How I Found the Perfect Dress (6 page)

Before I could even say good night, he was asleep.

b
Ч ten-thirtЧ sundaЧ morning tammЧ Was starving and whining for breakfast, but Colin hadn't come down yet. Dad insisted we start without him.

“Ten-thirty and still asleep! It'd be even later in Ireland,” my dad commented, as he stirred his coffee. “Half the day's wasted.”

“Don't be inhospitable,” Mom said, ladling out the fruit salad she'd been chopping all morning, which was carefully garnished with perfect circles of kiwi and sprigs of fresh mint. “He's exhausted from traveling.”

“He knows about chickens,” Tammy said, her mouth full of waffle.

“Need to brush up on my roosters, though. It's well past sunup!” Colin practically jogged down the stairs. “Good morning, everyone! I can't thank ye enough for lettin' me lie in. That was quite possibly the best night's sleep I've had in me whole entire life.” He smiled charmingly at my mother. “I hope I didn't cause ye to miss church.”

Ha. My mom's idea of Sunday worship was hitting a sale at Lord and Taylor's.

“Morning,” my dad said, sounding embarrassed. “Coffee?”

“Hardly feel like I need any, but sure.” Dad poured him a cup, and within seconds my mom produced a warmed plate laden with perfectly arranged fruit, homemade waffles and a festive drizzle of raspberry syrup.

“We were planning on doing some shopping today,” she said, as we watched Colin shovel the food down. “Would you like to see the mall? It's quite something!” Mom said “the mall” with a special glow, like, “Would you like to see
the Taj Mahal
? Would you like to see
the dead come back to life
?”

Say no,
I prayed.
Anything but the mall.

“If ye don't mind,” Colin said, glancing at me, “I'd be more than happy to just enjoy your beautiful home, and relax here for a bit.”

“I'll stay home too,” I said quickly.

Mom got it right away, but Dad slammed his coffee mug down and pushed back his chair. “Me too. I've been meaning to organize the garage.”

At my house, we spelled clueless D-A-D.

“Daniel,” Mom intoned, in the low pitch she only used when she was about to boss him around. “I
really
think you should come shopping with me and Tammy. Let Morgan and Colin have a chance to catch up.”

“But the garage is a mess—”

“It's been like that for
eight years,
” said my mom, the professional closet organizer and most passionately anticlutter person on the East Coast. “It can wait.”

My mom could be kind of a goddess herself, sometimes.

 

 

 

As the sound of the Subaru whisking my parents and Tammy to the mall faded into the distance, my heart started to pound. What to do first? Throw myself at Colin and plant a juicy wet one right on his lips? Tell him how much I'd missed him and beg him to move to Connecticut? Offer him more coffee and wait for him to make the first move?

Colin seemed unsure too. “Ye didn't tell me ye lived in a mansion,” he said, wandering through the “great room,” as my mom called it, with its vaulted ceiling and total lack of privacy. “It's a bloody big house yer folks've got here.”

I tried to match his casual tone. “It's medium sized by local standards, believe it or not. People love big houses in Connecticut.”

“Three bathrooms!” He turned to me. “And that's medium sized, eh?” He was standing in front of the sofa. How easy it would be for us to sink down on it together and start making out like ravenous beasts.
How easy it is,
I thought,
to remember exactly what his lips feel like on mine. . . .
Considering that I was a person who'd once traveled thousands of years back in time to the days of Irish lore, why couldn't I just skip ahead a few years and be old enough for Colin?
Why why why . . .

“Will ye listen to me,” he said, catching my gaze. “We haven't seen each other since the summer—”

My arms were around him, and his were around me. “I missed you so much,” I murmured.

“And here I am, talking about the—”

“Colin—”

“—plumbing . . .”

I turned my face up to his, eyes closed, ready for a kiss. And it came, tenderly, on my right cheek, where it lingered until Colin gently pulled away.

“There's some stuff I ought to tell ye, I think,” he said.

I did not like the sound of that one bit.

 

 

“
i
don't Understand.” the adrenaline rush of fear was clouding my brain. “Are you saying you're sick?” We were sitting on the sofa, but we weren't making out. Instead Colin was busy scaring the crap out of me.

Colin looked away from me and shrugged. “It'd be simpler if I were. They can't find anything wrong with me. I've been to the infirmary at school and a private doctor as well.” He tried to joke, but it was forced. “They all say the same thing: I'm fit as a fiddle, if a bit on the ugly side.”

Ugly, ha. Sparkling blue eyes, reddish-blond hair, a faery-dusting of freckles across his face and that naturally graceful, athletic bod. Colin was a hunk. Like mine, his hair had grown longer since the summer. It was softer now and tousled into silky curls. He was thinner, a little paler—he looked beautiful; that was the only word for how he looked.

“Colin, please,” I begged. “If you're not sick, tell me what's wrong.”

He exhaled and took my hand. “All right. Ye know me, luv, I'm a fairly energetic chap by nature. But soon after I started university, something changed.” He shook his head. “I was tired all the time and kind of foggy-headed. It got so bad I even tried cutting out the Guinness.”

I smiled at that.

“Ye'll think I'm daft, Mor,” he went on, in a quiet voice. “I feel like I almost never get a proper night's sleep—except for last night, here in this house, that was quite the exception—but I have these mad dreams.”

My head started to ache. “What kind of dreams?”

He opened his mouth, then stopped. “It's completely nutters. Never mind.”

Now the room was spinning and I had to hold on. I put my hands on his strong arms and felt the muscles moving beneath his skin, like there was a lean, wild creature that lived inside him.

“Colin—tell me about the dreams.” I wouldn't let him go. “I promise I won't think you're ‘nutters.' ”

I could see the need to tell someone gathering behind his eyes, like the clouds of a distant, fast-approaching storm.
I know that feeling,
I wanted to say.
When you know that no one will believe you, but you're desperate to tell the truth anyway.
If I didn't have Tammy to tell all my faery stories to, I'd probably have gone nutters myself by now.

“At first I couldn't remember any of it,” he began. “The dreams would fade as soon as I woke up. But now I'm starting to hold on to bits of 'em, not that they make any sense.” He looked at me helplessly. “In the dream I'm at a party. There's dancing, lots of dancing. Everyone's dressed to the nines.”

“Like—a prom?” Lame, I know, but it was the best image I could come up with.

“Yeah, I suppose. But it goes on and on. Every night, all night. A never-ending prom.” His voice sank lower. “Here's the truly daft part. Now and then, I find things in me pockets. Mostly pieces of paper—notes, lists. They're in me own handwriting, but I don't remember writing them.”

“Wait.” I had to ask, though part of me already knew the answer. “You
dream
that you find things in your pockets?”

Colin swallowed hard. “I told ye, ye'd think I was daft. No, Morgan,” he said. “The party with the dancing is a dream—I think it is, anyhow—but the stuff in me pockets is real.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, took out a slip of paper, and handed it to me. “They're all different, but this one's typical.”

It was a receipt, from a company called Wee Folk Custom Tailors & Alterations. In a curling script, in emerald green ink, it read:

 

“Now, how this got in me pocket's one thing,” said Colin, sounding exasperated. “But what on earth would I need with a flowy princess dress?”

p
issed off does not begin to describe how i felt about what was obviously a major shout-out from my old pals, the Faery Folk. “Wee Folk Custom Tailors!” I exclaimed. “Those fekkin' faeries—”

But the look on Colin's face shut me up fast. Colin believed in Unix programming and a pint of Guinness after a long day's bike ride. He believed that a guy in college should not date a sixteen-year-old girl, no matter how convinced she might be that he was her soulmate and the world's best kisser. But he did not believe in faeries, or leprechauns, or mermaids, or Tinker Bell, or any of that “faery claptrap,” as he called it.

I knew without question that his strange dreams, unexplainable fatigue and those bizarre notes were some kind of faery mischief, but there was no way was I going to try to convince Colin of that. At least not until I figured out what kind of troublemaking the Faery Folk were up to.

“Really, Mor,” Colin said gently. “Ye didn't used to say ‘fek' so much before ye met me, did ye?”

“I know,” I said, embarrassed. “My dad is on me all the time—”

“Ye sound like a proper Irish girl, is all.” He grinned. “I'm proud to have had such a beneficial influence.”

 

 

Colin Was onlЧ too glad not to obsess anЧmore about his mysterious problems, and we spent the rest of the afternoon gabbing away like we'd never left Ireland. He was full of questions about American high school life, and I wanted to know all about his first year at DCU. A couple of hours passed without us even realizing it, and much too soon my family was back from their shopping expedition. It was time to take Colin to his dorm at UConn.

Dad drove, and Tammy begged to come along for the ride. I was strapped in the backseat with Tammy, and Colin was up front. The whole way to the campus, my dad grilled Colin about the particulars of this robotics intensive.

“It's a competition, really,” Colin explained. “They bring together students from all over the world and divvy us up into teams. Then we've got two weeks to build and program a little robot bugger that'll more or less do what we tell it.”

“What's a ‘little robot bugger'?” Tammy asked.

Colin twisted around to face us. “There's something ye need to remember about me, Tammy,” he said, red cheeked. “If I say an unusual word and ye don't know what it means, chances are it's not fit for ye to repeat. Especially at school. D'ye understand?”

“Did I say a bad word?” Tammy asked, delighted. “I thought robots were toys!”

“Well, yes, they can be, of course,” Colin fudged. My dad kept driving and said nothing, which was not necessarily a good sign.

“‘Robot' isn't a bad word,” I explained. “It means machines that move around and do things.”

“Oh,” said Tammy. “Like the cows and chickens at Lucky Lou's.”

“No, no, lass, now I've got ye all bollixed up—I mean, confused.” Colin looked at me in desperation. “Cows and chickens are animals. They're not robots.”

“They are at Lucky Lou's,” I corrected.

“But I thought it was a grocery? The one with all the magnificent veggies?”

“It is,” I said, “but it has these animatronic farm creatures too. You kinda have to see it to believe it.”

Colin opened his mouth to ask something else, but Tammy interrupted.

“So which word was the
bad
word?”

“Bugger!”
my dad roared. That shut us up for the rest of the trip.

 

 

 

the UConn dorm Was standard-issue state school architecture—a big, institutional-looking box, built in the days when land was cheap and cinder block was plentiful. A far cry from the ivy-covered, Magic Kingdom castles of Yale, but it was good ol' UConn that brought Colin back to me, and I swore then and there to get myself a school hoodie at the campus store out of sheer gratitude.

Dad couldn't find a place to park and Tammy needed to use the bathroom, so she came inside with us while Dad circled. Colin stood on one line to find out where he was supposed to pick up his room key, and I stood on another line for the ladies' room with Tammy.