Ridley grinned.
Oopsies!
Ridley, stop!
I’m just getting started.
Charlotte was screaming, while Emily, Eden, and Savannah tried to shield her from view with their teen wedding dresses. The sound of a record scratching ripped across the speakers, as the record that was playing abruptly changed to the Stones.
“Sympathy for the Devil.” It could’ve been Ridley’s theme song. She was introducing herself, in a big way.
The people on the dance floor just assumed it was another one of Dickey Wix’s screw-ups, on his way to becoming the most famous thirty-five-year-old DJ on the prom circuit. But the joke was on them. Forget light strands shorting out; within seconds all the bulbs above the stage and the track lighting along the dance floor began to blow, one by one, like dominoes.
Ridley led Link onto the dance floor, and he twirled her around as Jackson students screamed, pushing their way off the floor, under the spray of sparks. I’m sure they all thought they were in the middle of some kind of electrical wiring disaster that Red Sweet, Gatlin’s only electrician, would get blamed for. Ridley threw her head back, laughing and undulating around Link in that loincloth of a dress.
Ethan—we have to do something!
What?
It was too late to do anything. Lena turned and ran, and I was right behind her. Before either of us reached the doors to the gym, the sprinklers went off, all along the ceiling. Water poured into the gym. The audio equipment started to short out, sparking like an electrocution just waiting to happen. Wet snowflakes dropped to the floor like soaked pancakes, and soap-flake snow turned into a bubbling mess.
Everyone started to scream, and girls dripping mascara and hair product ran toward the door in their soggy taffeta skirts. In the mess, you couldn’t tell a Little Miss from a Southern Belle. They all looked like pastel-colored drowned rats.
As I reached the door, I heard a loud crash. I turned to the stage just as the giant glitter snowflake backdrop toppled. Emily flopped out of position, off her step on the slippery stage. Still waving to the crowd, she tried to catch herself, but her feet slipped out from under her and she fell to the gym floor. She collapsed into a pile of peach and silver taffeta. Coach Cross went running.
I didn’t feel sorry for her, even though I did feel sorry for the people who would be blamed for this nightmare: the Student Council for their dangerously unstable backdrop, Dickey Wix for capitalizing on the misfortune of a fat teenage cheerleader in her underwear, and Red Sweet for his unprofessional and potentially life-threatening wiring of the lighting in the Jackson High gym.
See you later, Cuz. This was even better than a prom.
I pushed Lena out the door in front of me. “Go!”
She was so cold I could barely stand to touch her. By the time we got to the car, Boo Radley was already catching up to us.
Macon shouldn’t have worried about her curfew.
It wasn’t even half past nine.
Macon was infuriated, or maybe he was just worried. I couldn’t tell which, because every time he looked at me, I looked away. Even Boo didn’t dare look at him, lying at Lena’s feet, thumping his tail on the floor.
The house no longer resembled the dance. I bet Macon would never allow a silver snowflake through the doors of Ravenwood again. Everything was black now. Everything: the floors, the furniture, the curtains, the ceiling. Only the fire in the study fireplace burned steadily, casting light out into the room from the hearth. Maybe the house reflected his changing moods, and this was a dark one.
“Kitchen!” A black mug of cocoa appeared in Macon’s hand. He handed it to Lena, who sat wrapped in a scratchy woolen blanket in front of the fire. She clutched the mug with both hands, her wet hair tucked behind her ears, clinging to the warmth. He paced in front of her. “You should have left the moment you saw her, Lena.”
“I was kind of busy getting doused with soap and laughed at by everyone in school.”
“Well, you won’t be busy anymore. You’re grounded until your birthday, for your own good.”
“My own good is so clearly not the point here.” She was still shaking, but I didn’t think it was from the cold, not anymore.
He stared at me, his eyes cold and dark. He was furious, I was sure now. “You should have made her leave.”
“I didn’t know what to do, sir. I didn’t know Ridley was going to destroy the gym. And Lena had never been to a dance.” It sounded stupid even as I was saying it.
Macon just stared back at me, swirling the scotch in his glass. “Interesting to note, you didn’t even dance. Not a single dance.”
“How do you know that?” Lena put down her mug.
Macon paced. “That’s not important.”
“Actually, it’s important to me.”
Macon shrugged. “It’s Boo. He is, for lack of a better word, my eyes.”
“What?”
“He sees what I see. I see what he sees. He’s a Caster dog, you know.”
“Uncle Macon! You’ve been spying on me!”
“Not on you, in particular. How do you think I manage as the town shut-in? I wouldn’t get far without man’s best friend. Boo here sees everything, so I see everything.” I looked at Boo. I could see the eyes, human eyes. I should have known, maybe I had always known. He had Macon’s eyes.
And something else, something he was chewing. He had a ball of something in his mouth. I bent down to take it from him. It was a crumpled, soggy Polaroid. He had carried it all the way from the gym.
Our picture from the formal. I was standing there, with Lena, in the middle of the fake snow. Emily was wrong. Lena’s kind did show up on film, only she was shimmering, transparent, as if from the waist down she had already begun to dissolve into some kind of ghostly apparition. Like she really was melting, before the snow had even hit her.
I patted Boo’s head and pocketed the photo. This wasn’t something Lena needed to see, not right now. Two months until her birthday. I didn’t need the picture to know we were running out of time.
12.16
When the Saints Go Marching In
Lena was sitting on the porch when I pulled up. I insisted on driving because Link wanted to ride with us, and he couldn’t risk being seen in the hearse. And I didn’t want Lena to have to walk in alone. I didn’t even want her to go, but there was no talking her out of it. She looked like she was ready for battle. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, and a black vest with a fur-trimmed hood. She was about to face the firing squad, and she knew it.
It had only been three days since the dance, and the DAR hadn’t wasted any time. The Jackson Disciplinary Committee meeting this afternoon wasn’t going to be much different than a witch trial, and you didn’t have to be a Caster to know that. Emily was limping around in a cast, the winter formal disaster had become the talk of the town, and Mrs. Lincoln finally had all the support she needed. Witnesses had come forward. And if you twisted everything everyone claimed they saw, heard, or remembered far enough, you could squint, slant your head just right, and try to see the logic: that Lena Duchannes was responsible.
Everything was fine until she came to town.
Link jumped out and opened the door for Lena. He was so riddled with guilt, he looked like he was going to puke. “Hey, Lena. How ya doin’?”
“I’m okay.”
Liar.
I don’t want him to feel bad. It’s not his fault.
Link cleared his throat. “I’m real sorry about this. I’ve been fightin’ with my mom all weekend. She’s always been crazy, but this time it’s different.”
“It’s not your fault, but I appreciate you trying to talk to her.”
“It might have made a difference if all those hags from the DAR weren’t talkin’ her other ear off. Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Asher must’ve called my house a hundred times in the last two days.”
We drove past the Stop & Steal. Even Fatty wasn’t there. The roads were deserted, like we were driving through a ghost town. The Disciplinary Committee meeting was scheduled for five o’clock sharp, and we were going to be right on time. The meeting was in the gym because it was the only place at Jackson big enough to accommodate the number of people that were likely to show up. That was another thing about Gatlin, everything that went on involved everyone. There were no closed proceedings around here. From the look of the streets, the whole town had all but shut down, which meant just about everyone was going to be at the meeting.
“I just don’t get how your mom pulled this off so quickly. This is fast even for her.”
“From what I overheard, Doc Asher got involved. He hunts with Principal Harper and some bigwig on the School Board.” Doc Asher was Emily’s dad and the only real doctor in town.
“Great.”
“You guys know I’m probably going to get kicked out, right? I’ll bet it’s already been decided. This meeting is just for show.”
Link looked confused. “They can’t kick you out without hearin’ your side a the story. You didn’t even do anything.”
“None of that matters. These things are decided behind closed doors. Nothing I say is going to matter.”
She was right, and we both knew it. So I didn’t say anything. Instead, I pulled her hand up to my mouth and kissed it, wishing for the hundredth time that it was me going up against the whole School Board, instead of Lena.
But the thing was, it would never have been me. No matter what I did, no matter what I said, I would always be one of them. Lena never would. And I think that was the thing that made me the angriest, and the most embarrassed. I hated them even more because deep down, they still claimed me as one of their own, even when I dated Old Man Ravenwood’s niece and took on Mrs. Lincoln and wasn’t invited to Savannah Snow’s parties. I was one of them. I belonged to them, and there was nothing I could do to change that. And if the opposite were true, and in some way they belonged to me, then what Lena was up against wasn’t just them. It was me.
The truth was killing me. Maybe Lena was going to be Claimed on her sixteenth birthday, but I had been claimed since birth. I had no more control over my fate than she did. Maybe none of us did.
I pulled the car into the parking lot. It was full. There was a crowd of people lined up at the main entrance, waiting to get in. I hadn’t seen this many people in one place since the opening of Gods and Generals, the longest and most boring Civil War movie ever made and one that half my relatives starred in as extras, because they owned their own uniforms.
Link ducked down in the backseat. “I’m gonna slide out here. I’ll see y’all in there.” He pushed open the door and crawled out between the cars. “Good luck.”
Lena’s hands were in her lap, shaking. It killed me to see her this nervous. “You don’t have to go in there. We can turn around and I can drive you right back to your house.”
“No. I’m going in.”
“Why do you want to subject yourself to this? You said it yourself, this is probably just for show.”
“I’m not going to let them think I’m scared to face them. I left my last school, but I’m not going to run away this time.” She took a deep breath.