“Tripped you?” He frowns. “How?”
“Easy. By being you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Delightful, charming, wonderfulyou.”
“You forgot handsome and sexy.”
“Those two things go without saying.”
“Come with me.” He grabs my hand and starts pulling me from the dance floor.
“What? Where?”
“To the library,” he says over his shoulder, murmuring “Excuse me” as he plows a path through the crowd.
“What’s in the library?”
His grin is downright rakish. There’s that word again.
“Hopefully, nothing and no one,” he says in that low voice I’ve come to recognize from the bedroom. “That’s the whole damn point.”
Chapter Eighty-seven
______________________________________
Cash
You only live once. But if you do it right, once is enough.
Can’t remember who said that. Someone famous.
The quote comes back to me now as I stand in the crowd of Carnival revelers waiting for the Krewe of Iris to roll down the street. The people of New Orleans truly know how to live right. They truly know how tocelebratelife.
Sure, there’s the usual drunken debauchery going on around me. The eighty-year-old dude wearing nothing but a purple banana hammock, sipping a Hand Grenade, and prancing around like he’s on a European beach in the middle of summer instead of an American street in the middle of winter. The twentysomething guy not being too coy about pissing into the gutter on the corner. And the slurring girl beside me who confesses to her stumbling friends, “I’ve eaten Popeyes chicken five times this week. I need to take a long, hard look at my life.”
There’s the smell of beer and too many bodies pressed together. There’s the group of guys pushing a keg around in a shopping cart. And there’s a woman in a Marie Antoinette costume who can barely stand up, but she’s still imperiously yelling at passersby, “Let them eat king cake!”
A common saying in the Big Easy is thatwe don’t hide the crazy; we parade it down the streets.
But there’s also music and singing. Families have set up lawn chairs along the parade route and A-frame ladders so their little ones can climb up to see the bands and performers and floats from an optimal viewing perch. There are coolers packed with soft drinks and picnic dinners. People dancing with the uniformed police officers on duty. Shouts of hello and well wishes. And a general sense of being in the now and having as much good, wholesome fun as possible.
“Come on!” Maggie tugs at my elbow, shouting above the bacchanalian cacophony. “Eva and Jean-Pierre saved us a spot in front of the coffee shop!” She points up the block.
“I can’t take you seriously in that wig,” I tell her, fighting a grin.
She’s wearing a bright green beehive that’s a third as tall as she is. Her face is painted in a rainbow of colors. She’s already got a neck full of beads, and a few of them are battery powered and flash spastically, making her look sort of manic.
She touches the wig—the side of it since she can’t reach the top—and gives me a grin.
“You’re just jealous,” Luc tells me, looking as ridiculous as she does in an extra-tall top hat striped in purple, green, and gold. He’s paired that with an oversize purple sequined bow tie and green sequined suspenders. He has face paint, too, although his is more subdued than hers is.
There are a lot of things about New Orleanians that I get. But their fascination with costuming isn’t one of them.
“Here.” Maggie hands me a pair of sunglasses with lenses shaped like hearts. “Put these on.” The frames are covered in hot pink glitter with purple and pink feathers glued around the edges. In a word, absurd.
I stare at the sunglasses with a frown. “Number one, it’s night. Are we truly prepared to be the kind of assholes who wear sunglasses at night? Number two, isn’t it a big no-no to wear the throws of the krewe we’re going to see? Like sporting the T-shirt of the band whose concert you’re at?”
