“Okay, now get going. Your princess is on her way to a ball without her Prince Charming.”
“I’m on it.” I stand and get my bag, then quickly start toward the exit.
Dylan calls to me, “Will, what are you doing? Everyone needs to sit in their assigned seats.”
I turn back. “I’m not changing seats. I’m getting off the plane. There’s something I have to do that can’t wait.”
“No,” she says in a stern tone. “You have to stay on the flight. Filming starts now.”
“Sorry, Dylan. I’ll be there in time for the actual competition, I promise.”
“But I need to have footage of you on the plane with everybody else,” she says, squeezing her way around some of the other people so she’s now standing in front of me.
I put my hands on her shoulders and smile down at her. “You of all people can spin this into something amazing. I will see you in a couple of days.” With that, I pivot and press on down the aisle as fast as I can.
34
Octogenarians Showing Too Much Cleavage…
Arabella
“Which one doyou think is sexier?” Gran asks, standing in her slip, holding up two dresses—one of them a sparkly black and the other a royal blue with a plunging neckline (which I’m not convinced is meant for an octogenarian, but I’m not going to tell her that). “The black is very sparkly. I quite love it.”
“You just don’t want to see me with the plunging neckline,” Gran says. “But I’ll have you know, my cleavage is quite youthful. At least, that’s what the men say.”
“Brilliant.” I sit down on the tufted bench in her dressing room while she disappears behind the screen. “You’re going with the blue one, aren’t you?”
“But don’t take it as an insult, dear,” she says. “It’s not your fault that you’ve gone back to being completely dull. Old habits are hard to break and all that.”
“I havenotgone back to being boring,” I say, then glance down only to realize that my beige shoe is poking out from under my dress. I quickly tuck my feet under the bench to hide them. “I’ve just gotten very busy doing extremely important things.”
“If it makes you feel better, just continue to tell yourself that.” Gran appears from behind the screen, wearing the blue dress of course. Good God, that’s a lot of old lady cleavage. She turns and points to her back. “Zip me up.”
I stand and do as she asked, a sense of utter doom coming over me as I realize this is going to be it for me for the rest of my life—or even worse, only for the rest of hers.
She turns and stares at me for a second, then shakes her head in disgust. “Christ, you’re miserable.”
“I am not. I just have a lot on my mind, but I’m really quite happy.”
“Whatever for?” she asks. “If I had your life, I would be utterly despondent.”
“Thanks for that,” I say.
“Ridiculous,” she says, walking over to her wall of cubbies and selecting a gold clutch. “Here you arein your primeacting like an old lady—one without any imagination or adventure in her bones whatsoever.”
“That’s not true. You’re the one that told me to hear my own voice, and my voice told me that I was better off on my own than with someone who was going to treat me like a child.”
“That wasn’t your voice. That was your fear talking,” she says, “What I was hoping you’d get from my speech that day was that you need to listen to your heart, your gut,andyour brain.”
“Well, you could’ve bloody well said that,” I snap. “I’ve gone and dumped my one shot at any type of excitement in this life because I thought I was meant to be doing the sensible thing.”
“I never once said to be sensible,” she says quickly. “In fact, I’ve been trying to tell you the exact opposite for years now, only you’re too frightened to try.”
“That’s not true. Look at my speech at the UN. That was quite the departure from proper decorum, and it worked too,” I say. “Because the new slogan is ‘Unstoppable. United. Uplifting.’”
“I quite like that,” Gran says with a nod of approval. She walks over to her dressing table, where a large velvet box waits for her. Opening it, she picks up a pearl and diamond necklace and holds it up to me. “Be a dear and help me get this on. My date will be here soon.”
“Your date?” I ask.
