79. Helena #2
“So!” Diana clapped her hands together. “We’re going to just have some girl time, if that’s cool with you. Do some girly things. Like face masks and makeup and hair and stuff. Classic slumber party stuff. That sound good?”
“Sure!”
After doing each other’s facemasks and chatting, Diana encouraged Helena to pick a movie to put on her laptop while Diana got to work in earnest on a tricky style.
Helena chose an old human romcom that Diana had never seen, and the two laughed at the campier moments and teared up at the sincere ones.
By the time the movie was finished, Diana had fully done Helena’s makeup, and completed what felt like a full construction project on the top of her head.
“Ready to take a look?” Diana asked.
Helena swallowed and nodded. She could tell that, even though it was just for fun, Diana had put genuine effort into her work. Helena was prepared to squeal and tell her how amazing it looked even if it looked awful—
Helena gasped as she saw herself in the mirror.
What had felt like a million different little side projects as Diana was working on them came together cohesively with beautiful detail in the finished style.
The bulk of Helena’s hair was piled high on her head in perfectly pinned curls, but small braids crisscrossed throughout.
Two perfect tendrils hung on either side of her face.
“Oh my gosh, Diana! This is stunning!” Helena turned her head from side to side in the mirror, admiring every angle. “It makes me wish I had someplace real to go with it.”
“I mean, I think Bertram thinks you’re going someplace real. But! If you wanna ditch him and have a girl’s night at Wild Thyme, I can totally make that happen.”
Helena laughed. “That would be fun, but I do think I owe it to Bertram to see what he’s got planned. It just feels like a shame to waste this hairdo! I look like a princess!”
“Or at least a lady in possession of good fortune.” Diana ducked outside the tent and returned with three hangers, which held three dresses. “Now you get to choose a dress!”
Helena regarded the three choices that were set before her. All of them had puffy sleeves with lace trim at the neck and high waists, as if they were out of a regency novel . . .
“Oh my gosh,” Helena said softly, “he didn’t.”
“I’m not supposed to confirm or deny any suspicions you may or may not have about the evening’s festivities. I’m simply here to help you get ready and then babysit Lovey. We’re gonna practice our night-flying! It’ll be great.”
Helena swallowed down the lump in her throat, beyond grateful for not only the romantic love she found herself gifted, but the platonic love as well.
When she emerged from her tent, she was wearing a pink dress with tiny roses around the waist, and Diana had finished her updo with matching rose pins throughout her hair, as well as a small tiara.
Bertram was waiting for her outside her tent, wearing a white button-down shirt and black slacks. He wore a yellow carnation in his pocket and one on a corsage that he extended to Helena.
“Bertram,” Helena said, because she didn’t know what else to say. She walked toward him and found that she was automatically extending her arm—he immediately took her hand, kissed it, and put the corsage around her wrist.
The campfire area of basecamp was decked out in streamers and twinkling lights and garlands of origami roses. A quote was taped to the side of the lab saying, “You have (literally) bewitched me body and soul.”
“It’s . . . it’s Prom and Prejudice,” Bertram said, somewhat bashfully.
Helena laughed, even as tears of appreciation and overwhelming joy pricked at her eyes. “Yes, I can tell!”
“I both hope that you haven’t spent ten years being haunted by missing prom, but also that you somehow still care just enough that this is, fun or meaningful or both or—”
Bertram was silenced by Helena grabbing him and kissing him for all she was worth.
He took her by the hand and led her into the lab.
“When did you have time to make all of these roses?!” Helena asked as she stepped into a near-exact recreation of how she had decorated their high school gym.
“You’re a really, really heavy sleeper,” Bertram reminded her.
Helena stopped by a table to pick up a chocolate covered strawberry, which she immediately ate.
Beside it were cookies in the shape of piano fortes and books.
In fact, every detail of the laboratory—from the quotes plastering the walls to the tea sandwiches piled high on the table—looked as if it had been plucked from her memory of planning a party she was too scared to attend.
“How did you even remember half this stuff?!” Helena asked. “I wouldn’t have remembered until I saw it!”
“I knew my mom still had our old yearbooks. She’s still in the Arctic, obviously, but her neighbor has a house key in case of emergencies, and she’s enough of a romantic to consider getting old yearbooks for reference photos to be an emergency.”
Helena was worried she was going to cry for real.
And then stopped worrying about it, because she was actually crying.
“Are you okay?” Bertram asked, brushing away one of her tears with his thumb.
Helena nodded as she sniffled. “I don’t want to—to . . . ruin the moment.”
“You’re not ruining anything. You can feel however you want to feel. I just—is it good crying or bad crying?”
Helena tried to come up with an articulate answer—the way that she felt dipped in pockets of emotion from “nostalgic” to “flattered” to “deep grief for a lost period of time” to “yearning for multiple bygone eras” to “delighted” to “amused” to “mourning” to “being overwhelmed by his kindness and love for her as demonstrated by immaculate attention to detail.”
It was only this latter emotion that seemed worth expressing, and since she couldn’t find the words to do it, she just kissed him again.
It didn’t stop her quiet tears, but it did make Bertram smile as broadly as she was now smiling, runny nose and all.
“You look beautiful,” he whispered in her ear as she leaned into him. “I think I was too stunned to say it, but you really do.”
“Diana did great work.”
Bertram shook his head. “Diana had nothing to do with it.”
Helena snorted. “No, sorry, I did not sit still for that long and deal with that many twists and pulls to have her artistry disregarded.”
Helena spun in a slow circle, furiously indicating her hair with both hands.
Bertram laughed. “You’re right, I’m sorry. Let me rephrase: Diana created great art on an utterly flawless canvas.”
Bertram kissed Helena’s cheek and she found herself strangely giddy and blushing.
Unlike actual prom, Bertram and Helena were grown adults who could do whatever the fuck they wanted, so they drank their wine undisguised in glasses rather than taking swigs of vodka from water bottles, which is what Bertram informed Helena he and his friends had done at actual Prom and Prejudice.
“It really wasn’t fun,” he said.
“The vodka or prom?” Helena asked.
“Any of it,” Bertram said. “All of it. You weren’t there. Nothing is as fun when you’re not there.”
Bertram had made enough tea sandwiches to constitute an actual meal when combined with the sides of fries and salad and the many, many desserts that a much younger Helena had designed.
Most of the evening they spent talking—reminiscing or laughing or planning which journals they should submit various papers to, because they were gathering enough long-term data on owl-bears that there was certainly going to be enough for multiple papers.
Sometimes, Bertram offered Helena his hand and pulled her to her feet for an awkward slow dance to some song or another that she hadn’t heard in nine years.
“Even the playlist is perfect,” Helena said. She rested her head on Bertram’s shoulder to a refrain of nasally whine-singing from someone who Helena thought was a poetic genius when she was a kid. “This is the best birthday ever.”
“Do you want to sneak out of here before the chaperones notice?” Bertram said, looking around to make sure they were evading the view of imaginary teachers.
Helena laughed. “I would love nothing more.”
They retreated to Bertram’s tent, where despite all of Helena’s pent-up tension, she and Bertram undressed each other slowly this time.
Partially because the zipper of Helena’s dress snagged at her lower back and it took Bertram a bit to figure out that it was caught on the inner lining of the dress and to try to untangle it from the mesh.
“You can just rip it off,” Helena said, referring to the zipper or the dress itself—she was fine, either way.
“No, no. I’m taking my time with you tonight.” He kissed his way down her spine and Helena shivered each time his lips made contact with her skin.
“Hurry up,” Helena said, panting.
Bertram shook his head. “I don’t think so. I seem to recall you behaving quite badly this morning. I think I’m owed at least a little payback, don’t you?”
Bertram wheeled Helena around to face him.
She smiled naughtily at him. “I suppose I was a bit of a bad girl. Are you going to spank me?”
“Spank you?” Bertram wrinkled his nose as if the concept was utterly ridiculous. “My dear Helena, that ravenous look in your eye tells me that spanking you wouldn’t be much of a punishment at all.”
Helena floundered. “Then—”
“I warned you by the lake this morning that I would make you regret it, didn’t I?” Bertram raised an eyebrow. “I believe a wise woman once told me that the best way to discourage bad behavior is to pay it no attention at all.”
Helena gasped in indignation. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, but I would.” Bertram smiled . . . and then turned away from Helena, glancing casually around the tent as if she weren’t even there.
Helena tried to wriggle out of the dress on her own, but the zipper was still stuck. When Bertram turned around, still silent, Helena was tragically still fully dressed. Bertram didn’t even reach for her.
“You’re—you’re trying to LRS me, aren’t you?!” Helena’s eyes shone with a potent mix of lust, fury, and amusement. “You can’t do that!”
“I think I just did.” Bertram smirked.