Chapter Nineteen
Sucks to Be Elinor
Mallory
Blake and Mallory were doing their best to take turns. This morning Mallory was hiding out in a hammock tucked on the outskirts of camp where no one would notice her while Blake got the American summer camp experience she’d never wanted until it was on someone else’s plate. Never mind, for the moment, it was just her and the duke. Hopefully, Blake decided to go home before she wrecked everything. So far so good, but something was bound to go wrong. One day of juggling had already been too much. It was pure luck that nothing had gone wrong.
Blake’s return had been a wake-up call. No matter how much she tried, Mallory could never be her sister. It was a whole constellation of little things—posture, expression, mannerisms, style. One glance and anyone with eyes could see that Blake was a teen queen, the center diamond of the inner circle, the top girl on the cheerleading pyramid. Mallory wanted to think something snide, but really it was sort of admirable. Blake didn’t spend her life constantly reassessing her own self-worth. Oh well.
If Blake didn’t get bored and go home soon, Ben would notice. Blake was a star and Mallory just the girl who copied her look. The haircut wouldn’t fool anyone much longer.
Mallory halfheartedly flipped through The Accidental Duchess. Lydia’s day wasn’t going any better than hers. She sighed and dropped the book to her chest. Just as she shut her eyes, she heard footsteps coming her way.
“Mallory!”
Mallory opened her eyes to see her Hollywood-perfect sister staring at her with her hands on her hips and a dreamy look on her face. A squirrel scampered up the tree behind her completely unnoticed.
“You’ll never guess what happened last night!”
“What?” As long as it didn’t involve Ben. Zoe had promised to keep Blake distracted. She’d assumed everything worked out.
Blake twirled her hair and looked at the treetops. “It was amazing.” Blake was like Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Her highs were higher and her lows were lower than anyone else’s, like she had a premium on all emotions. No one else could feel as deeply or intensely as her. Mallory exhaled a breath. Elinor might be the heroine of the novel, but sometimes it sucked to be her. Sucks to Be Elinor might as well be the title of her life.
“I saw Ben.”
Mallory’s heart dropped to her stomach. “What?”
“He was so different than he was during school. He apologized for turning me down when I asked him to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.”
“Really?” Mallory’s stomach dropped to the floor. Had Ben recognized Blake and pieced together the mystery?
Blake nodded. “He was so nice. He asked me to some dance tonight.”
The horror of the situation hit her full-on and sacked her like a three hundred-fifty-pound defensive lineman. She took a puff off of her inhaler, but it didn’t help. She could barely breathe. Her Ben, the boy who made her heart beat faster, had asked out her sister. There was no way to fix this. It was the worst thing that could have happened. The rational part of her brain (which was rapidly shrinking) yelled that he thought Blake was her. He had asked out the wrong girl.
But how was she going to fix that? By telling him I lied to him.
Even worse, he might have realized Blake was Blake. Even with identical genes, she couldn’t cosplay her sister any better than she could Wonder Woman. She was an obvious fraud. If Ben had spent more than a minute with the real Blake he would have known it, and that was the minute he’d chosen to ask her out. The scared, irrational part of her brain screamed that Ben knew exactly what he’d done.
“Can you believe it? Ben asked me out!”
Mallory couldn’t speak.
Blake tossed a cracker at her. “Hey, did you hear me?”
Mallory felt sick.
Blake scrunched up her forehead and asked, “You guys weren’t seeing each other, were you?” She shuffled her feet. “I mean, it seems like you must have patched things up for me.”
Mallory started to say, “I think we were—” She’d never really explained the state of her relationship with Ben to Blake.
Blake was already talking over for her. “I really owe you one. I’ve had a crush on him for so long. I know I acted like a lunatic all year long.”
Mallory tried to explain that Ben was hers. “Blake, Ben and I kissed. We were—”
“You just kissed? That’s it?” Blake looked like that was no big deal.
“Well, yeah, but…” Kissing was a big deal to Mallory.
Blake softened her expression. “Well, that seems to have fixed things.” With a sassy lilt she said, “It usually does!”
Mallory tried to fight out of the despair. She said, “But, Blake, I think he meant to ask me out. Not you. I want to go out with him.”
Blake shook her head. “Mal, I mean, he asked me out. If you are upset about it, why don’t you go talk to him as Mallory. As far as Ben is concerned, I’m the only Blake from here on out. I don’t want things to get confusing.”
Mallory choked on a laugh. Things couldn’t get any more confusing. They’d reached the apex of confusion. It absolutely couldn’t get any worse.
Feeling sick to her stomach, Mallory excused herself. “I don’t know. I need some space.” She needed to get out of there. She couldn’t listen to Blake talk about Ben anymore. She couldn’t bear it. The happiness that had been so pervasive and felt like it had overwhelmed her yesterday disappeared. In one move, Blake sucked all the happiness from her life.
As Mallory walked away from the hammock—toward…she wasn’t really even paying attention—she picked up speed until she was running down the path toward camp. She’d never wanted to run before, but she couldn’t stop. She wanted to run away from her life.
Finally, because she was Mallory and not Blake, she went to her assigned class, canoeing with Derek, even though Derek was the dumbest guy on the planet and she didn’t even care about canoeing, at least today. She went because she, Mallory, didn’t make a habit of breaking rules. Only Blake did that.
Zoe intercepted her, “What happened?”
Mallory started to talk, but she was trying to hard not to cry to get any words out.
“You get in the canoe. I’ll paddle. You cry.”
“How did you know?”
“Ugh. Because you look like the love of your life just broke up with you.”
“That’s because he did.” Or something. There was no bouncing back from this problem.
Mallory launched into an explanation of how her life had gone from ecstasy to agony in less than a day, how her sister had drained all hope from her life. Basically, she would never be able to appreciate another sunset. “I’m going to be a crazy cat lady. I shouldn’t even bother fighting it.”
Zoe, the good friend that she was, automatically took Mallory’s side. “Your sister is a grade A bitch, Mallory. Ben didn’t ask her out. He was trying to ask you out.”
“It doesn’t matter. He thinks I’m her. Since I’ve been here, I have been her. I used her name. I wore her clothes. I put a lot more care into my hair than normal, even when it was orange. He doesn’t know the real me, the one who doesn’t style her hair and wears ugly shirts. I even did sports. No one from Bellevue would recognize the girl from this summer as Mallory Jones. Not to mention, he didn’t notice that she wasn’t me…” Then she remembered her earlier thoughts. “The worst part is that I don’t even compare! Knowing how to apply eyeliner is not enough to turn me into Blake. I’m a pale shadow of my sister. Everyone knows it, including Ben.”
Zoe frowned. “I don’t know what kind of Parent Trap bullshit you two are up to, but this is ninety-nine percent crazy talk.”
“Why does everyone always say that about us. I think it’s way more Sense and Sensibility.” She explained her theory about how she was Elinor and Blake was Marianne.
“There’s nothing to be done for you,” Zoe said. She rowed the canoe back to the dock and called, “Derek, I need your help.”
Derek ambled over to the shoreline in his usual not-a-care-in-the world fashion. Mallory slumped into the canoe until she was actually lying on the bottom and then pulled a life jacket over her face. “I don’t want to feel the sun today.”
Zoe pointed and said, “We need a shot of your grappa, dude. This one is having a breakup catastrophe.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Just have one shot to take the edge off.”
Any other day Mallory would have said no, but not today. One shot couldn’t hurt, right?