“She’s prettier than you said she was,” Dent said.
I stared at Ethan. “Have you been talking about me?”
“Pretty much nonstop for, like, two months,” Dent said.
“Okay. So, see you around,” Ethan said. “Bye-bye, Dent.”
“He doesn’t have to leave,” I protested as Dent hefted his backpack onto his other shoulder and started to walk away. “You don’t have to leave.”
“Nice meeting you, Tori,” Dent said. He saluted. Then he went down the subway entrance.
I turned to Ethan. “So he seems like a nice guy.”
“He is. He’s too nice, actually. It’s going to get him hurt someday,” Ethan said.
I was confused. Ethan was acting like Dent was his friend, a real friend, even, the kind you walk home with after school. The kind you talk to about girls. But the Scrooge was never friends with the Cratchit. Like, ever. He always looked at the Cratchit with disdain.
“How did you become friends with Dent—Danny?”
Ethan shook his head. “He annoyed me at first. I used to pull pranks on him, last year. And he’d fall for it. Every. Single. Time. He’d believe whatever I told him. But it didn’t matter, really. I’d try to get him in trouble, but he always made it through, like, smiling and stuff. He still annoys me. But he’s grown on me, too.”
Kind of the way I felt about Stephanie. But not very Scrooge versus Cratchit.
“You could have let him stay with us. I wouldn’t have minded,” I said, smoothing the lapel of his jacket. “It’s me who’s intruding here.”
“You were a welcome intruder.” Ethan took my hands and spun me like we were about to dance. “I’ve been thinking about you all week. I was hoping you’d show up, actually, because there’s this thing tonight I have to go to . . .”
“I’d love to go out tonight,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m asking you out. Starting right now. Can I steal you?”
His eyes were blue today, blue like the flames in the little canisters that caterers use to keep food warm. “Right now?” he repeated. “Sure. But later I—”
“Good. I hope you’re ready for some mega fun.”
He nodded. “But I have this thing tonight—”
“Do you have to go to the thing tonight?” I asked.
“Well, no, but I thought maybe we could go together, if you want. It’s a ball. Like a ball with dancing. Would you like to play at actually being Cinderella?”
I would have loved to play Cinderella. So much it was kind of killing me. I’d missed prom, after all.
“I can’t,” I said.
He frowned. “Because . . .”
“I don’t have a ball gown. Or a pumpkin. Or mice friends.”
“We could get you a dress,” he said. “This is Manhattan. There are shops everywhere. And I can get us a limo. It’s no pumpkin, but . . . I’m afraid I can’t help you with the mice.”
God, he was really killing me. “I . . . can’t go.”
“Why not?”
“Because spy reasons. But I have something else for us to do. Way more fun.”
I could tell he was holding on to the idea of me going to the dance with him. “But—”
“Trust me. This will be better.”
He gave in. “Okay.”
“Okay? Prince Charming will blow off the ball?”
“Balls are lame.” He grinned. “I’d never be caught dead at a ball.”
I hugged him again. I could have hugged him every five minutes for, like, ever. Then I took his hand and started towing him in the opposite direction of his apartment, away from where Dave’s team at Project Scrooge would be expecting him any minute now. We had to move. “Come on, slowpoke.”
“Wait, I should go home. Get out of this uniform,” he said.
I grabbed his tie and tugged on it playfully. “Oh, no. You’ve got to stay in the uniform. That is hot.” I lifted my hand to hail a cab. Miraculously, one pulled up right away. I followed Ethan as he ducked inside the car. Then I said to the driver, “Prospect Heights, please.”
Ethan laughed and shook his head like I was the craziest girl ever, but he liked it. “Where are you taking me?” he asked.
“To the moon!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, the moon.” He put an arm around me as we lurched away, officially off course from everything that was supposed to happen tonight. “I’ve never been to the moon. I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”
We spent the rest of the day roaming the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which was never as crowded as Central Park. It felt secluded, sitting there in the grass surrounded by trees, looking up at the cloudless blue sky. You could forget you were in the city. And it was the last place that the company would ever think to look for Ethan. We’d escaped Project Scrooge, at least for the night.
“This is nice,” Ethan said, leaning back and closing his eyes in the late afternoon sun. But I could tell he was thinking about how it wasn’t nicer than a fancy ball.
“Just wait,” I said. “The best is yet to come.”
We explored the rose gardens and hung out watching the koi in the Japanese garden before hitting the gift shop, where Ethan bought me a tiny cactus to mark the occasion. I couldn’t wait to stick it in the window of my apartment. “It’s so cute!” I kept saying, and Ethan said, “It’s just a cactus, Tori. It cost five dollars.”
“But it’s from you. I will think about you every time I look at it,” I said. “So it’s priceless.”
“Hmm.” He smiled. “If I’d known you’d like it that much I would have bought a cactus for every room.”
“That would be excessive. And dangerous,” I laughed.
Later we got ice cream cones and sat eating them on the swings at a nearby playground, watching the sky go a brilliant orange and then gray and then a deep, deep blue. When it was fully dark I led Ethan to the merry-go-round that was hiding under the bridge—Jane’s Carousel, it was called. I’d always wanted to ride on it—it looked amazing, this fully restored carousel from the twenties. It was all lit up against the bridge and the dark river, blazing with lights and the bright colors of the horses. I picked a white horse with wings on its chest, and Ethan took the one next to mine, and we laughed and pretended to race as we went around and around to the music. Then we rode a second time, and this time Ethan stood next to my horse and I picked a stationary one, one that didn’t move up and down, so we could talk.
“This is better than a stupid dance, right?” I murmured, staring down at him.
He nodded. “You know, sometimes when I’m with you it doesn’t feel real.”
I knew just what he meant. It made me sad a little.
I slid down and put my arms around him. The carousel whirled through the dark, but I felt like we were standing still. I wanted it to last. I wanted it to be love, the kind of love they make movies about. This was what love felt like, wasn’t it? The way my heart pounded and my chest felt like it was being squeezed? The way his face had become everything beautiful in this world? The way his laugh made me feel like I could fly?
“Come here,” I said softly. “I really want to kiss you right now.”
Our lips touched, exploring gently, once, and then again. We’d kissed before—lots of times since that first time on the Staten Island Ferry—but this time felt different. The world became Ethan and the solidness of his arms holding me and the pressure of his mouth on mine. It was perfect. Then I could feel the ride slowing down, and I became aware that we weren’t alone—that people might be watching. I opened my eyes and took a step back, suddenly dizzy.
Ethan brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “You sure know how to sweep a guy off his feet.”
I wasn’t capable of speech yet. I could only smile up at him.
We left the carousel and walked out in the park. The night was cool and breezy. I wore Ethan’s suit jacket as we wandered along the edge of the river, my hand in his hand. I knew that somewhere—I didn’t even know exactly where—the ball
had started, it was in full swing by now, and the people at Project Scrooge were almost certainly freaking out because they couldn’t find Ethan. He wasn’t at the ball with the girl in the white dress. He was here with me. Looking at me like he really, really wanted to kiss me again.
I stood on tiptoes and pressed my lips to his. Then I pushed him back and walked us over to sit on a park bench overlooking the river. We watched the boats pass by for a while. “What about Truth or Dare?” I asked suddenly.
He leaned in. “I dare you to—”
I put my hand over his mouth before it could find mine again. It was like now that we’d started kissing, we couldn’t stop. “Your turn first. Truth or dare.” I moved my hand. “Go on.”
He sighed. “Fine. Truth.”
“Am I your girlfriend now?”
“Oh.” He leaned back and smirked at me. “Okay. We’re going to have this conversation.”
“Am I?”
“Do you want to be my girlfriend, Victoria?”
The sound of the fake name jarred me. It reminded me that he didn’t actually know who I was.
I stared out at the water. “I guess what I’m asking is, are we exclusive?”
He frowned. “You want to go out with other guys?”
“No,” I answered. “But we haven’t talked about it. For all I know, you’ve been seeing other girls all this time.” Like a girl in a Badgley Mischka gown, for instance. Even though I was still fairly certain he didn’t know her.
“Oh, sure,” he said, raking a hand through his dark hair and raising an eyebrow at me. “I have a bunch of girls. A harem. Their names are, let’s see—there are so many it’s hard to keep track—Katy. Rihanna. Taylor. Adele.”
I pushed at his shoulder. He laughed.
“No girls but you, Tori.”
I kissed him as a kind of thank you, but I was restless all of a sudden. “Hey, let’s catch a cab, go to the top of the Empire State Building. I’ve never done that.” It felt reckless, since that would require Ethan and me to go indoors, and there were of course lots of cameras in the Empire State Building, but Dave’s team would be watching the ball, wouldn’t they? They’d never catch us.
I got up like I wanted to go, but Ethan grabbed my hand and pulled me around to face him.
“Just so we’re clear, I’m fine with being your boyfriend,” he said. “I was from the beginning, remember? That day at the pool, when it was like you just popped out of nowhere—the perfect girl. I said yes back then.”
I sat down next to him. “So it’s serious, then.”
“As serious as it’s ever been for me.”
I grinned. “Does this mean you’re going to take me to meet your parents?”
His smile faded, and he looked away. “My parents travel a lot, so it’s difficult to schedule anything if I don’t do it like months in advance.”
I didn’t know why I’d said that. It forced him to continue the lie that his parents were both alive and well. I just suddenly wanted to know exactly what I was to him. Or wasn’t. I couldn’t read his mind about it anymore.
“Have you ever brought a girl to meet your parents before?” I asked lightly.
“Oh God,” he groaned. “Here we go.”
“What? I’m just assessing the competition here.”
“You’re the first girl I’ve ever dated for more than, like, a week.”
“Oh, I see. Players gotta play,” I concluded.
“No, it wasn’t like that. My school is boys only, and in that situation you have to go out and find girls to date, and that seemed like a lot of hassle. So I was really glad that day you walked into the club and stole my newspaper and started yelling about how you were seventeen and told me to get lost.”
I put my hand over my mouth and gasped in fake horror. “Was I your first kiss?”
I could see his face getting red even in the dark. “No.”
“Who was your first kiss, then? Come on, tell me her name.”
“She was . . .” He stopped. “Wait. It’s not my turn. That was like the longest truth or dare answer ever. It’s your turn. Truth or dare.”
“Truth.”
“Who was your first kiss?”
For the first time, I didn’t have an answer prepared for him. “I change my choice. Dare,” I said.
“Oh, so you can dish it out, but you can’t take it.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay. I dare you to tell me who your first kiss was.”
“He was just a boy. The gardener’s son,” I explained.
He waited. I sighed.
“He kept trying to stick his tongue in my mouth, and I kept pulling away because I’d been chewing gum before and I didn’t know what to do with it. It was kind of gross, actually.”
Ethan was smiling again.
“Now you,” I insisted. “Your first kiss. I want details.”
In his memories, I’d seen Ethan kiss girls—I’d been searching through those moments in my halfhearted quest to find Ethan’s Belle—but I’d never seen his first kiss.
“It was at a party,” he said.
I’d seen him kiss lots of girls at parties. Like Kendra Cunningham. God, I really hoped his first kiss wasn’t Kendra Cunningham.
“I was seven.”
I gaped at him. “Seven. Years old?”
He laughed at my expression. “It was a birthday for this girl whose mom was a friend of my mom’s. I didn’t want to go, because I thought it’d be a bunch of little girls in princess dresses and stuff, and when we got there, it was exactly that—princesses everywhere. But then this one princess in a blue dress grabbed me and pulled me into the bathroom, and she told me, ‘I’m the birthday girl, so you have to kiss me.’”
“Well, obviously,” I said. “There are rules about these things.”
“So I did.”
I giggled. I couldn’t help it. The image was too cute. “How romantic. Kissed against your will in a bathroom.”
“I wouldn’t say it was against my will,” he mused. “It definitely made me a fan of kissing from that point on.”
“So I owe this princess a big thank you.”
“I still see her around sometimes.” I glanced down at his hands like this was the part he found embarrassing. “She shows up at fund-raising dinners or charity benefits that my grandmother tries to get me to go to—like this ball tonight, for instance. She’s probably there right now, even.”
“You have a little crush on her,” I guessed, a chill tingling down my spine at the words she’s probably there right now.
“Maybe I did, once.” He shook his head and took me by the shoulders to pull me toward him. Our faces were close—I could smell strawberry on his breath from the ice cream. “But now I have you, Tori,” he said. “My official girlfriend, if you want the title.”
“All right.”
He kissed me.
“What’s her name?” I asked when we came apart again. “The princess with the personal space issues?”
“Bella,” he said.
I pulled back so suddenly I almost fell off the bench. “Her name is . . . Bella?”
“Isabella, formally.”
I felt like I was on the carousel again, spinning, out of control. My face must have shown it because Ethan said, “Hey, don’t worry, Tori. Nothing real ever happened between Bella and me. There’s nothing there.”
Bella. Her name was Bella.
You’ve got to be freaking kidding me, I thought.
It was two days before I was on the schedule to go back into Ethan’s mind, but when I did, I went straight for his memories of Bella, and now that I had a name to go by, I found them. Easy peasy. It took all of five minutes for me to figure out that Bella was the only girl Ethan had ever been truly interested in—before me, that is.
She was definitely the one in the picture Dave had taken of the fund-raiser. The girl in the Badgley Mischka.
I located the moment—when Ethan saw her there, standing across the room at the Courage Award dinner, i
t turned out, which was some event that honored wounded servicemen.
He recognized her immediately. The second he laid eyes on her his stomach turned over, and his heart started to beat faster. He was staring like an idiot.
She glanced over her shoulder (she had great hair, I thought—long and shiny as a satin ribbon) and saw him. She was wearing white elbow-length gloves and she raised her hand to give him a shy wave, her face warming in a smile.
She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d grab a boy at a party and demand a kiss. She had kind of an Audrey Hepburn thing going for her, actually. Large brown eyes and long lashes, framed by strong but striking dark eyebrows. A small, straight nose. High cheekbones.
Classic, said Yvonne. She’s classically beautiful.
Bella. Her name was circling in Ethan’s brain. Bella.
No was the word going through mine. No. No.
Dave’s intuition had been right when he’d first passed around Bella’s picture. Bella was probably Ethan’s Belle.
I broke away from sleeping Ethan and tugged off the transducer. I drew the comforter up over his shoulder. Couldn’t have him getting cold. “Hey, I’m tapped out,” I said, rubbing at my aching temples. “Let’s quit for the night.”
“Okeydokey,” Grant said, but he sounded—what, reluctant? annoyed?—that I was suggesting making an early night of it.
When I came back through the Portal, I saw why.
It was just Grant and Stephanie in the Transport Room. They were both somewhat disheveled. The collar of Grant’s black polo shirt was mussed up, and Stephanie’s hair was all over the place. She wasn’t even wearing her glasses.
“Okay, I’m out,” I said as I took off my Hoodie and headed for the door.
Stephanie bounded after me, tucking her hair behind her ears, which didn’t really help. Her cheeks were pink.
“Sorry about that,” she said breathlessly as I booked it down the hall.
“No, no. It’s kind of my fault, right?”
She smiled. “Right.”
She still wasn’t wearing her glasses, which made her seem like a different person somehow. Her T-shirt was a depiction of a girl riding a bicycle—no, a mermaid riding a bicycle—underwater, with fish and bubbles, and strings of yellow hair floating all around her. Stephanie was also wearing jeans again today. And loafers.