The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove (7 page)

On the staircase, Mike and I paused again for another pose in front of the gilded mirror. Why was it that every time I caught a glimpse of myself looking so good, my father’s trashy text flashed into my mind?

I started down the stairs again, but Mike pulled on my hand.

“Don’t stray too far when we get down there,” he said. “Can’t have some masked man swooping in on you.”

“Promise,” I whispered back, glancing once more into his dark eyes.

In the kitchen, we passed the crawfish-boil buffet and the sign above it reading,
Bite the Tail and Suck the Head.
We paused behind a crowd of guys that had formed in front of the refrigerator. They each had a beer in one hand and a string of beads in the other. They were attempting a very drunken drum roll on their thighs.

“What do we have here?” Mike asked.

“Ask and you shall receive,” one of the guys answered, tossing Mike a strand of beads.

Soon, a line of girls filed in to stand in a row before the crowd. Their hands were poised at the hems of their shirts.

“And . . . flash wave!” one of the guys cued.

The girls all whooped, and one by one, they lifted up their shirts in a contagion down the line. When all the lacy bras had been shown off, everyone was rewarded with exchanges of beads and saliva.

“Encore!” the guys shouted.

“Moving on,” I said to Mike, and pulled him out to the tent.

At least the party outside was a step up on the classy scale. A band played old New Orleans blues songs on a rotating stage in the middle of the dance floor. Most of the upper-classmen were getting freaky around the band, holding giant feathered masks up to their faces.

From the bar, Kate waved in her hot-pink negligee. Her hair was in a high braided bun, and she seemed to be the only girl at the party who hadn’t bothered to cover up her face with a mask. Her feathered heels clacked on the parquet as she dashed over to us.

“Don’t you two look all regal?” she asked, giving Mike a once-over and me a solemn nod of admiration.

“We ran into Baxter upstairs,” I said, watching her face light up as she tugged the negligee lower on her hips. I leaned in and cupped her ear. “He looks like he could use a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

“Say no more,” she purred, then pounced past us towards the house. I wasn’t sure why she was after Baxter at all, but I was nothing if not charitable to the deserving. I wouldn’t stand in their way. And anyway, I had more important things on my mind. Like finding J.B.

I scanned the rest of the crowd, spotting some senior girls in the far corner. They were serenading each other with massive multicolored boas. It was one big cloud of feathers flying over variations of tight black dresses.

“You want to go dance with the girls?” Mike asked.

I looked around to see what else was going on. I did love to dance, and there was something pretty sexy about everyone being incognito behind his or her mask. But I also wanted to be
cognito
when Mike ran into J.B.

An unwelcome hand on my ass told me I didn’t have to wait any longer. I spun around and lowered my mask.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” J.B. purred. “I thought you were someone else. A girl I used to know. My mistake.”

I raised my palm to slap him, but Mike was standing right behind me.

“Hands off,” I muttered to J.B.

“C’mon, doll face. Don’t you know flesh is fair game on Mardi Gras?”

“Don’t call me that,” I hissed, my stomach seizing up at the sound of the nickname. “And for the record, my flesh is never fair game for you.”

“Hey,” Mike said, joining the conversation. “Balmer, you are one fugly woman.”

“And you didn’t dress the part,” J.B. said, taking in Mike’s tuxedo. From the self-conscious look on his face, it might finally have occurred to him how ridiculous he looked. “I thought you were going all out with me.”

“Change of plans,” I shrugged, thinking back to what Baxter had said upstairs about J.B. asking to get punked. “You look like you need another drink. Maybe it’ll make you forget how unflattering those fishnets are.” I turned around and spotted a crowd gathered next to the pool. “Look,” I said innocently. “Keg stands. That looks fun.”

“You want to do a keg stand?” Mike asked.

“No,” I said. “J.B. does.”

J.B. looked me up and down. His eyes were glassy and drunk. I couldn’t figure out why I suddenly felt more naked than I had when Mike had my dress hiked up around my waist.

“Well, that sounds like a dare,” he said.

Within minutes, Mike, Rex, and a couple of their JV football runners had J.B. lifted in the air. His legs were splayed out, and his mouth was poised over the keg to take it. I didn’t even have to lift a finger to get the crowd to gather around.

“Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!” the whole party cried out in unison.

J.B. spent a reputable amount of time sucking off the keg, and I sidled to the front to see his swollen face lurch with beer. When he made the mercy cut-off sign, the guys lifted him back up, then set him down. A cheer rang out across the party for the green-faced victor. I stood among my senior girls and waited for him to do something lewd enough to shock the crowd. Everyone knew Justin Balmer was no peach when he got trashed.

“Clear out,” J.B. yelled, stumbling toward the bushes. “I’m gonna puke.”

“Vile,” my friend Amy Jane Johnson said, offering the senior girls swigs from her grandmother’s old flask. “Keg stands are so bourgeois. Why is J.B. doing that?”

“That’s not what you said when you made out with Dave Smith right after he did a keg stand last summer,” Jenny Inman teased her, tugging on her uncharacteristically short black shirt.

“That was different,” Amy Jane said, fanning herself with her mask. “Dave Smith played at Wimbledon. He gets carte blanche.”

“Encore,” someone hollered at J.B. I looked up to see Baxter and Kate’s silhouettes huddled together on the library balcony. “Boot and rally!” Baxter yelled.

Amazingly, J.B. answered the call to binge-drinking duty. Disgusted as my friends and I claimed to be, we cheered with just as much enthusiasm when the whole thing started up again.

After the guys had set J.B. shakily back on his feet, Rex got up on the microphone and clanked a fork to his crystal goblet.

“Okay, merry makers,” he called. “As master of this party, I decree a skinny-dipping convention. In the pool. ASAP. You’ve got five minutes to get these heinous costumes off.” He gestured at a junior guy’s ripped gold-lamé tank top. “Find a dry place for your feathers, and get these gorgeous bodies in the water.” For emphasis, he grabbed a Bambi’s ass. “Rex’s orders—or get the hell out.”

Instantly, the whole mood of the party shifted as everyone flowed toward the pool. Seniors staked out lounge chairs for their clothes, while Bambies, who were virgins to Rex’s party rules, squabbled over whether it was dark enough to feel okay about getting naked.

I felt Mike’s hand take mine. “C’mere,” he whispered.

“No way, I’m not skinny-dipping,” I said quickly.

“Yes, I’m aware of your weird inexplicable aversion to skinny-dipping,” he said, pulling me toward the bushes. “That’s not what I had in mind.”

I grabbed Mike’s hand and smiled at him. He’d totally picked the right time for a private rendezvous in the side yard.

But when we got there, I was surprised to see J.B. slumped over against a dogwood tree. A cloak of Spanish moss hung down like a curtain separating us from the rest of the party.

“That second keg stand did him in,” Mike said. He looked worried.

“So he let loose. What’s the big deal?” I said. “He’s a big boy; he can handle a little bit of—”

“Alcohol poisoning?” Mike finished.

I sighed. The pool party had gotten so loud, I could barely hear myself think. If everyone was already skinny-dipping, this soiree was playing out just like any other. If we stayed here, shaking things up might be a lost cause.

I squatted down in front of J.B. He was pretty catatonic.

“He probably just needs some air,” I said finally. “Let’s take a drive, just the three of us. Maybe we can bring him back to life.”

CHAPTER Six

“
U
gh, he’s total dead weight,” I complained to Mike minutes later as we hauled J.B.’s limp body out to the driveway. “Why’d we park so far away?”

“I don’t think we planned on this development,” Mike said, looking unconcerned, like his end of the load was about as heavy as a feather boa.

He was holding J.B. under the armpits, and I had him by the legs. I was staggering under the weight, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a prime view of how green our patient looked around the gills.

Mike clicked the unlock button on his Tahoe. It was a good thing we’d brought his car tonight instead of the tiny, slightly used Miada that my mom’s new beau had just bribed her with.

“Let’s haul him in,” Mike said.

We laid Justin across the backseat, and Mike rolled down the windows to let in some cool night air.

“I think I’ve got a water bottle in my football bag somewhere,” he said, walking around to the trunk to rummage through his stuff.

Alone, more or less, with J.B. for a minute, I looked down at his face. He was going to feel like crap in the morning, but for now, he looked so peaceful. Even under all the makeup, you could see his fair skin and the freckles that gave him that deceiving boyish charm.

His red lipstick had faded to a brassy stain that crept out around the corners of his mouth, his eyelashes were clustered together by a pretty sad mascara job, and there was glitter, well, everywhere. Before I realized what I was doing, I ran my hand across his forehead to smooth out a gluey clump of the glitter from his eyebrow. I brushed a lock of blond hair back from his eyes.

They opened.

“Nat,” he whispered. “Is that you?”

“Found it!” Mike called from the trunk of the car. He walked around and delivered an old Nalgene bottle with the Palmetto High School crest decaled in white. “Here,” Mike said to J.B. “Drink this.”

“I can’t drink anything else,” J.B. groaned. “I’ll puke.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time tonight,” I added, hoping to undermine whatever weird moment J.B. and I had just had.

“Where are we?” J.B. asked. He looked so helpless.

“Getting you away from that party,” Mike said.

J.B. nodded, took a messy drink of water, and passed out again on the seat.

Mike chuckled and shut the door behind him. Then he leaned me up against it, stroked my hair, and pressed his body into mine. I could feel the familiar warmth spread through me, but I was thinking about what this would look like through the window if J.B. came to right now: my dark hair spread out against the glass, my arms pinned over my head, Mike’s broad shoulders covering mine.

Mike kissed me, then looked into my eyes.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Just drive.”

Mike started the car, and soon we were rolling out of Rex’s long circular entryway, past what seemed like a never-ending row of our classmates’ sports cars and jacked-up SUVs.

“Is it weird that
this
was our last Mardi Gras party?” I said, thinking about what was still going on at the pool. I didn’t usually skip out on a social gathering until . . . well, until I was sure there was no more drama to be missed and gossiped about back at school the next week.

“What do you mean our last Mardi Gras party?” Mike asked. “What about next year? And the year after that? You know, I hear some people celebrate Mardi Gras
every
year.”

“You know what I mean,” I said, chipping off a flake of my pale-pink nail polish. Nervous habit. I could never keep a manicure longer than a day. “It’s our last Palmetto High Mardi Gras. Our last Rex Freeman Mardi Gras. Next year, who knows where everyone will be. Things could be totally different.” I ran my fingernails up the back of Mike’s neck. “Don’t you ever feel like this whole year is one long
last
time?”

Mike squeezed my thigh. “If Rex heard you talk like this, he’d throw another Mardi Gras party tomorrow. I promise, senior year at Palmetto does not mark the end of things.” He looked in the rearview mirror. “Isn’t that right Balmer? How you doing back there, Balmer?”

“Sick,” J.B. groaned. “Very sick.”

“Don’t you dare throw up back there, Balmer,” I turned around to threaten. “Here,” I said to Mike. “Pull in up there and let’s park.”

“At the church?” Mike asked, looking nervous. Poor guy, he got weirded out enough having to be there once a week.

“Why not?” I shrugged. “It’s not like the minister’s doing drunk-driving patrol at one in the morning.”

“I’m not going to church today, Mom,” Justin moaned from the back. He was totally out of it.

“Did he say what I think he said?” Mike asked.

I started cracking up. I tried to imagine the tone of voice J.B.’s mother might take when she caught him doing something against her strangely lenient rules. Most of the week, Mrs. Balmer was probably too focused on counting the money in her boob-job piggy bank to give much thought to what her children did, but she always did drag her boys to church on Sundays. There was nothing more gauche than being seen at the pews without the arm candy you’d spawned.

“Well, Justin-honey,” I said, channeling his mother’s thick molasses drawl, “I think you got some sins that need atonin’ for. What better place is there than the house of God?”

“Nat,” Mike warned.

“I’m just screwing with him,” I laughed. “Trust me, he won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”

Mike pulled into a spot near the chapel and turned off the car. We got out and opened the door to the backseat.

“Heave ho,” Mike said, and we lifted J.B. up again and carried him to the lawn.

“Let’s park him where they set up the nativity scene around Christmas,” I said. “He’ll look just like a little baby Jesus.”