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“If this keeps up,” her dad said, putting on his turn signal, “we might just get one of those.”
Isobel stirred from her thoughts. “One of those what?”
“A white Christmas, Iz,” he said, his eyes never leaving the road. “What are you thinking so hard about over there, anyway?”
As they switched lanes, her dad offered a wave of thanks to the lady in the kid-packed SUV who had let them over. Isobel glanced down at her hands in her lap.
“Oh.” She summoned her best semblance of a smile. “Just thinking about . . . Nationals,” she lied, and touched the thin golden band on the ring finger of her right hand. She twisted the ring, turning it around and around. NATIONAL CHAMPION it read in bold capital letters that framed a smooth, glinting, Trenton-blue gemstone.
“Seems like you’ve been thinking about that an awful lot lately,” he said. “Or worrying about it, I should say. I mean, to the point where you’re dreaming that it didn’t happen.” He paused, looking away from the road to glance in her direction. Isobel knew he was waiting for her to speak, but she couldn’t think of what to say. She didn’t know what it was he wanted to hear. It was better, she thought, to remain silent and let him draw his own conclusions. At least it was easier to hide the truth that way.
“You know, Izzy,” he said, returning his attention to the road, “you were really great out there this year. I mean, better than ever. And I’m not just saying that. I have to admit, I was a little nervous when I saw Heywood do their routine, but you guys smoked them. You know that, don’t you? I mean . . . I can’t help but get this feeling that, for whatever reason, you keep asking yourself if you really deserved to win. It’s like you feel guilty about it, when I don’t think I’ve ever seen you more focused. The squad was great, but you, Izzy, it’s like you were on another plane of existence. I mean, you were totally zoned. You should be proud of yourself.”
“I am,” she said, giving the ring a final twist as the sedan rolled into their subdivision, past the triple-tiered fountain, which now stood as still and silent as a cemetery monument, collecting snow in its empty basins.
Isobel sensed her dad glancing her way again, so she looked up and squeezed out yet another false smile. She tried her best to hold the expression, even when he looked away, but keeping up the game was starting to take its toll.
At the very least, she’d tried to make it seem like Nationals had mattered to her in the way it once had, before that day at school when she’d been paired to work with a certain jade-eyed goth boy named Varen Nethers. Before she’d ever known a single thing about him or the ominous subject he’d chosen for their English project—the man who was Edgar Allan Poe.
But Isobel was a bad actress. When it came down to it, there was only so much “I’m okay—really” smiling she could muster when she wasn’t out on the floor cheering, when she didn’t have any choreography or chants to prop up the new cardboard-cutout version of herself. Without a distraction that took all her mind and body, it was just too hard to pretend that she wasn’t empty on the inside. Or that she didn’t know far more about what had happened on Halloween than what she had told her parents.
The events of that night came back to her in flashes. The Grim Facade. The dreamworld masquerade. The falling ash and the woodlands. The sky ripped into shreds by bleeding strips of violet. And his eyes. Always those eyes. Again and again she saw the blackness overtake them. She watched it spiral out, consuming her reflection, leaving behind a stranger.
“You think Mom will like the locket?”
“What?” Isobel blinked. “Yeah,” she said, recovering quickly, realizing that he must have meant the gift he’d picked up that afternoon, the one the store clerk had had to retrieve from the special-orders case. “Of course she will.”
The sedan slowed as it neared the stop sign just before their street. Isobel raised her thumb to her lips and bit down on her nail. “Hey, Dad,” she said, speaking around her thumbnail, “have you thought any more about, you know, us going up to take a look at U of M?”
Instead of rolling through the stop sign the way he usually did, the car gave a sudden slight jerk as he pressed the brake. At the same moment, Isobel saw his lips flatten into a thin, tight line.
“I have,” he said, his voice taking on that strained sternness she had grown more and more accustomed to during the past two months.
From Halloween on, as the weather had grown colder, so, it seemed, had her father’s temperament, his fuse snipped shorter than the days themselves.
Isobel had become so used to tiptoeing around him, filtering her words and monitoring her requests, that it was getting harder to remember a time when things hadn’t been so tense between them, so guarded.
It made her wonder if he would ever forgive her for lying to him. For sneaking off.
For falling in love with the wrong boy.
“And?” she prompted.
He sighed. Loosening his grip on the wheel, he made the turn onto their street. “And I think it’s great that you’re thinking about college, Izzy, I do. But we don’t have to go look at a school right away, you know. You’re still only a junior. There’s plenty of time. We can even go this summer if you’re still thinking about Maryland. Dallas and Nationals set us back a bit in the way of travel funds, kiddo. I just don’t think it’s feasible right now. Besides, you don’t really want to travel in January, do you?”
“But,” Isobel started. She clutched the door handle tight, trying to keep herself in check. She couldn’t seem too eager. She couldn’t seem too desperate, or he would see straight through her.
Taking a breath, she began again. “Dad, Martin Luther King weekend is the only time we don’t have practice or a game. And this summer will be my last chance for cheer camp.”
Her dad turned the steering wheel again, pulling the sedan into the driveway. In the same motion, he reached up to his visor and pressed the remote for the garage door. Snow filtered down in large clumps now, creating a rushing screen between the grille of the car and the yawning mouth of the garage as it opened with a low, grinding noise. A gray shadow slid over them as the sedan rolled into the dimly lit space.
“There’s always spring break, Izzy. Maybe we can go for your birthday. That way we could spend a little time there. Maybe see the Inner Harbor. I hear they’ve got a great aquarium.” He put the car into park and sat back, both hands resting on the top of the steering wheel, arms rigid. “But you know, I’ve talked to your mother about it, and I can’t say she’s exactly thrilled with the idea of your going so far away for school.”
“Because of what happened on Halloween.”
Immediately, Isobel regretted blurting these words. She pulled her hands into her lap, curling them into fists. Looking down again, she glared at the Nationals ring she had thought would solve the problem of her parents’ doubts and bit her bottom lip, waiting for the rebuff.
Her dad turned off the car, killing the Christmas music. He pulled the keys from the ignition and the cab light sprang on. Isobel stole a glance in his direction. In the stark light, his features looked harder than they had in the months before. The lines around his mouth seemed deeper than she remembered, and maybe that was because these days she did her best to avoid looking either of her parents directly in the eye. Not just because of the guilt that had come from the lying and the sneaking off, or from the boundless worry she had caused them both that night, but because she had grown to fear her own transparency, to fear how much of the truth they would see. Especially her dad.
