Page 11 of Her Rival

Brynn didn't miss much. Never had.

But she'd been wrong about one thing, I figured, drifting off. Some magazine writer wasn't a threat. A threat was a thing that could get inside, and I'd spent eight years making real sure nothing got inside.

Monday was going to be fine.

I really believed that, right up until it wasn't.

5

DANI

I didn't sleep. I'd known I wouldn't. Around two in the morning I gave up, lay on top of the blackout-dark guest bed in a stranger's glass palace, and let the thing I never let happen, happen.

I let myself remember the dance.

I'd gotten good, over the years, at not doing this. You can train yourself out of almost any memory if you're disciplined about it. You catch the first edge of it and refuse to follow, the way you'd refuse to follow a sound down into a basement. I'd been refusing this one for nine years. But there was something about lying awake in his city, a few miles from wherever he slept, that stripped the discipline right out of me. So I let it come. All of it. In order. The way it actually happened.

I was seventeen. October. The gym smelled like floor polish and the fog machine somebody's cousin had rented. I wore a green dress my mother had pressed for me that afternoon with the iron she kept hidden in the hall closet so my father wouldn't ask why we needed a new one. She'd pressed it careful. Told me I looked beautiful. She'd had a yellow shadow along her jaw she'd covered with the drugstore concealer we both pretended worked.

I'd asked Jettson Sturgill to homecoming three weeks earlier.

I could still see exactly how I did it. That was the part I couldn't forgive. Because I hadn't done it cruelly. If I'd done it cruelly he might have seen it coming. I did it sweet. Caught him at his locker. The tall quiet church boy who flinched when people moved too fast near him. Who wore the same three button-ups in rotation because his family didn't believe in spending money on a boy's vanity. Who had never once been asked for anything by a girl like me. I was pretty at seventeen in a way I knew how to use. I leaned on the locker next to his and asked him, soft, like it mattered, like he mattered, and I watched his whole face change.

That was the part I'd been refusing to look at for nine years. The way his face changed. Like a light coming on in a house that had been dark so long the neighbors assumed nobody lived there.

He said yes. Of course he said yes. He said yes and then looked immediately terrified I'd take it back, and I squeezed his arm and told him I couldn't wait, and I walked away down the hall to where my friends were waiting, and we all laughed before I was even out of his earshot. I made sure of that. I timed it. I wanted him to hear the beginning of it.

He came to the dance. Stood at the door of the gym in a suit that didn't fit him. A grown man's suit, his father's probably, shoulders too wide, sleeves too long, his hair combed flat with water. He stood at the door and waited for me.

I was already inside. I'd come with Tyler Brandt, who had a car and a varsity jacket and a meanness that matched the meanness in me. I'd planned it that way for two weeks. When Jettson came through the door looking for me, I was standing across the gym with Tyler's hand on my waist, and I looked right at him.

I looked right at him.

And here's the worst of it. I could have looked away. I could have given him that one mercy. Let him tell himself later that I just hadn't seen him, that it was a mix-up, that I'd never gotten his messages. I didn't give him that. I held his eyes across that whole stupid fog-machine gym for one full second, long enough for him to understand completely. Then I turned my face up to Tyler Brandt and laughed at something Tyler hadn't even said.

When I looked back, he was gone.

I heard later that he stood in the parking lot for almost an hour. That somebody saw him out there by the bike rack in his father's too-big suit. Not crying. Just standing. Then walking home. Six miles. In dress shoes.

I went to the bathroom an hour after that and threw up the wine cooler Tyler had snuck me. I knelt on the disgusting tile with my pressed green dress bunched around my knees, and I thought, with a clarity that has never once left me, you are exactly like him. Not Tyler. Him. My father. The man who could make my mother iron a dress and tell her she was beautiful and put a yellow bruise on her jaw all in the same week, and never once feel the contradiction.

I was exactly like him.

Then I stood up. Rinsed my mouth. Went back out to the dance. And did it all again the next week, to somebody else. Because knowing the shape of the sickness in you turns out to be a very different thing from being able to stop it.

I lay in the dark of the guest room in his city and let all of that come, and when it was done I didn't cry. I was past crying about it. I just lay there in the wreckage, the way you stand in a field after the storm's already taken the house, and I waited for morning. Morning was bringing Victoria Caldwell and whatever she wanted, and I needed to be a person again by then.

Victoria arrived at the penthouse at two in the afternoon precisely, which I'd later learn was the only way Victoria arrived anywhere.

She was not what I'd braced for. I'd met her once before, at the championship, but that had been across a loud box full of people, and I'd been so busy not being seen by someone else that I'd hardly registered her. Up close, in the quiet, she was something else. Mid-forties, silver starting at her temples and clearly allowed to stay on purpose, a stillness to her that made the room organize itself around where she chose to sit. She set a leather folio on the coffee table, squared it to the edge, and looked at me with a directness I felt in my spine.

"Brynn says you've had a hell of a month," she said.

"That's one way to put it."

"I'm not going to pretend to know the details and I'm not going to ask. People tell me what they want me to know on their own schedule. The rest is none of my business." She folded her hands. "So I'll tell you why I'm here, you can say no, and either way we'll have a nice afternoon."

"Okay."