Chapter 38
He was in the middle of a sentence, speaking to her through the door when she emerged. His jaw fell open, a word hanging on the air that he simply couldn’t finish.
“Whoa,” he said when he saw her in the gown. After a moment of staring, he said, “Now I really want to stay in the room.”
It was a sleeveless black bandage style dress that hugged her body, its V-neck revealing just enough cleavage and its midi length showing enough leg that she felt like she had what Josh and Kincaid considered “classy edge.”
She felt fierce and foolish all at once. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been this dressed up. Had she ever been this dressed up? She hadn’t even gone to her own prom—researching emancipation from the bitch of an aunt she’d been sent to live with and hunting for Berklee scholarships made finding the right garter a low priority. This whole place made her feel weird—off—as if she was dropped into a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language and certainly didn’t understand the strange customs, but she was somehow sure she was doing everything wrong. She questioned herself more this afternoon than she had in the past month.
“Too much?” she asked.
He got up from the bed, looking like a moving shadow in his suit, and took her hands in his.
“There is no such thing as too much of you. May I?”
He gently lifted her hand over her head, guiding her into a slow twirl, allowing him a complete view of her. The dress shimmered, the fringe detail at her hem swayed. When she had finished her rotation, his eyes were glassy.
“What?” she said, self-conscious and smiling.
“The twenty year old in me, the one who watched you from that that muddy festival field and fell asleep listening to your songs on my Discman and cursing this place because I couldn’t hang your poster… I can’t hear myself think because he’s in my head banging pots and pans and lighting off fireworks and hollering, ‘Can you believe this?’ and I can barely catch my breath to whisper back, ‘She’s so much better than you ever imagined.’”
“So…I look good then?”
Kyle laughed and placed her hand over his heart. It was pounding, beating as quickly as her own.
“Breathtaking.”
Leamy Hall was a stark rectangle of a building on the grounds of the Coast Guard Academy, imposing from the outside. Kyle took her hand and walked her in among the men—some in tuxedos, most in suits, and a handful in uniform—and women in their gowns. They climbed a short set of stairs inside, which led them into a massive, airy, and surprising beautiful ballroom. One wall, going up at least two stories, was comprised entirely of windows that overlooked the Thames River, and the twinkling lights of Groton on the opposite shore. Hanging among the other three walls were dozens of crests the size of shields, each displaying a different year.
Her heart skipped a beat. A real ball. She felt ridiculous. She didn’t care.
Kyle burst out laughing.
“Oh my God!” he said. “The ring!”
He took her hand and led her around the banquet tables to a giant replica of a class ring, large enough to stand inside. On one side of the ring was the Academy crest, Kyle explained, featuring an eagle with its wings spread and the hilts of two crisscrossed swords visible behind a shield inscribed with the year of the academy’s founding, 1876. Below it, an unfurled banner read Scientiæ Cedit Mare.
“The sea yields to knowledge,” he said.
They stepped to the other side of the ring, which featured their class crest. Corey scanned the walls again and realized the hanging shields were the class crests that could be interchanged and affixed to the giant ring. On Kyle’s year’s crest, there was a massive head and forelegs of a fearsome bear bursting through the center of ship’s wheel, which read Audentes Fortuna Iuvat.
“Fortune favors the brave.”
“I like that,” she said.
“Figured you might.”
She didn’t feel particularly brave in that moment, just terribly out of place. She spotted Charlie and waved, and he began to thread through the crowd toward them, a look of stern concentration on his face.
“Hey,” he said, “I’ve been looking for you. I—”
“Tried to warn you, I’m sure,” a woman’s voice came from behind.
Corey turned to see a stunning woman in a sleeveless, silver draped halter gown, a man in a dress uniform beside her. The silver gown shimmered like a slowly spinning disco ball, causing her body to sparkle at intervals, but her most arresting features were her blonde hair, buzzed in a pixie cut, and her eyes, which were the color of the arctic ice. Her cheekbones seemed to be chiseled from the same glacier. Corey pictured the girl in New York who blushed and clutched her portfolio to her chest and she could detect the resemblance to the woman before her now, but only because she was searching for it.
She towered over Corey, who at that moment, felt as if she was at a prom, while this woman was at a ball. The woman’s drape neckline and slide slit and halterneck all accentuated the woman’s height, which Corey figured was inches taller than her own. But the woman’s bearing made the difference seem like a foot. Her posture was perfect, her head held high, her chin up. She would look imperious if she wasn’t so fucking radiant, thought Corey.
The woman turned her piercing gaze to Corey. Corey felt her chest tighten.
“I’m Maxine Powers,” she said, extending her hand.
Corey cleared her throat. “I’m Corey Lyondell.”
“I know who you are.”
“Oh.”
“You’re the one who put a smile on my daughter’s face.” She turned to Kyle and raised an eyebrow. “Yours too, I bet.”
Everyone laughed, except Corey, who just smiled, unsure of what to do or say. She felt stupid and didn’t know what to do with her arms and her hands, which all of a sudden she was incredibly conscious of. She had never wished to hide behind a guitar more.
As if reading her mind, Cold Max stepped forward—no, glided forward. One moment she was feet away and the next she was beside her, and Corey remained rooted to the spot, as if she’d been entranced by a swaying cobra. Cold Max wrapped an arm around Corey.
“Let’s have a word,” she said.
Not a cobra, thought Corey, a boa constrictor.