“Present,” Beth said.
“Beth Rose, give up your date. Now. I want him.”
“Why?”
“He,” Gwynnie pronounced, “is astonishing.”
Nobody saw Molly. Beth, stupid Beth, was the center of action.
I’ll astonish you, Molly Nelmes thought.
You’ll be sorry.
You’ll see.
Molly fought through the crowd.
She took an elevator down.
She would get her bag, and then they would see.
Matt and Emily stood in the snow, looking up at the revolving restaurant. You could not tell from the ground that anything was moving; it was simply a blur of light through the falling snow. People came and went from the building, hunched over as if the snow offended them. Matt loved the snow, and he loved it that Emily did not try to cover herself from it, but enjoyed it, and turned her face up to it, and smiled.
“I don’t want to join the party yet,” Matt said.
Emily had never been in such a party mood. “Why not?” She could hardly wait to see everybody’s dresses, and hear everybody’s laughter, and dance long and hard to the rhythm of rock.
“Want to talk,” he said.
Matt always talked. But talk was something you did at the same time you did something else. Matt could drive and talk—swim and talk—repair cars and talk—and even kiss and talk. But talk and talk—no.
“Let’s dance and talk,” she said, pulling him toward the bank of elevators.
He gave her coat to the cloakroom attendant and pocketed the ticket. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat. His tuxedo jacket was dusted with snow.
“You’re snowy,” she said.
Matt shook himself like a retriever coming out of the water. Snow landed on her bare arms like tiny cold freckles.
“Over here,” Matt said, pointing toward an oversized beige armchair near the piano bar. The piano was a gleaming white grand sitting on a white “shelf” over the pool. Its gentle notes mingled with the sound of the fountain.
Emily was in the mood for loud throbbing rock bands, not tinkly little piano melodies. She did not cooperate at all. “Over here,” she argued, leaning toward the elevators.
“No, here.”
“Oh, for goodness sakes. All right.” The armchair was so deep her legs were too short to reach the edge and stuck straight out instead of bending at the knees. “This is graceful,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Families,” Matt said promptly. “Next year. Life. Future.”
“Oh, Matt, no! Not tonight! Let’s just have a Happy New Year. Nothing heavy.” She struggled to get comfortable in his lap. “Matt, you’re quivering all over! What’s the matter?”
“I have a fever.”
“Oh, no, why didn’t you say so?” Emily tried to sit up.
“I’m all heated up over you,” he said, laughing.
She let go of all her muscles until she was a velvet puddle on top of him. “Matthew O’Connor, get to the point. First you’re lost. Now you have a fever. Do you think your first love is getting out of hand?”
“Who says it’s first love?” he teased. “I’ll have you know I am a very experienced man.”
“You’d better be precisely as experienced as I am, no more and no less. If you’ve been feverish elsewhere, you’re in trouble, Matthew O’Connor.”
“I’m in trouble when you call me by my whole name anyway. That’s how I know you’re mad at me.”
“I’m not mad. I just want to dance through the evening. If we talk about where I’m going to live and how my family has fallen apart, I’ll cry. Who needs that?”
“Which is why I want to talk about it,” Matt said. He sat up so suddenly she practically rolled onto the floor.
“It’s a good thing nobody can see us back here behind the piano,” Emily muttered. “I have never looked so un-graceful in my life.”
“You look perfect. I want to talk family.”
“No, Matt! I can’t bear talking about selfish, unkind, uncaring—”
“I mean us,” Matt said
“Us?”
“Our family, Em. Yours and mine.”
“Matt,” she protested, “you and I aren’t a family.”
“We could be, though.”
Emily was aware of every texture in the lounge. A voice speaking into a phone placed a rental car order; the piano played a slow rag; a glass was set down on the bar. The upholstery beneath her was nubbly and Matt smelled of his father’s aftershave. Her heart was pounding so hard that the crimson ribbon at the top of her gown trembled.
Matt held her hand. Hers was like ice; his was hot as fever. There was something in his hand, and at first she thought it was a salted nut, that he was offering her something to eat.
It was a ring.
A lovely tiny diamond that sparkled in his palm like a thousand, thousand snow flakes.
“M&M,” Matt whispered, “let’s get married.”
Chapter 10
BETH ROSE AND GEORGE danced three dances together. He was energetic, and that was about all you could say for his technique. But at least he was willing. A lot of the boys simply would not dance. Ever. They would buy tickets to dances, and they would dress up for dances, but once they got there, they would eat, drink, talk, or watch. Period. So Beth counted herself lucky.
Gwynnie’s knot of hair bobbed between them. “I am very attracted to your date,” she informed Beth Rose.
And not for the first time, Beth thought.
“George,” Gwynnie demanded, “what languages do you speak? English is too boring.” She was so truly strange, in her feathers and white tower of hair, with her orange sunglasses and her black boa, demanding George to speak in a foreign language. Maybe Gary was dating Gwynnie strictly for entertainment value and not because he liked her. Was Gwynnie a circus and Gary had bought a ticket? Even Gwynnie could not want that. Even Gwynnie must want to be asked because she was special, not because she was crazy.
“Illway you anceday?” George suggested.
“Well, I like that, George,” Beth Rose said. “All this time you’ve been fluent in Pig Latin and you never told me?”
George grinned. “I was saving the important stuff for later, when we’re alone.”
Beth Rose laughed. “Take her,” she said to George. “Dance the night away.”
“The night?”
“Five minutes of it,” Beth Rose corrected. Gwynnie danced George backward, using him like the prow of a ship to push through an ocean of crowd.
“Hold your dinosaurs for you?” Gary offered.
“No, thanks. They’re tethered securely.” She was getting the quivers now, with the two of them alone, their dates traded off.
“You look lovely,” Gary said after a while.
“Thank you.” She brushed her dinosaurs aside to look out the window. The sky was dense with falling snow. Far down, the lights were not distinguishable as dots, but simply as yellow blurs. It was too bad the evening was not clear.
“Getting on toward midnight,” Gary said.
“What happens then? Does Gwynnie turn back into a pumpkin?”
Gary laughed. “You’re mixing your mice and your Cinderellas. No, I meant midnight as in New Year’s Eve.”
If he asked her to dance, would she say yes?
After all, George and Gwynnie were together. It was logical that now Beth Rose and Gary should be together. If only she could believe he wasn’t asking because he was afraid of falling apart, too! But he was waiting for Gwynnie to return. Asking Beth to dance had not entered his mind. He discussed dinosaurs. Anne was not the only one who cherished an early dinosaur passion.
I quiver for a lost love of Gary, Beth Rose thought, and he quivers for a lost shoebox with a dinosaur diorama.
Gwynnie quit mid-dance anyhow and returned, George in hand. George had hung his sunglasses down over his bowtie so Beth could see his eyes again. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. At least she hadn’
t lost George to Gwynnie, too!
“Forget dancing,” Gwynnie said, “I can’t dance until I’ve visited a mirror.”
Beth Rose had heard a lot of dumb ways to refer to bathrooms, but never this one.
“Because,” Gwynnie explained, “my hair is hot. I’m going to take it off.”
“What a great sentence,” George said. “Does she talk like this all the time, Gary?” he wanted to know.
“This is pretty mild,” Gary said.
“What are you going to do with your hair after you take it off?” George asked.
“Beth is going to wear it,” Gwynnie said, grinning wickedly. She stood up on the couch, plunged off ~as if deep sea diving, caught herself and her wig, and very delicately tucked her bare toes into her scarlet high heels. Then she gave Beth the end of her black boa to hold. “Don’t let go of the rope,” she warned, “you might get lost in the crowds. I am going to take a difficult route.”
“Wait,” Beth said, jerking back on her end of the boa. She untied her dinosaurs. “Your turn, George.”
“Oh, good,” George said happily, and he tied them through one of his buttonholes, except for the three that Gary passed on to dancers whose outstretched hands were grabbing the free strings.
Hey, nice, Beth Rose thought. Pretty soon I’ll be down to one quiet manageable pterodactyl.
Gwynnie’s progress toward a mirror was slow.
She was twirling the end of the boa that Beth was not holding, and because the kids were packed in so tight, there was very little twirling room. Beth Rose didn’t mind. It gave her a chance to stare around the room. I love staring, Beth thought Everybody else is so interesting.
Anne and Lee were dancing together.
Beth remembered when Anne was going with Con, how Beth admired them from afar. Anne and Con danced like one person: melting into each other. It made you feel all soft and yearning to see them. Well, they had melted a little more than they should have, and paid quite a price for it.
Anne and Lee, however, danced like people who didn’t know each other and didn’t care to. There was considerable space between their bodies, whether they danced slow or fast, and Lee’s eyes stared out past Anne’s hair into space.
No.
Not into space.
He was staring at Kip.
What we should do is get us all together, sit down, place our bids, and then see who’s with who, Beth thought. I wonder who I would bid for. Would it still be Gary?
“What are you thinking about?” Gwynnie said. “You look so frowny.”
“New Year’s Eve. New beginnings. Fresh starts. Do you suppose there are ever any moldy old starts? Or are all starts fresh?”
“Let’s hear it for moldy old starts!” Gwynnie said. She shoved on a bathroom door.
“Gwynnie! That’s the men’s room!”
“They have mirrors in there.”
“Mmm,” Beth Rose said. “Fortunately I am holding the rope, and your rope and I are going into the girls’ room.” She wound the black boa around her wrist a few times, flicked it like a cowboy’s lasso, and took the lead.
“You still in love with Gary?” Gwynnie asked.
You could strangle a person with the black boa, too.
“Or is it dull dry history?” Gwynnie said.
Beth had to laugh. “It’s history,” she said, “but it isn’t dry. My bed has mildew from my tears.” They passed the elevators. “Ooooh, look,” she whispered.
Gwynnie looked quickly. “What?” she whispered back.
“It’s Con.”
Gwynnie was disappointed. “Con is so goopy,” she complained. “Who cares if he’s here or not?”
“Goopy?” Beth Rose whispered. How handsome Con looked tonight! Very tan, his formal dark suit somehow as casual as California.
“Personality free,” Gwynnie defined. She sniffed and ignored Con.
“No,” Beth Rose said, defending him quickly. “It’s just that both he and Anne are so good-looking you have a hard time finding their personalities. Con’s got plenty, though. He just doesn’t use it very often.”
“Doesn’t use his personality very often?” Gwynnie repeated. “Beth, I have been scouring the countryside for a good friend. I believe she’s going to be you.”
Beth stared at her. “Me?”
“You. Now point out Jade to me. Famous Jade. I don’t even see a girl with Con. She must really not use her personality. She’s invisible.”
Beth Rose and Gwynnie examined every female in the elevator lobby. “You’re right,” Beth said. “The case of the invisible girlfriend. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser.”
“There’s no mystery,” Gwynnie said, opening the girls’ room door after all. “Jade didn’t want to hang out with a goop like that. Especially not on New Year’s Eve.”
Molly left in the midst of a fast dance. Christopher didn’t see her go and she didn’t tell him. She pressed the first floor button in the elevator and could not believe how long it took that poky dumb elevator to find the bottom. She barged through a bunch of people trying to get on and screamed at them for being in the way. She was gone before they could retort.
Out the front door, past the doorman, into the cold wind. She darted over the slush and jumped over a wall of snow that the road crews had dumped on the sidewalks. It was already turning black with city filth. She ran inside the garage.
In the black awful cold of the immense garage she realized she didn’t know where Christopher had parked. There were hundreds of cars here. What was she going to do? Walk up and down in her sleeveless gown until she located a dented Subaru?
She was trembling more with rage than with cold. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them! she thought. Ignoring me!
Christopher had said he was parking on the lower level where the temperature was more even. She found the stairs and went down. The stairs were evil. Spray painted obscenities and discarded styrofoam coffee cups, cigarette butts and the sole of a shoe. One light had gone out and another light made a high vicious buzz, like a wasp.
She didn’t notice.
She flew into the lower level. Ceiling lights dimly penetrated the parking garage. Silent abandoned cars sat on stained concrete. Molly ran down yellow aisle four, and up blue aisle five. BMWs, Volvos, Saabs, Cadillacs, Mercedes, and Corvettes. She hated Christopher for bringing her in a dented Subaru.
The Subaru was on the end of blue aisle nine.
She wrenched the passenger door—and it was locked.
Molly kicked it.
What a jerk Christopher was! He’d locked her out of the car! She hated him too. She hated them all. She kicked the car again, and now her foot hurt, and somehow that made it possible to breathe again, and took away the razor-sharp edge of her rage.
There was a slight sound behind her.
A rasping gravelly sound, like heavy feet sneaking up.
She didn’t even turn to look. She just ran.
But not fast enough.
A large hand closed over her wrist.
Kip and Mike were with Anne and Lee when Gwynnie charged off to find her mirror. “Gwynnie is the one who should be named Jade,” Kip said. “‘Gwynnie’ just isn’t exciting enough for her. She’d be a perfect Jade.”
“Perfect?” Mike said, raising his eyebrows. “Gwynnie? That girl is a lot of things, Kip, but perfect isn’t one.”
“Gwynnie is absolutely perfect, Mike,” Kip said. “Perfectly weird and unself-conscious.”
It was clear that Mike and Kip planned to argue the night away. Anne was stuck not only at the entrance, through which Con and Jade would come, but also next to a fighting couple. But Lee had led her there, and it did not cross her mind to move of her own accord. Besides, it was clear to the biggest fool in the world that Lee liked standing there watching and listening to Kip.
He’s still in love with her, Anne thought.
She would have volunteered a trade, but that would leave her with Mike. Anne would trade only if she got to trade up.
/> “Gwynnie’s perfectly exotic,” Lee said.
“Perfectly creepy,” Mike snorted.
“Oh, I don’t think she’s creepy,” Kip exclaimed. “In fact, I like her. She definitely adds to the occasion.”
“Some occasion,” Mike said, glancing around irritably. His eyes didn’t actually land on anything; he just itched with annoyance.
We’re fleas, Anne thought. He’d like to scratch and be rid of us.
A person could stare only so long. After that, you got used to anything. Even Gwynnie. Hundreds of kids had danced until the first surge of energy was gone. They had tried out all the available food and drink … said hello to anybody they recognized … admired or scorned everyone else’s dress.
Now they were ready for the next installment of the evening.
Jade.
Con had told them so much about Jade. How much he adored her. How much she adored him. How lovely and brilliant and clever and amusing she was.
But nobody had met Jade.
Lee danced from boredom. Anne, whose hand hardly even touched his jacket, suddenly gripped his shoulder. Her fingers tightened. Her fist scrunched the material. Her slender form grew taut, as if preparing to dive, and she stood taller, as if she needed another inch to exist.
Con’s here, Lee thought. He kept dancing exactly as he was, to give her plenty of time to check him out.
I love Kip, he thought, enough to drown in—and she picked a jackass like Mike Robinson.
Now I’m going out with Anne, and she’s in love with a lightweight who has already given her major proof what a jerk he is.
They don’t love me, he thought. So maybe I’m the jerk.
Con’s best friends—Gary, Mike, Jared—went up to him. They hadn’t met Jade either. They drifted, waiting for Jade to show, eyes constantly flicking to the entrance.
Jade didn’t show.
“She’s sick,” Con said, shrugging slightly. “In the hospital.”
Molly wasn’t the only one who thought that was fishy.