MONDAY, I SET up by Shea without giving him a look. The rest of the day is a haze of berries, my rake flashing in the sun, the sound of my own hard breathing. Shea’s always there, making it look easy, playing it up for the other guys. Laughing at me. Mason stays close, but more and more I get the feeling he’s keeping an eye on me, making sure things don’t go too far. I don’t see Jesse except at lunchtime. He looks like he wants to talk, but we don’t.
End of the day, I’m seventh on the board. Shea moves up to fifth. And Bankowski’s still beating my butt in sixth.
“Go ahead. Drink.” Mags watches me chug the Gatorade she bought me in three big gulps, then wipe the red mustache off with my hand. We sit in her car with the doors hanging open, our feet on the pavement of the Lehman’s Formal Wear parking lot in the Bangor Central Plaza.
“Are you going to barf?” Nell leans between the seats. She’s been a little stiff with me since Sunday, but this has her interested. “’Cause if you are, lean way out. I’ve barfed up Gatorade before, and it’ll stain your shoes.”
“I’m okay, guys. Seriously. Quit hovering.”
Mags shakes her head. “You look like a boiled lobster.”
“Awesome. Thanks.”
“You do. You probably gave yourself heatstroke today.” Mags grabs her wallet as we get out and walk to the shop. “Ready to give up this stupid race with Shea?” She says “no” at the same time I do. “’Course not. Wait till you’re lying toes-up in the barrens instead. And you know what your tombstone will say? ‘She never listened to her sister.’”
“No, it’ll say, ‘She never made it out of seventh place.’ If I find that Bankowski, I’ll break both his arms.”
“He can probably rake with his feet,” Nell says, surprised by our laughter as we step inside. “I’m only saying he’s good, if he can keep ahead of you.”
“Thanks, Nellie.”
Mags floored it up to Bangor after work so we could go dress shopping at Lehman’s before they close at six thirty. Nell’s been set on coming here; Lehman’s is the place to get prom dresses and tuxes, at least by Sasanoa standards. Nell has strict orders from Libby not to buy anything tonight. If she finds something she likes, she’s supposed to ask them to put it aside so Libby can see it first and give the okay. Gag.
There’s a row of headless mannequins in the window wearing formal getups, and classical music plays overhead. The lady working the counter does a double take at the sight of us; guess she doesn’t get too many sunburned, calloused customers with wet hair from taking crazy-fast showers after a day of raking.
Nell’s psyched, running from rack to rack, holding gowns up to herself in front of the mirrors as she chatters about some magazine article she read. “See, I have a cool, clear winter coloring, so I’m supposed to wear jewel tones—blue, red, purple. . . .” She points at me. “You’re a warm spring, so you need pastels.”
“Warm spring. Gotcha.” I grip my purse tighter as I look at the price tags. Wish I could put my dress money right into my car fund instead. What’s the point of spending two hundred dollars on a dress I’m going to wear only once?
Nell carries a mound of dresses into the changing room with her. I grab a couple from the sale rack without really looking at them. Mags parks herself in the mom chair outside, whistling a little.
I kick off my flip-flops and slip out of my shorts. “Hey, maybe I could wear your prom dress,” I call to Mags. “You’ve still got it.”
“Darce, I wear a sixteen. You’d swim in it.”
I look at myself in the mirror, standing there in just my bra and underwear. Mags is right. I look worn out. I’ve always had something pinchable around my waist and hips, but now there’s nothing to grab on to. It’s all getting burned off in the barrens, battling with Shea. “You never did tell me what you and Will did after prom.” I drag one of the dresses over my head.
“We went to a party at his friend’s house.”
“And . . . ?”
“And nothing. It was fun. Then he brought me home.”
I open the door and narrow my eyes at her. “On prom night. You didn’t get down on prom night?”
Mags laughs. “We didn’t ‘get down’ ever.”
I stare at her. The counter lady calls that they’ll be closing in fifteen minutes. “You freakin’ liar.”
Mags shakes her head. “Truth.”
I’m speechless as Nell bustles out in a dress that looks like a grape layer cake and flounces the ruffles in front of the three-way mirror, making a face at herself. “For a whole year. You never did it. Not once.”
“Well, we messed around and stuff, but that’s it.”
“Why?”
Mags thinks for a second, scratching a mosquito bite on her elbow. “I dunno. Guess we weren’t ready.”
Nell lets out a cry that makes me think somebody must’ve left a pin in her dress. “I love it!” Not the layer cake: whatever it is I’m wearing. Nell drags me over to the mirror, spinning me by the shoulders as I try to get a look at what she’s so excited about. “How did you find the perfect one so fast? Mags, tell her how good it looks.”
Mags give a thumbs-up.
I check out my reflection. The dress is knee-length, sea-foam green, with spaghetti straps and an empire waist. Silver beadwork covers the bodice. The color’s not bad with my hair, I guess, but my knees look like three miles of bad road from berry-bush scratches.
“You look like a mermaid.” Nell pokes her head into my changing room and comes out carrying a matching wrap that must’ve been attached to the hanger. She drapes it around my shoulders. “You can borrow my shoes. You know, those strappy silver sandals? They’d go perfect.”
I can’t quite see whatever it is she’s seeing, but I love the idea of not having to spend another second thinking about dresses. “Okay. What the hell. Thirty percent off, right?”
We go back out so Nell can keep looking. The associate working the bridal section is talking with the only other customer in the place, a petite brunette in her twenties. Her hair is long, grown almost down to her butt, and she talks with her hands, stroking the fabric of the lilac bridesmaid gown she’s holding. “—think they’ll love it. Sunday works for everybody, so we’ll come up and do the fittings and everything then. . . . Oh, shoes, shoes, I meant to ask you about—”
I notice that Nell’s standing very still. All the joy and energy have drained from her face. She watches the girl flutter her hands, resting on the satin of the dress and then lifting off again like butterflies. This bride’s a stranger, but as I listen to her talk about her wedding plans, it hits home. Oh God. I know who this is without ever having met her, because of the look on Nell’s face.
I press my hand against Nell’s back, ushering her toward the counter so I can pay and get us the hell out of here.
“Nell? Don’t you want to try on some more?” Mags stops her.
“They want to close,” I say.
“But we might not get back up here again before the Festival.”
Nell drags her gaze away from the bride and looks at us. “It’s okay. It’s not here.”
“What isn’t?” Mags says.
“The one. The dress I’m going to wear.” Nell shakes her head. “I’ll look somewhere else.”
The lady at the counter boxes up my dress quickly, seeming glad to be rid of it and us. We almost make it—we’re actually turning toward the exit—when the bride says, “Nell?”
My stomach is an elevator with a cut cable, dropping thirty stories. She’s coming over and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Nell waits, and I can’t read a thing in her face but sadness, like she’s remembering something she once watched drift away from her, bobbing and listing until it finally disappeared under the surface.
The bride’s smiling, getting these cute creases at the corners of her eyes. She’s firm and tan, wearing a T-shirt from the Blue Hill Co-op and cargo shorts, so I guess she’s kind of a crunchy granola type. “Do you remember me?” Hand to her heart. “Elise Grindle. Brad’s fiancée? We met at school a couple times.”
What’s she think, Nell’s some feeb who can’t remember anything just because she takes special classes? But that’s not what she meant, and I know it; it’s my hate leaking out all over her, this nice girl who has no idea what she’s putting us through right now. “How are you?” Nell says in a colorless voice.
“Great. Man, what a summer, huh?” Elise jerks her thumb over her shoulder. “I just picked out my bridesmaids’ dresses. Took forever to decide.” She laughs, then looks at us. “Are these your sisters?”
“Cousins.” Mags shakes her hand. “Margaret. That’s Darcy.”
I don’t want to touch Elise’s hand, but I have to. It’s soft and warm and it’s all I can do to keep from wiping my palm off on my shorts.
“So you’re going to be a senior this year, right?” Elise keeps smiling, trying to draw Nell out. “Nice. Brad really misses teaching at SAHS, you know. He’s always saying that your class was the best he ever had.”
“Oh, really?” Nell looks at a spot somewhere over her head.
“Are you here getting a dress for the pageant? Brad mentioned you were nominated as a Princess. Good for you.”
Something the size of a fist lodges in my throat. He mentioned. Just casually mentioned across the breakfast table: Oh, honey, remember Nell Michaud? Isn’t this nice, says here she’s a Bay Festival Princess this year. That’ll really boost her self-confidence. She always struggled. I step back, crushing my dress box under my arm. “We have to go.”
If Mom was here, she’d cuff me in the back of the head, but Elise rolls with my rudeness pretty well, stepping back and smiling again. “Oh, okay. Nice to see you again, Nell. I’ll tell Brad you said hi.”
Even though she didn’t. None of us did. But Elise soon-to-be Ellis is too caught up in her dream wedding to see two inches in front of her own nose, and I hate her for being happy and blind. And the worst thing, what I can’t get over as she walks back to the bridal section with her long, wavy brown hair hanging down her back, is how much she reminds me of Nell.
We all get into Mags’s car, and she takes the interstate ramp, I-95 South. I feel shaky and sick, like we’ve survived a disaster, a hurricane tearing through. Nell sits, looking down at her hands, not talking. Finally, Mags says quietly, “What just happened in there?” She waits. We all sit and wait, listening to the sound of the wheels beneath us, and we don’t talk.