Tempestuous (14 page)

The combination of sweat, glitter, and endorphins was intoxicating as we joined a circle taking shape on the dance floor. At the center, Alfredo’s slammin’ pop-and-lock moves drew cheers and whistles from our erstwhile foes while Stacy Scott upped the ante with some crowd-inciting freestyle. Public school and private school kids intermingled as if we’d known each other since kindergarten and were now carousing together at our senior prom. Perhaps the United Nations could learn to resolve international conflicts with that great equalizer, the dance-off, I mused.

On the other side of the circle, I caught Ariel’s face intermittently as she jumped up and down like a spastic terrier. My poor, “fun-sized” friend was attempting to peer over the rows of people crowded in front of her. I beckoned her to stand by me for a better view, but just then she was lifted up above the crowd in one fluid movement. A chivalrous Chad had hoisted her to a seated position on his right shoulder as if she weighed no more than a gallon of milk—which, truth be told, was probably the case. Thunderstruck, Ariel found my eyes in the crowd and stared at me with incredulity, silently mouthing, “Oh. My. God!”

“Happy Birthday!” I mouthed back at her, knowing that she’d be replaying this moment—and, perhaps, this whole night—in her head for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, I was again surprised that Caleb and I had somehow managed to find a happy medium with our movements on the dance floor. Certainly I’d had to temper some of my more intricate steps, but he wasn’t nearly the clodhopper I’d expected him to be in spite of his accidentally treading on my toes a few times.

“Oh god—my bad!” he said after one such incident. “Are you alright?” He grabbed my shoulder with his free hand and brought his face close to mine so I could hear him through the din.

“Watch it, mister. I’m not the sort of person you can just walk all over,” I said teasingly.

“
That
I know,” he said with a grin. “Don’t worry.”

The music downshifted to something a bit slower, and a few people on the floor paired up as if to slow dance. Oh no. The deejay had been spot-on till now, but I suddenly found myself wishing a plague upon his house. Caleb and I were finally getting along okay, but that was a far cry from wanting to sway arm-in-arm with him to some cheesy light FM song. Besides, I had urgent business to attend to, and by business, I meant
business.

I yanked Caleb in the direction of Ariel and Chad. The football star had gently placed my colleague back down on the ground and they were looking at each other a bit expectantly.

“Ariel, I need your help,” I said, firmly.

“Wha—?
Now?
”

“Yes,
now.
”

“Are you sure it can’t wait? I mean, I thought you said the copter run would be our last act of defiance!”

“Ariel, please, please,
please
come with Caleb and me. I need you! I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.” My loyal friend sighed and gave Chad a sweet shrug, clearly hesitant to part ways with him but bound by what had become a sisterly allegiance to me.

“Well, thanks for the lift.” She glanced at him and then averted her eyes in a blush.

“No problem, Tink.” As he said this, Chad reached down and brushed a bit of purple glitter from Ariel’s face with the palm of his hand. I hadn’t the time to be sufficiently flabbergasted by this wholly unexpected kernel of romance I perceived between them. With Caleb and Ariel struggling to keep up, I shuffled as quickly as I could away from the party.

“So where are we going, your highness?” he asked.

“Believe me, you don’t want to know.” I grabbed a men’s silk tie off an accessories kiosk en route. “We’re going to need this.”

• • •

Three people, one pair of handcuffs, and a three-by-five-foot bathroom stall; Harry Houdini couldn’t have thought up a dicier tight spot for one of his great escapes, but here I was, finally attempting to soothe the savage beast—my bladder.

Caleb was standing with his face toward the stall door, blindfolded by the yellow-striped necktie so he couldn’t see a thing. That, paired with the handcuffs and the grimace on his face, made him look like a hostage in the final hours of a long and intense negotiation for his release.

The embarrassment factor was excruciating in more ways than one. I’d wanted to turn on all the faucets in an attempt, I’d hoped, to keep Caleb from hearing the sound of me peeing. It seemed absurdly wrong to have any guy—let alone, this one—hear me tinkle. But alas, they were those automatic dealios that turn themselves off after ten seconds to save water. I’d hoped my chatterbox coworker would keep up her mile-a-minute play-by-play of the night long enough to drown out the sound.

Common girl knowledge the world over: Pulling down a pair of tights is hard enough with both hands, and virtually impossible with only one. So like an Elizabethan lady-in-waiting, Ariel dutifully stooped next to me, helping me shimmy my red tights and undies down past my knees. The skirt of my jumper hid the money shot, if you will, so even if Caleb had wanted to sneak a peek (and he didn’t seem interested at the moment), he wouldn’t have gotten to see much beyond the awkward visual of me hunched on the can. Ariel was wrestling with the protective seat cover made of tissue paper.

“It keeps slipping off the seat,” she said. “I hate these stupid things!”

“Never mind! I’ll crouch.” I whispered this into her ear, just wanting the nightmare to conclude.

It was a tremendous relief to answer the now-insistent call of nature, but having held it in for so long, the process of elimination took mortifyingly longer than your average bathroom break. When it was clear that I’d finally emptied the kettle, so to speak, Ariel ripped off some toilet paper and handed it to me before we repeated the painstaking process of hiking my tights and unmentionables back north of the border.

“What are you guys doing back there, lacing up a corset?” Caleb said. “I thought girls took longer than guys in the bathroom because they were primping. I didn’t realize a simple pee was an undertaking on par with sequencing the human genome.”

I was about to respond but held my tongue when we heard the sound of the ladies’ room door squeaking open. It was shame-inducing enough to have my bathroom break turn into a team sport, but to have someone find us crammed unnaturally together in the stall was enough to make all three of us clam up and assess the situation.

A cadre of high heels clomped across the marble floor accompanied by a garble of voices a few decibels higher than the roar of a jet engine. Ariel’s face registered semi-panic.

“I canNOT.
Even.
Deal,” Whitney said in a rage. “You do
not
do something like this to Whitney Elaine Emerson and live to tell—hiccup!—about it.”

“Whatever, you’re not the only victim here,” Britney shot back. “C’mon, don’t be a booze hog. Hand it to me.” We heard the sound of liquid jostling in a glass bottle. “Uggh, this is rotgut. I’m not sure we should be drinking it straight.”

“Like, what do you mean? It’d be safe if we were lesbians?”

After a confused pause, both girls erupted into inordinate peals of laughter until Britney abruptly halted midsnicker and added. “Seriously, couldn’t you have at least added some, like, Apple Pucker to mask the turpentine taste?”

“Sorry, I’m not a freakin’ ‘mixologist’—you told me to swipe something that would get us shitfaced. Well, this stuff is the beverage of champions according to Nate’s frat party postmortem e-mails. I’m already feeling a little bit cross-eyed, which proves this is hardcore hooch. Oh—speaking of Nate, we’re, like, technically still together, so not a word to him about any of this mess.”

I tried in vain to get a glimpse of the girls through a crack in the stall, failing to see why Whitney would be so worried that her college boyfriend hundreds of miles away would actually dump her over Ariel’s little make-under. Not that I’d seen the results, but I didn’t get the impression it was anything that a few weeks’ time and a trip to a salon for some color corrections wouldn’t fix.

“How could we not have seen it?” Britney leaned her back abruptly against our stall, rattling the door in the process. “I feel so stupid.”

“And poor Rach,” Whitney said. “You and I got played, sure, but she’s the one who’s hurting the most. I could see on her face how messed up she was. Her therapist’s going to be, like, back at square one.”

“This will
not
go unpunished,” said Britney, clearly seething. “God, I need to be anesthetized. Give me another swig.”

Wow. I knew my little bunny prank messed with Rachel’s head, but it never occurred to me that it would be as serious as the Itneys were implying. It had just been a harmless joke, hadn’t it? I glanced at Ariel, who looked as if she was a drug lord hiding out from the feds. If the Itneys were going this bitchcakes about the incidents we’d pulled earlier, I needed to run some interference for her sake. After all, they hopefully still had no idea that I was the puppetmaster who’d pulled Ariel’s strings. I flashed my coworker the universal gesture for “Stay put!”—and reached past Caleb’s right hip to unlock the stall door. Nudging him from behind, he and I stumbled out of the stall as if quite by accident, leaving Ariel behind.

I was about to feign surprise at seeing them, only I didn’t have to. Seeing the number Ariel had done on them back at the salon made my jaw fly open. They both looked like they’d been hosed down with carrot juice, and their coiffes resembled frightful “mall hair” circa 1992. I tried my best to keep from staring at their depraved transformation, but needn’t have worried. The Itneys were far too distracted by the shock of seeing yours truly—manacled to Caleb—stumbling out of a bathroom stall.

“What are
you
doing here?” they both said. I glanced guiltily at Caleb and rubbed my hand over my lips. Thankfully, he evinced his usual demeanor—stonefaced—and let me do all the talking.

“Sorry, girls. I guess we just got a little … worked up.” (Desperate times called for desperate measures.)

“Really, Miranda? With
him
? And handcuffs? Ew. That’s, like, totally gross.”

The implied insult of Caleb rubbed me the wrong way. I was the only one allowed to express any feelings of repulsion for him, dammit! My defensive instincts kicked in.

“Wow, you guys look …
different.
”

“Huh?” Britney said, as if completely unaware of how hideous she looked. “Oh, right. Your coworker—Ariel, is it?” I nodded.

“I mean, she’sssweet girl and all,” Britney said, tripping through her consonants, “but somebody really ought to tell her she’s not cut out to work in the personal beauty industry. I wouldn’t hire her to groom my dog.”

“Yeah,” Whitney said, nodding. “I don’t know how long she’s been in the trainee program at Blissworks, but, like, I think she needs a lot more practice. I mean, god help her first bikini wax client! It’s a shame, because the poor thing seemed so passionate about it. I really hope she’s got a Plan B. Maybe computers or something … she told us about some really cool app.”

This wasn’t adding up. A minute ago these two were foaming at the mouth about Ariel’s pranks, but now they acted only mildly put-out by the whole experience. They frankly seemed oblivious that they’d even been the butt of any joke. As I mentally tried to work out what in the name of sweet baby Jesus was going on, Whitney changed the subject.

“Good to see there’s life after Brian, at least,” she said, pointing a limp arm in the direction of Caleb, whom, truth be told, we were all treating like a potted plant. “I mean, you’ve clearly moved on.”

“Yeah … I guess all’s well that ends well,” I said with a shrug. I was certain they were setting me up for some scathing insult and considered preempting them with a caustic remark of my own. Instead, I opted to play it chill until I could figure out why they were being so uncharacteristically approachable. I’d heard of friendly drunks before, but I never imagined the Itneys would fall under that category.

“
Ends
swellll?!” Britney half-slurred and half-huffed. “Not for Brian, if I have any slay in the matter.”

“You don’t like him?” I asked. Now I was completely lost. “He’s a total man whore.”

I wasn’t about to argue her point, cryptic as it was.

“But I swear, Brit” Whitney said, “I had no clue he was playing you, too. He promised me that he was ending things with Rachel as soon as all the dust had settled on the SAT crap—I took him at his word.”

“Yeah, well he must have been working off a script, because he basically was feeding me those same freakin’ lines,” said her pal. “He didn’t tell you that his love for you was, like, ‘deep as the sea,’ did he?”

“Oh, he is unbelievable. Yeah, I think it was ‘boundless as the sea.’ God, he probably ripped that off some hack on Google!” (Come to think of it, that line sounded vaguely familiar to me, too.) “I think I was just vulnerable, with Nate being away and all,” Whitney said. “But it’s inexcusable. I won’t blame Rachel if she never speaks to me again.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Whit. I feel guilty, too, but he was the one who had all three of us snowed.”