Envy (Fury) (9 page)

Skylar texted back:
It was great. I’m going to a dance committee mtg 2moro!

Awesome
, Meg replied.
Check yr email before bed. Hope to c u for lunch.

When Skylar turned on her computer, she found an email from Meg, sent earlier that afternoon.
Hope you’re having fun
, it read.
Here are a few songs from that Boston band I was telling you about—they’re totally going to be the next big thing. See you soon!
There were a few MP3s attached to the email, and Skylar listened as she got ready for bed. The band—called the Dusters—was pretty good. A little rockabilly, a little indie. She downloaded the songs onto her iPod and went to bed humming them, her voice echoing in the old house. She prayed she would dream of her new life, not her old one.

•  •  •

Skylar’s optimism extended into the next day, though it didn’t help her come up with any brilliant dance themes (other than the theme of “make Pierce Travers fall madly in love with Skylar McVoy,” which she didn’t think the other girls would go for). Still, she practically skipped to the dance committee meeting after school.

“Hey, babe!” Gabby’s greeting was chipper, but Skylar could
tell she was watching the door for someone else. “Now that you’re here, I guess we’re just waiting for Em.” A whole cluster of other students—mostly girls, but a few guys, too—were in the room. Everyone seemed to be friends with everyone else.

One of the girls spoke up. “Could we just start without her, Gabby? She hasn’t been here the last two times, and I’m missing part of practice for this.”

Skylar could tell that Gabby wanted to stall. “She’s probably just staying after class,” Gabby offered vaguely. But after a few moments of shuffling papers, she took a deep breath and started talking, while keeping one eye trained on the door.

“So, we’ve got about three weeks to go, and not a lot figured out,” Gabby said. Skylar made a mental note: The thing about really peppy people like Gabby? It was very easy to tell when they were off their game. “Um . . . what else? I’m glad the posters went up even without a theme, but we still need to have one for the actual event. We also don’t have music figured out. . . .” She trailed off.

“What about the DJ we had at homecoming?” The suggestion came from one of the few guys on the committee. He looked artsy—he had a camera with a fancy lens on the desk next to him.

“No chance,” piped up another girl, one Skylar had seen hanging around with Pierce and his friends. “He played the
worst
music.”

“Um, I liked him,” the boy replied.

“Me too,” Sports Girl echoed. “Remember how he played all that dubstep? Perfect for dancing.”

“That shit sucked, Sara,” another guy, one of the ones from the mall yesterday, responded. “But when he played some of the harder stuff—”

“You mean the stuff that no one dances to,” a young-looking girl with supershort hair cut in.

The conversation was getting weirdly heated. “Okay, guys, this isn’t helpful,” Gabby spoke up, but she sounded uncomfortable, and the debate about the music continued back and forth. Skylar knew that Gabby must be upset about the fact that this friend of hers—this Em she’d heard so much about—hadn’t shown, leaving Gabby to corral the committee alone.
That’s not how best friends should act,
Skylar thought.
That’s not how I’m going to act.

Notes of a Dusters song played in her head, and she got an idea. She sat forward excitedly, then checked herself and raised her hand timidly. “Hi,” she said, smiling shyly, “I’m Skylar. And, so, I know I’m new? But I have an idea.”

Gabby smiled at her. “Go ahead, Sky.”

“Well, I just found out about this band, from Boston? They’re called the Dusters. I think they’d be perfect—it’s good dancey stuff but it could also just play in the background, you know? Maybe since they’re kind of local, they’d consider it if we paid them?”

As soon as the word “Dusters” left her mouth, Gabby was squealing and banging her hand lightly against the desk. “Yes! Yes! That is such an awesome idea! Did you know that I’m going to
see
them in concert in April?”

“I’ve never even heard of them,” someone said doubtfully.

But one of the other girls, the one who hadn’t said much yet, nodded enthusiastically. “My brother
loves
them,” she said. “I think that’s a great idea.”

“Sky, do you have them on your iPod?” Gabby asked.

Skylar silently thanked Meg for the music advice and the MP3s. “Of course,” she said, digging her iPod and headphones out of her backpack.

“Here, listen to this, Jeff,” Gabby said after pulling up her favorite song. She thrust the iPod in Photo Boy’s face and turned to the rest of the group. “I am totally going to get in touch with them, like, today.”

The girl who was friends with Pierce looked up from her phone, where she’d been texting. “I knew it,” she said triumphantly. “I thought I’d heard of the Dusters from Angela McGowen—you know, she’s a senior, she plays tennis?” Gabby nodded. “Well, she
knows
someone in the band! I just asked her, and she says her cousin is the drummer!”

Gabby squealed. “Are you serious?”

“Dead. Lemme ask her if she has their contact info.”

Skylar couldn’t believe her timing. Or, to be more accurate,
Meg’s timing. It was like Meg was coordinating her life for her—perfectly.

“That’s terrific, Gabs,” Skylar said. She liked the sound of Gabby’s nickname rolling off her tongue. The others nodded.

“If you think they’d play a high school, we should do it,” Jeff relented, pulling the earbuds out of his ears. “This is actually pretty good.”

So it was settled. Angela was going to call her cousin and set things in motion. Gabby would follow up the next day. If it fell through, they’d call an emergency meeting to come up with a backup plan. As the meeting broke up Gabby linked her arm through Skylar’s. “This is, like, amazing luck. You should come with me to the concert,” she said. “It’s like fate brought us together or something—you’re like my long-lost twin!”

Skylar squeezed Gabby’s arm and grinned. Everything was falling into place. She allowed herself to relax ever so slightly.

Then they rounded the corner.

Skylar stopped and gasped. Right in front of them was Lucy, smiling, waving, and covered in blood.

“What’s the matter, Sky?” Gabby squeezed Skylar’s arm, breaking the spell. The girl in front of them was not Lucy. She was a blond girl about Lucy’s height, draped in red streamers that she was removing from the ceiling. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Skylar said, still catching her breath. “I just thought I saw someone I knew.”

The phone woke Em up at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. Gabby.

“Hey, Gabs,” she said sleepily.

“You missed another meeting,” Gabby said, without offering any greeting. “Another Spring Fling meeting. I called you and your phone was off.”

“Oh no, Gabs, I’m so sorry.” Em cursed herself for forgetting. She’d been at Drea’s rereading a bunch of news reports about “accidents” that Drea believed had been caused by the Furies, trying to locate other copies of the overdue (“missing”) book, and rehashing the strange run-in with the antiquities librarian. She’d been so stressed out recently that she hadn’t charged her phone in days, and it had died. “I—I totally forgot.” She felt like
she should just start handing out preprinted apologies, the way she kept letting people down.

“You’re supposed to be cochair of the committee, Em. Do you know how stupid I felt, waiting for you to show up?” Gabby’s voice broke, and Em winced. She wanted so badly to be able to tell Gabby about what she was doing, why she was behaving so strangely. But she knew she’d sound crazy, and Gabby would never understand. Anyway, she couldn’t tell Gabby—she’d made a promise to the Furies.

Instead, Em was left feeling awful—outside her own life, unable to talk to her closest friends about what was going on. She was getting doubly punished: first by the Furies, and now by Gabby and JD. She thought about what Mrs. Haynes had said about the Furies driving people mad. Maybe this kind of cycle of hurt and dishonesty was the core of insanity.

“I had—I needed to study for the SATs,” Em said weakly. “My parents are really riding me about it. They made me turn off my phone.”

“Em, you know how important this stuff is to me,” Gabby said, lending each word a special amount of meaning. Em rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. It was true. For Gabby, much more than for Em, the dances and parties marked important milestones. They were symbols in her personal life. Just six months ago Gabby had announced her “V-Squared” Plan—her intention to lose her virginity on Valentine’s Day, with Zach.
Then Em had hooked up with Zach. That asshole. Now he was gone. Off in some recovery facility somewhere—if the rumors were true. Em shuddered, thinking about the gossip that Zach had been in some kind of accident. Deep down, she knew the truth: the Furies must have gotten to him, too.

Without Zach around, Valentine’s Day had come and gone with little fanfare, Em secretly agonizing over JD and Gabby acting more bubbly than ever to preserve her pride. Gabby was doing her best to keep up appearances, to still function as queen social bee of Ascension—even though Em knew that she must often still feel sad, betrayed, and embarrassed. Em dug her heels into the mattress, disgusted by the memories.

“I know, Gabby, and I’m sorry. I really am.” She was. But seriously, a dance was the
last
thing she could think about right now. How could she get that across to Gabby without sounding like she didn’t care?

“And when people flake, nothing gets done.” The pitch of Gabby’s voice raised. “This dance
has
to go well, Em, can’t you understand that? I need it to.”

“I get that,” Em said. “And I’m sorry the committee sucks. But do you think, maybe, you shouldn’t let it carry so much weight? I mean . . .” She spoke carefully, knowing she was treading on thin ice. “It’s just a dance. In twenty years you won’t remember any of it. The decorations or the music or any of the other stuff that’s keeping you up at night. We’ll just
pick something out at the Party Shop this weekend.”

“The Party Shop?”
Gabby said each word as though it was a sexually transmitted disease. “Em, this isn’t, like, our fifth-grade graduation. You know what?” Her voice quivered again. “Since this is obviously the last thing you care about, I’ll find someone else to cochair. Someone who gets that the decorations can’t come from the freaking
Party Shop
.” And then she hung up.

Em tried calling back, but it rang twice and then went to voice mail. Fantastic. A fine start to her Saturday.

The fight with Gabby stuck with Em all day (which had at least one positive effect—for once, she wasn’t thinking about the Furies) as she legitimately did try to study for the SATs. After botching yet another practice test, she threw her test prep book at the wall in frustration. Here she was, by herself on a Saturday evening, missing Gabby and wanting to make it up to her.

There was only one foolproof solution she could think of.

She called Chinese Dragon Palace and ordered delivery.

“We have food in the refrigerator,” Em’s mom said with raised eyebrows as Em pounded down the stairs to intercept the delivery man as soon as he rang the doorbell. “I’m glad you have your appetite back, but I’d prefer you feasted on something other than fried chicken and egg rolls.”

“I know, Mom.” Em pulled out a crumpled twenty and pressed it into the delivery guy’s hands. “But Gabby and I are—Gabby and I kind of got into a little fight today. And I really
want to do something nice for her. I want to bring her an olive branch,” she said, motioning to the bags. “Or an egg roll branch, in this case.”

“And how do you expect to do that? You know the new rule about weekend car use. It’s for your own safety, honey.”

After Em’s car accident on Peaks Road, and then her secret drive out to the new mall construction site, which had ended in JD getting injured, her parents had laid down the law.

“Please, Mom. Gabby’s is practically around the corner. I’ll be home in a few hours.”

With a sigh, her mom relented. “You better be back here by ten p.m., Emily.”

Em was already halfway out the door.

•  •  •

As she was jogging to the car she heard the clanking of tools against JD’s driveway. She looked over in time to see him sliding out from under Mr. Fount’s Mustang, his mad-bomber hat framing his angular face like an astronaut’s helmet. He’d taken his jacket off, presumably to use as a pillow between his body and the cold asphalt, and Em couldn’t help but notice the way his bare biceps flexed when his arms pushed against the fender of the car.

Out of instinct, she shouted across the thin strip of lawn that separated their driveways. “Hey, you!” Almost as quickly, she remembered that they were barely speaking.

As he stood up, unfolding his tall and lanky frame, JD’s eyes flickered over Em’s face. For a moment he looked as though he was going to flat-out ignore her and go inside. But then his gaze settled on the bags in her hand.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Fried pork dumplings.”

“And sesame noodles—your favorite,” she burst out eagerly. “Special delivery to Gabby.”

He paused and toed the crusty snow with his boot. It was all Em could do to not charge over to him and wrap her arms around his waist.
Please, please, please forgive me,
she’d say.
I love you. I’ll make you believe me.

“You fixing your dad’s car?” The answer was obvious, but she didn’t want the conversation to be over yet.

“Yeah,” JD said. There was a brief silence. “Well, I hope she doesn’t hog the fortune cookies as bad as you do.” His forehead wrinkled and he cracked a small smile, gone almost as soon as it came. Then he turned abruptly and went into the house.

As she unlocked her car, Em was elated. It was a short exchange, but it was progress.

•  •  •

The Chinese food may have been overkill, Em discovered when she showed up at Gabby’s doorstep. And it probably hadn’t been necessary for her to bring the stack of old DVDs that Gabby had asked to borrow ages ago.