Handcuffs (8 page)

“By talking. I don’t think you ought to bottle this up. Don’t you want to tell me about it?”

“What?”
I cannot believe she is asking me this. She wants me to tell her about it?

“Do you remember the time you told on me for kissing Brett Sanders out in the backyard?” She’s looking straight at me like I’m on trial or something.

“I didn’t tell on you for that,” I answer, trying to keep my cool. I’ve heard the long boring litany of all the guys Paige was with. Yeah, Brett Sanders was possibly hotter than West. She should make a freaking photo collage or something, because she can’t stop thinking or talking about them. She’ll never stop rubbing in how popular she was.

“You did tell on me, because you were jealous. That’s why I want to know how it was for you.”

“So you can go tell Mom and Dad?”

“Just so you’ll know how I felt getting caught. I can’t believe you’re still being such a little princess, even now.” Her voice oozes disgust.

“What?” Why am I even talking to her? She’s just here to enjoy my misery.

“Mom and Dad catch you in the act but you’re still better than me, is that it?” Everything she says confuses me more. Better than her? Me?

“What are you talking about, Paige?” I realize that she’s twisting things. Somehow everything always becomes about her. Even this thing that is so totally about me. Even though she’s mad, she still takes a second look at herself in my full-length mirror. My big sister.

“Did you know that Marion Henessy turned all of her Barbie dolls into Paige and Parker voodoo dolls and then she beheaded them?” she asks out of nowhere. “Well, actually, she only beheaded mine. She torched yours.”

Now she has my attention.

“Oh my God, how do you even know that?”

“She took a picture and sent it to my Gmail address. Can you believe it? I was going to e-mail her back and say that only I could be Barbie and that she should use some ugly old Bratz doll for you, but West said I shouldn’t respond.” She laughs like this is funny. I think she really is trying to be funny. We used to play with all of them together, Bratz dolls, Barbies, this stupid army action figure that I think belonged to Kyle. We always fought over the Barbies; nobody wanted the other dolls.

“Thanks, Paige.” It’s hard to manage a sarcastic tone when you’re totally freaked out. “She burned the Parker Barbie?” I can’t stop myself from asking.

“Melted its face right off. That girl is as crazy as her brother. At least he was never violent.”

“How did you know which one was me? If they were both Barbies, I mean?” This conversation is surreal. She’s telling me all this and still looking at herself in the mirror.

“She had it all labeled, like
Paige Prescott, death by beheading. Parker Prescott, death by bonfire.
”

I shudder. Paige is acting like this is no big deal, but I think it’s terrible to have someone hate you this much.

“Well, I don’t know why she torched my Barbie. I never did anything to her.”

“It’s your fabulous luck being my baby sister. Anyway, how is it my fault her brother wanted to watch me with binoculars and stuff?”

I’ve never quite figured that one out, but somehow I suspect that she is at least a little bit to blame, and Marion Henessy thinks she is totally to blame and will do anything she can think of to try to get back at both of us.

Paige’s reflected image shakes her head at me sadly and runs her hand through her glossy golden hair. It does sort of look like Barbie’s.

“If you want to talk about getting in trouble or you want any advice, you have my number.”

“I’m grounded from the phone.”

“All right, Princess Parker. You know Mom will let you talk to me if you tell her you need to. Just call me, okay? And put a little more conditioner in your hair. It looks dull. Try some Paul Mitchell.”

She should totally start an advice column.

12

T
he Coming of the Ice Princess:

So, once upon a time there was this little girl who liked to be neat. She liked her clothes to match and to be clean and she liked her toys to be put away in the toy boxes. One of this little girl’s first memories is of her mother having a miscarriage.

She remembers her mother falling on the floor, holding her stomach, and she remembers that there was a lot of blood.

Mrs. Prescott (as we will call the mother) had one miscarriage after another in her quest to have a son. Then, when her little girls were five and nine years old, Mrs. Prescott had a pregnancy that lasted longer than the others. At thirty-three weeks she had her little boy, but he was so small that he had to stay in the hospital for months. The littlest Prescott girl was in kindergarten. Her father got her up each morning and helped her get dressed. Wearing neat, clean outfits that matched, particularly with matching hair ribbons in her dark hair, made her feel safe and secure, and close to her mother, who was often in the hospital with the miracle baby, as everyone called him.

At the age of ten, the girl’s sister got up on her mom’s desk in the middle of her office in front of all of her coworkers and did an entire song-and-dance number, complete with a flip at the end. Family legend states that it was not two weeks later that the girl’s mom got a fabulous promotion. I remember vaguely that someone asked if the little one sang and danced too. The little one ducked her head and held on to her mother’s skirt.

I guess I—er, I mean
she
didn’t change much when she got older.

Paige was the center of attention. Preston got over most of his initial health problems, but he has severe ADHD, which keeps Mom busy all the time. I never caused any trouble, not before this week.

There’s something about being the younger sister of the most popular girl in school that makes your fellow students, or at least those that I met my first day at Allenville High, think you are a colossal snob. I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to jump up and yell, “Hey, everybody, I’m not a snob!” Especially when the reason they think you’re a snob is because you’re so quiet. It’s a dilemma.

Allenville is a magnet school. It gets two types of students. Well-to-do students from the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods who have decent-to-good grades, and really smart kids from everywhere else. Our house is in the Allenville school district, so I guess that makes me one of the well-to-do students. Which is pretty funny when you think about it. Ironic or something.

The ex-boyfriend wasn’t around my freshman and sophomore years because he was at a private prep school. An honest-to-goodness boarding school in New England. He got kicked out. There was speculation for weeks over what heinous crime had earned him the axe.

They put him in my advanced British literature course, where he settled in the back of the room kind of hunched in his seat with his legs crossed at the ankles. He was wearing a long black coat. He’d been in private preps for so long he didn’t realize that the trench coat went out with Columbine. It was ultimately hot on him.

All the girls were panting over him. I was hot for him too, but I didn’t know how to break out of the cool quiet calm façade that I had built around myself, so I just observed while every creature with breasts threw herself at his feet. Although some (Kandace Freemont) were aiming a bit higher than the feet. He was polite but sarcastic. He was quiet. He had a mysterious little smile that drove me crazy.

The rejected ones swore he was a homo, but he didn’t have that vibe. Being uninterested in some whorey girl doesn’t make you gay. It just makes you discerning, right?

So he was in my fifth-period class. When they moved him in, the rest of the boys dropped off my radar. Unfortunately, I didn’t drop off theirs.

Sometime, someplace, some genius realized that my pale skin holds a blush exceptionally well. Let the games begin. It became a challenge to see who could make me blush first. I think the thing that bothered me most about the constant torment of the guys who called themselves the Gruesome Twosome and their little psycho friend was that they initiated their torment in front of him. These guys had it in for me.

It really big-time sucked.

They didn’t torment me around Raye, and I never mentioned it to her. I mean, Raye and I met in middle school when she saved me from some kids who were teasing me. But that was a long time ago, and I didn’t want to tell my best friend that I was still such a loser that all the boys still wanted to embarrass me. Since we’d become best friends I liked to feel somewhat equal to her in coolness. So I didn’t tell anyone. I just tried to ignore it and hated every minute that Ms. White wasn’t hovering over me in advanced British lit, shielding me from oncoming humiliation. Until October 13.

I remember the date because it was Friday, therefore Friday the thirteenth. I didn’t have plans for either weekend night, but that didn’t mean I was interested in anything the Gruesome Twosome could think of to tempt me with. And the little weirdo they had picked up was even nastier than the original two. As soon as he caught sight of me coming into the room his beady eyes would light up, and I knew he was searching his tiny brain for the dirtiest and most perverted thing he could think of to say to me.

We had a sub in advanced British lit, and he was really interested in current events, so no hovering at all. In fact, I’m not sure he ever looked up from the Friday newspaper. Didn’t Ms. White know that I needed her to be there every day?

They had a theme going. You could call it creative, but it was probably because they weren’t so good at thinking stuff up. They needed a bit of inspiration. The subject for that day was tea bagging. If you don’t know what that is—and I didn’t before it became one of their topics—it’s, well . . . They were talking about . . . What they were doing was . . . speculating on how much I would enjoy having their balls in my mouth.

“So, Parker, would you just slide them into your mouth and suck on them?”

“Wouldn’t it feel gross? Squishy?”

“What happens when you get a little hair in your mouth, do you like that? Huh?”

I was staring at my notebook because there was nothing I could say to make them stop. On TV you could have a comeback so good it would stop everyone in their tracks. In real life you would be lucky to spit the words out, and even luckier if they heard you over their own laughter.

“I’ll bet she loves it.” The little one was standing right in front of my desk kind of gyrating toward me. I glanced up and several girls were watching, but they looked away, unwilling to help me. This is one of those awful classes where I don’t really know anyone. And no one has ever tried to get to know me. Probably because they don’t want to get picked on too.

“Is it the salty taste you like, Parker? You want that, huh? You love it?” Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t always say my name. Then it would be a little less personal, less like they were imagining me actually doing these things and, judging by the fast shallow breathing, getting into it. I wondered what kind of damage a sharpened pencil could do. I was so mortified I didn’t want to look up. Was afraid I’d glance toward them and see some telltale sign of how into it they were. Less than five minutes until the dismissal bell, I told myself.

The boys in the back row were listening. I could tell because several of them were leaning forward, laughing silently at me. The little evil one leaned down on my desk, so close I could smell something decaying on his breath. “So you like to put balls in your mouth, you like to suck on them, do you? Would you like me to—”

“Back off.” At first I didn’t know who said it.

“What?” The little asshole almost died of shock. No one had ever said anything to him before. His Chihuahua eyes bulged with disbelief.

“I said back off. Get away from her, you little pissant.” Then I recognized his bored drawl and I could see the toes of his scuffed black boots even though I was still afraid to look up. What if
he
was going to say something perverted now? What if he was judging me over all those things they said to me and my inability to defend myself?

“What’s your problem, man?” Gruesome Twosome Guy Number One sounded irritated but also a little nervous, like a person who knew he had been doing something wrong and had been expecting to be called out on it.

He laughed. “You wanna pick a problem? I have several. How about you acting like Parker Prescott would give you the time of day, much less touch your shriveled, diseased, and probably microscopic balls? Is that a good enough problem for you?” His voice softened and I knew, even though I was still staring at my notebook, that he was saying this for me. “I know you guys get a rise out of trying to heat up the Ice Princess, but let me tell you dumb fucks something. Making a girl blush is nothing.” I risked looking up really fast. He wasn’t looking at me. He was standing in front of me, keeping them back. He was protecting me.

“Parker Prescott is beautiful, in a way that you three don’t understand.” His voice went low. “If anyone is going to thaw her, it’s going to be me.” I felt a flush of embarrassment. He knew about the Ice Princess thing. He knew what people said about me. And yet there he was protecting me, watching me with something like fascination. There was something dark in the way he said the thing about thawing me, something that made me forget to breathe, but there was also a certain softness in his voice that made me curious about what he saw when he looked at me, curious about the interest that I thought I detected in his eyes.