Last Dance (24 page)

T
AKE ONE SLIM AWKWARD
red-headed teenage girl with no self-confidence. Dress her in the loveliest antique gown imaginable, and set her lightly on the dance floor in front of Prince Charming. One kiss, and she turns into a Princess.

It’s not just for fairy tales, thought Beth Rose Chapman. It really works. It worked for me. But that was last year. This is this year.

For what the fairy tales neglected to mention was that Prince Charming was the type of guy who liked more than one princess. And once the prince moved on, the magic spell was broken.

“The beautiful girl,” Beth Rose said, “is in serious danger of turning back into a wallflower.”

Beth Rose examined her reflection. Her mirror was a cheap rectangle from the discount store. The bottom was blocked by rows of lovely bottles, full of perfumes and creams. For a whole love-filled year she had not cared about purchased beauty. Gary loved her no matter what scent she wore.

Now she was back at the beginning.

And in the beginning, Beth Rose thought ruefully, there was panic

The kind of panic where your mind said constantly, if I just pick out the right eye shadow, the right perfume … then he’ll like me. If I just buy the right dress … If I just use a different conditioner….

Panic, of course, resulted in decisions like going to the hairdresser yesterday. It had seemed intelligent at the time. She couldn’t go on forever with the same old hairdo. And her bright auburn curls were long tangles that hurt to run a brush through. “Do something interesting with it,” Beth Rose commanded the stylist. New hair would be a good beginning to a New Year; perhaps with new hair she would begin sleeping through the night, instead of weeping through it. She cried so often for Gary that she had to leave the bed half made each morning, so the damp pillow and the top sheet with which she mopped her eyes would dry during the day.

“Cut it all off,” Beth Rose said grandly at the beauty shop.

And that, indeed, was what the stylist did.

There was not a hair on her head longer than two inches. Some of it was scarcely half an inch. The red curls tightened into little knots all over her head. If she brushed hard, it turned into red fluff, sort of like cake icing. But the curls were tough, and as the minutes passed, they tightened, and popped back into place, so she looked as if her hair had been made of yarn: tied into French knots by someone trying to learn embroidery.

Now when she had to face Gary with his newer, better princess, she was practically bald. She had never noticed before what a long neck she had. Now that her thick red hair no longer hid it from view, her neck felt very conspicuous. Her ears looked like little white doorknobs.

All year she had had such poise! Could it really have been a gift of Gary exclusively? Gould it really be that she, Beth Rose, had none, except what she borrowed from him? She resented Gary for that, and despised herself for it: but how much easier it was to be poised when somebody special loved you, and made it clear in public. And when that special somebody very clearly in public chose to love another girl … well, the old poise was a little harder to come by.

At least her dress was perfect.

Brocade, and of all the unexpected colors for a redhead to pick, it was lavender. Deep rich lavender like violets in spring. Silvery lavender weeping willows were embroidered over violet streams. The brocade pattern wound and shimmered around and around, vines twining together, streams flowing beneath and above.

Tightly shirred around Beth’s narrow waist, the dress covered one shoulder and left the other bare. It gathered in a bustle around her hips, twisted around her legs, and ended in a ruffled flourish at one ankle, leaving the other leg open to the knee.

Although it covered most of her, it was a very sensuous dress, and more sophisticated than anything she had ever worn. It was not last year’s sweet fragile antique lace, and it was not last summer’s gentle pastel cotton. It was this year’s brilliant elegance.

I can’t go mousy with a dress like this, she decided, choosing makeup.

Instead of the usual little-girl colors recommended for redheads, she tried dark dusky shadows about her eyes. High up beneath her eyes, she sculptured cheekbones. Then she turned off all the bedroom lights except the tiny reading light by her pillow. The dim light cast mysterious shadows on the new high cheekbones she had drawn in.

However, nice high cheekbones were not as good as poise.

“There is always the possibility,” Beth Rose said to the friendly dark, “of just not going to the dance at all.”

Beth Rose had considered this every ten minutes since her date had been arranged. Seventeen days now. That was a lot of consideration. The date embarrassed her. Everybody would know who her date really was—somebody’s little brother—and they would know he was there because nobody else would go with Beth.

Gary would pity her.

She thought she could not bear it that the boy who had loved her, admired her, laughed with her, and teased her, would now feel that embarrassing emotion—pity. At least Beth Rose was not the only one in this boat: Kip had lost Lee, and the girls had spent many an hour on the phone, endlessly going over the reasons and agonies in their love lives.

Some senior year, Kip had said more than once. Senior year is supposed to be perfect. Problems are okay when you’re a sophomore or a junior, but by the time you’re a senior you should have it together.

The boys did have it together, of course. It was just that they had it together with other girls.

Gary’s new princess would shine so much that even in this stunning purple brocade, Beth would feel faded, like old jeans.

She studied her reflection again. The brocade shimmered. Her pale skin was ghostly, and delicate. And actually, now that she was slightly used to it, how nicely her head was shaped! She had always thought of her head as a large red thing balanced heavily on top of her shoulders, but now she saw it was neat, small, and attractive.

Maybe the haircut wasn’t grotesque.

Maybe in the darkness of the dance, nobody would recognize her date as Kip’s younger brother, drafted for the occasion.

Maybe in the dark she would find another romance.

“Oh right,” Beth said. “And maybe I’ll win the lottery, too.” She turned the lights back on in order to find her evening bag. Mistake. For there, lying beside her silver purse, was the crimson red invitation to Gwynnie’s After Midnight party.

Gwynnie was the new girl in town.

She did not dress, talk, act, or move like any other girl in Westerly. Sometimes she wore black: huge skirts made of sweatshirt material that hung down to her ankles, with huge sweatshirts, jet-black jewelry, and dark sunglasses. Sometimes she wore horn-rimmed sunglasses and a man’s pinstriped wool business suit, with scarlet suspenders to keep up the enormous trousers. She had a leather bomber’s jacket she paired with a red velvet skirt (and suede sunglasses) and an antique smoking jacket of dark green silk that she wore with jeans (and rubber wrap-around sunglasses).

Always sunglasses.

Some teachers made her take them off. Without sunglasses Gwynnie would blink steadily. If the teacher complained, Gwynnie would reply that bright light was destructive to her personality and it was essential to filter it.

She had as many wigs as she had sunglasses. A black sleek twenties’ wig that curved over Gwynnie’s cheek, frozen as if it were made of metal. A white-blonde wig of hair that reached her waist and stuck out on the sides an almost equal distance, so that she resembled a tent of hair. When she wore this Gwynnie had difficulty fitting in the classroom doorways.

Once in math Gwynnie gave herself a pedicure on her desk. The class watched fascinated as Gwynnie removed her orange running shoes and then two pairs of socks: high chartreuse argyle knee sox, next white ankle socks with turquoise lace trim. Gwynnie placed one large bare foot on her desk, brought out a little zipped leather foot-care kit and started in on her nails.

The math teacher deliberately ignored her.

They went on with their trigonometry, pretending nobody could hear the little rasp of Gwynnie’s nail file.

Gwynnie was knitting a vast scarf on tiny gauge needles. The scarf appeared to use whatever yarn Gwynnie had found in the gutter or at a tag sale: all weights and colors knit haphazardly on the thin needles. The scarf was probably eight feet long now, but Gwynnie kept knitting. Whenever a class was boring, and often when it was not, Gwynnie would pull out her knitting, and begin another row.

Gwynnie’s real hair was short with a single tiny braid right over her forehead. She frequently paused during tests to rebraid it. She was very good at braiding and could do three, four, or five strands. Beth Rose nearly failed a history quiz in November watching Gwynnie’s thin fingers keep track of five skinny strands of hair and braid it down over her eyes, and nose, and mouth.

Sometimes Gwynnie sat with Beth’s group at lunch. Anne might say, “I was thinking of going to Lord & Taylor’s to look at lingerie.” And Emily would moan, “I’d go but I’m so broke. I might fall in love with something I can’t get.” And Kip would say, “I never care about whether I can afford it. I just like to look at it and touch it.”

Gwynnie would say, “I prefer the West Indies.”

Everybody would sit for a moment studying their Jell-O and chicken noodle soup and wonder what to say to that.

It was Beth Rose’s opinion that Gwynnie was not human.

“Then what is she?” Kip asked. “A vampire?”

“That seems all too possible,” Beth Rose admitted.

Nevertheless, they were all going to Gwynnie’s after the ball at The Hadley. This was partly just to see Gwynnie’s house. Her parents (who appeared to be quite normal for people whose daughter was a vampire) had built on a hill on the outskirts of Westerly. Easily visible from the road, the house was enormous and very modern, with vertical light-gray sheathing and windows that rose two stories. The house sprawled over the hillside and stabbed the sky. Beyond the four-car garage was an indoor swimming pool with jungle-like vines growing against the glass walls. A long driveway curved through a meadow, and the meadow became velvet lawn, and the lawn turned to manicured gardens. The doorway was marked by a six-foot piece of polished marble, which curved like a welcoming hand to show you where to enter.

In winter, the gray and glass house was sculpture against black silhouettes of trees and white billows of snow.

You would think that anybody who lived in that house would go back and forth to school in her own Jaguar. You would think the girl who lived there would look like her house: tall, sleek, elegant. But no, it was crazy Gwynnie who got off the schoolbus.

Beth Rose had always been afraid that Gary would drift on. Staying in one place did not suit his personality. But how—how!—could Gary have chosen bizarre, semi-human Gwynnie over her?

New girl in town. She took my man.

Oh, it sounded like a bad country and western song, didn’t it? The Other Woman. The New Girl In Town. She Stole My Man.

Beth Rose forced herself to think about the ball.

Beth Rose had never been to The Hadley.

She did not have the kind of parents who dined there, or the kind of boyfriend who would take her, and she certainly did not have the money to go herself. The Hadley was the tallest building in Lynnwood, right downtown, part of the successful urban renewal in that city. Everybody said The Hadley would fail, nobody would rent offices there, nobody would open stores in the interior mall, nobody would park in the huge parking lot beside it. Most of all, everybody said nobody would pay all that money to eat in the revolving restaurant on the top floor.

To look at what? everybody demanded.

Horizons of Lynnwood and Westerly?

Maybe in New York they went up elevators in skyscrapers and sat in revolving restaurants, but not in Lynnwood. Those people are going broke, said everybody, nodding knowingly.

But they were wrong.

Everybody—even the people who said nobody would go there—went there.

And now, at last, Beth Rose would, too.

The Ball was being held in the revolving restaurant. They would dance far above the snow, and the floor beneath them would turn slowly, slowly, while the lights of the cars and the streets below became golden jewels in the dark night. The Hadley would fill with the throbbing rhythms of dance bands and the shouting screaming exhilaration of New Year’s Eve.

New Year’s Eve, Beth Rose Chapman thought. I’m bald, my ears look like doorknobs, I’m going with Kip’s little brother George, and I have an invitation to my ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend’s for breakfast.

The phone rang.

Her parents had already left for their New Year’s Eve dinner and dance. She was home alone.

She picked it up.

“Beth Rose?” a peculiar voice said.

She didn’t recognize the voice. “Yes?” she said.

“It’s me,” the voice said.

Her mouth went dry. The voice was freakily high pitched. Somebody—somebody weird—disgusting—was this a—

“Beth Rose?” the voice said.

She tried to swallow. I should hang up, she thought. I’m alone. Somebody knows I’m alone.

Her hands grew slippery, and the telephone almost fell to the floor.

“Beth Rose, do you like dinosaurs?”

Well, it was not your typical obscene phone call, at least. “Oh, some of them,” she said. “Stegosaurus, he’s kind of cute. Tyrannosaurus was never my favorite.”

“Oh, good. Kevin and Pete and I were just checking. Because Kip said if George really sent you a bouquet she’d shoot him, and we said that he could send it to us, we’d love to have a bouquet of dinosaurs. I guess he’s sending it to you, though,” said the very high voice sadly.

“Jamie!” she exclaimed. “Jamie Elliott. You scared me.”

“I did?” Jamie said, thrilled at this compliment. “Wow.” And, totally satisfied by the conversation he hung up.

A bouquet of dinosaurs? Beth Rose thought. What word could he have misunderstood? She tried to think of flowers that sounded like dinosaurs: Orchids? Camellias? Red roses?