Kissing Midnight (2 page)

“No,” I say quickly. “I’m fine.” Going home is not really an option, since there’s really no home to go home to now that my mother sold the house, and joining her at her parents’ in Mexico City isn’t really an option, either. “I told you, I want to stay here with you over break. I’m not changing my mind.”

Delia lets out a sigh of relief, her whole face brightening. “Good, because we’ve still got a shit-ton to do. How about a romantic evening in Paris?”

“That depends.” I smile. “With whom?”

Delia rolls up her notebook and smacks my hand with it. “I mean as a theme for the ball! I want to have my suggestions all thought out before the planning meeting tonight. We have to focus.”

I pull my notebook a little closer. “I am focused. On Abnormal Psych. I still have two more exams, remember?”

“Saintly, in a few short hours it will be winter break. The ball is New Year’s Eve, and we haven’t even announced a theme! People have bought tickets! They need to know what their costumes should be, and we only have nine days.”

“Well, I only have two hours and—” I glance out the window of the student union, toward the big clock tower of the library “—twelve minutes before this exam.”

“Which you are going to ace, by the way, so I don’t know why you’re sweating it.” She reaches over and slides my notebook from under my nose. “Abnormal Psych is your subject.”

I give her a look.

She sighs. “You know I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean you ace everything.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.” It’s true I’ve done well this semester, but I’ve had to. That was the deal I made with my mom: Good grades, stick with Delia, stay in therapy. If my grades slip at all, my mother will panic. I have to show her I can cope. “I got a B on my last psych paper. I told you that.”

“Sure,” she says, “But only because Stridewater doesn’t give A’s, so that’s like an A in translation to Stridewater language. So you B-aced it. You baced it.”

I smile in spite of myself. Deals loves to make up words. “There is no such word as
baced
.”

“Still! I’ve known you since we were—what? Nine? You’ve always gotten good grades.” There’s a touch of envy in her look. “Your grades were good enough to get you in here, even without most of senior year. I bet you could have gone Ivy League if it weren’t for—” She catches herself. Deals knows better than to bring up Westgate by name. She straightens in her seat. “What I mean is, precedent suggests you have no reason to act the freakazoid about this test.”

“Delia,” I say gently, “There is no precedent. These are our first college finals.”

“And this is my first and last chance to make an impression in the theatre department. You know they never let first years onto the New Year’s ball committee! They only let me in because you and I were willing to stay here over break, and now I have to prove I actually belong there by suggesting a kick-ass theme. Come on, Saintly.” Delia widens her big blue eyes. “You know how important this is to me. Please?”

I sigh. It’s not like I don’t owe Delia pretty much everything, after all she’s done for me. “Okay,” I say, “I will allow myself a study break until noon. That gives us—” I glance at the clock again, “—about nine and a half minutes to find a theme.”

“Yay!” Delia bounces in her seat. She grabs her purple pen and starts scribbling things down. “So, A Night in Paris.”

I shake my head. “Too high school.”

Delia looks crestfallen. “But you love Paris! Paris is sophisticated!”

“Sure, when it’s a salon by the Louvre, but A Night in Paris is more mimes and baguettes and cardboard cutouts of the Eiffel Tower.”

“And French kisses! And French fries! And those little French bulldogs with the flat faces!”

“No,” I say, “Just no. Think of the people who go to the ball, Deals. They’ve been to Paris. They probably
own
Paris.”

“Fine.” She pouts and draws a purple line through A Night in Paris, crossing it off her list. “What do you want, then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe come as your favorite author?”

Delia crinkles her turned-up nose. “What would the couple’s costumes be? Poe and his raven?”

“Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley…”

“And who am I supposed to go as? Frumpy Emily Dickinson? Dowdy Jane Eyre?”

“Jane Eyre is actually a character, not an—”

“Whatever. The point is, it’s a New Year’s masquerade ball. A
ball
. For
New Year’s
. It has to be glamorous!”

“Okay,” I say, “So maybe it
should
be characters. Jane Eyre would actually be a very—”

“Oh!” Delia starts scribbling, “What about movie characters? If that guy I told you about in my acting class came as James Bond, I think I’d die happy.”

“No,” I say, “No movie characters. No TV. This is a fundraiser for the theatre department of a liberal arts college. It has to be, you know, artsy. Intellectual.”

“You’re right.” Delia’s brow creases in thought. She twists one blond pigtail around her finger. “Theatre characters then. Or, narrower than that. Characters from Shakespeare.”

I nod slowly. “Yeah. I can see that. Someone as Prospero. Someone as… who’s the jester? Touchstone?”

“I was thinking couples costumes. Romeo and Juliet,” she says at the same moment I say, “Desdemona and Othello.”

We both laugh. “That’s the difference between us,” Delia says loftily, “I’m a romantic. You always expect the tragedy.”

“They’re both tragedies, Deals,” I point out.

“Yes,” Delia says, “But Romeo and Juliet is a very
pretty
tragedy and a great costume idea. Although,” she purses her lips in thought, “everyone would think of it. There would be a whole ballroom full of them. What girl wouldn’t want to be Juliet?”

Me
. I can’t think of anything more pathetic than a lone Juliet, and the chances of me having a date to the ball are slim to none. Which is fine. After all, I’ll just be there volunteering, to help Delia out, and it’s not like my life needs any more complications. I rub the heart tattoo again. I’m still just trying to get by. “There would be lots of costume options,” I say reasonably, “You said people can borrow costumes from the theatre department archives, right? Well, they must have done a million Shakespeares over the years. They did Tempest recently. You would make a great spirit of the air…”

But Delia is already crossing “Shakespeare” off her list. “Ariel is too obscure.”

I glance at the clock tower again. I need to get back to studying, but Delia will never let me if we don’t hit on a theme. “Midsummer Night’s Dream, then. They’ve done that, right? Or use the fairy costumes from that in some other way, like we could do… a fairy tale theme.”

“Fairy tales? And you said Paris was juvenile! Fairy tales would be…” Delia’s voice trails off. Her blue eyes widen “Oh my God,” she breathes, “I hope that’s him.”

“Who?”

She’s staring at someone over my shoulder. I start to turn around, but Delia grabs my hand. “Don’t look! He’ll notice you!”

I laugh. “You make it sound like we’re on a nature special. ‘Don’t make eye contact. If he notices you he may—”

“Shhhhh! It’s not a predator, it’s a guy.”

I start to open my psych book again. “This campus is crawling with guys. I thought you, of all people, would have noticed.”

“Not that kind of guy,” she hisses, “A hot guy. A guy we haven’t seen before, which means he may be our new volunteer. Kate from the committee said she told a guy who wanted to volunteer that he should meet me here.”

A guy we haven’t seen before. That is sort of unusual, on a campus as small as this one. I start to turn again, just out of curiosity.

“I said don’t look!”

“Okay.” I go back to my psych notes, happy for the excuse.

“What?”she says, “You don’t even want to see him? Look, quick!”

I laugh. “Fine.” I turn slowly around in my seat, trying to pretend I’m just casually stretching. The student union is full of people—studying, blowing off studying, celebrating because they don’t have to study any more. I search the crowd for the guy.

But someone else snags my gaze. A girl, sitting a few tables away. She has short, pale blond hair cut messy so it hangs in her eyes. She’s wearing a denim jacket covered with pins and patches, like something out of the ’80s or ’90s. Maybe that’s why she looks… out of place, somehow. Strange. Whatever it is, there’s something different about her and it makes me pause. For a second, her gaze meets mine and I see her gray eyes widen behind the shag of her bangs like she’s an animal caught in a sudden beam of light.

“No,” Delia whispers, “Over there!” She juts her chin at the other side of the room. I tug my gaze away from the girl and turn.

Instantly, I know who she means. The room may be crowded, but the guy stands out, and for once I can tell Delia isn’t just being dramatic: He really is that hot. Rumpled red-blond curls, sharp, stubbled jaw, pale blue eyes. He’s dressed casually in a hoodie and jeans, his jacket slung over his arm, but there’s an intensity about the way he’s looking around the room. A sense of purpose.

Delia crosses her fingers. “Please, let him be looking for us.”

And then the beautiful guy’s gaze comes to rest on Delia and his face lights up in the most charming smile I’ve ever seen.

Her answering smile is just as bright. I turn back to my notes, but I can feel him coming toward us, the way you can still feel the sunlight when you’re looking at the ground.

“Hey, there,” he says when he reaches us. “Delia Barron?”

Delia’s smile brightens a few more watts. “That’s me!” She holds out her hand, and he takes it.

Cautiously, I glance up from my notebook. The guy is looking Delia over, and I’m sure he likes what he sees. Guys always fall all over Deals. She looks like a doll, with her heart-shaped face and her little blond pigtails and her big blue eyes, so different from my long, dark hair and tan Latina skin.

Delia holds onto his hand a beat longer than strictly necessary. “I’m sorry, they didn’t tell me your name.”

“Dev.” He reaches back and snags a chair from the table next to us, flipping it around to face ours, and takes a seat.

“Dev.” Delia jots it down in her dance-planning notebook, next to our list of themes. “Is that short for something?”

“Devilishly Handsome.” He says it without hesitation, with a perfectly straight face.

Delia laughs. I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Maybe just devilish.

“
Devilishly
, huh?” Delia shoots me a sly smile. “Then you two should meet. We call her Saintly–”

“Because my last name is Santos,” I put in quickly.

“Because she’s so perfect.” Delia smiles at me, teasingly. “Perfect grades, zero vices. It’s disgusting.”

This time I do roll my eyes. “Thanks for making me sound boring.”

“Oh,” Dev holds out his hand, “I’m sure you’re very interesting.” He says it mildly, but when his blue eyes flick up to meet mine, I feel a little spark. “Nice to meet you, Saintly.”

“Mariana,” I correct him. “Santos.”

“Mariana Santos,” he says, like he’s trying it out. It seems to meet his approval.

“Nice to meet you, too…Devon?” I guess.

“Yeah.” He picks up my pen and taps it on the table. “Let’s go with that. Much more normal.”

“Come on,” Delia coaxes. “What is it really?”

“Deveraux.” He shrugs. “Old family name. I don’t use it much. Devereaux Renard.”

“Deveraux!” Delia exclaims in an exaggeratedly French accent, “
Mais oui! C’est
Francais!
I’ve played Cosette in Le Mis—not to mention a champagne flute in Beauty and the Beast—so French is like my second language!”

“Oh, are you a theatre major?” There’s a spark of humor in Dev’s eyes. “That explains it.”

Delia fakes surprise, her blue eyes wide. “Explains what?”

“Your
joir de vivre
,” he says, spreading the accent on just as thick, “You’re certain
je ne sais quois
.” He winks at me, and I fight the urge to smile.

“Oh.” Delia looks confused, “Sorry. I don’t actually speak French. You know, except for
voulez vous couche—
”

“Deals.” I cut her off. She’s making a fool of herself.

“It’s actually Saintly who’s taking French,” she shrugs, “Which is ridiculous, if you ask me, since she already speaks fluent Spanish and could just test out of the language requirement if she wanted.”

I look down at my psych book. She’s right. I maybe should have played it safe. “I know,” I say, “But I always wanted to visit Paris.”

“So tell me…” I’m surprised when Dev rolls up his sleeve, baring his right forearm. Delia looks thrilled, but he holds his arm out to me. “Can you translate this?”

For a second, I’m distracted by his arm, which is, admittedly, nice: Not bulky, like some guys, but muscled. Strong.

But it’s the tattoo he’s trying to show me, nestled just below the crook of his elbow on the underside of his arm.

I rub at my own tattoo self consciously and read, hoping my accent isn’t too bad. “
A corps perdu?”

He nods. “Exactly.” The blue of his eyes is intense up close, and I wish he would look away. “Do you know what it means?”

My face blushes hot. I hesitate. “Something about the body?”

“Yes.” He smiles. “
Lose the body.
It’s a French phrase, an idiom. It means ‘in the moment, reckless, lavish.’”

“Lose the body.” I had actually been going to guess that, but it didn’t seem to make sense, or it sounded like something sinister, like “get rid of the evidence.”

Or maybe that’s just me. God, I’ve become so morbid. I try to push all thoughts of dead bodies out of my mind. “I get it, but it seems odd to put those particular words on your body, doesn’t it?”

His smile widens. “See, most people don’t get the irony.” He leans back in his chair and pulls his sleeve back down, propping the ankle of one foot on the knee of the other, clearly at home. “I think you’re smart to learn as many languages as you can. Makes it easier to travel.” He twirls my pen between his fingers and grins. “Never know when you might need to skip town.’