Sure.”

She leads me to a table stocked with hard alcohol and some mixers. A pony keg and a Styrofoam crate full of wine coolers sit underneath. “What do you want?”

“A little bit of everything?”

She laughs, but cutting the anxiety seems like a not-so-bad idea.

“Caddie, living dangerously.” She pours some ice and what looks like a lot of lime vodka into a red plastic cup, followed by Sprite. “What do you think?”

It's tangy and acidic, but on top of all that it's . . . “Sweet. Really sweet.”

She watches me gulp and says, “Make sure you drink a glass of water before you have another one, okay?”

I nod. It's awkward between us, but I'm grateful to her for at least trying to make me feel welcome. We wander up a brick walk to the flat expanse of grass between the pool and the ridge. The old trampoline still sits there.

“Remember this guy?” Mandy scoots onto it, sloshing her drink as she bounces. “Oops.”

“Yes, I remember this guy. This guy broke my wrist.”

“Right! I had almost forgotten that. Remember that time when we moved it close to the edge of the wall so we could bounce off it into the pool?”

“It's a miracle we didn't die.”

As I push up onto the trampoline, my lowest hoop flips vertical, flashing anybody who might be looking. I squeal, and backpedal to the center of the net, trying not to spill my drink in the process. Mandy's laughing at me, but she helps me wrangle the skirt, and we sit cross-legged facing each other.

“I'm glad you came tonight, Caddie,” Mandy says. “It wouldn't be the same without you.”

“Thanks. I'm glad you came too. I mean, I'm glad I came.”

Down by the pool, Livia and Hank are doing a bastardized swing dance. He throws her away from his body and yanks her back so her Medusa snakes whip around. Then he lifts her and swings her so close to the edge of the pool that she shrieks and starts kicking her feet.

I want to shake Hank and Livia so the feelings between them come out more even.

“Why does he flirt with her like that?” I ask.

“She loves it.”

“But it can't ever become anything.”

Mandy sighs. “Maybe that's why she likes it.”

I hadn't thought about them like that before.

“Maybe some kind of closeness is better than none,” Mandy says, “if you're afraid of the real thing? Or if the real thing starts making you crazy.”

“Where's Drew?”

“Drew. Is. Sulking,” she says, and nods toward the ridge. “Peter's up there with him, I think.”

Mandy must be able to hear my heart beat in my chest, feel the trampoline pulse, but if she notices, she's too polite to say anything.

“Why the sulking?”

“We had another fight. I started it this time,” she says guiltily. “I wasn't the kindest version of myself. But he pushes my buttons. We ought to break up.”

She says it so matter-of-factly.

“I thought you were terrified of losing him.”

She twists so she can look me in the eye. “So what?”

“What do you mean, so what?”

“So what if I'm afraid?”

She holds my eyes for longer than is comfortable and I fall back on the trampoline, watch the dark branches frame stars then swish to the side in a sudden breeze.

“Caddie, there are worse things than feeling afraid.” She lies down beside me, close enough that the wire brim of her witch hat brushes my temple, but I stay still.