"After the Ball"
is a short story set in Beau Rivage, a city where fairy tales come to life, and
ancient stories are played out again and again.
Art by Oona
Pohjolainen.
Midnight arrived, on the third and
final night of the ball, and Dusty’s enchanted gown started shedding flowers.
Flowers fell from her dress as she
ran down the hotel staircase. She lost one of her golden shoes, but didn’t go
back for it, because the prince was behind her, yelling “Wait!” in that
desperate, confused way that didn’t sound like him at all. The golden strands
of her hair were reverting to their natural black, and as she ducked into the
waiting limo, she covered her head with her hands, as if she could hold on to
her disguise.
The flowers trailed her all the way
to her bedroom in the attic, where she curled up on the floor, panic racing
through her. What had she done? How had this happened?
The prince wasn’t supposed to have feelings for her. It was too fast, they
were too different, he wasn’t her type.
And maybe that had felt less true
while they were together . . . but that was the magic, making everything seem
special. She’d been caught up in the moment. They both had.
The dolls from her dead mother’s
doll collection regarded her with their cold, plastic eyes. Kewpies and Barbies
and American Girl dolls. Hearty porcelain toddlers in faux-velvet coats. Dusty
let her gaze move from one doll to another, to the cardboard boxes stacked in
the shadows, and the dingy clothesline that served as her closet. The familiar
decrepitude of the attic made those three nights at the ball seem like they’d
happened to someone else.
She was hidden now, safe. She didn’t
have to face him, or decide anything.
Dusty turned the gold shoe over in
her hand, idly brushing dirt from the sole, and froze when she saw the message
her fairy godmother had written there:
IF
FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO 1697 AZURE TERRACE, BEAU RIVAGE.
Her address: better than
breadcrumbs.
Dusty gripped the shoe until the
metal edges bruised her fingers.
There had been strings attached to
those gorgeous gowns, the slippers of glass and gold. The fairy had been
playing with Dusty and the prince like they were dolls—and now she planned to
mash them together in her vision of wedded bliss.
No,
Dusty thought. You do not get to decide
this.
Eventually, Dusty’s stepmother and
two stepsisters, Pixie and Fair, came home. Their voices carried up to her
through the floorboards: complaints about how tired they were, how the prince
hadn’t looked at anyone but the mystery girl, how it had been a waste to go to
the ball and not even get to talk to him. They made all the noises that went
along with discarding their formalwear and going to bed in bad moods. Bedroom
and closet doors slammed. Shoes were kicked off, expensive dresses flung onto
chairs. Dusty could picture it perfectly because she knew what kind of messes
they made—she was the one who always had to clean them up.
When the house phone rang a little
after 1:30 a.m., Dusty dashed for the extension and pried the phone out of its
cradle. She heard his voice—the first time she’d heard him on the phone.
“Is
it you?”
She didn’t answer. He waited a
moment, then said they needed to talk—he was coming over. “We can’t just leave things like this.”
He hung up, and she had the urge to
run, like she had the past three nights. But she couldn’t. Not now that he knew
where to find her. Destiny was backing her into a corner. She had to find
another way to disappear.
Dusty went to her stepsister Pixie’s
room and crawled onto the king-size bed. Her enormous, silk-and-flower dress
billowed over the edge, petals fluttering down like she was dragging a magical
spring forest behind her. Pixie was making little whistling noises. Sleeping
peacefully—until Dusty yanked the pillow out from under her head.
“Hey!” Pixie whined. “What is your
problem?”
Dusty was never the aggressor in
their relationship—normally, she kept her head down and kept quiet; just popped
the tabs on Pixie’s Diet Cokes so Pixie wouldn’t ruin her manicure, and ran up
or down stairs to fetch Pixie’s cell phone or whatever random thing Pixie was
too lazy to do herself.
Tonight was different.
“Get up,” Dusty said. There was a
hardness in her voice, an authority born of desperation, and Pixie didn’t
argue.
While Pixie struggled out from under
her covers, Dusty reached behind herself and awkwardly began to undo the tiny
hooks on her dress. The delicate gown had been impossibly strong at the
ball—but now the seams threatened to split each time she moved. The magic that
held the dress together was dying.
They didn’t have much time.
The prince didn’t know who Dusty
was; he just had her shoe. And he wouldn’t recognize her, not right away. He’d
seen her with gold hair, not black, and she’d been wearing a couture gown—there
would be a disconnect, when he saw her now. She could do this.
Pixie was rubbing makeup from the
corner of her eye when she finally noticed the dress. “You stole that dress. There’s—there’s no way you were there. No way
that was you.”
Dusty held out the gold shoe, and
tried to look calmer than she felt.
“Here’s your chance to be a
princess. Do you want it?”
* * *
In Beau Rivage, a princess didn’t
rule a kingdom. She wasn’t even the sort of princess who wore T-shirts that
said I am a princess. All girls are.
She was a princess in the fairy-tale sense, and there were dozens of them in
the city.
Princess
meant status, wealth, special treatment from fairies. Certain bloodlines were
considered royal, and Pixie wanted to be a Royal more than anything.
That was why Dusty went to her. Not
because Pixie deserved to get what she wanted, but because Dusty had a prince
to pawn off, and she knew Pixie would take him.
It would be the first helpful thing
her stepsister had ever done. Wickedness ran in Pixie’s family, just like blue
eyes and caramel-colored hair.
It was her stepsisters’ constant
harassment that had driven Dusty into the attic in the first place—just so she
could have some peace, and not be tortured every second. She’d started wearing
old, ugly clothes around the same time—clothes Pixie and Fair wouldn’t be
caught dead in—because if she owned anything nice, her stepsisters would ruin
it. She even let them call her Dusty
instead of her real name, because it satisfied their need to insult her, and
kept them from doing anything worse. So long as they thought she was miserable,
they mostly left her alone.
Dusty’s stepmom, on the other hand,
was never satisfied. When Dusty’s dad (whose charm had an expiration date)
started blowing money, disappearing for days at a time, and worse, Dusty’s
stepmom started taking it out on her: assigning new chores until Dusty barely
had time for anything else, and screaming at her every time she screwed up.
Her stepfamily didn’t want her
there. They said she was a leech—and Dusty felt like that was sort of true. She
was a mouth to feed—and a constant reminder of her dad’s bad behavior, since
she was there even when he wasn’t. So she did whatever her stepmom told her—and
only complained when there was no one around to hear.
From age twelve to twenty she lived
as a servant in her own home, and tried not to think about what she was
missing. But sometimes she was tempted by her destiny.
Beau Rivage was a city of curses, of
magic hidden in plain sight, in dark alleys and darker forests. And that magic
had come to Dusty when she was ten years old. A fairy had appeared, shortly
before her mother died, and marked her, cursed her and given her a destiny.
The mark—the sign of her Cinderella
curse—made Dusty’s skin itch late at night. When the world got quiet, when all
she heard were the creak of the house settling and the sighs that slipped from
her own throat, she wanted more. She wanted to be that princess her curse
promised she could be.
And she wanted to take her
stepsisters’ dreams, and crush them the way Pixie and Fair had crushed her.
There was a boy her stepsisters both
wanted. His name was Max, and he was a prince. He’d been a senior in high
school when Pixie was a freshman, Fair was an eighth grader, and Dusty was a
sixteen-year-old housekeeper who’d been forced to quit school by her stepmom.
Max had been a star athlete in high
school, was also rich, and hot, and had a tendency to get naked at parties as
soon as he was drunk. He’d gone to college out of state, and only came back
during summers and holidays, but Pixie and Fair continued to stalk him online.
They knew he’d come back eventually. All the Cursed came back.
Dusty had never met Max; she’d just
seen him in photos his friends posted, which Pixie and Fair collected: mostly
candid party shots, or blurry pics of Max jumping naked into a pool. There was
a photo of Max wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and a tinsel-covered Happy New Year crown that Pixie used as
her laptop wallpaper.
Dusty didn’t lust after him like her
stepsisters did—he seemed like kind of an idiot. But she could recognize that
he was also a prize. And it was no secret that he had a Prince Charming
curse—he’d been naked in public often enough for everyone to know about the mark on his back.
So when Prince hot idiot’s family
threw a three-day fancy dress ball to celebrate his college graduation, Dusty
made up her mind to go. But first, she needed a dress.
* * *
On the first night of the ball,
Dusty had waited until her stepmother and stepsisters left, then went out to
visit the hazel tree in the backyard.
The hazel tree was supposed to be
magic. It was one of the fairy-tale conventions—part of the Cinderella
curse—that if Dusty ever really needed something, all she had to do was go to
the tree and ask for it, and her mother’s spirit would find a way to give it to
her. But she’d never tested it until that night.
Standing before the hazel tree,
Dusty tried to remember the words from the fairy tale.
“Shake and shiver, little tree . . .
throw gold and silver down to me?”
She squinted up at the branches,
half expecting a blocky silver shoe to tumble down and hit her in the face. But
nothing happened. The little bird helpers who were supposed to do her bidding
weren’t there. She gave the branches a few hard shakes, and finally knelt down
in the dirt and thought about dead puppies until tears dripped from her eyes,
hoping some Cinderella-tears would jolt the tree into action.
Nothing.
Sighing, Dusty lay down in the dirt
and made a mental inventory of her stepsisters’ old prom dresses. As she was
trying to decide what to borrow—one of Pixie’s skintight shiny dresses, or one
of Fair’s Betsey Johnson cast-offs?—her fairy godmother appeared.
* * *
Fairies had different ways of
presenting themselves to the world. Some chose to go around in disguise, making
themselves look like old hags. Some liked to pass as normal humans. And some—like
Dusty’s fairy godmother, Lorelei, whom she’d only met once, when the fairy had
cursed her—went the all-out magical Barbie route.
Lorelei looked like a cross between
the Blue Fairy from Disney’s Pinocchio,
Marilyn Monroe circa Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
and the old Lady Lovely Locks dolls from Dusty’s mother’s doll collection. Her
voluptuous figure was encased in a body-hugging, powder blue satin dress; she
wore white, elbow-length gloves; and her flowing, platinum blond hair was
decorated with pastel-colored woodland creatures: squirrels and lizards and
birds in every marshmallow color of the rainbow, who clung to the fairy’s blond
locks like living barrettes.
“You look so precious in those
rags!” the fairy exclaimed. “Such a charming urchin!”
Dusty pushed herself up so she was
no longer lying on the ground. In her bleach-stained T-shirt and ripped jeans,
she did look a little like an urchin. She hadn’t combed her hair in two days.
“I just want a dress,” she said. She
felt crushable and small next to the fairy, even though they were the same
size. “And maybe some shoes.”
“But of course,” the fairy said. “A
dress and shoes—that’s the bare minimum!”
As Lorelei waltzed closer, her glass
wand tick-tocking back and forth, Dusty felt a strange tingling on her skin.
Her clothes began to transform, cotton stretching like taffy, faded denim
spilling down her legs as lustrous white silk.
Dusty put her hand on the hazel tree
to steady herself. Her clothes were changing shape, too—billowing in some
places, cinching in others—and as the bodice of the new dress squeezed the
breath from her lungs, she fainted.
The fairy caught her before she hit
the ground.
When Dusty came to, a web of gold
embroidery draped her body, hanging like a second skin over a dress of
shimmering white silk. Her shoes were white silk trimmed in gold.
Dusty’s black hair had changed as
well. Before, it had reached her shoulders; now it hung to her waist in shiny
golden locks, and it had the same metallic sheen as the dress. She tugged on
her hair, expecting it to feel like tinsel and to come away in her hand—but it
was part of her.
“What—what did you do?” she asked.
When she blinked, newly long eyelashes smacked her cheeks. And there was a
scent coming off her—a scent she had first thought was the fairy’s—but no, it
was wafting from her skin: a perfume that reminded her of honey and fresh,
buttery cake.
Tears glistened in the fairy’s eyes.
“You’re going to make such beautiful babies! Now run along. There’s a limo
waiting out front. You don’t want to be late!”
Dusty had thought the fairy was
joking about the baby stuff. But no—she meant to play matchmaker.
And she lived for “happy” endings.
* * *
That first night, Dusty had just
wanted to go to a party. To dance, have fun, be noticed.
Now,
she wanted to reverse all that.
Pixie stared warily at the golden
shoe. Her hair was mashed against her face on one side. “I can’t believe you’re
the girl he couldn’t get enough of. You’re so”—she scrunched her nose—“ugly.”
Dusty tossed the shoe at her. “See
if you can get your foot in there.”
“I don’t understand you,” Pixie
muttered, trying to work her foot into the unforgiving shoe. The gold didn’t
bend or stretch; you had to fit into it exactly. “I thought you—no, correction:
I thought the glamorous princess you were
pretending to be liked him. You seemed
to like him enough when you were making out with him.”
“Yeah, well, that was then,” Dusty
said, struggling to undo the rest of the hooks on her dress. “We’re not
compatible.”
When she finally got the dress off,
only ripping the silk in a few places, Dusty gathered the gown in her arms and
dumped it on the bed next to Pixie. “Put this on,” she said. “If he sees you in
the dress, he might not care about the shoe. But hurry up. He’ll be here any minute.”
While Pixie wrestled with the
flower-shedding gown, Dusty threw on a pair of Pixie’s jeans and a college
sweatshirt Pixie had stolen from an old boyfriend. Then she headed downstairs
to find a roll of duct tape, some scissors, and a stick of butter—maybe they
could butter Pixie into the shoe. She was snipping off little pieces of duct
tape to repair the torn dress when there was a knock at the door.
Dusty froze. Her heart rose up from
its normally peaceful spot in her chest and thumped between her ears. The knock
came again, and this time she hurried to answer it, a strip of silver duct tape
stuck to each finger on her left hand.
When she flung open the door, he was
there.
Max. Her prince.
He was standing on the porch, still
in the tux he’d worn at the ball, but it was rumpled and so was his dark brown
hair—like he hadn’t bothered to comb it after she’d run her fingers through it.
Don’t
think about that, she told herself. It
was a fling—that’s all.
Max was holding her missing gold
high heel in his left hand. His fingers curved around it protectively, like it
was a football or a baby kitten. He raised his eyebrows in that charming way
the other girls liked so much.
“I’m looking for the owner of this
shoe,” he said. “Is she here?”
Dusty ran her hands over her
no-longer-golden hair, casually brushing away any dust from the attic. She
needed to look like the wicked stepsister now, not the poor unfortunate urchin.
“I don’t think anyone here owns a
shoe like that. But . . . maybe I could try it on?” She gave him her best
impression of one of Fair’s flirty looks—even more inept than Pixie’s,
guaranteed to turn him off. She propped the door open wider and winked.
“Please?”
“Uh . . . all right,” he said,
stepping inside. “But I’m looking for someone a little more . . .”
She watched his face while he
hesitated, wondering what he was trying not to say. Gorgeous? Not that it mattered.
“Just let me try,” she said. He gave
her the shoe, and she made a big show of trying to cram her foot into it,
grunting with annoyance when she failed.
Max gazed at the wide staircase that
led to the second floor. There were flower petals scattered on the steps.
“There must be someone else here,” he said. “Not that you’re not . . .” He
coughed. “It’s just that . . . I spent a lot of time with her. The girl who
wore this shoe. So I’m pretty sure I’d know if it was you.”
“It was worth a try,” Dusty said,
flipping her hair over her shoulder, Pixie-style.
“So . . . is there anyone else?”
“There’s my little sister, but she
was with me the whole night, and I know she
wasn’t wearing gold shoes. We were both there.” She put on her flirt face
again. “I don’t know if you saw us.”
“No, I don’t think I did . . .
sorry.”
Dusty sighed. “If you want to get
technical, there is one other girl
who lives here. But she didn’t go to the ball. Our mom wouldn’t let her. She’s
dirty and she dresses in rags. I can get my little sister if you want,” she
said quickly. “She’s really cute. Like me.” She angled her body toward him. Max
took a step back.
“Uh—you said there’s another girl
here? Someone less fortunate? A . . . Cinderella type?”
“Well . . . she does clean our house
and cook for us. But she didn’t have time to go to the ball. She was here,
picking lentils out of the ashes.”
Sorting lentils—that was so
old-school Cinderella. Maybe that was pushing it.
“Lentils? Really?” Light came into
his eyes. Light, and confusion. “Could I talk to her?”
Dusty shrugged. “I guess.”
Please
let this work, she thought. Please
let this work . . .
* * *
The first night of the ball, it had
taken a while to get his attention. Dusty had glided in, expecting to catch
every eye as soon as she entered the room, like Cinderella did in the movies.
Hell, like any gorgeously transformed heroine did in the movies.
But people were distracted, busy
talking, drinking, dancing—it wasn’t like all eyes were on the door, or like
she was a real princess who got announced when she arrived.
But when the other guests saw
her—when they finally noticed, turning toward her one section of the ballroom
at a time, they looked at her in a breathless, astonished way. She was
fairy-tale beautiful in an enchanted gown, too delicate to last, and her hair
shimmered like real gold under the light from the chandeliers. Once people
could breathe again they breathed her in, and her perfume enchanted them anew.
It was pretty magical, and she
almost would have been happy to go home right then. But she wanted to dance in
the arms of the boy her stepsisters fawned over—and she wanted them to see this
perfect creature dancing with him, and be painfully aware that it wasn’t either
of them.
When Max finally saw her, he
interrupted the conversation he was having, handed his drink to a friend, and
made his way over to ask her to dance. She felt like she was a movie in slow
motion. Everyone was watching, and everything felt frozen before it
happened—but she wasn’t worried, or scared. When his fingers twined with hers
and he guided her onto the dance floor, her skin tingled with the same feeling
the fairy’s magic had given her.
They danced together for two
dances—two songs she couldn’t remember now—before slipping away to get to know
each other better. And all the things she learned about Max could fit into a
man-shaped box. She’d kept her identity a secret, and they’d kept the talking
to a minimum.
So . . . if he was in love with her,
it wasn’t like he loved anything real. She just hoped he didn’t know her body
well enough to know that Pixie was a different girl.
* * *
When they reached Pixie’s bedroom,
Dusty held her finger to her lips to mime shhh,
then held up another finger to say wait.
Max nodded, and she stepped into the room and shut the door behind her.
Pixie had managed to get into the
dress, and to fasten most of the tiny hooks—but she was lying facedown on the
floor, and a pool of blood had spread out on the carpet beneath her foot.
Dusty clapped a hand to her mouth to
stifle a scream. She moved closer—and almost blacked out when she saw the
butcher knife sticky with blood. Red spatter marked the path between the knife
and where the severed toe had ended up, a few feet away.
Pixie had cut off her big toe to fit
into the shoe. Just like in the Grimm’s fairy tale.
The taste of vomit surged in Dusty’s
throat, and she had to look away to get control of herself.
The prince gave a light tap on the
door.
“Just a minute,” she said. She
needed to hurry. If Fair or her stepmother woke up and found Max in the hall,
they’d ruin this out of pure stupidity.
She grabbed Pixie under the arms and
hoisted her up, dragging her backward toward the bed and streaking bright red
blood in their wake. She dumped her onto the bed and tried to stop the bleeding
by holding a wadded sheet around Pixie’s toes, but the blood just kept coming
until the sheet was soaked, and it was impossible to tell if she was helping.
Pixie’s injured foot was also greasy-looking and smelled like freesia. She must
have rubbed lotion all over it, trying to get it into the shoe.
Dusty gave her stepsister’s cheek a
light slap—she didn’t want to hurt her. “Pix!” she hissed. “Wake up! You’re
almost there!” She honestly didn’t know if the missing toe would do the trick.
An open wound against the hard metal interior of the shoe? The pain would be
excruciating. They might squeeze Pixie into the shoe only to have her pass out
again.
Maybe it was best to try to get her
into the gold shoe now—while she was still unconscious.
Dusty found the shoe—slippery and
smelling of flowers—and swallowed the urge to throw up. Her vision was going
black around the edges and her head felt too light, but she sat down next to
her stepsister, seized her bloody foot by the heel, and then . . .
She forced it into the shoe. It was
a little like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, but she made it
fit—and it did, just barely. Pixie’s damaged foot was now tightly encased in
the shoe, the skin mottled with blushing blood smears, pressed red and then
dead white where the metal sides of the shoe met her skin. Dusty did her best
to wipe the skin clean. The part that was visible, anyway.
“Wake up, Pix,” she whispered,
nudging her stepsister. “You’re wearing the shoe. We’re good. Wake up, wake up,
wake up.”
Pixie’s eyelids fluttered open. She
looked blank and sick from the pain. “Celeste,” she said, using Dusty’s real
name. “I . . . I . . .”
“It was stupid, but it worked,”
Dusty said quickly. “Just . . . take deep breaths. I’m going to . . . uh, clean
up the mess and then let him in. Just breathe.”
There came another tapping at the
door. Maybe there had been more, and she’d missed them. She didn’t deal well
with severed appendages. Severed anything.
Dusty ripped huge armfuls of Pixie’s
clothes from the closet and scattered them over the carpet, hoping to hide the
blood. Then she balled up the stained sheets and stuffed them in the back of
the closet. It wasn’t perfect—there was no way they’d get Pixie’s other foot
into the shoe Max had brought—but it would have to be enough.
Dusty opened the door, and this time
she didn’t have the flirty expression on her face. She could barely manage a
smile.
“You were right,” she whispered as
she ushered him in. “I was wrong. I found her like this.”
“I was right?” He fingered the shoe.
He was sweating a little. He looked nervous. And then he stepped into the room
and his nostrils twitched.
“It smells like blood in here,” he
said.
“It’s freesia. Body lotion.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I can
smell that flower scent, but it smells like blood, too. Can’t you smell it?”
“It’s cheap body lotion. She’s an urchin, remember?”
Dusty turned away from him, heart
pounding, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. She was doing a bad job of
hiding—of pretending to be someone other than herself—and though she’d turned
on the charm and sexiness at the ball, and the dress had definitely helped, she
was afraid he would somehow see through to the real her, and recognize her,
even with the black hair and borrowed clothes, and she didn’t know what to do
if he did.
Max went to shove some of the
scattered clothes out of the way, and Dusty grabbed his arm to stop him. “You
can walk on them. They’re just rags.”
“They don’t look like rags.”
“Well, they are,” she insisted, clutching his arm more tightly and steering him
toward the bed.
Pixie was lying on her back, panting
a little, but she looked deliriously happy when she saw Max hovering over her.
“You came,” she said. In the low light, her caramel-colored hair could almost
pass for gold. Her voice was sweeter and more romantic than Dusty’s, but maybe
he wouldn’t notice. Most of their conversations had taken place with loud music
in the background. Mostly she’d breathed his name and whispered things like kiss me.
Dusty bit her thumb, tasted Pixie’s
blood on her nail, and clasped her hands behind her back. Then she decided to
make herself useful, and pulled the long skirt of the couture gown above
Pixie’s ankles, so Max could see the gold shoe lodged firmly on her foot.
“You were right,” Dusty said again,
feeling ill that she’d started this. She’d never meant for Pixie to do
something so extreme. “She must have snuck out and gone to the ball anyway.
I’ll have to double-check those lentils. She probably did a crappy job sorting
them.”
“I love you,” Pixie gasped, the look
of happiness lingering on her face before her eyes rolled back in her head and
she passed out again.
Dusty adjusted the gown so it
covered Pixie’s feet. She couldn’t be sure more blood wouldn’t start leaking
out.
Max sighed. He sank down on the bed
next to Pixie, the gold shoe still cupped in his hand. “I don’t know what’s
going on.”
“It’s freesia,” Dusty said.
“Not the freesia. This is all wrong.
That’s not her. It’s her dress, and her shoe, but . . . it’s not her.”
“Maybe she had a fairy godmother,”
Dusty said. “She couldn’t have afforded that dress on her own. Maybe the fairy
godmother improved her looks a little. Maybe she was hotter at the ball. And it
faded after midnight. Are you saying you only liked her for her looks? Because
if so, that reflects pretty badly on you. That makes you more like . . . Prince
Jerk than Prince Charming.”
“It’s not her looks. They’re
different, but . . . all of her is different. She said I love you.”
“I guess she loves you.”
“She doesn’t. When I said it to
her—tonight, at the ball . . . she ran away.”
Dusty swallowed. That much was true.
“Maybe she changed her mind.”
“Did she?”
She hadn’t. She hadn’t loved anyone
since her mother died. She wasn’t going to start now, after knowing him for
three days, no matter how good she felt when she was with him. She’d seen too
many embarrassing pictures of Max. She’d made up her mind about who he was
years ago . . . and the connection she felt, the chemistry . . . it didn’t make
sense and it wouldn’t—couldn’t—last.
Max was watching her carefully, like
he’d seen a flicker of someone else and was trying to confirm.
“When I told her,” he said, “she
looked like she was going to throw up. Kind of how you look now.”
“I’m sure she didn’t look like
that,” Dusty said. “Maybe it was almost midnight.”
Max glanced at Pixie again,
unconvinced. “That’s not her.”
* * *
On the second night of the ball,
when Dusty had believed she could disappear from his life forever, she’d wanted
to see Max one more time. She could have stayed home and put an end to the affair
right then, but she’d felt like she was just getting started.
The fairy produced a second dress,
this one pale pink and dripping with pearls, and clear glass high heels that
Dusty was miraculously able to dance in.
Apparently Max’s parents had lectured
him about disappearing during his own party—they were angry that he’d vanished
the night before. So on the second night of the ball she and Max were good:
they danced for a long time, and he made the rounds with the mysterious
golden-haired girl at his side. And then halfway through the ball the two of
them disappeared into the game room of the hotel, and made out against the
pinball machine for fifteen minutes, everything buzzing and lighting up.
They played a round of air hockey to
cool off, then spent the rest of the night giving each other secret looks while
Max diligently played host.
Dusty played the mystery girl. When
anyone asked her name, she just smiled. And when Max swept her past Pixie and
Fair on the dance floor, she took a long, satisfied look at their angst-filled
eyes, leaned in, and kissed him—and felt the dual pleasure of both kissing Max
and trampling her stepsisters’ hearts. That was for all the names they’d called
her, all the tricks they’d played . . . all that and then some.
On the third night of the ball,
she’d craved seeing him again. There wouldn’t be a fourth night, so why not
enjoy a third? She wore the silk dress covered with fresh flowers, and the gold
heels, and even though her clothes were heavy, she moved as if they were made
of air.
They danced until eleven, drawing
imperceptibly closer with every turn on the dance floor, and then snuck away to
the privacy of the hotel bar, where she sat on his lap and they fed each other
cake with their fingers. She wouldn’t talk about herself, and he didn’t have
to—she knew about him, everyone knew about him.
When the cake was down to crumbs,
she leaned against him and said, “I feel sick.” But it was a contented kind of
sick. And he laughed oddly and said, “I wish you hadn’t said that.” And when
she asked why, he said, “Because it’s
not a good lead-in to what I’m about to tell you.”
He took her hand and said, “This is
going to sound crazy, but . . .”
* * *
I
love you.
He’d said more than that—tried to
explain it, to make sense of how he could feel that way after just a few days.
And she’d felt the sudden weight of their time together like so much cake. It
had been delicious while it lasted, the craving seemingly endless, until she
hit a point when she had to think about tomorrow, and she realized she should
have stopped sooner, maybe she didn’t like the flavor enough to risk this
dangerous, treacherous, too-sweet feeling that suddenly made no sense to her.
“I have to go,” she said.
The clock read 11:55; it was time to
leave anyway. She scrambled to her feet and he stared after her, as if in
shock. Then he gathered himself and said, “Wait!” And she took off running,
moving as swiftly in her golden shoes as she would have in bare feet, through
the hotel and out the door and down the staircase, shedding flowers as she
went.
On her way to the waiting limo, she
tripped over a sprinkler set into the lawn and one of the gold shoes popped off
like a bottle cap. She turned back to get it, but couldn’t find it in the dark;
and then she saw him, hurrying after her, wanting answers, and she raced to the
limo and threw herself inside, figuring: okay, she’d lost the shoe, but maybe
that was the way a Cinderella curse was bound to end, and it wasn’t like he
could search every house in the city to find her, the world wasn’t like that
anymore, she’d never see him again . . .
* * *
Dusty glanced sideways at Max, at
where he sat on Pixie’s bed, cupping the shoe, like maybe that was all that was
left of that night.
“I think you’re wrong about her,”
she said, nodding at Pixie. “About her not being the same girl. I think you
should give her a chance.”
“And why would I do that?” Max
asked.
Because
she loves you. Or thinks she does. Because she chopped off her toe and I don’t
know what to say to her if you leave without her. She searched for
something she could actually say, and came up empty. Nothing felt right.
“She’s not the person I’m in love
with,” Max said.
His eyes lingered on the parts of
her that remained the same—her eyes, her mouth. Dusty felt herself flushing, as
if she were back in the game room, watching herself. It wasn’t that she’d been
pretending, exactly. It was more like she’d let a part of herself out. A part
she didn’t know very well.
“Maybe you don’t know what love is,
if you feel it that fast,” she said.
“I’m a spontaneous person,” Max
said. “If I feel something, I don’t wait to be sure. I am sure.”
“I’m not spontaneous,” Dusty said,
not sure why she was admitting this. “But she is.” She motioned to Pixie.
“I don’t know. I think you’re pretty
spontaneous. I think you liked being that way, when you let yourself.” He
shifted closer. “Did you not think of me all those nights when you went home
afterward? Because I was thinking of you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking
about,” she said, playing with her black hair—very obviously, so he’d see the
color and be reminded: not her.
“Could you stop pretending to be
someone else?”
Frustration spilled out of her. “Why
does it matter? I was pretending at the ball. That’s not what I’m like. This is what I’m like.” She tugged at
her sweatshirt. “Except usually my clothes are uglier than this. And I’m
exhausted from cleaning the house, doing the laundry, whatever my stepmom wants
done.”
“Why don’t you just leave?”
“I don’t know.” She bit her thumb.
It didn’t taste like blood anymore—just faintly, chemically, of freesia. And
she did know. She just tried not to think about it.
“Because I’m scared,” she said.
She knew how to live like this. She
wasn’t happy about it, but she was used to it. There weren’t any fresh
disappointments this way. Just the same ones over and over. And she’d found
ways to cope with all of those.
“You didn’t strike me as the kind of
person who lets fear stop them from doing things,” he said.
“It was the dress. And the hair. The
fairy-godmother magic.”
But it was more than that. She’d
felt like that night—like all three nights—were owed to her. And it had
affected the way she behaved. She’d let herself be a different person, instead
of repressing everything she felt, letting her fears control who she was. But
that didn’t mean she’d stopped being afraid.
“Anyway, the shoe fits,” Dusty said,
drawing away from the bed, crossing her arms over her chest. “And she thinks
she loves you. She’ll probably worship you for the rest of her life if you guys
get married. And she’s cute. You could do worse.”
“Are you insane? You think I fall in
love too fast, but you want me to marry your sister, who I’ve never even talked
to?”
“My fairy godmother is a little aggressive,”
Dusty said. “I don’t think she’ll be satisfied if she doesn’t get a happy
ending out of someone.”
Right on cue—or maybe a little late,
considering Max already knew he hadn’t spent the past three nights dancing with
Pixie—a pair of doves appeared in the room. They were the color of wedding
mints: one pastel green, the other pastel pink.
“Coo, cooo, there’s blood in the
shoe,” they sang in unison.
Max paled. He turned toward Pixie’s
sleeping form. “Blood?”
“Dumb birds,” Dusty muttered. She
swatted at them, hoping they’d dissolve into air, the same way they’d formed.
Instead, the fairy appeared, still in her powder blue gown, an innocent smile
on her face. In one hand she held her glass wand. In the other she held the
bloody severed toe.
“Frightful!” the fairy exclaimed,
before tossing the toe to the birds, who began to peck and snap at it,
shredding the flesh with their beaks.
Max bent forward and buried his head
in one of the pillows. Dusty rubbed his back, worried about him.
“Was that necessary?” she asked the
fairy.
Lorelei shrugged.
“I have enjoyed these awkward
confessions,” the fairy said. “They were entertaining, for a while. But now
you’re supposed to reveal yourself in your full glory, and be happy that you’ve won the heart of such
a charming young man. And you are making a complete mess of it! One might say
you seem rather ungrateful. The other
girls are disfiguring themselves to have him, and you’re not interested? Who
are you to be uninterested? What an arrogant little wench!”
Dusty’s mouth fell open. “Are you
threatening me?”
The fairy laughed. “What would I
threaten you with, dear? What could be more pathetic than your life?”
Max pushed himself up off the
pillow. He looked like he was trying very hard not to look at either Pixie or
the flesh-eating doves. “Stop.” He held his hand out toward the fairy. “Please.
It’s not going to end the way you want it to.”
“I was so sure you’d be good
together,” Lorelei said. “You’re supposed to get married and live happily ever
after—the wedding is the best part! Ah, well. Might as well make the best of
it.”
The fairy stuck her fingers in her
mouth and whistled, and the doves rose into the air, hovering for a moment
before they swooped toward the bed.
Toward Pixie.
Too late, Dusty recalled what
happened at the end of some of the Cinderella fairy tales: at the wedding, the
birds pecked out the stepsisters’ eyes. And since there wouldn’t be a wedding . . .
Dusty dove across the bed, her body
slamming into her stepsister’s. The pink dove’s beak grazed her cheek, and she
felt a drop of blood slither down like a tear. Her fist smacked the other bird,
and it exploded away from her in a flurry of feathers. She stayed crouched over
Pixie, her fists clenched, not sure what to expect—and then abruptly, there was
silence. No wings. No fairy.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she
looked up.
It was Pixie. Her eyes had
opened—both of them—and neither one was stained with blood. “What happened?”
Pixie said. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing.” Dusty brushed a lock
of hair away from Pixie’s face. Her stepsister’s skin was hot, like she had a
fever. “Don’t worry about me. I’m going to get you some water.”
Dusty went into the bathroom and
filled a mug in the sink. Max came up behind her. Their eyes met in the mirror.
“God,” she said, the word falling
out like a sigh. “That fairy godmother. She was like an I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse godmother.”
“I guess she likes weddings.”
“I guess . . .”
“We should probably get your
stepsister to a hospital,” Max said.
“You’re right. She’s not exactly a
surgeon.” Dusty pushed her fingers through her hair. She felt so tired. And she
hadn’t even thought about how she was going to tell her stepmom.
Max wrapped his arms around her from
behind, and she leaned against him, her hair bunching up against his cheek. It
felt a little like it had when they’d been feeding each other cake in the bar,
not worrying about what happened next.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that so
soon,” he told her. “But you didn’t have to run away.”
“I did have to. It was almost
midnight. I was about to change back.”
“I wouldn’t have cared.”
“No? If your pretty princess fell
apart in front of you, you’d be okay with that?”
“I’m okay with her now.”
She didn’t smell like buttery cake
anymore. She smelled like dust, the old-book smell of the attic, laundry soap,
blood, and, beneath it all, her own skin—but he buried his face in her neck
anyway and breathed her in. Her messy, very unprincesslike hair was in his face
and he didn’t seem to mind.
She turned, and kissed him, and it
felt the same as it had at the ball. It didn’t matter what she was wearing,
what she looked like or how many stupid pictures he’d let people take of him—or
how different their lives had been. It was just what it was, and it felt right,
and she stopped trying to make sense of it.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Dusty found
herself dragging a laundry bag full of her belongings to the curb. Her
stepmother had kicked her out. The yelling, she’d expected. She’d even
anticipated the harpy shriek of “get out
get out get out!”—but she hadn’t expected her stepmother to be serious. Or
to show how serious she was by pelting Dusty with shoes, a wine glass, and a
pair of scissors in quick succession.
Her stepmother had given her five
minutes to pack her things. Dusty had run up to the attic, and stuffed everything
of value—material or sentimental—into a laundry bag: the enchanted gowns that
fell to rags when she touched them, loose pearls that had dropped off the pink
dress, a few of her mother’s old dolls, a photo album, and—for posterity—the
glass slippers. She never wanted to see the gold shoes again.
She dragged the bag onto the front
lawn just as the ambulance pulled up, and stood and watched while the
paramedics loaded Pixie into the back. She doubted it was the first time they’d
attended to this kind of emergency—Beau Rivage was filled with cursed girls:
mermaids with slashed tongues; stepsisters who were desperate to fit into
too-small slippers; girls whose feet were chopped off by axes, to save them
from dancing to death in red shoes.
But Dusty couldn’t help but feel
like a criminal when she noticed the crew checking her out, like they wondered
if she was the one whose foot fit the
shoe—the Cinderella who’d caused this disaster.
Dusty’s stepmother drove off after
the ambulance, shouting out the window that Dusty had better never show her
face there again. Fair stayed behind, standing guard in the doorway.
And when the ambulance was gone, and
Dusty’s stepmother’s car had disappeared, and Fair had locked her out, Max was
waiting for her, leaning against the silver Audi he’d parked across the street.
The doors were open, and as she dragged her bag across the road, he took it
from her and put it in the backseat. The moon was shining down on them, and the
neighbors who’d come out to observe the drama were lingering on their lawns, as
if trying to discern whether this was happily ever after.
Dusty turned her back on the
voyeurs. She brushed a fluff of dust from her sleeve.
“So,” Max began. “I have an idea. I
need a roommate. My apartment is too big. And I could get a dog . . .”
She raised her eyebrows.
“But I’m not really a dog person.
And since we already know we get along . . . I think you should move in.” He
dipped his head, his eyes saying please.
He was very endearing when he was nervous. There weren’t any pictures of him
like this in Pixie’s files.
Dusty climbed into the passenger’s
seat. “Now I’m a substitute for a dog? I think I liked it better when you were
just in love with me.”
“You had your chance to be happy
about that.” His grin—free and unself-conscious—made her glad to be in the car.
She wondered what his apartment
looked like. And what it would be like not to live in an attic, to be a regular
person who could wander into the kitchen in the morning and make herself a cup
of coffee without brewing some espresso concoction for her stepmom first.
The neighbors shuffled back into
their houses—disappointed, perhaps, that there hadn’t been an earth-shattering
kiss—and Max started the slow drive back to his apartment. One of his hands
rested between them, and she curled her fingers around it and held it. There
was no traffic in her neighborhood this time of night. Just the two of them,
the darkness, and the car—and the refuse of her old life in the back seat.
“Max,” she said, just to mess with
him, “what if I want a dog?”
“Then you can have a dog. But no
birds.”
“No birds,” she agreed.
It seemed like a good place to
start.
