Rebel Belle (21 page)

I don’t know what Ryan was expecting when he opened the door, but me basically launching myself at him was probably not it, if his “Whoa!” was anything to go by.

I stood in his front door, dressed in my Cotillion gown, my arms locked so tightly around his neck that I was holding my elbows, toes dangling off the ground. After a beat, he wrapped his arms around my waist.

Ducking my head, I pressed my cheek to his neck, wanting to breathe in the safe, familiar scent of him, wanting to climb inside his soft gray T-shirt, wanting to
hide
in him.

“Harper, are you all right?” he asked, and I shook my head, pressing closer.
He gave a sighing laugh, breath brushing my ear. “Well, whatever it is, it’ll be okay. Actually, wait.” Ryan set me back on my feet, looking me up and down, appraising. “Are you running away from a wedding? Because that might be less okay.”
I swatted at him with a watery chuckle. “This is my Cotillion dress, thank you very much.”
His hazel eyes went wide. “Ah. I thought I wasn’t supposed to see you in that.”
Waving that away, I stepped past him and into the house. “Oh, who cares?”
I walked down the hall to Ryan’s room. His parents would still be at work, so we could safely hang out in what was normally a forbidden zone.
“‘Who cares?’” Ryan echoed, following me. “Who are you, and what have you done with my girlfriend?”
Ryan’s room used to be his brother Luke’s. It couldn’t have been more different from David’s room. No maps of Middle Earth, for one thing, and not many books. There was a flatscreen mounted to the wall, and a gaming station. Ryan had been in the middle of some basketball game, but he crossed the room and turned the television off.
“So do you want to talk?” he asked, sounding a little unsure. “Or are you here so we can . . .”
He trailed off, but his gaze slid behind me to his bed.
“Talk,” I said firmly, sitting on the edge of the mattress. “For one thing, it takes too long to get this dress off and back on.”
That made him smile and took a little bit of the disappointment out of his eyes. “Okay. Can I at least do this?”
Sitting next to me, Ryan took my face in his hands and lowered his mouth to mine. Even as I reached out to clutch the front of his T-shirt, I was thinking of that first kiss on the swings at the park. The way my heart had leapt into my mouth, how every hair on my body seemed to stand on end.
It was only natural that Ryan’s kisses didn’t make me feel like that anymore. We’d been together for two years now. Those kind of sparks only belonged in new relationships, didn’t they?
Or was Mary Beth right? Was I holding on to Ryan because he was another
thing
for me to have? Another achievement on Harper Jane Price’s list of accomplishments? 4.0 GPA, SGA President, Homecoming Queen, Haver of Best Possible Boyfriend.
“Um, Harper?”
Ryan pulled back, his hands falling from my back. His eyes were kind of hazy, but he was starting to frown.
“What?”
“It’s customary to kiss back when a guy is kissing you.”
Ugh. I’d done it again. “Sorry,” I said, ducking my head in my best attempt to seem apologetic. “I was thinking.”
Sighing, Ryan sat back. “Of course you were.”
“You’re right. Things are weird right now,” I said. “It’ll be better after Cotillion.” That was becoming my mantra. Problem was, I wasn’t sure if that was actually true. Whatever was going to happen at Cotillion, Saylor said it would change things. Would it be for the better?
Ryan reached out and took my face in both hands, a mix of exasperation and love on his face. “You always say that,” he said, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones. “It’s always going to get better someday. Sometime in the future, things won’t be so crazy.” Leaning forward, Ryan dropped a kiss on the tip of my nose. “But the thing is, Harper, we can’t
see
the future. So how can you have any idea if it’s going to get any better?”
Irony, thy name is Ryan.
“Do you like Mary Beth?” I asked suddenly. One of Ryan’s pillows sat next to me, and I pulled it to my stomach.
Ryan rocked back from me, his hands lifting from my face to hover somewhere in the air around my shoulders. “Where did that— No. I mean, I like her, but not . . .”
“Right,” I said, twisting my hands in my skirt. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Ryan. He wasn’t a bad liar like David, he just . . . didn’t. Ever, as far as I could tell. But there was something kind of unsure in his voice, something that lodged under my skin.
“Do you like David?” Ryan asked, dropping his hands to his thighs.
“No,” I said immediately. “We’re maybe not as hostile as we used to be, and he’s finally backed off on the paper thing, but that’s it as far as we go.”
But I kept thinking of sitting across from David at Miss Annemarie’s, the way he’d said Mary Beth wasn’t me. And the more I thought about it, the more confused I felt, which sucked since I’d come to Ryan’s specifically to stop feeling so confused. To feel
normal.
Yes, David and I were closer now than we had been. But that was only because he was the only person other than Saylor who knew the whole truth. Of course I’d feel the odd warm fuzzy for him. So there was an obvious solution here.
“Hey, you wanna help me with something?” I asked Ryan, rising to my feet.
He quirked one auburn brow. “Is it the buttons on that dress? Because if so, then yes, very much so.”
It was flirty and jokey and I should find it charming and not slightly irritating. I reminded myself of that as I smiled back. “Not exactly. It’s research.”
The corners of Ryan’s mouth turned down and he flopped back on his bed. “Now that sounds like a great, sexy time right there,” he told the ceiling.
“It’s going to be fun,” I insisted, sweeping a pile of
Sports Illustrated
magazines off his desk chair and turning on his computer. “It features death and destruction and other things boys like. It’ll be like
Hard Fists
, only more . . . historical.”
Ryan was still lying on his bed, arms folded behind his head. He laughed. “Oh, man,
Hard Fists
. I hate that you missed it. There was this one part where this dude killed another dude using, shit you not, a ladle, and Mary Beth said—”
He broke off, and I pretended to be really involved in finding the perfect search engine. “So what kind of death and destruction research?” he said, finally.
“This king, Charlemagne. He had a bunch of knights who died fighting a—” I broke off, suddenly realizing that I couldn’t exactly get into all the Oracle stuff. “A bad guy,” I finished lamely. I’d read everything I could on Charlemagne’s Paladins on the internet, but there was hardly a mention of Alaric. Still, it couldn’t hurt to look again.
I rummaged around on Ryan’s desk, sifting through more
Sports Illustrated
s, a bunch of loose change, and a stack of video games. “Don’t you have a notebook or some paper or something?”
By now, Ryan had shifted on the bed, turning so that his feet were braced on the headboard. He was tossing the mini basketball that sat by his bed on the wall above. Catching it, he tilted his head. “You’re seriously going to do homework.”
I paused, my hand still resting on a video game, the box reading
War Metal 4.
“It’s not really homework. More like an . . . extracurricular project. I thought it might be fun if you were more involved in the stuff I do.”
“Why?” Ryan asked, tossing the ball again. “It’s not like you’re all that involved in the stuff I do.”
He didn’t say it accusingly, and didn’t even seem that put out by it. It was just a fact. “I cheerlead at your basketball games,” I reminded him.
He shrugged. “You were doing that before we even started dating. It’s no big deal, Harper, I’m just saying we don’t have to be all up in each other’s business.” He gave the basketball another thump before grinning at me. “Unless it’s in the carnal sense.” This time, I didn’t even try to hide my irritation. “You spend too much time with Brandon,” I muttered, and Ryan gave a bark of laughter.
“Right, because he knows what the word ‘carnal’ means. But please . . . don’t keep trying to fix us, Harper. We’re not broken.” But the thing is, we felt broken. Really broken. And the scary thing was, I wasn’t sure how we’d even gotten here in only a month. I’d been so busy worried about saving David, saving Cotillion, saving
myself
, that I hadn’t noticed my relationship was also in need of a hero. Could I fix that, too?
Ryan kept thumping the basketball behind his bed and I watched him, my Cotillion dress crumpled and uncomfortable, and thought about the scariest question of all: Did I want to?

When I got to school the next morning, Bee was waiting for me in the parking lot. Leaning against her car, blond hair whipping in the wind, she frowned as I walked up to her. “You never texted me last night, and I called you like a hundred times.”

It took me a second to remember that I’d promised to text her, and why. Oh, right, the ugly scene at Cotillion practice. “Ugh, I’m sorry. I went over to Ryan’s last night, and I left my phone in the car.”

Bee pushed away from her car, tugging her knit hat a little further down over her forehead. “Are you guys okay?”
The words “Of course!” immediately leapt to the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. Bee deserved better than that. “We’re trying to be.”
Kids were walking past us and up the stairs into Wallace Hall. I caught a glimpse of Mary Beth’s reddish hair before she disappeared into the building. Bee must’ve seen her, too, because she paused on the steps. “Mary Beth had it totally wrong yesterday. You and Ryan are perfect together, and you know that.”
“Are we?” I heard myself ask, and Bee’s head jerked up like I’d smacked her.
“What?”
“It’s only . . .” I thought about last night, sitting in Ryan’s bedroom, me on the computer, him tossing his basketball, sitting four feet apart, but feeling like there was an ocean between us. “I love Ryan, but—”
“There are no buts,” Bee said, taking my hand. “You said it yourself. You love him.” She shrugged. “That’s all that matters.”
“You’re right,” I said, even though I wasn’t really sure that she was. And when she added, “Besides, you guys have to get married, and then Brandon and I will get married, and we’ll all live next door to each other, and our kids will play together . . .”
She was smiling, and when she bumped my hip with hers, I knew she wasn’t totally serious, but I couldn’t make myself smile back. I wasn’t an Oracle, but even I knew that future was  .  .  . wrong.
Bee lowered her head. “You know, I was thinking last night. Don’t get me wrong, your lessons with Saylor are really awesome. I mean, the other day, when she taught you how to disarm someone with a knife? Even
I
wanted to learn that.”
I smiled at the memory of last week, Bee sitting in the grass of Saylor’s backyard, her long legs stretched out in front of her, cheering me on as Saylor put me through my paces.
“And I get why you’re keeping it a secret,” Bee went on once we were inside the school. The burnt-hair smell of the ancient heaters assaulted my nose, and the squeak and click of hundreds of shoes filled my ears. “But  .  .  . Harper, if it’s making people think you and David Stark have something going on, is it worth it? I mean, do you even
need
any more lessons? You looked pretty freaking skilled the last time I watched you.”
“After Cotillion,” I told her, giving her my favorite saying. “I have a couple more lessons, and then I’m totally giving it up. Trust me.”
But once again, there was that niggling thought. Even if I did manage to keep Blythe from doing her crazy spell and save the town, what would happen then?
No. One day at a time.
Bee nodded, but she was still chewing her lower lip. “Okay. So hey, since we don’t have Cotillion practice today, wanna hit up the Dixie Bean after school?”
A pair of freshman girls walked by, their arms linked tightly. They were laughing, heads close together, and something about them made my throat ache. “I have to meet Saylor today.”
Bee’s face fell a little, so I hastily added, “Do you want to come with me again? I think today we’re learning this cool move that knocks people out. You know, like that
Star Trek
thing.” I pinched the air with my hand, hoping Bee would laugh.
She just shook her head. “That’s okay. I think the twins are free, so . . .”
“Oh.” I dropped my hand. “Right. Well, y’all go to the Dixie Bean. Put extra whipped cream on your mocha for me.”
She smiled at that, but it didn’t reach her eyes. We made our way to our lockers. “I suwannee,” I joked. “Next year? I am so going to be one of those stereotypical seniors who stacks her schedule with easy classes.” As I said it, I tried to push away the image of me bleeding out on the steps of Magnolia House. I
would
have a senior year.
“But I guess that’s the thing with junior year. Between college stuff, and regular school, things are so—”
“Really busy right now,” Bee filled in, switching her backpack to her other shoulder. “I know. And it looks like things are about to get busier for you.” She inclined her head toward my locker, or rather, to the pale purple sheet of paper taped there.
That color paper only meant one thing. The headmaster wanted to see me.
“What?” I said dumbly, ripping the paper from my locker.
“It can’t be bad,” Bee offered. “I mean . . . you’re you.”
My hand was trembling a little as I pushed the piece of paper into my coat pocket. “Yeah, he probably wants to talk to me about SGA stuff. See you at lunch?”
Brandon came through the front doors then, whooping Bee’s name, and I never got a reply.
Turning away, I headed for the main office, Headmaster Dunn’s secretary waving me through when I held up the little piece of purple paper. The office smelled like coffee and leather, and the walls were covered in all of his various diplomas and awards for education.
The headmaster himself was a short, squat man with droopy green eyes and a fringe of reddish hair circling his bald head. I took a seat in the chair opposite his desk, and gave him my best Harper Jane Price smile. “You wanted to see me, Headmaster? Is this about SGA?”
In a way, it was.
His face folded with concern as leaned over his desk. “Harper, I understand that you’re very committed to this school and to your studies. But perhaps you’ve overextended yourself.”
“I . . . what?” The leather chair squeaked under me as I sat up straighter.
He pulled out a manila folder and began paging through its contents. “According to your teachers, your grades have been slipping. And you’ve been tardy to class . . . let’s see . . . three times in the past few weeks?”
Okay, so yes, I had gotten a B on my last history test, and I turned in one paper—
one
—late in English. As for the tardies, the first time had been after the janitor’s closet with David. The second had been because I thought I felt that David’s-in-danger feeling, but actually, I just hadn’t eaten breakfast. The third time had been because David texted me that he’d seen some weird dude lurking outside the school, but it had been the new lawn guy.
Not like I could tell Headmaster Dunn any of that. “I had female troubles.”
But even that, the Gold Standard Excuse to Give to Male Teachers didn’t work. Headmaster Dunn went on like I hadn’t said anything. “I think it’s possible you’re suffering from stress.”
“
I am not stressed!
” My fingers dug into the sides of the chair, clutching so hard I was surprised I didn’t tear a gash in the leather.
He might have believed me if the words hadn’t come out in a hysterical shriek.
As it was, he heaved a huge sigh. “In your best interest, Harper, I’m removing you from the SGA.”
“You’re . . . you’re what?”
“Also, I’m going to advise Coach Henderson to give you a break from cheerleading until next semester.”
“But it’ll be over next sem—”
Headmaster Dunn’s jowls wobbled as he shook his head. “And I think the Committee for Academic Honesty can do without you, at least until Christmas.”
Now I was making high-pitched whimpering sounds.
I watched him write down and subsequently cross out every single activity I did for the Grove. Future Business Leaders of America? Gone. Key Club? Gone. Annual Christmas bake sale chairperson? Crossed through
twice
.
“There,” he said with satisfaction once he was done erasing my entire life. “Now see? You’ll feel so much better.”
“But . . . college,” I said weakly. I didn’t care what Saylor said. I could still do that, right? How could I
not
go to college? “They’ll see that I dropped out of all this stuff my junior year, and they’ll think I can’t follow through, and all I do is follow through, so—”
“Harper,” he said sternly. “You are bright and talented and driven, and any college would be lucky to have you. But as your principal, it’s my job to guide your academic pursuits. And I think all these things you do here at the Grove are getting in that way of that.”
He ripped the paper in half, the sound making me wince.
“But now you’re free. Concentrate on your classes. That will do more to get you into a good school than all the extracurricular activities in the world.”
I stood up, my legs numb. All I could do was nod.
“And Harper,” he added when I opened the door, “maybe take some time for yourself now, okay?”