He’ll take one look at me and run screaming in the opposite direction.
Saskia teases my hair into curls and pinches my cheeks, murmuring something about Rose having more of a natural glow. I couldn’t feel more deficient if I tried. Once she’s finished prodding my face and my ego, she leads Nate and me towards the orchard, navigating the estate in the dark like a bat.
The Harper estate is large, even by Gem standards. Hundreds of acres of woodland and meadows and landscaped gardens. I imagine I could easily get lost, so I stay close to Saskia, even though her constant frown unsettles me.
We cross a paddock, climb over a fence, skirt around the edge of a lake – this route actually seems familiar, echoing the set of the movie, but I feel so far from being a film star it’s untrue. With every step, my nerves seem to build, and now they fill my entire body, making even my fingers tremor. I begin to long for that beyond-cold shower again.
You see, I’ve always been terrible with the opposite sex. I’ve been on one date, which ended with me choking on an olive, and I’ve only been kissed twice. Once I was so drunk I barely remember it, the other time it was like having a wet gherkin shoved into my mouth. It’s hard pulling boys when you’re constantly overshadowed by Alice, the human mannequin.
Violet the Virgin. Ryan Bell called me that for a whole term, until Katie kneed him in the balls and called him a skid mark.
Just thinking about Katie and Alice makes my heart feel like it’s going to explode. I have to get Willow to fall for me or we’re all stuck here. The image of my feet pirouetting through the air bursts into my conscious – in six days, I will hang – but I push it down into that shadowy part of my brain along with the olive and the gherkin and all my other insecurities.
Saskia pauses by a leafy archway, laced with trailing wisteria. ‘That’s your best bet, the orchard.’ She gestures beyond the archway. ‘His evening stroll should take him right near here. Attract his attention somehow, do your thing. Thorn trusts you, God knows why.’ She looks me up and down. ‘If you let us down, I’ll kill you.’
I suppose a ‘good luck’ is out of the question then, I think to myself.
She grabs Nate by the arm. ‘Come on young ’un, best not cramp the lovebirds.’
‘No.’ My voice comes out a little desperate.
Saskia glares at me.
‘Can he stay? Please, I don’t know if I can do this on my own.’
Nate interrupts. ‘She needs me to prepare, we’re a team, you see.’
Saskia curls her lip at the word team. ‘Whatever.’ She walks away, and I get this awful feeling she wants us to fail so she can follow through on her threat.
Nate runs through my lines with me, quoting the scene from the film. He takes Willow’s lines, using this deep, manly voice, which makes him sound like the girl who played the prince in last year’s pantomime. And I say Rose’s lines, wincing at how stale my voice sounds:
WILLOW
Are you OK? Are you hurt?
ROSE
No, thank you, I’m fine, it’s just a little graze. You must be Willow.
You look like a Willow.
WILLOW
And what does a Willow look like?
ROSE
Tall and lanky.
WILLOW
(laughs)
And you are?
ROSE
Just another Night-Imp.
WILLOW
Really, I hadn’t noticed.
Fortunately, the dialogue from the film remained pretty true to the book, so we at least don’t feel torn about which lines to choose. I have a different problem: the words have lost all meaning and swirl around in my head like a series of disjointed sounds. And I can’t believe I never noticed how cheesy they sound. Saying them out loud makes me cringe.
I raise a hand to show I’ve had enough. ‘It’s not helping, sorry.’
‘It’s OK, you know it backwards anyway.’
I stand next to the plum tree, my hands sweaty, my breathing shallow. I try leaning against the trunk like Rose, but my hair sticks to the wood and I worry I’ll get a bark pattern imprinted on my forehead.
‘I don’t think I can do this.’ My voice seems to disappear upwards, between the leaves and branches.
‘Of course you can,’ Nate replies.
‘But Rose and Willow . . . they’re like Edward and Bella, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde . . .’
‘Kermit and Miss Piggy.’
This makes me laugh, but only for a second. ‘What if he doesn’t like me?’ I wish I hadn’t said this, because even in the dark, Nate’s face acts like a mirror, reflecting my anxiety.
He catches himself and smiles. ‘Course he will, just stick to the script. Say the lines and try to look, you know, half decent . . . Don’t dribble or fart or pick your nose.’
‘But what about that connection,’ I say.
Nate recites a line from the book. ‘And after only the briefest of encounters, Willow knew that he could wander the earth for the rest of his life and never find another soul who made him feel so complete. It’s like they were born to slot together.’
‘Seriously, Nate. I don’t need to hear that shite right now.’
The clock tower strikes midnight. I imagine a stage curtain lifting.
‘You ready?’ he says, handing me a knife.
The knife. In all my anxiety, I totally forgot about cutting myself. Thank goodness Nate remembered. He must have lifted the blade from Saskia on the way here.
I hold it above my outstretched palm. I am Rose. I am strong and fearless. I squeeze my eyes shut and will myself to stab my own hand. But my arm just wavers mid-air, puppet-like and uncertain.
‘Violet,’ Nate hisses.
Panic forces my eyes open. ‘I can’t.’
‘You have to, it’s canon.’
‘But I don’t do pain.’
The clock finishes chiming, the curtain has lifted, and yet here I stand, unbloodied and wobbling like a giant marionette.
Nate grabs at my overalls and whispers in an urgent tone, ‘Come on, you’ve got balls of steel, think Rose, think Tris, think Katniss.’
I flatten out my palm, now dappled with sweat. ‘Balls of steel, balls of steel.’ I say it like a mantra, letting the adrenalin build inside. And just as I’m about to thrust the knife blindly downwards, hoping I somehow hit my palm, I hear the crack of twigs.
‘It’s him.’ Nate dives behind a nearby trunk, his slim frame easily swallowed up by the orchard.
Necessity pulls the blade down in a graceful arc, but I lose my nerve at the last moment and whip my palm away. The tip of the blade just catches my thumb, sending a sharp pain up my wrist like I’ve been stung. ‘Ow! Bastard knife!’ I drop it – handle first – on my foot. Mid hop, I remember Rose leant seductively against the tree, and I kind of headbutt the trunk in my eagerness.