Things Are Gonna Get Ugly (20 page)

“It sounds cool but I'm not sure if I get it,” I say, being completely honest.

“Neither do I sometimes, which is the point,” says Winslow. Running his hand under the faucet to wash off the little bit of blood, he laughs. “So luckily for you, I hit the cutting board.” Winslow shrugs.

“I guess,” I say and we laugh a little. “Your hand's still bleeding. Maybe you should put on a Band-Aid.”

The Dance

Winslow blinks and I can see in his Saturn eyes how he's not going to going to give any cues for me to
continue talking, like,
Yes, I'd love to hear anything you have to say.
Nope, he's going to stand there in the kitchen and force me into blurtation.

I breathe deeply and try to ignore the fact that my whole body feels like it's revved up. “Okay,” I say.

“Are you disappointed?” I ask. “That I'm not Petra?”

He gazes down at his duct-taped shoes. “No, relieved, actually. I dunno. I wanted to believe, I guess. But I'd much rather be sitting here talking with a real person. I'm sorry I asked you to, you know, cheat. That was pretty heinous of me. But not you, you're pretty perfect.”

His eyes flick up to my eyes, and my whole body seems to flutter for a moment. That's when I notice he's got Scotch Tape wrapped around all of his fingers. “I thought you were going to put on a Band-Aid.”

“Works for me,” says Winslow. “Now here's
my
question. Why are you so obsessed with getting
me
to the dance? You sound stressed.”

With my foot, I trace a plank of wood. “I have to get you to dance. For a very good reason…” My back is up against the sink. “I had to get you to dance with me because I need to become my real self.”

“Which is?”

Oh, god. Here it goes.
“This beautiful, popular
girl named Taffeta Smith. Ring a bell?”

Winslow fingers his iPod and I'm feeling stupid. “You don't believe me, do you? You think I'm a mess.”

He stares at me. “Wow, okay, I'm processing this.” He shakes his head. “
Vous êtes un lunatic
. Did you know that means, you are…?”

“Crazy!” My breath comes out in short puffs. “I can understand that.”

“Crazy. That's not a bad thing but, okay, I am tripping here a little.” I start to turn away. But Winslow touches my arm. “Don't go, dummy. I want to see where you're going with all of this. Taffeta—that's a kind of material. Silk.
La soie.
Sounds better in French.”

“Listen to me, Winslow. I'm not joking around. Okay! This is not some attempt to get your attention. I used to be her. Taffeta. I turned into this other person.” I pat my face. “Ernestine. I need to dance with you. Got it?”

He crunches his eyes at me, and moves his head side to side. “So you're telling me you used to be somebody else? Seriously?”

“YES!”

“Okay, chill. I'm not judging. I'm listening. It's not your run-of-the-mill statement like
I once broke my elbow when I was seven
. But I'm intrigued. I always
wanted to be able to shapeshift into something else and get all powerful.” He makes a muscle. “But you're saying you were—”

“Beautiful.” I pull on my polyester apron. “Everyone used to love me. EVERYONE. They just worshipped me. I could make them do whatever I wanted. The limo thing. That was my idea because it's MY birthday today.”

“When you say
everyone
worshipped, do you mean
me
?”

“Especially you.”

As he pulls off his glasses to wipe them, a lopsided grin spreads over his face. “I knew it. I knew something was up with you. 'Cause you've been acting a little weird.” For a moment, I'm hurt, but then Winslow crouches down. His eyes crinkle up and his lips tug into a slight smile. “Did you know there are two kinds of forces? If we didn't have gravity, we would have been pulled into the sun and would've been fried, but the two forces even things out and keep things going into orbit. Shows the importance of balancing. Don't want to get sucked up by one force or the other.” Pretending to battle a force, he sways back and forth.

I blink, not sure where he's going but I'm hoping it's someplace decent. Finally, he stops his mock
combat. “I bet it's hard sometimes to know who you really are,” Winslow says in a whisper.

And I realize something. He's taking me seriously. He's, maybe, believing me.

Grovel

We pedal back to school on my bicycle built for two, up the long hill and into the La Cambia parking lot. I look at my cell phone. There's still twenty minutes left of the dance. YES!

As we walk through the open double gym doors, Winslow stretches out his arm. I think he's going to grab me and dance. This is it. Instead, his fingers play with the bracelet on my wrist.

“There's a lot more to you than I thought….”

“What did you think?” I'm hanging on his every word, watching the door for Olivia. He is still twisting the bracelet around my wrist.

“I don't know,” he says, smiling. “That you're really cute when you get all weird and babbly.”

“Do you believe me?” I ask. “Tell me. Be honest now.”

“I believe that
you
believe,” he says.

His fingers are still touching my wrist, and I'm finding it hard to concentrate, to make my words
stick together into a sentence. “I know I was Taffeta. It's not a belief.”

“Okay,” he says. “I'm open to new ideas. Sure. Because, I seriously believe I might have been King Arthur, Lancelot, or maybe just the Round Table itself.”

I want to be mad at him for not really believing me, but I'm too jumbled. “What do you think of me? I mean, why was it so hard until recently for us to connect?”

“I don't know.” He smiles and drops my wrist. It's hard to hear because of the music. “I guess I thought sometimes that you didn't approve of me.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I'm not exactly on time with assignments. Don't follow directions. You and Olivia and Ninai always hand everything a week ahead of time.”

“But you get an A on every test. Everything!”

“Yeah. But not on my report card. Too many incompletes. I can't stand to do every little thing the teacher says. All of the hoops we have to jump through and sometimes you seem like you're playing the game, that's all. You're like a Girl Scout.”

Me, like a Girl Scout? I laugh at the idea. But maybe it was true now. “So you thought I was judging you.”

“Judging everyone, in fact.”

“Yeah. Maybe I was.” I smile—judging people is a trait Ernestine seems to share with Taffeta. “Maybe I do,” I admit, wishing he'd start playing with my bracelet again.

“But you're a freak. Like me.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

He takes off his glasses to rub his eyes. They're big and fringed with lashes. Thick like a girl's, but I can see that when he grows into his body that, well, he'd be sort of interesting-looking.

A fast song ends and a slow song comes on.

“Want to dance?” he asks.

I hear his words. I mean, I know Winslow has said them, but somehow it seems surreal.

Like I've been waiting ALL THIS TIME for this moment and now it's here and it's just us.

My Moment

That's all. It's like the rest of the kids and the teachers aren't there. And somehow I thought there would be more of a drumroll. Like a giant highlighter pen would come down from the sky and highlight us in blue and everyone would stop what they were doing and watch and nod approvingly. But it's not
like that at all. It's much more private and normal, like it was just an extension of any kind of moment we would have had together. My body plays catch-up and, suddenly, I feel like my insides have dragged down into my toes.

“You look good,” Winslow shouts over the music.

Okay, me, the lights, the DJ equipment—we're all one because I'm totally and completely electrified. I'm about to actually go onto the dance floor.

Winslow is reaching out to grab my hand, not my bracelet. It's going to happen. My dance with Winslow that will change me back. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Olivia. She's still standing with Principal Barnes, who has a walkie-talkie up to her ear. She stood up for me and acted like a true friend. Olivia thought it wasn't fair that I got punished. She could have let me take the fall. Yes, she's a
very
good friend.

As Winslow's arms go around my waist, Olivia twists her body around to stare at me and Winslow. Her mouth drops open and her eyes blink a few times, and there is no magic fluttering of her fingers now.

What am I doing?

Not Me!

I can see that Olivia is making the connection. Me being so helpful. Me giving advice to her about Winslow. All of those
but I only want to help you
s—I can tell she's not buying it this time. Even from the corner of the gym, I can see her mouth forming a round
o
, then twisting into a scowl of disgust.

I bolt, leaving Winslow on the dance floor by himself, and rush over to Olivia. “It's not how it looks.”

“Winslow's arms were around your waist,” she says matter-of-factly.

“No! Well, yes.”
How do I say this?
“It wasn't like he was going to kiss me or something. He wanted to dance and I told him that I didn't want to dance. He thought you went away. Because of the incident. To the principal's office.”

“No, he didn't. Don't lie to me.”

“He probably thought I was you or something. It's dark in here. All those lights.” I squint and shield myself from the strobes.

Winslow trots over to us. “See…he's coming to see
you
, not me,” I say. “Go dance with him.” I point her toward the dance floor.

“You of such short memory.” She shoots me a
reproving look. “Mrs. Barnes, as in the principal, said I'm on NP. I have to wait here until my parents come pick me up.” Mrs. Barnes is in fact, conveniently, standing next to the refreshment stand helping herself to a few cookies. She must need lots of sugar to make it through her job.

I swallow and yell, “Principal Barnes. The Hummer and straw girl—I was the one who did it. The messing up the LIMO! Olivia only said she did it to cover up for me!”

Then I drag her over to Winslow and shove her toward him. He glances over at me, giving me a shocked, questioning look.
What?
he mouths and I feel a twinge of guilt. I can tell he's confused, just like me. I mean my mind is pretzeled, but I know one thing. I can't do this again to Olivia, to somebody who trusted me and has been my friend. But this is tough, because I also really don't want to hurt Winslow, either. It seems I have no choice.

“Forget it,” I say. “Olivia likes you. NOT ME! I wouldn't dance with you unless forced, like in a desert island–type situation.” Winslow furrows his brow and lifts his head back like he wants to spit at me, like he's realizing for the first time that I'm
actually, really and truly insane. And maybe I am, losing my one chance to be myself.

Olivia is fingering the buttons on Winslow's digital
Star Wars
watch. “Can I communicate with Han Solo?” she asks, playfully. Is that lip gloss making her mouth so shiny? “I want to speak to someone from the Rebel Command Center,” she goes on, rather dimly. Is she playing dumb to get close to Winslow?
It's working,
she mouths. And then it hits me. I was the one who told her to try flirting, being silly, and using an excuse for epidermis contact. It was all
my
fault, and Winslow doesn't seem to be minding in the least. Nope, he likes having his buttons literally pushed, and Olivia's hennaed hair in his face.

Suddenly, he looks at me and shakes his head, and I can see that he's disgusted with me, but he's a boy, and he wraps his arms around Olivia and spins her and she laughs and they're having a great time, and it's like I'm not even there at all. Okay, he looks up at me once, maybe twice, and scowls, maybe more, but mostly I have my head down because I don't want to see the confusion, the hurt in his eyes. Part of me wants Winslow to fight for me, to run after me, but mostly I'm relieved because I just want to sit down on
the bleachers and stare at my hands for a while.

Ninai is clapping—she's so happy Olivia finally got to dance with Winslow.

I feel good about what I have done but for some reason I'm shaking so badly that I stumble toward the bleachers to sit down. As Mrs. Barnes pulls me into her office, all I can think about is that I'm now really and truly and always locked into Ernestine.

NO!

A hand pulls me along out of the dance, through the foyer. “Do you realize how serious this is?” asks Mrs. Barnes. “On school grounds you have defaced a private vehicle and who knows how long it will take to clean that limo, not to mention
how
inappropriate.”

I nod as she talks. “School grounds.” Nod. “Clean.” Nod. “Inappropriate.” Nod.
Yes, I get it. All too well, Mrs. Barnes. It's you who doesn't understand how serious this is, Mrs. Barnes. You don't understand anee-thing.

It's freezing but I feel hot, almost feverish. It's like a heat wave is racing up my spine. The floor almost shakes and I can still hear the thrumming of the music through the closed doors.

The Importance of Being Ernestine

I stare at Mrs. Barnes's Master of Education degree from the University of California at Davis and her Best Volleyball Coach Ever plaque. Her office isn't that big and I feel like I'm suffocating. My stomach ricochets and I REALLY need some air. My whole body feels chilled and hot at the same time and little pinpricks of energy swirl even down to my toes. “I—don't feel very well,” I mumble.