Chapter 24 1964
“Flitter!”
I lean over the edge of the pool, stretch out a desperate hand toward the red dress. Then there’s a splash—Theo’s thrown off his leather jacket and his shoes and dove in. He scrapes up Flitter, then wades over to the steps with her.
She’s completely limp. Burned up? Dead?
How can she be dead? She’s Flitter, the life of every slumber party.
“Call a doctor,” Theo barks. Yes, the doctor will fix Flitter. He fixes everyone.
I sprint over to the poolside telephone and once I know Doctor Foster is on his way, I push through the staring, whispering crowd. Nobody is helping Flitter and Theo. He’s the only one checking her pulse.
Then a miracle happens. Flitter’s head lifts. Her red-lipsticked mouth curves into a smile. Her hand waves.
She winks.
“How’s that for a knockout audition, Matty? See, I can be any part a movie needs me to be. It was just special-effects fire. But thank you, my Prince Charming.” She kisses Theo full on the mouth.
Everyone applauds. What an idea for an audition! they say. She’ll get the part. Look, she’s in Win’s arms. Maybe the fortune-teller was right.
I can’t breathe. My whole body is shaking. I try to suck in air, try to quell panic and adrenaline. But it won’t be calmed, just like the memory of fire can never be stamped out.
“How could you?” I scream at my friend. “I thought you were burned and dead like my parents!”
Everyone’s eyes turn to me, ranting by the poolside. I advance on Flitter, my hands still visibly trembling, wanting to reach out and shake her, but she stops me dead by saying, “Take it easy. It was a prank.”
Take it easy?
I turn and run. Away from the pool. Away from Flitter kissing Theo, who should have thrown her back in the pool and let her drown in her own charade. Away from the recurring vision of my mother’s white pumps melting in murderous blue flames.
I run up to the turret and shove my journals into my suitcase along with a photo of my parents. I take the money out of War and Peace and put it in an envelope addressed to Doctor Foster, along with a note saying, For Miss Devine Rey’s rehab. I keep two hundred dollars for myself.
I’m leaving. What could possibly happen to me out there that’s worse than what happens in here?
Fires and games and people dying, but not really; starlets and auditions and the relentless ambition to film another made-up story that will stop us from thinking about the real lives we all have to live.
“Aria?”
I gasp, hand flying to my heart, a cliche that fits in so well tonight.
Theo, face inscrutable, is dripping water onto the floor and staring at my suitcase. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere far from here,” I shout at the man who jumped into the pool to save a woman who’s beyond saving. “I hate this place. I hate Bob and Matty and Flitter and even Calliope. I hate the screams in the night and the bungalows and that damn wind out there. God, I hate that wind.”
The rant that’s been sitting inside me since the first night here when I yelled at my aunt pours out. It feels like the whole world is shaking, like the turret is quivering with all the rage I can’t let out by screaming through the window and into the night.
Laughter, lawless and wild, rises up from the party that the Queen of Fortune had been ruling over until Hollywood reminded everyone that it is king of us all. We’re just chessboard pieces—and pawns can become queens and then they can die.
My god, of everyone, Flitter’s been the one who’s never given in to the games. But now, even she has.
The floorboards creak under my feet like a sad little voice saying that maybe seven years of forgettable roles have tarnished her dream too. I step forward, shut the voice out.
But it’s taken away my anger. Left me with tears.
I lean my hands on the desk, try to breathe.
Drip, drip, drip. Water falls onto the floor from Theo’s clothes.
“You need to change,” I tell him. I want him gone. “You’ll catch cold.”
“If I go downstairs, I’m worried you won’t be here when I get back.”
“Why?” I’m through with not understanding everything, had enough of plunging from doubt to hope and back again over this man standing in front of me.
“Who cares where Aria Jones is? Aria, the name everyone here knows, but no one ever thinks about unless I’m getting in their way or rescuing them.
In a world that doesn’t care who it burns, I’m just the one waiting around with the water.
I don’t have a face worth a damn, but I have a heart, and I’d rather have that even if nobody ever looks at it. But right now…”
I blink and whisper, “My heart is so damn tired of everything.”
The floorboards shift again. Theo takes his chance to get away from the madwoman in the turret. But no—he’s walking toward me, rather than away.
He stops just two inches from my body.
“Aria?”
I lift my head up very slowly.
“You’re not just the one waiting around with the water,” he says and his voice is whiskey-fire, the kind that makes your insides yearn.
“You’re the one eating grilled cheese with your eyes closed like it was Beluga caviar.
You’re the one who would have taken Adele under your wing anyway, even if I’d said you couldn’t be her tutor.
You’re the one who wears your heart in your eyes.
” He pauses. “In your beautiful green eyes.”
His finger reaches out to touch the circle of skin beneath my chin and I jump.
If that’s what it feels like to have Theo Winchester touch an ordinary, unerotic part of my body, then I don’t think I can ever again think about his eyelashes sweeping over my inner thigh.
Because right now, I’m standing on the edge of that world my encyclopedias told me existed—the one where it’s possible to feel so much that you could spontaneously combust.