Chapter Twenty-Two #2
As I describe the plan, Candace starts frowning.
“I avoid Griff at large social gatherings. Audiences make him insufferable. If I stick close to him at the formal, he’ll get suspicious.
But more importantly…over break, he told me he asked you to the formal, Norah.
He said he wouldn’t bother going this year unless you said yes, since he has so much to get done in the Archive. ”
My stomach drops. “For real?”
“Griffin asked you to Winter Formal?” Vik asks tightly.
“Uh.” I avert my eyes and keep my voice casual. “Yeah. He told me not to answer right away. I was brainstorming how to let him down easy.”
“You could say yes instead,” Candace says. “If you’re his date, you have a perfect excuse to keep tabs on him all evening.”
Vik’s an unignorable presence in my peripheral vision, but I tamp down on my overwhelming feelings of awkwardness and think through her suggestion. “If I have to play lookout, we’ll need you to search the Highwall Collection with Vik. Which means we’ll have to teach you to league.”
She nods thoughtfully. “Will that be difficult?”
I’d like life to assign me a manageable task for once.
Make Jo’s semi-complicated chocolate hazelnut birthday cake.
Run a slow 10K. Read a novel in smallish type.
Anything less difficult than (a) leaguing or (b) teaching someone else to league.
“The first time Vik and I got it right was an accident,” I say.
“When we banished the beasts after the first trial. It took us almost a month to manage it again, and it’s still…
Yeah, it’ll be wildly difficult to teach you. ”
Candace lifts her chin. “Great. I love wild difficulty. I had planned to drop in on the formal, but I’ll put that on hold for the greater good. You can thank me later. Or now. I take chocolates, tennis bracelets, and poems in praise of my beauty. Extra points for a villanelle.”
“Thanks,” I say. “You’re hot AF.”
“That’s not a villanelle. Okay, to summarize: Norah surveils Mr. Davis and Griffin, Vik lifts his keycard, and Vik and I search the Highwall Collection. Norah, you should join the search after the formal if the coast is clear.”
“The formal’s the week after next, and my dad—” I can’t make myself say, I don’t know how long he has. “We’re teaching you to league on a tight schedule. Meet back here tomorrow at six?”
“All right. See you guys,” Vik says. Without looking at me—or Candace, to be fair, though that feels less pointed—he heads up the footpath.
When he’s out of sight, Candace says, “I heard Eden Ragsdale asked him to Winter Formal yesterday, and he very politely turned her down.”
Eden sits two desks from me in AP Stats. She has a mommy’s-got-money wardrobe and pretty hazel eyes that she accentuates with purple eyeliner. I thought I liked her fine, but now the memory of her LV Monogram suede boots makes me want to growl. “Okay.”
“You don’t seem okay.”
“Well, holistically I’m not. We’ve reviewed why.”
“Uh-huh. Why’d you break up with him?”
“I told you.”
“You said something vague about him being a bad idea. What was the real reason?”
I feel trapped and exposed. My shoulders tense like I’m bracing against a slap. “Being close to someone with a bite—”
“Do you think people were justified in treating me like a leper?” Candace interrupts.
“You’re healed.”
“Before that. At my old school, when teachers sat me apart from the other kids, and parents wrote a letter asking the principal to keep me out of the cafeteria.”
“They did that?”
“Yeah.”
I hate the thought: Candace alone, dying, surrounded by assholes. “That’s messed up.”
“But aren’t those the rules you’re following? I bet you broke up with Vik because of your bite, and you stopped hanging out with me and Bree, and you’re exiling yourself from public spaces. That means you think I deserved exile too.”
“It’s not the same. I—I had a death dream with him in it.”
Candace flinches. “You’re having the dreams already?”
I nod.
She breathes out hard. “Did he die in your dream?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I was busy dying myself.”
“So it might not mean anything that he was there. Maybe he showed up in your dream because you think about him too much.”
“Hey,” I squeak. “Big assumption.”
“Uh huh. Anyway, it looks to me like you know how people treated me was wrong, but you’re treating yourself the same way, because you’re a self-hating control freak who thinks that everything is her responsibility and therefore everything is her fault.”
I open and close my mouth a few times. Then I deploy my snottiest tone: “Armchair psychology. Anyway, what, I should practice self-love and go get my man? Why do you care?”
“Because we’re friends,” she says simply.
My whole body turns to jelly with relief. “Yeah?”
“Sullivan, yeah.” Her forehead wrinkles. “Did you think I’d drop you after the trials?”
“No, but—the thing with Bree. You sent me a fuck you text and all.”
Her forehead smooths out. “I was pissed. I mean, you really need to apologize to her. Of course, now I know why you—”
“You don’t have to make excuses for me. You’re right. I was nasty; I need to apologize.”
Candace smiles with half her mouth. “Good. But now I have to ask you. If you’re so worried about being around crowds, how are you going to handle the formal?”
“Prayer, I guess.” I glance around. It’s getting lighter, shadows fading from black to gray. “Should we get out of here?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to insist on leaving one by one with three minutes in between? Or can we leave together like normal people?”
When I think about hiking up the path close to Candace, heavy branches hanging over her fragile skull, my brain fills with horrified nope. But she thinks that if I avoid people because of my bite, I believe the same superstitions as the jerks who ostracized her.
I swallow. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”
When we break onto the grass that fringes the basketball courts, Candace spreads her arms like, Where’s the sudden death?
But I can’t reason away my low-grade panic, lungs tight and face numb.
I text Griffin, Okay yeah. When my phone buzzes seconds later, the unexpected vibration nearly sends my skeleton out of my skin.
Candace glances at me. “Griff?”
It is Griffin: Okay yeah what?
I thought it was clear from context, I text with shaky thumbs. Okay yeah I’ll go to the formal with you.
He replies quickly. It was clear, I just wanted it in writing.
“The dance is a go,” I tell Candace.
Griffin texts again: Want a corsage?
I don’t like flowers.
You don’t like flowers, you don’t like dancing. What do you like? Seconds later: The correct answer is: you, I like you, Griffin.
“Lots of texts, just to confirm a date,” Candace says.
I slide my phone into my pocket. “Are you still mad at him? For, you know, not helping? Or maybe helping the wrong way.”
Candace looks around. There’s no one in earshot, though on the campus loop, a half dozen more runners are jogging. “I’m not sure what the stepdad would have told him, but he must have guessed something, and he never said a word.”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” I say. “If someone offered to help my dad, but only my dad…it would be hard to say no.”
Candace’s expression goes bleak. “I know it happened because my family loves me. Or Mom and Griff love me, and the stepdad loves them. That makes it harder to live with.”
I don’t have any words to comfort her. We set off toward campus in silence.