Vesper (2 page)

"Seriously, Emily, middle ground," Dawn said as she came up behind me.

"You don't need to go over the top, but you are way too good-looking to hide yourself under a hoodie. Boys are only gonna see you as one of the guys if you dress like this all the time."

I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. "Thanks, but that's just not me. I don't mind that boys don't see me as anything."

It was a lie. Of course I hoped that maybe one day someone would notice me, even if I was afraid of what they'd think when they did. But admitting that to Dawn would have given her way too much ammo to fire the next time she tried to convince me to let her do a makeover.

Dawn threw her hands up, surrendering. "Okay, well, don't say I didn't try to share my older-step sister wisdom. I just want you to discover the inherent hotness that is Emily Webb before it's too late” I turned Dawn toward the bedroom door and playfully pushed her out.

"All righty, fashion hour extravaganza is over, I need to go to bed now. First day of school tomorrow."

"No going out your window!" Dawn said as she began to close the door.

I kicked off my sandals. "I won't. I wasn't really going to go outside, I was just hot”

Dawn gave me a doubtful look.

"Hey," I said. "I was gonna ask you, this weekend sometime: you, me, and a Whedonverse marathon? I feel a need to get my Buffy on."

"'Get my Buffy on'?" Dawn shook her head. "Seriously? Once we rid you of your shlubby clothes, we´ve really got to work on how you talk."

"What's wrong with how I talk?"

"Too large a topic to deal with now, Grasshopper." Dawn pointed at me.

"Now, wait. Don't think changing the subject will make me forget about the window thing. Seriously, there could be some wacko out there killing people."

"Don't worry, I got it. No sneaking out."

I smiled at Dawn as she gave me a flippy wave and headed to her room, then shut my bedroom door and leaned back against it to take in a long, deep breath.

Okay, so whoa. Let's stop for a second, flip it, and reverse it, because listen: As you've likely guessed by now, I was so not the type of girl who gets dressed up in tight clothes and sneaks out of windows. I'd never snuck out of anything in my life. I didn't have any place to sneak out to. My idea of a fun night was diving into the massive To Be Read pile of books stacked near my dresser, or draping myself in a Slanket and marathoning old sci-fi shows on DVD. No latest fashions, no parties, no football games—I was the girl with the big sweatshirts who loved everything geeky.

What I wasn't was someone who ran around dressed like she just got finished with a particularly sleazy
Maxim
photo shoot. Maybe that was what the other Emily was like, but I don't know. I guess I'll never know.

Yet only a few minutes before, I'd felt... different. Wild, free from all my debilitating self-consciousness, and, well, pretty. It had been thrilling, because I can't lie—I'd thought about it. A lot. What it would feel like to not be so endlessly mousy, not so ashamed of what I hid beneath baggy clothes.

To instead be a girl who oozed confidence, who was actually at ease with the body she was stuck in. Someone graceful and commanding and as kick-ass as the women in all the books and shows and movies I loved.

But still. You usually don't just
become
that type of girl overnight. It was all massively unsettling.

I opened my top dresser drawer. Pulling a makeup wipe from its little box, I began to clean my face. I had to really scrub. The makeup was heavy and thick, foundation cracking on my cheeks and the eyeliner goopy. The chemical in the wipe stung my eyes and made my contacts burn.

I went to the bathroom and popped them out. My reflected image went blurry around the edges, and I remembered how the book on my floor had seemed fuzzy while I was talking to Megan, even with my contacts in. Then Megan had told me about Emily Cooke, my brain had gone all dizzy, and I'd started to see clearly again just as I began to feel normal.

Yeah. That was weird.

I finished wiping off the makeup, put on my glasses, and examined my reflection. Except for the short-shorts, I looked like myself again.

I studied my face beyond the toothpaste-splattered mirror. "What were you going to do?" I asked my reflection. "You're not going all Jekyll and Hyde, are you?"

Biting my lip, I thought about what had happened. All I remembered was sitting on my bed, resting against the headboard, reading my book, and then ...

Everything between that moment and the phone call from Megan was a blur.

My bedroom had felt so tiny, so stuffy, and outside had seemed so open, so wide and breezy and interesting, that I had to go out there and ... do what, exactly?

"What were you going to do?" I asked myself.

My reflection stood there silent, as clueless as I was.

By the next morning I'd completely forgotten about Emily Cooke. Having a close encounter with an alternate personality tends to weigh on your mind, and that was on top of the whole first-day-of-school thing.

Megan picked me up in her old rust bucket of a car. She cursed the whole way to school—about her car, other cars on the road, old people crossing the road, the glare from the rising sun, the nasally voice of the DJ on the radio—

on and on.

Megan's not exactly a morning person.

School picked up with the same routine as every year. Megan stormed through the halls in her black skinny jeans and black dress-tunic thing and black sunglasses, her butt-length blond hair slapping me in the side as she whipped her head around to meet everyone's eyes, daring them to say something. Meanwhile I sort of shuffled alongside her, folded in on myself, my eyes not leaving the schedule I held. Every now and then I'd glance up from the green tile floors to make sure I wasn't going to walk into someone or something, but otherwise I did my very best to stand in Megan's shadow and let her be angry enough at the world for the both of us.

This year Megan and I shared the same homeroom: Ms. Nguyen, our calculus teacher by day/local access Vietnamese talk show host by night. I sat at a desk halfway back, by the windows, with Megan beside me. Everyone else in the class was loud and laughing: The girls with their camis and tight jeans and glossy hair were huddled in little groups getting all
ohmigod
about something, the guys acting like complete jackasses as usual. They were straight out of The CW Land, a magical place where everyone dates everyone else, then gets all dramatic about it. A land of excitement and wonder where everybody spoke a language I had no hope of understanding.

Of course, there were other "geeks" scattered about—some tiny girl in the front with curly hair and wire-frame glasses who shivered like she was cold, a chubby guy near the door wearing an unfortunately patterned button-up shirt and sporting the skeezy little mustache boys get. And Megan, eyes aimed at the ceiling, arms crossed, letting out pointed sighs to show how over everything she was.

Only, they weren't like me, not really. Because geeky can be worked if you know how to pull it off. You like things not in the mainstream? There's definitely a group you can click with somewhere in school—I'm pretty sure I've seen glasses girl and mustache guy in the same after-school LARP club.

But here's the thing about me and school: I didn't fit into any of those neat cliques, because I didn't know how to make myself fit. Among all the kids in our little suburban school—the freaks and the nerds, the jocks and the cheerleaders—I was hopelessly apart. Just me, Emily Webb, alone, counting the hours until school was done and I got to go back home to my room and my DVDs and my books.

My only real friend was Megan. She could be dour, yeah, but I didn't blame her, not really. Back in junior high, she'd spent three years trying desperately to join the in crowd, though her overly eager efforts were met mostly by whispered mocking in the halls and the occasional harassing email.

I stuck by her through it all, halfheartedly helping her with her plans to be cool despite not having any idea what cool was. One of the girls, Sarah Plainsworth, the ringleader of what could best be called a tween
Mean Girls,
actually seemed to take pity on Megan one day. She introduced Megan to a boy from another school—online, of course—and set about arranging a date for them. Megan was more excited than I'd ever seen her, and we'd spent a week finding her the perfect outfit, and the perfect hair, and practicing the perfect things to say.

Only, of course, there was no boy. The date had Megan standing alone in a family-style Japanese restaurant as Sarah and those she'd wrangled in on the gag sat around a hibachi table and laughed. Megan had stood there, shaking, focusing on the chefs making little volcanoes out of onion slices to keep from seeing the faces of those mocking her.

Something clicked then. She finally got that, for whatever reason, people like Sarah Plainsworth would never let her become a part of their seemingly perfect lives. And so Megan just looked Sarah square in the eye until the girl no longer laughed, then left, leaving those kids and her dreams of being somebody like them behind.

Sarah Plainsworth moved away between junior high and high school, and with her left the memories of her epic prank—for everyone except Megan.

Freshman year, Megan came back to school all withering attitude and black clothes. A whole new girl.

I watched Megan glare at a shiny blond girl sitting near her, and it made me wonder what she'd think if she knew about my alter ego the night before.

About my weird, temporary mood swing. Because if there was one thing I knew about Megan, it was that she trusted me to always be me. Quiet and with an ear only for her. Not someone who dressed flashy or trashy, not someone who longed to go out on the town to mingle with people very much like bitchy party girl Sarah Plainsworth.

I stooped over my desk and ran my finger over a name carved into the faux-wood top, still trying and failing to recall everything that had happened between reading and Megan's phone call. Maybe, for just a moment, I'd managed to flip the normal teen switch in my head. Maybe, for just a moment, whatever issues made me so hopelessly incapable of fitting in with anyone had gone away. Megan wouldn't like it, not at all. But maybe if I figured it all out, then we could figure her out too.

I didn't get the chance to think about it further, because the second bell rang and Ms. Nguyen swished into class.

"Good morning!" Her voice was loud, her smile broad and bleached. She sounded exactly like you'd expect a local access talk show host slumming as a high school teacher to sound. She was never boring, Ms. Nguyen. Today she wore a canary yellow pantsuit accessorized with a red and purple scarf tied round her neck, and her hair was shellacked into a bob last seen in 1967.

I sort of loved her.

"Another year is upon us," Ms. Nguyen announced as she sat in a chair, crossed her legs, and cradled a cup of coffee in her lap. She took a sip, then made a face. "Oh, that is just terrible”

I laughed a little too loudly and got a wink from the short guy sitting in front of Megan. Spencer Holt was the sort of goofy guy who was just funny enough to get to hang out with all the cool kids as their token comedian. I'd seen him around for years, but had never really talked to him. He grinned over at me, and, heat rushing to my cheeks, I looked down at my desk.

Ms. Nguyen set the coffee cup on her desk and was about to resume speaking when the door opened. A small woman with a somber face stood there, and she beckoned Ms. Nguyen over. They huddled together and spoke in hushed tones in the hallway while the whole class watched.

Megan sighed. "Let's get on with it already” she muttered.

When Ms. Nguyen came back a moment later, she seemed a different person. She sat back in her chair at the front of the class, hands trembling.

"Ms. Nguyen?" A pretty, redheaded girl in the back stood up, concerned.

Nikki Tate, the head cheerleader.

Ms. Nguyen shook her head and looked over the class as though she was just now seeing us. Her eyes welled up with tears.

Something inside my chest twisted, like a spring wound too tight.

Something horrible had happened ... and it was then that I remembered, and I felt like a total jerk for forgetting: Emily Cooke had died last night. Emily Cooke had died, and no one knew except me and Megan. And now everyone who knew her—who actually knew her, not like me—would hear about it, and...

I hunched over my desk, eyes down. I didn't want to see anyone's face. I felt strangely guilty, because I'd known about this horrible secret and should have said something. Ms. Nguyen spoke, her voice quiet and shaky, but I didn't really hear her words, just the sadness in them. She told us that a student had been found murdered the night before and that we were going to have an assembly about it later. The class listened in shocked silence.

"Who is it?" the guy behind me asked. "Who died?"

Shoving my glasses up my nose with my index finger, I dared a glance up at Ms. Nguyen. She seemed to wobble in place before blinking and taking us all in. It was as though she'd mentally drifted off somewhere and only now realized she wasn't alone. "I know many of you were her friends," Ms.

Nguyen said. "She was a lovely girl, a lovely girl...

"Who?" Nikki Tate whispered from her seat in the back. "Please tell us."

Ms. Nguyen's face contorted in grief. "Emily," she finally said. "It's Emily Cooke." And Ms. Nguyen began to sob.

The air felt sucked out of the room.

A chair squealed as it was hastily shoved back, and a girl ran past. I only saw her for a second before she tore open the classroom door and was in the hallway— Mai Sato, a big track star around school. Only then did I remember that she and Emily Cooke were friends.

Mai's flight set the room buzzing with whispered chatter. Normally Ms.

Nguyen would have put a stop to that, but she was softly crying to herself in her seat while Nikki Tate and the curly-haired girl from up front comforted her. I never knew Ms. Nguyen cared so much about Emily Cooke. But then again, I didn't really know anything about Emily Cooke, did I?