What Happens After Midnight, page 4
“How was your meeting?” I ventured halfway through an episode. We were both snuggled on the couch, my mom now wearing her exploding fireworks PJs.
“Complete chaos,” she replied, chili long ago inhaled. “We discussed the freshmen’s final exam’s structure and content.”
“Ah,” I said. “Modeled after the classic fifth grade language arts test?”
My mom nodded. “There will be a matching section right out of the gate.”
“True or false?”
“Naturally.”
“Short answers?”
“No, too difficult,” she kidded. “It’ll be fill in the blank instead…with a word bank.”
We both laughed. “So pretty brutal, huh?” I asked, thinking of my prior English finals. Five very tricky multiple-choice questions, a handful of short answers, and then two essays.
Yikes.
“They’ll be fine,” my mom said. “Or at least my students will be. It was decided that the content should be the same across classes, but…” She sighed. “Mr. Rudnick doesn’t like Arthur Miller, so he never spends much time on Death of a Salesman.”
“And that’s the big essay topic,” I guessed.
She smirked. “If anyone asks, you know nothing.”
I nodded solemnly before resting my head on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Mom,” I murmured, feeling my eyelids flutter closed. Today had been a lot. “I am a vault.”
But was I?
The next day—the day of the Jester’s mysterious prank—I felt like I was being eaten alive by anxiety. “Do you feel okay, Lily?” Zoe asked me at lunch. “Because no offense, but you seem a little off…”
I said I had a headache, which was true. Last night I’d tossed and turned, unsure whether I wanted to play a part in the prank anymore now that I knew Tag was the Jester. Do I dare spend a whole night with him? I wondered.
I only fell asleep for good when I realized the answer was yes. Because I’d already committed…and because I was curious. Alex had brainstormed so many schemes over the years, so what did Tag have up his sleeve?
Whatever it was, I wanted to watch it come together. Tag Swell had a Midas touch.
That didn’t make me any less restless, though. During the day, I avoided Tag and Alex at all costs. Sometimes we crossed paths, but I would crack if I saw them today. What are you waiting for? I imagined publicly interrogating Tag. Where is this promised “further information”?
There had been no word from his Jester email account, and I knew he wasn’t procrastinating or stalling; no, he was timing. Tag had this all figured out. If I hadn’t gotten a message from him yet, it was for a reason.
That reason revealed itself at 4:00 p.m. while I was trying to draft a salutatorian speech at the huge oak table in my mother’s classroom. It was a true marvel, looking like you’d time traveled back to a 1920s Parisian writing salon. Persian rugs covered the floor, and the walls were a deep plum and decorated with more framed oil paintings than possible. I always smiled at the one of dogs playing poker. Books were also everywhere, tucked into tall bookcases and piled on low shelves. A record player sat near one stack, but instead of Cole Porter, Leda Hopper preferred Dave Matthews. “You haven’t worked in here in a while,” she commented as I typed DRAFT 1 at the top of a blank Word document.
“Well, the underclassmen have all moved into the library,” I said. “There isn’t one free study carrel, and the upperclassmen…” I trailed off to glance out the classroom’s big casement window. The Circle and Crescent looked like a circus with my fellow seniors everywhere. Some were darting around playing Frisbee, others balancing on the slackline set up between trees, and most relaxing in the Adirondack chairs. None of them had a care in the world.
“They look like they’re having fun,” my mom said, smiling.
“Because they aren’t the salutatorian,” I mumbled before sighing. “Mom, my speech is seriously going to be a flaming pile of—”
My computer suddenly pinged with an email notification. “Ooh, a love letter from a not-so-secret admirer?” my mom teased. She’d said anyone with eyes knew how Daniel felt about me and that I was putting up a pretty good front about feeling the same way.
She also kept advising me to tell him the truth.
“No, just a reminder that Anthropologie’s having a sale,” I lied quickly. Anthropologie was always having a sale. Their clothes went from outrageously expensive to reasonably expensive.
“Mmm, let me know if there’s anything that must move into our closets…” My mom’s voice drifted up to the classroom’s ceiling. I looked over to see that she was wrapped up in skimming a book with a highlighter in hand.
So I stole the chance to open the Jester’s email, hoping its message wouldn’t trigger a fainting spell.
To: bells_whistles82@gmail.com
From: TheJesterXXIII@gmail.com
Subject: Tonight
Dear Lily,
They say good things come in threes, so…
Please be at King’s Court by the stroke of midnight.
Please wear all black.
Pretty please with cherries on top bring Leda’s keys.
See you in several hours.
Best wishes, warmest regards,
The Jester
Good things come in threes? Well, it felt like I’d just been slapped in the face three times. If I hadn’t figured out Tag was the Jester yesterday, this would’ve been the ultimate giveaway. Best wishes, warmest regards. Leave it to him to slip in a Schitt’s Creek reference.
Midnight. Okay. I gritted my teeth. I could pull a Cinderella running away from the royal ball. Had I worked out the particulars of how I was going to sneak out of my house? No, but I would. And I had plenty of dark clothes. That was a non-issue.
But bringing along my mom’s keys—stealing my mom’s keys. My heart rate heightened. It suddenly made crystal clear sense why Tag had recruited me: This year’s senior prank required the Jester and his fools to sneak into campus buildings. Before now, all the hijinks had taken place outside, but here Tag was, wanting to kick it up a notch.
And he needed me to make it happen.
Again, curiosity made my mind spin.
But curiosity also killed the cat, I reminded myself.
I tried to ignore the thought.
Every student had an Ames School ID card that let us swipe into academic buildings, but we lost access once the sun went down. Besides the dorms, Ames was locked up tight at night. Only faculty IDs worked twenty-four hours a day.
Tag had been over to our house a million times. He knew my mom always tossed her Red Sox lanyard in the kitchen’s catchall when she got home, and he knew that in addition to her ID, she’d charmed physical metal keys out of various departments. “Why do you need a key to the Buildings and Grounds facility?” I’d once asked, to which she airily replied, “I’m not sure yet.”
I wanted to scream. Tag expected me to steal my mother’s keys?!
TELL ME WHAT WE’RE DOING RIGHT NOW, I replied to his email.
No need to yell, Ms. All-Caps, he wrote back. It’ll be easy.
Easy? I typed. You think swiping my mom’s keys will be easy? When she probably won’t even be asleep yet?
YES, I DO, he said. YOU’VE GOT THIS!
I rolled my eyes when “the Jester” went offline. Hopefully to go brainstorm a contingency plan if I showed up tonight without my mom’s loaded lanyard.
Guilt squirmed in my stomach when I shut my laptop and looked over at my mother. “Mom…” I whispered but astonishingly went silent before I could add, I have something to tell you.
I told my mom everything, absolutely everything. From good grades to bad grades to student gossip to my first kiss with Tag. God, I’d even told her about our first time sophomore year. “Mom, Tag and I slept together!” I’d blurted after coming home and finding her in the family room. I hadn’t even bothered to take off my heavy winter coat or brush the snowflakes out of my hair. “And it was fine!” I barreled on before she could respond. “Totally fine! We were safe, so you have nothing to worry about! Again, totally fine!”
Then I nearly collapsed, breathless.
“Well, okay.” My mom nodded, a look of both bemusement and concern on her face. “I’m glad it was totally fine.” Her lips twitched up in a smile. “But now how about you take off your coat and stay a while…” She patted the couch cushion next to her. “Because I take it there’s a more romantic version of this event?”
Yes, there was, and I told her that too. Not every little detail, but most of them. That year’s winter musical had been The Sound of Music, and I’d somehow been cast as Liesl von Trapp. What had Mrs. DeLuca, the head of the theater department, been thinking?
Tag always picked me up after rehearsal, but one day he’d been late because his swim meet had run long. Everyone had left the auditorium’s basement lounge by the time he’d finally arrived. “How old are you, junge Dame?” he asked cheekily, finding me on the couch still wearing my floaty pink dress with my script. The show opened next week, but I kept butchering some lines. “Sixteen, perchance?”
I glared at him. “Nice try, Herr Swell.”
Tag laughed and climbed onto the arm of the couch. This was when he was still all arms and legs, after his first growth spurt but before he started hitting the gym. “Bambi,” Alex and I liked to call him back then. I watched as he spread out his arms for balance and began humming “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”
“Okay, stop.” I stood up, my skirt swirling. “Seriously.”
“Why?” He was now precariously perched on the back of the couch. “This is a pretty good makeshift gazebo bench.”
I sighed. “We rehearsed this scene a lot today.”
“But not with me.”
I shook my head and smirked.
“Come on, Lily.” He crouched and kissed my cheek. “We’ve sung this song together so many times.” His green eyes glinted because it was true. Tag had always offered to duet with me when I’d first needed to learn the lyrics. “Please give me my time to shine.”
My heart swelled. “You’re such a dork,” I told him but didn’t say no. Instead, I queued up the music and shooed him off the couch. “It’s Liesl who dances on the gazebo benches.”
Tag’s voice was hoarse from his meet, so he was a terrible singer that day and I couldn’t stop laughing. But we could dance together; we were so good at dancing together, even if it wasn’t remotely the right choreography. And of course, Liesl and Rolf’s scripted kiss was supposed to be light and quick like a butterfly, but instead Tag put one hand on my waist and weaved the other through my hair. I rose up on my tiptoes and wrapped both arms around his neck. “That wasn’t meant for the stage,” I said when we pulled back a few inches for air. Our breathing was heavy but fully in sync.
“How convenient that we’re backstage, then,” Tag quipped, and before long, we ended up tangled together on the couch. His warm skin smelled like chlorine. “Do you want to?” he whispered after a little while.
“Yes,” I whispered back, feeling his hands slipping up my skirt. “I do.”
“Me too,” he said, nodding as I kissed his neck. “I do too.”
So we did, because we loved each other.
I made zero progress on my speech that afternoon, racked with too many nerves. My mom ordered Italian for dinner, but I only pushed around my ravioli, appetite nonexistent. She didn’t notice because she was overwhelmingly preoccupied with her plans tonight. Headmaster Bickford was a member of a local wine club, and so was my mother…theoretically. The club met once a month, but my mom had managed to get out of the last eight gatherings. “You know I’m not ageist, Lily,” she once said, “but I am the youngest member by at least thirty years, and those women…” She huffed. “I have nothing in common with them.”
“How would you know?” I goaded her. “You haven’t been to a single meeting.”
“Because Penny took me to that ladies’ luncheon, remember?” She rolled her eyes. “All they talked about was the goings-on at their country club. It was a full-on gossip session. Penny had to keep feeding me information to keep me in the loop.”
I made a face. “Penny’s a member?”
“Yes, almost every family in town is.”
Right. Most of the faculty was from elsewhere, but Penny Bickford was a true Rhode Islander. She had a whole community outside of Ames.
Unfortunately for my mom, there was no getting out of wine club tonight. It disbanded for the summer, so this was the last meeting until September, and Penny wasn’t taking “I’m swamped with schoolwork” or “Josh’s family is in town” for an answer. She’d even politely insisted on driving my mom to the hostess’s house.
Which, as I later watched the two of them speed off in Penny’s jet-black Jaguar, gave me the perfect opportunity to commit tonight’s impossible crime. I spotted the Red Sox lanyard lying lazily in the kitchen catchall with the usual assortment of crap. Lip gloss, spare change, hair ties, Post-its, colorful gel pens, and way too many Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. My stomach somersaulted with excitement.
This could work, I thought as I unzipped my backpack’s front pocket and pulled out my own red-white-and-navy lanyard. This just might work…
Josh had given us the matching lanyards last year, and like my mom, I kept my Ames ID and house key on it. But unlike my mom, I didn’t have a hundred other keys and kitschy key chains.
Time to get to work.
I needed my mom’s ID and master keys, but I also knew this couldn’t be an overwhelmingly obvious theft. Sprucing my lanyard up with her key chains and leaving it in my mom’s usual place would be a good enough disguise…right?
My fingers fumbled as I unhooked key chains and transferred them to my lanyard, soon finding a rhythm. The only thing that caught me off guard was the Chicago Cubs key chain. My mom had tried to convert Tag to Boston’s sports fandom, but he had remained loyal to his hometown. Once upon a time, that key chain had been a “teacher appreciation gift.”
Now it wouldn’t budge. I pried as hard as I could, but the Cubs logo was determined to stay linked to the Red Sox.
Leave it, I told myself. One key chain is not going to make or break this mission!
I let out a deep breath when I finished. If you didn’t check the photo on the ID card, my lanyard was now a dead ringer for my mom’s and hers for mine. Now all I had to do was carefully position it in the catchall. My gut told me that she wouldn’t touch it once she got home, but the Red Sox logo needed to be visible in case she glanced over in that direction. I made sure to tuck my ID under a coupon. Again, my red hair stuck out like a forest fire.
Then I ran upstairs and hid her keys under my pillow.
Penny’s Jaguar pulled back into our driveway at 9:45 p.m. “It was wonderful, no!” I heard my mom say after getting out and shutting the passenger door. “No, you should definitely order a case of the Sancerre. And no, Cynthia’s bathroom renovation was stunning. I loved the gilded mirror!”
Oops, too many nos, I thought. She must’ve really hated it.
“Okay, fine, I’m lying,” she admitted after Headmaster Bickford called her out on the last part. “That mirror was a travesty.” She laughed. “Thank you for tonight, Penny!”
Once I heard her heels click-clack on the front walk and then a twist of the doorknob, I assumed my position on the couch: curled up under a blanket with Pride & Prejudice on TV.
The 2005 version, of course.
“Hi,” I said when my mom walked into the family room. “How was it?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “Extremely uninteresting with a few moments of mind-numbing boredom.”
“Come on,” I said as she unbuckled her high heels and tousled her blond curls. She looked gorgeous in her strapless lavender jumpsuit. “Something funny must’ve happened.”
“Mmm…” She pretended to think. “Oh, every woman there asked for my number—”
“I knew they would.”
“—to pass along to their divorced sons.”
“Wait, ew.” I wrinkled my nose. “Did you tell them about Josh?”
“No, but they’ll find out soon enough.”
I gasped. “Mom, you didn’t!”
She kicked away her shoes. “Hey, I wasn’t going to give them my number!”
“Okay, but Josh is going to get all these bizarre texts telling him how beautiful he is and how dazzling he sounds and then they’ll ask if he’d like to grab a drink sometime at their club.”
“I know.” She beamed. “It’ll be amazing.”
“Did you have anything to drink?” I asked. She didn’t seem tipsy. Just loopy.
“I wish,” she answered through a gritted-teeth smile. “But apparently you only drink wine at a wine club. They hide all the good stuff.”
“Huh, how odd,” I said dryly. My mom preferred whiskey to wine.
“Please remind me to make a dentist appointment,” she continued. “The one glass I had was so sweet that I’m going to need some cavities filled…” She trailed off, noticing Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy onscreen. “Crap, I missed the hand flex.”
I winced. You idiot, I thought. If you hadn’t passed the hand flex, you would’ve had her.
Pride & Prejudice was my mom’s clickbait. If it was on TV, she watched it, obsessed with the scene where Mr. Darcy flexes his hand after helping Lizzy into a carriage. “It shows how moved he is,” she’d say reverently, “just from touching her hand…”
If we had the hand flex to look forward to, my mom would’ve collapsed on the couch and drifted off to the movie instead of popping open a Red Bull before grading her students’ assignments.
And I really didn’t want to sneak out of my house with my mom awake, alert, and highly caffeinated in her study just off the front hallway.
“Well…” she said a few seconds later. “I’m gonna head to bed.”
My pulse spiked, a shock to the system. “What?”
“I’m going to bed,” she repeated. “Tonight took a lot out of me. I’m going to make a cup of chamomile—”
“Why don’t I make it?” I volunteered, heart racing. If I could avoid it, I didn’t want her going into the kitchen. “I was going to make some and go up soon too. Do you want honey?”
“Complete chaos,” she replied, chili long ago inhaled. “We discussed the freshmen’s final exam’s structure and content.”
“Ah,” I said. “Modeled after the classic fifth grade language arts test?”
My mom nodded. “There will be a matching section right out of the gate.”
“True or false?”
“Naturally.”
“Short answers?”
“No, too difficult,” she kidded. “It’ll be fill in the blank instead…with a word bank.”
We both laughed. “So pretty brutal, huh?” I asked, thinking of my prior English finals. Five very tricky multiple-choice questions, a handful of short answers, and then two essays.
Yikes.
“They’ll be fine,” my mom said. “Or at least my students will be. It was decided that the content should be the same across classes, but…” She sighed. “Mr. Rudnick doesn’t like Arthur Miller, so he never spends much time on Death of a Salesman.”
“And that’s the big essay topic,” I guessed.
She smirked. “If anyone asks, you know nothing.”
I nodded solemnly before resting my head on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Mom,” I murmured, feeling my eyelids flutter closed. Today had been a lot. “I am a vault.”
But was I?
The next day—the day of the Jester’s mysterious prank—I felt like I was being eaten alive by anxiety. “Do you feel okay, Lily?” Zoe asked me at lunch. “Because no offense, but you seem a little off…”
I said I had a headache, which was true. Last night I’d tossed and turned, unsure whether I wanted to play a part in the prank anymore now that I knew Tag was the Jester. Do I dare spend a whole night with him? I wondered.
I only fell asleep for good when I realized the answer was yes. Because I’d already committed…and because I was curious. Alex had brainstormed so many schemes over the years, so what did Tag have up his sleeve?
Whatever it was, I wanted to watch it come together. Tag Swell had a Midas touch.
That didn’t make me any less restless, though. During the day, I avoided Tag and Alex at all costs. Sometimes we crossed paths, but I would crack if I saw them today. What are you waiting for? I imagined publicly interrogating Tag. Where is this promised “further information”?
There had been no word from his Jester email account, and I knew he wasn’t procrastinating or stalling; no, he was timing. Tag had this all figured out. If I hadn’t gotten a message from him yet, it was for a reason.
That reason revealed itself at 4:00 p.m. while I was trying to draft a salutatorian speech at the huge oak table in my mother’s classroom. It was a true marvel, looking like you’d time traveled back to a 1920s Parisian writing salon. Persian rugs covered the floor, and the walls were a deep plum and decorated with more framed oil paintings than possible. I always smiled at the one of dogs playing poker. Books were also everywhere, tucked into tall bookcases and piled on low shelves. A record player sat near one stack, but instead of Cole Porter, Leda Hopper preferred Dave Matthews. “You haven’t worked in here in a while,” she commented as I typed DRAFT 1 at the top of a blank Word document.
“Well, the underclassmen have all moved into the library,” I said. “There isn’t one free study carrel, and the upperclassmen…” I trailed off to glance out the classroom’s big casement window. The Circle and Crescent looked like a circus with my fellow seniors everywhere. Some were darting around playing Frisbee, others balancing on the slackline set up between trees, and most relaxing in the Adirondack chairs. None of them had a care in the world.
“They look like they’re having fun,” my mom said, smiling.
“Because they aren’t the salutatorian,” I mumbled before sighing. “Mom, my speech is seriously going to be a flaming pile of—”
My computer suddenly pinged with an email notification. “Ooh, a love letter from a not-so-secret admirer?” my mom teased. She’d said anyone with eyes knew how Daniel felt about me and that I was putting up a pretty good front about feeling the same way.
She also kept advising me to tell him the truth.
“No, just a reminder that Anthropologie’s having a sale,” I lied quickly. Anthropologie was always having a sale. Their clothes went from outrageously expensive to reasonably expensive.
“Mmm, let me know if there’s anything that must move into our closets…” My mom’s voice drifted up to the classroom’s ceiling. I looked over to see that she was wrapped up in skimming a book with a highlighter in hand.
So I stole the chance to open the Jester’s email, hoping its message wouldn’t trigger a fainting spell.
To: bells_whistles82@gmail.com
From: TheJesterXXIII@gmail.com
Subject: Tonight
Dear Lily,
They say good things come in threes, so…
Please be at King’s Court by the stroke of midnight.
Please wear all black.
Pretty please with cherries on top bring Leda’s keys.
See you in several hours.
Best wishes, warmest regards,
The Jester
Good things come in threes? Well, it felt like I’d just been slapped in the face three times. If I hadn’t figured out Tag was the Jester yesterday, this would’ve been the ultimate giveaway. Best wishes, warmest regards. Leave it to him to slip in a Schitt’s Creek reference.
Midnight. Okay. I gritted my teeth. I could pull a Cinderella running away from the royal ball. Had I worked out the particulars of how I was going to sneak out of my house? No, but I would. And I had plenty of dark clothes. That was a non-issue.
But bringing along my mom’s keys—stealing my mom’s keys. My heart rate heightened. It suddenly made crystal clear sense why Tag had recruited me: This year’s senior prank required the Jester and his fools to sneak into campus buildings. Before now, all the hijinks had taken place outside, but here Tag was, wanting to kick it up a notch.
And he needed me to make it happen.
Again, curiosity made my mind spin.
But curiosity also killed the cat, I reminded myself.
I tried to ignore the thought.
Every student had an Ames School ID card that let us swipe into academic buildings, but we lost access once the sun went down. Besides the dorms, Ames was locked up tight at night. Only faculty IDs worked twenty-four hours a day.
Tag had been over to our house a million times. He knew my mom always tossed her Red Sox lanyard in the kitchen’s catchall when she got home, and he knew that in addition to her ID, she’d charmed physical metal keys out of various departments. “Why do you need a key to the Buildings and Grounds facility?” I’d once asked, to which she airily replied, “I’m not sure yet.”
I wanted to scream. Tag expected me to steal my mother’s keys?!
TELL ME WHAT WE’RE DOING RIGHT NOW, I replied to his email.
No need to yell, Ms. All-Caps, he wrote back. It’ll be easy.
Easy? I typed. You think swiping my mom’s keys will be easy? When she probably won’t even be asleep yet?
YES, I DO, he said. YOU’VE GOT THIS!
I rolled my eyes when “the Jester” went offline. Hopefully to go brainstorm a contingency plan if I showed up tonight without my mom’s loaded lanyard.
Guilt squirmed in my stomach when I shut my laptop and looked over at my mother. “Mom…” I whispered but astonishingly went silent before I could add, I have something to tell you.
I told my mom everything, absolutely everything. From good grades to bad grades to student gossip to my first kiss with Tag. God, I’d even told her about our first time sophomore year. “Mom, Tag and I slept together!” I’d blurted after coming home and finding her in the family room. I hadn’t even bothered to take off my heavy winter coat or brush the snowflakes out of my hair. “And it was fine!” I barreled on before she could respond. “Totally fine! We were safe, so you have nothing to worry about! Again, totally fine!”
Then I nearly collapsed, breathless.
“Well, okay.” My mom nodded, a look of both bemusement and concern on her face. “I’m glad it was totally fine.” Her lips twitched up in a smile. “But now how about you take off your coat and stay a while…” She patted the couch cushion next to her. “Because I take it there’s a more romantic version of this event?”
Yes, there was, and I told her that too. Not every little detail, but most of them. That year’s winter musical had been The Sound of Music, and I’d somehow been cast as Liesl von Trapp. What had Mrs. DeLuca, the head of the theater department, been thinking?
Tag always picked me up after rehearsal, but one day he’d been late because his swim meet had run long. Everyone had left the auditorium’s basement lounge by the time he’d finally arrived. “How old are you, junge Dame?” he asked cheekily, finding me on the couch still wearing my floaty pink dress with my script. The show opened next week, but I kept butchering some lines. “Sixteen, perchance?”
I glared at him. “Nice try, Herr Swell.”
Tag laughed and climbed onto the arm of the couch. This was when he was still all arms and legs, after his first growth spurt but before he started hitting the gym. “Bambi,” Alex and I liked to call him back then. I watched as he spread out his arms for balance and began humming “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”
“Okay, stop.” I stood up, my skirt swirling. “Seriously.”
“Why?” He was now precariously perched on the back of the couch. “This is a pretty good makeshift gazebo bench.”
I sighed. “We rehearsed this scene a lot today.”
“But not with me.”
I shook my head and smirked.
“Come on, Lily.” He crouched and kissed my cheek. “We’ve sung this song together so many times.” His green eyes glinted because it was true. Tag had always offered to duet with me when I’d first needed to learn the lyrics. “Please give me my time to shine.”
My heart swelled. “You’re such a dork,” I told him but didn’t say no. Instead, I queued up the music and shooed him off the couch. “It’s Liesl who dances on the gazebo benches.”
Tag’s voice was hoarse from his meet, so he was a terrible singer that day and I couldn’t stop laughing. But we could dance together; we were so good at dancing together, even if it wasn’t remotely the right choreography. And of course, Liesl and Rolf’s scripted kiss was supposed to be light and quick like a butterfly, but instead Tag put one hand on my waist and weaved the other through my hair. I rose up on my tiptoes and wrapped both arms around his neck. “That wasn’t meant for the stage,” I said when we pulled back a few inches for air. Our breathing was heavy but fully in sync.
“How convenient that we’re backstage, then,” Tag quipped, and before long, we ended up tangled together on the couch. His warm skin smelled like chlorine. “Do you want to?” he whispered after a little while.
“Yes,” I whispered back, feeling his hands slipping up my skirt. “I do.”
“Me too,” he said, nodding as I kissed his neck. “I do too.”
So we did, because we loved each other.
I made zero progress on my speech that afternoon, racked with too many nerves. My mom ordered Italian for dinner, but I only pushed around my ravioli, appetite nonexistent. She didn’t notice because she was overwhelmingly preoccupied with her plans tonight. Headmaster Bickford was a member of a local wine club, and so was my mother…theoretically. The club met once a month, but my mom had managed to get out of the last eight gatherings. “You know I’m not ageist, Lily,” she once said, “but I am the youngest member by at least thirty years, and those women…” She huffed. “I have nothing in common with them.”
“How would you know?” I goaded her. “You haven’t been to a single meeting.”
“Because Penny took me to that ladies’ luncheon, remember?” She rolled her eyes. “All they talked about was the goings-on at their country club. It was a full-on gossip session. Penny had to keep feeding me information to keep me in the loop.”
I made a face. “Penny’s a member?”
“Yes, almost every family in town is.”
Right. Most of the faculty was from elsewhere, but Penny Bickford was a true Rhode Islander. She had a whole community outside of Ames.
Unfortunately for my mom, there was no getting out of wine club tonight. It disbanded for the summer, so this was the last meeting until September, and Penny wasn’t taking “I’m swamped with schoolwork” or “Josh’s family is in town” for an answer. She’d even politely insisted on driving my mom to the hostess’s house.
Which, as I later watched the two of them speed off in Penny’s jet-black Jaguar, gave me the perfect opportunity to commit tonight’s impossible crime. I spotted the Red Sox lanyard lying lazily in the kitchen catchall with the usual assortment of crap. Lip gloss, spare change, hair ties, Post-its, colorful gel pens, and way too many Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. My stomach somersaulted with excitement.
This could work, I thought as I unzipped my backpack’s front pocket and pulled out my own red-white-and-navy lanyard. This just might work…
Josh had given us the matching lanyards last year, and like my mom, I kept my Ames ID and house key on it. But unlike my mom, I didn’t have a hundred other keys and kitschy key chains.
Time to get to work.
I needed my mom’s ID and master keys, but I also knew this couldn’t be an overwhelmingly obvious theft. Sprucing my lanyard up with her key chains and leaving it in my mom’s usual place would be a good enough disguise…right?
My fingers fumbled as I unhooked key chains and transferred them to my lanyard, soon finding a rhythm. The only thing that caught me off guard was the Chicago Cubs key chain. My mom had tried to convert Tag to Boston’s sports fandom, but he had remained loyal to his hometown. Once upon a time, that key chain had been a “teacher appreciation gift.”
Now it wouldn’t budge. I pried as hard as I could, but the Cubs logo was determined to stay linked to the Red Sox.
Leave it, I told myself. One key chain is not going to make or break this mission!
I let out a deep breath when I finished. If you didn’t check the photo on the ID card, my lanyard was now a dead ringer for my mom’s and hers for mine. Now all I had to do was carefully position it in the catchall. My gut told me that she wouldn’t touch it once she got home, but the Red Sox logo needed to be visible in case she glanced over in that direction. I made sure to tuck my ID under a coupon. Again, my red hair stuck out like a forest fire.
Then I ran upstairs and hid her keys under my pillow.
Penny’s Jaguar pulled back into our driveway at 9:45 p.m. “It was wonderful, no!” I heard my mom say after getting out and shutting the passenger door. “No, you should definitely order a case of the Sancerre. And no, Cynthia’s bathroom renovation was stunning. I loved the gilded mirror!”
Oops, too many nos, I thought. She must’ve really hated it.
“Okay, fine, I’m lying,” she admitted after Headmaster Bickford called her out on the last part. “That mirror was a travesty.” She laughed. “Thank you for tonight, Penny!”
Once I heard her heels click-clack on the front walk and then a twist of the doorknob, I assumed my position on the couch: curled up under a blanket with Pride & Prejudice on TV.
The 2005 version, of course.
“Hi,” I said when my mom walked into the family room. “How was it?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “Extremely uninteresting with a few moments of mind-numbing boredom.”
“Come on,” I said as she unbuckled her high heels and tousled her blond curls. She looked gorgeous in her strapless lavender jumpsuit. “Something funny must’ve happened.”
“Mmm…” She pretended to think. “Oh, every woman there asked for my number—”
“I knew they would.”
“—to pass along to their divorced sons.”
“Wait, ew.” I wrinkled my nose. “Did you tell them about Josh?”
“No, but they’ll find out soon enough.”
I gasped. “Mom, you didn’t!”
She kicked away her shoes. “Hey, I wasn’t going to give them my number!”
“Okay, but Josh is going to get all these bizarre texts telling him how beautiful he is and how dazzling he sounds and then they’ll ask if he’d like to grab a drink sometime at their club.”
“I know.” She beamed. “It’ll be amazing.”
“Did you have anything to drink?” I asked. She didn’t seem tipsy. Just loopy.
“I wish,” she answered through a gritted-teeth smile. “But apparently you only drink wine at a wine club. They hide all the good stuff.”
“Huh, how odd,” I said dryly. My mom preferred whiskey to wine.
“Please remind me to make a dentist appointment,” she continued. “The one glass I had was so sweet that I’m going to need some cavities filled…” She trailed off, noticing Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy onscreen. “Crap, I missed the hand flex.”
I winced. You idiot, I thought. If you hadn’t passed the hand flex, you would’ve had her.
Pride & Prejudice was my mom’s clickbait. If it was on TV, she watched it, obsessed with the scene where Mr. Darcy flexes his hand after helping Lizzy into a carriage. “It shows how moved he is,” she’d say reverently, “just from touching her hand…”
If we had the hand flex to look forward to, my mom would’ve collapsed on the couch and drifted off to the movie instead of popping open a Red Bull before grading her students’ assignments.
And I really didn’t want to sneak out of my house with my mom awake, alert, and highly caffeinated in her study just off the front hallway.
“Well…” she said a few seconds later. “I’m gonna head to bed.”
My pulse spiked, a shock to the system. “What?”
“I’m going to bed,” she repeated. “Tonight took a lot out of me. I’m going to make a cup of chamomile—”
“Why don’t I make it?” I volunteered, heart racing. If I could avoid it, I didn’t want her going into the kitchen. “I was going to make some and go up soon too. Do you want honey?”
