“Sorry. No time for a photo session. I’m picking her up from her house. The guy is supposed to pick up the girl, remember?” That was a stretch, considering I was picking her up in the Beater. Link was catching a ride with Shawn. The guys on the team were still saving him a seat at their new lunch table, even though he usually sat with Lena and me.
Amma yanked on my tie and snorted a laugh. I don’t know what she thought was so funny, but it made me edgy.
“It’s too tight. I feel like it’s strangling me.” I tried to wedge a finger in between my neck and the collar of my rented jacket from Buck’s Tux, but I couldn’t.
“Isn’t the tie, it’s your nerves. You’ll do fine.” She surveyed me approvingly, like I imagined my mom would have if she’d been here. “Now, let me see those flowers.” I reached behind me for a small box, a red rose surrounded by white baby’s breath inside. They looked pretty ugly to me, but you couldn’t get much better from Gardens of Eden, the only place in Gatlin.
“About the sorriest flowers I’ve ever seen.” Amma took one look and tossed them into the wastebasket at the bottom of the stairs. She turned on her heel and disappeared into the kitchen.
“What did you do that for?”
She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a wrist corsage, small and delicate. White Confederate jasmine and wild rosemary, tied with a pale silver ribbon. Silver and white, the colors of the winter formal. It was perfect.
As much as I knew that Amma wasn’t crazy about my relationship with Lena, she had done this anyway. She’d done it for me. It was something my mom would have done. It was only since my mom had died that I realized how much I relied on Amma, how much I had always relied on her. She was the only thing that had kept me afloat. Without her, I probably would have drowned, like my dad.
“Everything means somethin’. Don’t try to change somethin’ wild into somethin’ tame.”
I held the corsage up to the kitchen lamp. I felt the length of the ribbon, carefully probing it with my fingers. Under the ribbon, there was a tiny bone.
“Amma!”
She shrugged. “What, are you gonna take issue with a teeny little graveyard bone like that? After all this time growin’ up in this house, after seein’ the things you’ve seen, where’s your sense? A little protection never hurt anybody—not even you, Ethan Wate.”
I sighed and put the corsage back in the box. “I love you, too, Amma.”
She gave me a bone-crushing hug, and I ran down the steps and into the night. “You be careful, you hear? Don’t get carried away.”
I had no idea what she meant, but I smiled at her anyway. “Yes, ma’am.”
My father’s light was on in the study as I drove away. I wondered if he even knew tonight was the winter formal.
When Lena pulled the door open, my heart almost stopped, which was saying something considering she wasn’t even touching me. I knew she looked nothing like any of the other girls at the dance would look tonight. There were only two kinds of prom dresses in Gatlin County, and they all came from one of two places: Little Miss, the local pageant gown supplier, or Southern Belle, the bridal shop two towns over.
The girls who went to Little Miss wore the slutty mermaid dresses, all slits and plunging necklines and sequins; those were the girls that Amma would never have allowed me to be seen with at a church picnic, let alone the winter formal. They were sometimes the local pageant girls or the daughters of local pageant girls, like Eden, whose mom had been First Runner Up Miss South Carolina, or more often just the daughters of the women who wished they had been pageant girls. These were the same girls you might eventually see holding their babies at the Jackson High School graduation in a couple of years.
Southern Belle dresses were the Scarlett O’Hara dresses, shaped like giant cowbells. The Southern Belle girls were the daughters of the DAR and the Ladies Auxiliary members—the Emily Ashers and the Savannah Snows—and you could take them anywhere, if you could stomach it, stomach them, and stomach the way it looked like you were dancing with a bride at her own wedding.
Either way, everything was shiny, everything was colorful, and everything involved a lot of metallic trim and a particular shade of orange folks called Gatlin Peach, that was probably reserved for tacky bridesmaids’ dresses everywhere else but Gatlin County.
For guys, there was less obvious pressure, but it wasn’t really any easier. We had to match, usually our date, which could involve the dreaded Gatlin Peach. This year, the basketball team was going in silver bow ties and silver cummerbunds, sparing them the humiliation of pink or purple or peach bow ties.
Lena had definitely never worn Gatlin Peach in her life. As I looked at her, my knees started to buckle, which was starting to become a familiar feeling. She was so pretty it hurt.
Wow.
Like it?
She spun around. Her hair curled around her shoulders, long and loose, held back with glinting clips, in one of those magical ways girls have of making their hair look like it is supposed to be up, but also sort of falling down. I wanted to run my fingers through it, but I didn’t dare touch her, not a single hair. Lena’s dress fell from her body, clinging to all the right places without looking Little Miss, in silvery gray strands, as delicate as a silver cobweb, spun by silver spiders.
Was it? Spun by silver spiders?
Who knows? It could’ve been. It was a gift from Uncle Macon.
She laughed and pulled me into the house. Even Ravenwood seemed to reflect the wintry theme of the formal. Tonight, the entry hall looked like old Hollywood; tiles of black and white checkered the floor, and silver snowflakes sparkled, floating in the air above us. A black lacquered antique table stood in front of iridescent silver curtains, and beyond them, I could see something that glinted like the ocean, though I knew it couldn’t be. Flickering candles hovered over the furniture, tossing little pools of moonlight everywhere I looked.
“Really? Spiders?”
I could see the candlelight reflecting off her shining lips. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to want to kiss the little moon-shaped crescent on her cheekbone. The most subtle dusting of silver shone on her shoulders, her face, her hair. Even her birthmark seemed to be silver tonight.
“Just kidding. It was probably just something he found in some little shop in Paris or Rome or New York City. Uncle Macon likes beautiful things.” She touched the silver crescent moon at her neckline, dangling just above her chain of memories. Another gift from Macon, I guessed.
The familiar drawl came out of the dark hallway, accompanied by a single silver candlestick. “Budapest, not Paris. Other than that, guilty as charged.” Macon emerged in a smoking jacket over neat black pants and a white dress shirt. The silver studs in his shirt caught the glint of the candlelight.
“Ethan, I would appreciate it greatly if you could take every precaution with my niece tonight. As you know, I prefer her home in the evenings.” He handed me a corsage for Lena, a small wreath of Confederate jasmine. “Every possible precaution.”
“Uncle M!” Lena sounded annoyed.
I looked at the corsage more closely. A silver ring dangled from the pin that held the flowers. It had an inscription in a language I didn’t understand, but recognized from The Book of Moons. I didn’t have to look too closely to see it was the ring he had worn night and day, until now. I pulled out Amma’s nearly identical corsage. Between the hundred Casters probably Bound to the ring, and all of Amma’s extended Greats, there wasn’t a spirit in town that would mess with us. I hoped.
“I think, between you and Amma, sir, Lena will survive the Jackson High winter formal all right.” I smiled.
Macon didn’t. “It’s not the formal I worry about, but I’m grateful to Amarie just the same.”
Lena frowned, looking from her uncle to me. Maybe we didn’t look like the two happiest guys in town. “Your turn.” She picked up a boutonniere from the hall table, a plain white rose with a tiny sprig of jasmine, and pinned it on my jacket. “I wish you would all stop worrying for one minute. This is getting embarrassing. I can take care of myself.”
Macon looked unconvinced. “In any event, I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
I didn’t know if he was referring to the witches of Jackson High, or the powerful Dark Caster, Sarafine. Either way, I’d seen enough in the last few months to take a warning like that seriously.
“And have her back by midnight.”
“Is that some powerful Caster hour?”
“No. It’s her curfew.”
I stifled a smile.
Lena seemed anxious on the way to school. She sat stiffly in the front seat, fiddling with the radio, her dress, her seatbelt.
“Relax.”
“Is it crazy that we’re going tonight?” Lena looked at me expectantly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean everyone hates me.” She looked down at her hands.
“You mean everyone hates us.”
“Okay, everyone hates us.”
“We don’t have to go.”
“No, I want to go. That’s the thing…” She twisted the corsage around her wrist a few times “Last year, Ridley and I had planned to go together. But then…”
I couldn’t hear her answer, not even in my head.
“Things had already gone wrong by then. Ridley turned sixteen. Then she was gone, and I had to leave school.”
“Well, this isn’t last year. It’s just a dance. Nothing’s gone wrong.”
She frowned and shut the mirror.
Not yet.
When we walked into the gym, even I was impressed by how hard Student Council must have worked all weekend. Jackson had gone all the way with the whole Midwinter Night’s Dream concept. Hundreds of tiny paper snowflakes—some white, some shimmering with tinfoil, glitter, sequins, and anything else that could be made to sparkle—hung on fishing wire from the ceiling of the gym. Powdery soap flake “snow” drifted into the corners of the gym, and twinkling white lights fell in strands from the risers.
“Hi, Ethan. Lena, you look lovely.” Coach Cross handed us both cups of Gatlin Peach Punch. She was in a black dress that showed just a little too much leg, I thought, for Link’s sake.
I looked at Lena, thinking of the silver snowflakes floating through the air at Ravenwood, without fishing wire or silver tinfoil. Still, her eyes were shining and she clung to my hand tightly, like she was a kid at her first birthday party. I had never believed Link when he claimed school dances had some sort of inexplicable effect on girls. But it was clear it was true of all girls, even Caster girls.
“It’s beautiful.” Honestly, it wasn’t. What it was, was a plain old Jackson High dance, but I guess to Lena, that was something beautiful. Maybe magic wasn’t the magic thing, when you grew up with it.
Then I heard a familiar voice. It couldn’t be.
“Let’s get this party started!”
Ethan, look—
I turned around and almost choked on my punch. Link grinned at me, wearing what looked like a silver sharkskin tuxedo. He had one of those black T-shirts with a picture of the front of a tuxedo shirt screened on it underneath, and his black high-tops. He looked like a Charleston street performer.