Лорен Кейт - The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove

Mike whipped around.

“What did you take?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Whatever was in his pocket. I just stuck it in your jacket. I was cold. I forgot about it. I mean, I have your jacket right he—”

Before I could even unzip my backpack all the way, Mike had grabbed his jacket from it and was rummaging through the pockets. When he yanked out the little orange bottle, he looked at me wide-eyed.

“What?” I asked — as if playing dumb might undo my mistake.

Mike crouched under the blinking red light to examine the label.

“Trileptal,” he read slowly. “Indications: nerve-damage relief and seizure prevention. Take one pill every six hours.” He squinted to read the fine print. “Seek medical attention upon missed dosage.”

“I thought they were fun pills,” I stammered. “I thought he’d never miss them.”

Mike glared at me as he stuffed the suit jacket into his backpack. Then he thrust the pill bottle into my sweaty, shaky palm.

In a voice lower than I’d ever heard him use, he said, “Lose these.”

“ N at, I swear, if you don’t stay still, I’ll never get this eyelash on, and then you’ll be all lopsided.”

How did I get here?

I was seated on a wicker pedestal facing the bulb-lit bridal vanity. The peach-toned ladies locker room of the Scot’s Glen Golf and Country Club was full of my ladies-in-waiting from school. Amy Jane hovered to my right, waiting to glue the last in a box of twenty individual fake eyelashes to the outer corners of my eye. Jenny stood over me, her seven-gauge ceramic curling iron poised in the air. Behind us, the gaggle of underclassmen handmaids slung over giant floor pillows, buffing their nails and begging me with their liquid-lined eyes to be given a job to do.

This was what I’d been waiting for. But. .

It was Wednesday afternoon, just before the coronation ceremony for Palmetto Prince and Princess. By Tuesday morning, even before the vote, the whole school had known it was going to be a landslide, but since they’d left J.B.’s name on the ballot in memoriam, they waited until after the official day of mourning to announce our win. Even then, it wasn’t official until Principal Glass called us into his office yesterday to break the news with his killjoy bravado.

“Now just a quick acceptance speech from each of you tomorrow,” he said, his eyes looking past us like he was following a script. “Remember, the Ball is still ten days away, so kindly hold the party reins in until then. Tomorrow’s just a small, family-friendly affair.”

He cracked open a can of Coke and split it between three Styrofoam cups as if to drive home his crusade against substance abuse.

“To the Prince and Princess,” he said.

“Cheers,” I said, raising my cup and keeping my eyes on Principal Glass so I wouldn’t be able to tell if Mike’s hand shook.

“There,” Amy Jane now said, stepping back to view her masterpiece. She held a mirror up for me to see. “You’re fairer than a flower.”

“And deadlier than a snake.”

I spun around. The mirror tumbled out of my hand and shattered on the floor.

“Who said that?” I hissed.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Darla Duke penitently got to her knees and clasped her hands.

“I didn’t I just,” she stammered. “It’s just something my grandmother used to say: ‘Look like a flower, act like a snake,’ or something. It’s supposed to be a good thing.”

The words tumbled from her mouth. Lies. Lies. Lies. Useless shrugs and lies.

“It means you know how to get what you want,” she kept blathering.

“Well, I don’t have to tell you what my grandmother told me about broken mirrors,” Jenny butted in crisply. “Someone clean this up.”

I looked at Darla, keeping my voice low so it would stay even. “Yes, we don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

While Darla and three other Bambies jumped up to scoop up the shards of glass, Kate stood up and leaned in to me. We hadn’t spoken since Monday when she clued me in about Baxter.

“You okay?” she asked. “You seem a little—”

“Just nervous,” I said. “About the acceptance speech.”

“Of course,” she nodded — even though Kate had seen me destroy last year’s finalists in Palmetto debate tournaments. Public speaking was one of my strongest suits. It had to be: As Palmetto Princess, I’d be the official voice behind the mic at every pep rally and award ceremony for the next year.

As I watched Kate empathetically brush my hair in the mirror, I realized she would know I wasn’t nervous about the speech. She knew that I’d perfected my coronation speech as far back as this time last year, when Marc Wise and Sadie Hoagland took the crown. It was all memorized, from the pride-of-Charleston theme behind our campaign, right down to whom to thank and in what order. It wasn’t the speech that was wigging me out — it was the nightmare I’d had about this carriage ride.

“Oh,” Kate said, interrupting my thoughts. “Your mom swung by and brought this over.” She unsheathed a bright orange-matte tube of lipstick that my mom had been trying to get me to wear since she first put full makeup on me for the fourth-grade piano recital. It was the kind of color Mom could usually only get her corpses to agree to wear. I shuddered.

“That’s what I thought,” Kate said, whipping out a much less terrifying shade of shimmery pink. She showed me the name on the bottom of the tube. “See that?” she pointed. It was called Princess.

But when she dotted the lipstick around my mouth and held out the tissue for me to blot, all I could think about was the lipstick I’d put on J.B.

I went utterly cold.

The lipstick. The bound wrists. The pill bottle.

“The carriage!” the Bambies exclaimed from the corner. All of them dashed to the window. “The carriage is here! It’s outside!”

“Tell me you went with the vanilla-flavored massage oil I suggested,” Amy Jane said, coming up behind me to add a few more sprays of Aqua Net to my updo.

But there was no massage oil in the montage I was trying to stop from running through my mind. There were just J.B.’s blue lips in the carriage and the icy chill I’d felt when he’d closed his eyes in my dream.

There’s been a change of plans, he’d said.

I needed to get out to the real carriage to prove to myself it had only been a nightmare — or at least that part of it had only been a nightmare. I needed to get on top of Mike and take a break from my J.B. paranoia. But when I stood up, just when I needed to show strength, I teetered in my sling-back heels, then collapsed on the vanity chair.

“Jesus, Nat, you’re white as a ghost. More rouge!” Amy Jane called over for reinforcements. “What is it, honey? Talk to us.”

“I forgot to lose it,” I mumbled, thinking about the pills still tucked inside the inner pocket of my backpack. “Mike told me to lose it and I didn’t.”

“What’s she talking about?” Jenny whispered to Amy Jane. “I don’t get it.”

“Oh my God,” Amy Jane said. “Were you and Mike going to play ‘revirginized’ in the carriage? You guys are kinky.”

Before I could say anything to cover up my slip about the pills, my two ladies-in-waiting had helped me to my feet. Minutes later, they were guiding me out the door towards the carriage. I noticed Kate hung back.

“Listen, don’t freak out,” Jenny said, looking me in the eye. “You and Mike are the real deal. You don’t need to break any school records out there. Just be yourself,” she said.

Amy Jane slipped something into my hand. It was the same size and shape as the pill bottle, but when I looked down“ I knew you’d forget the massage oil,” she laughed. “I always carry extra.”