Kissing Midnight (7 page)

That’s all I need to hear. In seconds I’m out the door, letting the cold breeze slap me back to my senses.
Breathe
. I catch a glimpse of my face in the glass doors and I can see why she let me go: I look gray and shaken and very sick.
Because I am
, I think,
I am sick, but not the way she thinks
.

I’m sick in the head.

Again.

Still.

Dev

“How is it going?” Anathema shifts from a cat curled up on my pillow to a beautiful woman lounging on my bed in the space of a heartbeat.

“Jesus, An, not on the pillow. You know how I feel about cats.” I shrug out of my leather jacket, drape it across the back of the chair and sit down. The dorm room is supposed to be a double, but it’s still so small that if I lean this chair back and stretch out my legs, I can prop my feet up on the bed. Not exactly luxury, but what choice do I have? It will do for a few weeks. “It’s going fine.”

“Fine? Is that all?” She smiles slyly. “Shouldn’t it be going better than fine if you want her to fall in love with you in just eight days?”

“You can’t rush it.” I’m already pushing things a bit, I think, coming on to her so strong in the library just now. There’s a real risk of scaring her off. It’s going to be a fine balance, this year. A particularly challenging hunt.

“So you’ve asked her out then?” An sits up, running her fingers sleepily through her long blond hair. “What did she say?”

“I haven’t outright asked her.”

Her blue eyes widen. “You haven’t? Why not?”

“Because I’m laying the groundwork. Right now, she’s still sort of hesitant. A little afraid of me.”

An smiles wickedly. Her teeth haven’t shifted yet—they are still the little needle teeth of a cat. “Smart girl. A little too smart, if you ask me. How will you get her to stop fearing you?”

“By making her fear something else.” I pick up the box, which I keep on the floor beside my bed. As always, it’s cold to the touch. A chill passes through me as I run my finger tip over the ornate carvings in the deep red wood. “She’s a romantic at heart, I think, and a romantic loves a rescue. We need a bonding experience, something heightened and emotional. We need to share an adrenaline rush.”

An is watching me with cat-like curiosity in her eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

I set the box back down, carefully. “I’m going to help her and her roommate this evening, at a warehouse in the North of town. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything,” she says, “Just name it.”

Saintly

“This is it,” Delia calls to the cab driver. “Stop here!”

“Here?” The cabdriver eyes the big old warehouse doubtfully. “You girls wanna get out here?”

I understand his hesitation. This whole neighborhood is warehouses, and most of them look abandoned—some for the weekend, and some for good. The one we’ve stopped in front of is worse than most. A few of the upper windows are boarded up, and the ones that aren’t are broken. Barn swallows fly through the missing panes like spit through an old man’s teeth.

Not exactly reassuring.

But Delia is on a mission. “Yes, I’m sure of it. This is the place. I’ve got it right here on my phone.” She rummages in her overstuffed bag and comes up with cash for the driver. For a minute, I consider asking him to stay, at least until we get inside, but it’s too late. The moment we’re out of the cab, it takes off with a roar. Evidently the driver is as eager to be out of here as I am.

But Delia isn’t worried. She strides toward the warehouse door, her high-heeled boots clicking on the damp pavement. She’s a little over-dressed even for Delia, and I wonder if it has to go with a certain someone. “Is Dev still coming to help us?”

“Eventually,” she says. “He said he’d catch up.”

I nod numbly. I consider telling her Dev came by the library but decide not to. What would I say? Sure, Dev was flirting, but I have a feeling that’s just his nature. He probably flirts with everyone like that.

And it’s not like I can tell her about the book.

Delia fishes a set of keys out of her purse and fits one into the fist-sized padlock that holds the door. It releases with a rusty creak. Together we push open the sliding door, sending up a cloud of dust. The warehouse is dark and musty as a cave.

“There must be a light here somewhere.” I run my hand along the wall, cringing at the sticky touch of cobwebs and grime, until my fingers find the switch. Fluorescent lights hum to life overhead, casting the warehouse in a greenish glow.

“Holy crappola,” Delia breathes.

“You can say that again.” The space is huge, and every inch is crammed with set pieces: wooden pallets stacked with tables, couches wrapped in plastic, neon signs and house facades and staircases sweeping to nowhere. A “stone” tower rises behind a ’50s lunch counter. A huge silver moon sits in the back of an antique truck. There’s a trampoline in one corner stacked with tiki masks as big as I am and, way at the back, a big chrome jukebox. Through the teetering piles of treasure, little pathways run like streams through a canyon of junk.

Delia bounces on her toes. “This is going to be fun!” She whips a notebook and a stack of bright orange tags out of her bag. “We’ll take a tour through the set pieces first and mark anything we think we should use, so they can get it with the truck later, when it’s time to start decorating the ballroom. Then, if we have time, we can start going through the costumes and props to see what we should pull to lend out. Anything small we can take today in Dev’s car. The rest we’ll just pile by the door, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “But it’s hard to know where to start.”

“I know! It’s insanity! Like a theatre-junkyard-slash-archives-slash-museum.”

“It makes me giddy-slash-overwhelmed.”

Delia laughs. “No being overwhelmed. Just take these—” she shoves half the stack of orange tags at me, along with the notebook and pen “—and start tagging things that make you think ‘fairy tale.’ Then jot down what you tagged so I can tell them what we found, okay?”

“Okay.” Deals and I set off in opposite directions, and soon we’re deep in the maze.

The next two hours pass quickly. I spend my time attaching orange toe-tags to furniture fit for a castle: a pair of thrones, a curved staircase, a mirror in an ornate gilt frame. Delia flits like a butterfly from piece to piece, snapping pictures on her phone as she goes and sending them to people on the organizing committee. I can’t always see her—the piles of furniture are over our heads—but Delia is hard to lose. I can hear her keeping up a running commentary as she works: “I’m taking a selfie in this magic mirror… Do you think this jukebox really works?... Could this coffin be Snow White’s if we painted it pink?... Wouldn’t this chandelier look awesome in our dorm room?”

“That chandelier wouldn’t even fit in our dorm room.
We
don’t even fit in our dorm room!”

“Well, it’s a good thing it wouldn’t fit in my purse or I’d be taking it right now.”

I catch sight of Delia’s blond hair as she climbs up a teetering pile of boxes. “Deals, you’re gonna break your neck.”

“I am not!”

“You are, too! You’re going to cause an avalanche of crap!”

“A crapalanche!” She laughs at her own word.

“Yes, and it will bury us both and it will take them two weeks to dig out our bodies.” I pick up the armless torso of a mannequin and shove it aside. I’m trying to unearth some boxes marked “Camelot,” but they’re buried pretty deep. “Shouldn’t Dev be here by now?” I tug out the Camelot box, rip it open, and start sifting through the daggers and goblets and shields. “This whole box is good, but it’s barely labeled. I swear, never leave organization projects to artists! I just want to get in here with a decent data base. All they need is a bar code generator and a scanner and—”

Delia’s laugh echoes in the cavernous space. “Deep breaths, sweetie. Is all this chaos making your eye twitch? Hey, look at me!”

I look up to see Delia posing on a white-painted balcony set.

I frown at her. “You don’t know that’s safe. The floor could fall right out from under you. How did you even get up there?”

She shrugs. “Climbed the boxes.”

“In heels?”

“No. I took my boots off a while ago. Let me know if you see them, by the way.”

I roll my eyes. “They’re gone now. Blanche Dubois will be wearing them in next season’s production of
Streetcar
.”

“Well, you said I shouldn’t have worn them.”

“But I didn’t say go barefoot! Have you had your tetanus shot?”

Delia ignores me. “But look, I’m Juliet! No, I’m Taylor Swift! No, wait, wait! I’m Evita!” She flings her arms wide and sings “Don’t cry for me, Argentina! The truth is I never left you!”

“You look more like Taylor Swift than Madonna.”

She shoots me an exasperated look. “I’m the
Broadway
Evita, not the movie. Rise, my
descamisados
!”

“Wait,” I say, “I think I hear Dev.”

We both stop and listen.

“Hello?” Delia calls, “Dev, is that you?” She puts on her Shakespeare voice “Deveraux, Deveraux, wherefore art thou Deveraux? Deny thy father and refuse thy name!”

“Deals, hush!” I strain to listen, but no one answers. “I swear I heard something.”

Delia leans her elbows on the balcony railing. “Could have been anything. We’ve probably dislodged a bunch of stuff, and stuff settles. Or it could have been a mouse. They eat
papier mache
paste, you know. That Chinese dragon in the corner is chewed to bits.”

“Great,” I mumble, “Mice.” But that must be what it was, because the sound doesn’t come again.

“We totally need this balcony,” Delia says. “We could have a photographer take couples pictures up here. It could be a Cinderella thing. Or— oh! Oh! Have you seen a clock? We could pose them in front of a clock striking midnight. Then it would be Cinderella and New Year’s both!”

“That’s a good idea,” I say, but I’m only half-listening. I’m on edge already after my moment in the library, and now something about the sound or the thought of mice or something has unnerved me. I keep glancing over my shoulder as I replace the Camelot props in their box. I want to pull the box out, but to do that I’d have to move another mannequin, and I don’t want to touch it. It looks to creepy lying there with its empty arm sockets, its vacant eyes staring at the ceiling, its head turned a little too far…

“I’m going to call Dev,” Delia announces. “I can do that,” she adds in a sing-song, “because I have his
num-ber
.”

“Yeah,” I say distractedly, “Do that.” I pick up a velvet curtain and toss it over the mannequin, sending up a cloud of dust. The cloth hides its frozen, pretty face, but the human-shaped lump is still there.

Relax
, I tell myself.
There’s nothing wrong
.

“You okay over there?” Delia’s voice drifts to me over the piles of junk. I can hear the creaks and bangs as she climbs back down from the balcony. “It looks like you’re sending up smoke signals in the dust.”

“Sure. I’m fine,” I say, but when I notice I’ve left one of the prop daggers out on the floor, I don’t try to put it away. I pick it up and grip it tight. It’s only made of plastic, but it makes me feel better to look armed.

“Hey, Dev?” I can hear Delia talking on her phone. “It’s Delia. You’re still coming, right?” She pauses and I imagine Dev’s charming voice answering. “Yeah, it’s kind of out there, isn’t it? The cab guy looked at us like we’d lost it. But no, you’ve got the right address…” She pauses again. “Okay, super. Yeah, if we could just get some of the smaller stuff back to campus tonight, then—” She pauses again. “Yeah, she’s here. She came with me.”

Did Dev just ask about me? The anxious fluttering in my stomach turns into a different kind of nerves. My mind flicks involuntarily to our moment in the stacks, the way his blue eyes shone in the darkness…

“Well,” Delia says, “We’ll see you soon.” Dev must say something witty because Delia bursts into exaggerated giggles. “Okay, we won’t. Bye!” I hear her phone click shut. “He’s on his way but running late. He got a little lost and—oh! Jackpot!”

“What?” I start to pick my way towards her. “Did you find your boots?”

“No, better: Boxes marked
Into the Woods
. I knew they had to be here somewhere.”

“Smart!” Sondheim’s fairy tale show will be full of things we can use. I duck under an arbor draped with flowers and follow the sound of Deals exclaiming over her treasures.

“It’s all here—crowns, aprons, the red hood.” Delia comes into sight, kneeling on the floor in a pile of props. “And there are two boxes marked MND here, too. If that’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, we’re golden on the fairy wings and—” Delia’s phone chimes with a text.

“Dev again?”

“No.” She frowns at her phone. “Oh, fuckity fuck! It’s from Hannah on the committee. She’s got the chick with the cake samples and the florist person meeting her on campus in like twenty minutes and she’s stuck at her folks…” She’s texting double-time as she talks. “She needs me to meet with them.”

“What? Can’t someone else do it?”

“I can’t say no, Saint! I’m trying to get in good! I’ll have to call a cab.”

“But…” I can feel my worry building. “Can’t you just wait for Dev? You said he was on his way!”

“Oh, double fuck! Well, I can’t ask him to just turn back around. We need to load stuff into his car. Would you mind waiting here for him while I cab it back? Help him bring the stuff back?”

I bite my lip, hesitant. I’ve had enough of the warehouse. “Maybe we should just call him, tell him I’m cabbing with you…”

“Pretty please?” Delia gives me a pleading look, her blue eyes wide. “Dev should be here any minute. You’ll be okay, right?”

What can I say? I’m afraid to stay alone in the warehouse for even a few minutes? I’m too shy to be alone with Dev? I don’t want to sound crazy. “Well…”