Chapter Forty-Six Party-Ing Is Such Sweet Sorrow
Jude doesn’t move. In fact, I’m not sure he even breathes. Though, to be fair, I don’t think anyone else does, either. Even Jean-Luc, who seems as shocked as the rest of us that he actually managed to connect with Jude.
“What the—” Mozart starts, then freezes as Ms. Aguilar’s familiar trill suddenly fills the air around us.
“Yoo-hoo, Ember and Mozart! You really shouldn’t have your front door open in the middle of this storm.” A chartreuse umbrella pops through the open front door, followed closely by my English teacher in a matching coat.
“The rain will dama—” She breaks off mid-word, her bright-blue eyes going wide as she looks from Jude to Jean-Luc to me to Jean-Claude to Ember. “Oh my! What exactly is going on in here?”
“They were just leaving, Ms. Aguilar,” Mozart starts.
“Who particularly are you referring to?” she asks.
Jean-Claude gives his friends a cocky I’ve-got-this smile as he shakes out his hair and turns around to—I have no doubt—harass Ms. Aguilar yet again. Only this time she’s not all alone in front of her classroom. Because Mr. Danson, anger management instructor and hard-ass extraordinaire, walks in the door right behind her. And he looks as annoyed as she does bewildered.
“You want to tell me what the hell’s going on in here?” he barks as he, too, looks us over one by one.
“We were just—” Mozart starts, but he cuts her off.
“Having a storm party,” he fills in, his gruff, deep minotaur voice filling the room even though he hasn’t raised it at all. “Despite the fact that all of you are supposed to be in your rooms right now.”
“Technically, I’m—” Ember starts.
“Don’t push it, Collins. This may be your room, but that’s not exactly to your benefit right now.” He turns his eyes to the Jean-Jerks, two of whom are slowly sidling toward the corner where I dumped the tapestry earlier.
“Don’t think I don’t know that you’re here to cause trouble,” he rumbles. “Now get out.”
“We’re just here for the party,” Jean-Paul tries.
“Yeah, well, party’s over.” Danson’s eyebrows come together to make a very angry-looking caterpillar across his forehead as he jerks his head toward the door. “Move it.”
“Of course.” Jean-Claude takes over, trying what I know he thinks is a charming smile. Too bad he just ends up looking like a total jerk. “We just need to get—”
“Let me put it to you this way. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in here, but I know it’s not good. Which means I’m not leaving this room without the four of you. And since I’m leaving right now…” He cocks his head to the side. “I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this, right?”
“Yeah.” Jean-Claude mutters something beneath his breath that I don’t quite catch. Apparently, Mr. Danson does, though, because his eyes narrow dangerously—right before he crosses the room in a single bound and picks Jean-Claude up by the back of his T-shirt.
“Now means now,” he says as he frog-marches Jean-Claude out of the room—directly behind the other three Jean-Jerks, all of whom are now racing for the door. Apparently, Danson is one of the only people on the island they can’t buy, harass, or intimidate into doing what they want.
I have to say, it makes me like him more.
“Everyone else needs to leave, too,” Ms. Aguilar says in a sing-songy voice that I know she thinks is stern. “You’ve already missed curfew, and I’m supposed to write you up. But if you head back to your rooms now, I’ll pretend this didn’t happen.”
She turns and heads for the cottage’s small front porch, but not before she waves at me and whispers, “Hi, Clementine! Hi, Jude!”
I smile back—she’s so ridiculous that it’s impossible not to—and a quick glance at Jude out of the corner of my eye tells me he does, too. Or at least he gives her the tiny uptick at the corners of his mouth that’s the closest he gets to smiling.
I go to grab the tapestry from the corner, but Eva’s already got it. She shoots a meaningful look toward Jude—her way of telling me to stay and talk to him—before making a big deal of how tired she is and how she’s taking the tapestry back to our dorm.
Remy, Izzy, and Simon file out right behind her, then head off in different directions—Remy and Izzy to their cottages at the back of the senior section, and Simon straight across the center mall to his cottage.
Which leaves Jude and me staring at each other in silence—right up until Ms. Aguilar sticks her head back in the room and says, “Let’s go, you two. There will be plenty of time for you to stand around and stare at each other in the warehouse tomorrow.”
Embarrassment shoots through me at her words, and I all but dive for the door. Jude follows at a more sedate pace, while Mozart calls, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” after us.
Ms. Aguilar gives a nod of satisfaction, then turns away as I grab my poncho and head down the front steps. But I don’t even make it to the bottom stair before Jude rests a hand on my shoulder.
“Can I talk to you?” he asks, voice raised to be heard over the storm.
My heart starts pounding even as I freeze. “Of course!” I raise my voice as well as I wait for him to say something—anything—about what happened between us just a couple of hours ago.
But when I turn back toward him, his face is grim, and I can feel the fragile bubble of hope inside me burst. Even before he says, “I need you to give me that tapestry.”
I’m half expecting the words, and still they hit me harder than I expect—and harder than I want them to. But just because I’m reeling doesn’t mean I need to make it easy for him. Not when he’s done nothing to make any of this easy for me.
There are a million things I want to say to him right now, a million things I want to ask him, but as the wind whips around us, I start with the most basic. “Why?”
“What do you mean why?” He looks shocked by the question. “If you hold on to it, Jean-Luc and his crew are just going to keep coming for you. It paints a damn target on your back.”
“What do you care? It’s my back.”
His eyes go dark and swirly in that way they do when he’s really upset. Which is fine by me—it means he’s finally catching up.
“Look, Orangelo, this is no time to be stubborn. You need to let me have the tapestry.”
“And you need to tell me what’s going on, Penny Lane. Because your interest in that tapestry has to do with a lot more than keeping me off the Jean-Jerks’s radar.”
“The Jean who?”
“The Jean-Jerks,” I snarl. “It’s what I call them.”
He does smile then, his lips curving up into what would be a grimace on most people but what is definitely a smile for Jude. “Nice alliteration,” he says.
“Not-so-nice subject change,” I counter. “You know, you could stop playing games and just tell me what’s really going on here.”
“Do you think that’s what I’m doing? Playing games?” His face is as intense as the words themselves.
“I don’t know what to think!” I shoot back. “Because you won’t talk to me. About anything!”
“It’s not that easy!”
“Sure it is.” I’m not backing down this time to make him more comfortable, not easing off because I’m as worried about upsetting him as I am about the answers he has locked up. “You just take a deep breath, open your mouth, and let the words come out.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it. Shoves a frustrated hand through his hair, then opens his mouth again. And closes it again.
“Is it really that hard to be honest with me?” I ask after several seconds go by.
“Is it really that hard to trust me?” he counters.
Yes!I want to shout at him. Especially when I feel like I’m one betrayal away from shattering all over again.
But telling him that will only build the walls between us even higher. And it will just keep us at this impasse we seem to have reached, where neither of us is willing to give the other an inch.
So even though there’s a huge part of me that wants nothing more than to hurl a bunch of painful words at him so I can build that wall to protect myself, I bite them back. And extend a tiny, little olive branch instead.
“I know there’s something weird about the tapestry.”