to be rude to Josie, but shouldn’t she have told me all this a few months ago?
No one’s supposed to see my dress yet, but the wannabe girls, like Orang-Anna, wait around the kitchen entrance to get in a final bit of ass-kissing before the main event.
“You look so awesome!” Anna squeaks, running over to me. “This is so cool. It’s the first year I’ve been allowed to come. Thanks so much for the invitation.”
“Yeah, sure. No problem.” Because I’m me and had to do something at this ball to annoy my grandmother just a little, I’ve invited the entire junior class—nerds, jocks, potheads, and all. Apparently, they actually care about this crap. Idiots.
“I love your dress. Where’d you get it?”
“It was my mother’s.” The mention of my mom brings the shame rushing in. What would she say if she knew how easily I’d been taken in by the very thing she’d run so far away from? I want so badly to talk to her that I feel a sharp pain in my chest. “She wore it in 1989.”
“Well, it’s still awesome, even if it is super old.”
“Thanks.”
I push past Orang-Anna and hike through the kitchen. Two waiters in black tie show me to the cramped back staircase.
“This way to the Pretty Room, miss,” one of them says with a little bow. I notice that most of the kitchen staff are black. One of them looks familiar to me, but I’m not sure why. Then I place her: the night of my initiation. She catches my eye and stares at me like I’m something in a zoo. I blush and hurry up the staircase.
At the top, another tuxedo-clad waiter ushers me down the hall to the Pretty Room, where the debutantes are stored like pieces of meat before being introduced to Savannah’s richest white people at the Small Ball upstairs. Hayes and Madison and the other three girls who are making their debuts are already inside. Since this is the South, there’s plenty of champagne and not a thing to eat.
“Alex!” Hayes whoops as she links arms with me. “We thought you were getting cold feet. Did you see Thaddeus? You haven’t seen my brother until you’ve seen him rocking a tux. And I’m so glad you’re here, because I am about to officially explode. Do you know who Madison’s secret date is? You won’t—”
“Uh… Thaddeus isn’t coming,” I say.
“What?” She whips out her BlackBerry. “What the f ? Did he fall asleep or something? Let me call him. I’ll tear him up one side and down the other.”
“No, don’t. It’s totally my fault. I screwed up.”
Hayes’s voice drops when she sees the tears in my eyes. “What did you do?”
I want to tell her so badly. I want to tell her and cry and have her hug me, and then she’ll fix my makeup and tell me that everything is going to be okay. I want her to take me under her wing and protect me from all these awful people and, more important, I want her to protect me from myself. I want her to fix everything that I’ve ruined. But how can I tell Hayes that I put a love spell on her brother? Just as Madison did, but worse, because I knew what might happen to him, and I ignored it. I can’t disappoint her like that.
“I got jealous of him and Madison. And I did something stupid.”
“What did you do?” she asks quietly.
“I didn’t… nothing like that, Hayes,” I lie. “I freaked out on him. He came by the house and I freaked out and screamed at him like a crazy person and accused him of cheating on me with her and told him I never wanted to see him again.”
Hayes’s eyes are laughing. “Do you want to know who Madison’s escort is?” she asks.
“Who?”
Just then, Madison comes out of the carefully concealed door that leads to the powder room (God forbid anyone in Savannah actually say “bathroom” out loud), and Hayes waves her over.
“Madison, you have to tell Alex!”
“Calm down, for Christ’s sake,” Madison says, rolling her eyes. “It’s no big thing.”
“Spill!” Hayes can hardly contain herself.
“It’s Dexter, okay,” Madison says. “My escort is Dexter. And he’s wearing a powder-blue tuxedo, which is probably the most embarrassing thing to ever happen to me in my life.”
But she looks kind of proud of him too.
“But I thought you and Thaddeus—”
“What?” she says.
“You aren’t…”
“Nope!” Hayes squeals, and she actually claps her hands.
“OMG,” Madison says, realizing what