“It’s fine.” I smile and close my eyes. It’s better than fine.
I put my hair up. I take it down. I have no sense of how I should get ready tonight. Sometimes I get a feeling—one pair of shoes over another, one way of doing my hair—that for whatever reason is right. Tonight I can’t get a read on those feelings. Everything is scattered and shattered and put back together.
Tonight I am going to dance with James.
I laugh, giddy, and leave my hair long and waving down my back. Simple. I’ll keep it simple, because James has seen me through so much and I don’t need to change, not for him, never for him. We understand each other. I can read the lines of his shoulders, catalog the lies of his smiles; he can touch my hands and not care.
I’m his. It’s such a relief to be someone’s, to not have to be my own (to not have to be Annie’s—don’t think about Annie, not tonight, especially not tonight).
It’s still early, we aren’t leaving yet, but I hold my shoes and dance and twirl barefoot out of my room and into the hallway of the cool white house we’re staying in. It is all stone and tile and brilliant splashes of color. I dance past the hallway, past the kitchen. I am going to dance into pieces, I am ready to go, I am ready for tonight.
Laughter and hushed voices from the kitchen. Something is off, my stomach isn’t giddy with butterflies so much as sick with them now, and I don’t want to but I have to, I have to see.
I am a ghost, I am a whisper of feet on the tile. The arched entry to the kitchen shields me and I peer past the edge and there is Eden.
And she is wrapped around—wrapped around—wrapped around James, my James, and she is laughing and her hands (not my hands, not my horrible hands) are in his hair and she is whispering in his ear.
“I promised her dancing,” he says, and she frowns.
“But I’m so tired of dancing. I’m lonely. I want to stay in tonight. With you.”
“Another time, love,” he says.
Love, love, love.
Love.
My dancing heart has danced itself apart and I was wrong, of course I was wrong, I am always wrong, everything is always wrong.
I am James’s but he is not mine.
“Fia?” he calls, pulling away from Eden (soft Eden, untrained Eden, Eden with all her soft parts that I could hurt, hurt, hurt—no, don’t think about it, get away from Eden, don’t let her feel it). “You ready?”
I back into the other room. My feet are ghosts and my heart is a ghost and my dreams? I have no dreams.
I am an idiot.
“I’m ready,” I say. I wipe it clean, push it away, I am nothing, I feel nothing, there is nothing here.
Eden squirms when we get in the car. “She’s doing that thing again.”
“What thing?” James asks. He is smiling and driving, and I wish I were driving. I would drive us off a cliff. No I wouldn’t. (Maybe I would. I am so stupid, I am sick with the stupidness of me.)
“That thing where she feels totally empty. It gives me the creeps. She hasn’t done it in a long time.”
“She is sitting right here.” My voice is bright. My voice is a lie. I can lie better than you can, James.
“You’re happy, right?”
“The happiest.” I smile at him. I am going to dance tonight. I am going to dance tonight and I am not going to dance with James. I will never dance with James.
The club is the same as every other club we go into anywhere else in the whole world. Music and lights and bodies. I leave James and Eden without a word and go to the center of the floor and dance out my rage and my sorrow and dance out everything I am not.
I am not a girl who thought she was in love with James. I am not a girl who has failed and betrayed her sister at every possible turn. I am not a girl whose hands have ended lives. I am not a girl. I am just a body in motion.
“Emilia?”
I do not turn around until the hand comes down on my shoulder and I remember that today I was Emilia. I twist out from under the hand and turn to see Rafael. He is beautiful and he thinks I am beautiful and everything about him is slick and predatory—and he wants me.
He is wrong and I should not encourage him, I should leave right now and find James. This is not safe. (There are too many bodies, several of the tall, broad guys around us are obviously with him. I am outnumbered; it is dark; he thinks I am very young and very helpless and only one of those is true.)
He does not like James. He hates him. I noticed on the beach, but I was distracted by James claiming me. Not claiming me. Using me. Keeping me away from Rafael.
I smile and raise my arms over my head, dance closer to Rafael. He hates James. He is dangerous. I let him put his hands on my hips and twist my body against his. Because he is not James.
And James does not want me this way.
“You are beautiful,” he whispers in my ear and he is not lying. I turn my back to him, trace my arm behind myself, onto his neck. We are dancing and dancing and then before I realize it he is kissing me.