Perfected (Entangled Teen) (3 page)

Four

“W
hy can’t she sit at the table with us?” Ruby asked for the fifth time since dinner began.

She was seated at the end of the long dining room table, picking at her food. The congressman had called it chicken piccata but the only thing I recognized were the bright green asparagus and red potatoes pushed to the edge of her plate. Every few seconds she would glance over to where I was sitting at the small, round table set up near the window and smile happily, waving her fingers at me.

Penn rubbed a hand over his face. “God, how many times are you going to ask? She’s a pet. Get it?”

“But our other pet used to sit at the table.”

“Honey, we’re trying to create better boundaries this time,” the congressman explained.

“I just don’t think it’s fair. Doesn’t it seem like she’d rather sit here, by me?”

“The people we bought her from gave us special instructions on how to take care of her,” he said. “Her food is special. It’s different from our food. And they said it was best to make sure she had her own dining space. We don’t want you slipping her something that will make her sick.”

Penn rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we wouldn’t want her to
come down
with something like the last one.”

I took a small bite of my sweet potato, barley, and lentil stew. This was one of the staple meals from the kennel. It didn’t taste bad, but the smell drifting over from the congressman’s meal was making my mouth water in a way I’d never experienced before.

Miss Gellner said our meals were designed to give us the perfect balance of vitamins, protein, and carbohydrates. The kennel tested out dozens of food combinations on us while we were growing up, but they found that a rotation between five staple meal plans gave the best results. Our special diet was one of the reasons us girls from Greenwich were known for our shiny hair, soft skin, and delicate frames. The people from the kennel didn’t want our new owners messing up that reputation by feeding us the wrong sort of food. And if sitting at a different table would keep me from getting sick like the last pet, I was happy to oblige.

“What if I promise not to feed her anything?” Ruby asked.

“How about this,” her father said. “Instead of thinking about where we’re all sitting, what if we come up with a name for her?”

Ruby dropped her fork and clapped her hands, but a second later her face dropped. “Is it okay if we do it when Mom’s not here?”

“Yeah, something tells me Mom’s not going to mind too much,” Penn said, stabbing at a potato.

The congressman glared at him across the table but he didn’t say anything.

“There’s a girl in my class that got a pet and they named her Princess,” Ruby said. “They got theirs from a kennel in Virginia because her dad knows the owner.”

Penn put down his fork and folded his arms over his chest. “Princess? That’s what they named her? People name their golden retrievers Princess.”

“Well, I wasn’t saying
we
should name her that,” Ruby said.

I could tell her feelings had been hurt by the way her bottom lip jutted out as she glared at him, but I was glad Penn had said something. I didn’t want to end up with one of those common names Miss Gellner said people were always giving their pets—names like Princess and Lady.

“What about Ravenna? It’s prettier than Princess and it’s a perfect pet name.”

The congressman sputtered and coughed, shaking his head.

Penn kicked his sister under the table. “Don’t be stupid! You can’t name them all the same thing.”

The congressman stopped coughing and brought his napkin up to his face, dabbing at his watering eyes. “What about Bette,” he asked. “That’s a pretty name. And there’s no denying she has those big eyes like Bette Davis.”

“That’s an awful name,” Penn said. “You might as well call her Mildred or Ethel. It’s an old lady name.”

“Fine,” the congressman said. “Do you have any better ideas?”

Penn paused and turned to look at me for the first time since we sat down to eat. All at once my cheeks burned and I cast my gaze down toward my plate, taking a delicate bite of my stew. I stared at my lap, chewing slowly, willing the heat in my face to fade. I could feel Penn’s gaze on me, pensive, studying. Why did it feel as if he were touching me?

My body is a stem and I am the flower that sits atop it
, I repeated in my mind.
I am a flower. I am a flower
. The words did little to distract me from the fluttering in my stomach. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I lifted my head, looking up to where he sat, still staring at me. Our eyes met.

“Well?” the congressman said, breaking the silence.

“Her hair’s not really blond, is it?” Penn asked, not answering his father’s question at all.

“I don’t know what that has to do with naming her.” The congressman’s voice sounded gruff, aggravated. “I suppose people would call it strawberry blonde.”

“Strawberry!” Ruby yelled. “That’s a pretty name. Like Strawberry Shortcake.”

“Well, I still think it’s weird we have to name them at all,” Penn said, laying his fork down on his plate with a bang.

The congressman pulled at his collar, loosening it. “If a person is going to spend a small fortune on a pet, the least they should be entitled to is choosing a name for it.”

Penn didn’t seem upset by the rise in his father’s voice. “You’re right, Father. It’s the least you’re entitled to.”

“Don’t give me lip about entitlement, young man. Not after what we’ve been through with your school.”

Penn’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t ask you to move me.”

“I know,” Ruby said, clapping her hands. “We could name her after someone famous. I just read a book about Cleopatra. She was pretty cool. Did you know she died when an Egyptian cobra bit her?” She smiled, oblivious to the tension running between her brother and father.

Penn held his father’s gaze for a few long beats until, finally, he turned away. “Cleopatra? Doesn’t that seem a little pretentious?”

“We could call her Patty?” the congressman suggested.

Ruby scrunched up her nose. “Patty sounds like an old lady substitute teacher.”

I swallowed, afraid my voice would fail me. I wanted to say something to bridge the gap between the congressman and his children. I hated to think of them fighting over a name that would belong to me for the rest of my life. I searched for the right words, words that would leave them all happy. What had Miss Gellner said was the real purpose of conversation? To leave your partner feeling as if the correct answer had been theirs all along? That was easy enough to accomplish when speaking to one person, but it certainly became more difficult when you added a teenage boy and a little girl to the mix.

“What about Ella?” Penn said after a moment.

Ruby nodded. “Ella’s a pretty name.”

“Ella,” the congressman repeated. It seemed that almost instantly he’d forgotten the harsh words that had so recently passed between himself and his son. “Yes, I think that might be it. What do you think, love?” he asked, turning to face me. “Is Ella the one?”

“It’s lovely,” I said, relieved. “Thank you. I imagine most people would be thrilled with the chance to help choose their own name. Babies don’t really have that option, do they?”

“No, they don’t,” the congressman said. The edges of his eyes wrinkled as he smiled.

“I definitely wouldn’t have picked Penn. I don’t know what you and Mom were thinking,” Penn said, but he smiled at his dad anyway.

“I like my name,” Ruby interjected.

“Well, I like
all
your names,” the congressman said before he took a hearty bite of his meal.

I
t was still light out after dinner. The warm western sun flowed in through the back of the house, turning the rooms to gold. It wouldn’t have been difficult for me to believe that everything was gilded: the chairs, the walls, the thick molding that crowned the ceiling. It was as if on the strike of the hour they’d all been transformed.

We were sitting in the conservatory with the congressman. He sat in the corner in a large, wing backed chair reading the paper. Every few minutes he would pause and glance up at me before he went back to his article. Ruby sat on the floor in front of a large, square coffee table piecing together a puzzle of a field of wildflowers while I leaned back on the chaise lounge eyeing the baby grand piano that sat in the corner of the room. I hadn’t noticed it when we’d walked through earlier, but now I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

The congressman hadn’t asked me to play anything for him yet, and I knew it would be presumptuous of me to suggest it, even though my fingers longed to stroke the keys.

“Can I take Ella up to my room?” Ruby asked, shoving aside the puzzle piece she’d spent the last five minutes trying, unsuccessfully, to fit into a spot.

“You can stay up for an hour,” he said “But that’s it. One hour. You better be in bed by the time your mother gets home.”

Ruby tugged my hand, pulling me through the door. I glanced back at the piano one more time, knowing I wouldn’t have a chance to play it tonight.

Ruby’s room was upstairs at the end of the hallway. She stopped outside her closed door and turned to face me.

“I don’t usually have friends over,” she said. “But you can come up here whenever you want. Our last pet hardly ever came up. She was always in my dad’s office.” She frowned. “But I heard my mom say that you weren’t even allowed in there. So, you can visit me all the time. If I’m in here, just knock like this and I’ll let you in, okay?” She tapped lightly three times, paused and then gave two harder knocks followed by one final tap, so soft that her fingers hardly brushed the door.

She stared at me, waiting. I wanted to ask her to tell me more about the other pet, but it looked like she was waiting for me to respond. I nodded to let her know I understood.

“No, you have to try it,” she said. “So I know you can do it later, without me helping.”

Tap, tap, tap, knock, knock, tap.
I finished, waiting for her approval.

“Okay, it isn’t perfect, but it’ll do,” she said, and opened the door.

It was no surprise that the inside of Ruby’s room was as elegant as the rest of the house. On the far side stood a four-poster bed that looked quite a bit like the one in my room, aside from the soft pink bedding and rose-colored canopy that covered it. The bed wasn’t the only pink thing in Ruby’s room. Almost everything, from the wallpaper, to the curtains, to the loveseat and chair, were colored in some varied shade of pink. Coral, rose, fuchsia, magenta, I couldn’t even name all the different shades.

“Is pink your favorite color?” I asked.

Ruby shrugged. “It’s okay. My mom picks everything out.”

She led me in, sitting me down on the tufted bench at the end of her bed before she plopped down on the floor and gazed up at me. Miss Gellner’s instructions to always keep myself in a lower, subservient position to my master nagged at the back of my mind. I hoped I wouldn’t get in trouble if the congressman walked in.

“So what do you want to do?” Ruby asked. “The old pet liked to color. She was really good at shading stuff in so it looked real. But sometimes she spent too much time on her pictures and it got kind of boring.”

I folded my hands in my lap, trying not to fidget. I’d never been very good with the visual arts, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. Ruby sprawled out on the floor, leaning back on her elbows with her legs splayed out in front of her. Miss Gellner would never have let us sit that way, but it looked so comfortable, so relaxed, that I wished I could lie down next to her on the soft carpet.

“I’m happy to do whatever you’d like, Mistress.”

Ruby rolled over on her belly, laughing. It wasn’t a very ladylike laugh, more like a high-pitched giggle interspersed with little snorts. Finally she calmed down enough to speak. “Why’d you call me that?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, flustered. “Didn’t the other pet call you Mistress?”

She shook her head.

I should have known better. If the congressman’s wife had asked me not to use the term “Master,” maybe I wasn’t supposed to address any of my new owners with the titles Miss Gellner had taught us to use. Obviously the last pet had picked up on things more quickly.

“What would you prefer me to call you?”

She sat back up and crossed her legs in front of her, leaning her elbows on her knees. “Just Ruby. That’s what everybody calls me.”

I nodded and blinked back a few tears threatening to form at the corners of my eyes. It seemed as if everything I said was wrong and I didn’t understand why Miss Gellner had told us to call our new owners by names they didn’t like. If Master and Mistress were so wrong, shouldn’t she have known better? What if everything she taught me was wrong? I couldn’t afford to be anything but perfect.

Ruby cocked her head and her face became serious. “It’s okay,” she said, sitting up to pat me on the hand. “I wasn’t making fun of you.” And then, as if she was searching for some way to repair things, she said softly, “I think you’re beautiful. You’re even prettier than Ravenna.”

“Thank you,” I told her, trying to compose myself. I shouldn’t care what the other pet looked like, but a part of me wanted to believe it was true. The thought was prideful and my stomach knotted with shame. “And I think your freckles are beautiful. I’ve never seen anyone with so many.”

“No. They’re not beautiful,” she said, covering her face with her hands. “They’re ugly. My mom bought some special cream that was supposed to make them go away, but they’re still there.”

I didn’t know what to say. At a time like this, maybe it was better to keep my mouth shut.

Ruby uncovered her face. “My mom doesn’t think I’m pretty.”

My voice faltered. “I doubt that.”

She sighed deeply. “My big sister is pretty. She looks like my mom. They have the same eyes and the same shaped face, but I don’t really know who I look like. Just myself, I guess.”

“You have a big sister?” I asked.

“Yeah, Claire. She’s in college so she doesn’t live here anymore,” Ruby said. “But sometimes when she comes to visit she does my hair.”