Infatuate
Table of Contents
2. Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler
7. I Have to Tell You Something
19. I’ve Been Waiting Months to Do That
21. The First of Many Soul Captures
23. You’ve Been Consorting with Them
29. You’re Kind of a Troublemaker
34. Prepare to Chase and Be Chased
35. Is This Your Way of Making Me Feel Needed?
Read More from the Gilded Wings Series
Copyright © 2013 by Aimee Agresti
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-547-62615-4
eISBN 978-0-544-03479-2
v1.0313
F
OR
B
RIAN AND
S
AWYER
There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not innocent freedom of the soul.
—Robert Louis Stevenson,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Part One
1. The Calm Before the Storm
I hadn’t expected the end of high school to feel this way. Sure, there was a certain fizzy exuberance warming the chilly hallways of Evanston Township High School. There were joyous squeals and heartfelt hugs. There were colorful tatters of festive wrapping from token gifts littering the floor. There was that spirited roar of hundreds of our classmates simultaneously buzzing about their plans for the coming week. But all of that had nothing to do with the milestone I had reached with the ring of that final bell seconds earlier, and
everything
to do with the winter white blanketing the football field outside the window, where cars screeched out of the parking lot, their horns honking wildly. The holiday break was upon us all. That Dante, Lance, and I wouldn’t be back here until June’s graduation ceremony wasn’t news on anyone else’s radar. I gazed out the window again as the Chicago wind wrapped a wayward sheet of newsprint around the goalpost. In my mind, memories swirled in the same reckless way. Graduating early had to be the ultimate anticlimax.
The locker next to me slammed and Dante appeared. “Sooooo, everyone seems to be going to Jason Abington’s Christmas party tonight,” he needled me, eyebrows twitching up down, up down. He was making fun of me in the way that only best friends can get away with.
“Fantastic,” I said with the full dose of necessary sarcasm. I pulled off the taped photos from the inside of my locker door and gave them a last glance—all featured me with either Dante or Lance—then grabbed my bag and coat. I nodded at the now empty locker, then closed it one last time.
Bang.
I flashed Dante a look that said I wouldn’t be sweet-talked into any party- crashing expeditions. “Spend the evening with a house full of sloppy drunks in Santa hats while Jason and Courtney hook up in every room?” I had gotten over my longtime crush, but I still didn’t feel like watching Jason paw at his brainless bombshell of a girlfriend. No thank you.
After the conflagration that was our prom—no metaphors here: the entire event really had gone down in flames, taking with it the historic Lexington Hotel downtown in what had been dubbed “the Great Chicago Fire, Part Two” by the
Chicago Tribune
—Jason had actually called me once. It was soon after school let out for the summer. I had thought it was Dante playing a trick on me, and by the time Jason convinced me it was him, I was too shocked to speak. It didn’t really matter, though—by then I was uncharacteristically settled in the boyfriend department. Maybe boys have some sort of radar for when you no longer need them and that is precisely when they finally start noticing you.
“So, then that’s a no?” Dante asked with mock innocence.
“That’s a ‘not-if-everyone’s-life-depended-on-it’ no . . .
again.
” I couldn’t resist adding that last bit. It sometimes felt like Dante, Lance, and I lived in an entirely different universe from everyone else at school. We had played this odd role in, well, saving them from losing their souls this past spring, but it’s not as though any of them knew. I was beginning to think I had hallucinated it all. Our lives—Dante’s, mine, Lance’s—had changed, but no one else’s had.
“Okay, okay, got it.” He put his hands up in surrender. “You’re no fun.” He paused, and then asked with a smirk, “How ’bout a Christmas carol?”
I scanned the area around us, but as usual none of the bodies bouncing like charged atoms along the crowded hallway paid us any mind, so I played along, with just the slightest roll of the eyes: “‘Angels We Have Heard on High’?”
Dante gave me a friendly smack on the arm. “Ha! Am I crazy or do these jokes never get old?” He fixed his attention over my shoulder. “You’re still coming over for holiday movie madness, right?”
“Sure thing.” It was Lance’s voice behind me. Two vinelike arms wound around my waist and held me close. He leaned his chin on my shoulder. “What time do you want us?
“Happy graduation, by the way,” he said. He turned to me, lunging, to peck me fast and firm on the lips.
“And to you, too,” I said, just flirtatious enough, kissing him back.
“Ugh. I swear, sometimes you guys are worse than Courtney and Jason.”
“I’m offended,” I said in mock protest.
“I’m not!” Lance said, squeezing me. He planted an exaggerated smack of a kiss on my neck but then straightened up just as fast. He pushed his clunky black glasses farther up on his nose, his gaze darting. From the corner of my eye, I saw my favorite English teacher passing, trying not to see us, it seemed. Even after Lance and I had been together so many months, I still blushed when we had these moments at school. I never would’ve guessed I would be the type to even
have
moments like this at school. I had proved to be anything but this type for my entire high school career up until this last semester.
Dante shook his head. “The things I put up with in the name of friendship.” It was true. The three of us had one another and we were grateful. Dante and I had been pals since we were little kids. Lance had been something of a loner until that fateful internship brought us all together in our junior year. It had been his idea for us to do summer school and graduate early. “What would we miss? Another prom?” he’d joked. And so we had spent those sunny months studying, writing papers, taking tests, and now we were done.
After we cleaned out our lockers, we set off down the hall, Lance’s warm hand in mine. “I was starting to think this one might be a flight risk tonight,” Dante said, nodding in my direction.
“Fine, I’ll be there.” I sighed. “I just have to finish my college applications,” I explained to Lance. “We can’t all be evil geniuses like Dante, who can write application essays in his sleep.” I was done with the ones I really wanted—Northwestern, University of Chicago, Princeton, and Harvard and Yale (those last two were just for kicks)—but I still had my safety schools left. I had waited till the last minute on those in the hopes that I wouldn’t really need them.
“Whatever, there’s plenty of time,” said Dante, who seemed to score perfect grades without breaking a sweat.
“They’re due in, like, a week.” Lance laughed. He was also brilliant, but was supremely organized and had sent his off back in September.
“Exactly! Plenty o’ time!” Dante flashed that wide, winning smile. “Dude, I’m finishing mine on the way to the airport. I’ll send ’em before the plane takes off.” I slapped his arm playfully. He was kidding now.
The hallways had mostly cleared by the time we made it to the door. I wrapped my scarf around my neck and Lance held the door for me. The three of us stepped out, and a gust of wind swooped to meet us. Heads down, we pushed on to the L station.
Over the summer we had started taking the L to that familiar stop downtown and then walked through a pile of rubble to the ruins of the glamorous hotel we had once called home. At first, we just needed to be near it, like anyone visiting a grave site. We would sit wordlessly sorting through all our memories of the horrific and the good—because, despite it all, there had still been some good—we had witnessed there.
We picked up hot chocolate from a weathered convenience store underneath the L tracks and made our way to South Michigan Avenue along grungy streets that grew emptier and emptier by the block. Every inch of sky appeared gray as the wind whipped us enough to convince me that even if we weren’t going to be soon boarding a plane and heading south for the next few months, we probably wouldn’t have had too many more pilgrimages here before the frigid depths of a cruel Chicago winter would have kept us away.
Louisiana. In just over a week, we would be on our way there. We were volunteering in a student program in New Orleans, doing a host of community service projects and, I could only imagine, having an adventure or two. I had once been to Florida—Disney World—with my adoptive mother, Joan, but otherwise, I had never been farther south than our cousins’ place in Evansville, Indiana. And sure, I had lived away from home, at the hotel, but that was in Chicago. No matter what had happened at the Lexington, at least the proximity to home had been a comfort. But now . . . New Orleans? My pulse picked up.
I pulled my jacket closer around me and glanced from behind a curtain of my hair to Dante on my left, who was watching the sky, and Lance on my right, hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement. None of us had spoken since boarding the L in Evanston. That, in itself, seemed to be a sign that our thoughts would have been nearly identical.
We turned the corner and found ourselves at the foot of the Lexington Hotel debris. Whenever I stood here, it was almost impossible to imagine what the entrance, with its swooping awning and stately steps, had once looked like, or how row after row of windows had reached ten stories into the sky. The building had been decimated in such a way that it seemed a bomb had gone off inside. Only jagged portions of the first level remained, spiky bits of the façade jutting up and out. The rest of this behemoth had been reduced to no more than a series of mountainous piles of oddly shaped fragments, like one of those 3-D puzzles of architectural landmarks that Lance liked to put together and display in his room.