Tempestuous Read online

“Dude, they shot at us with BB guns,” Caleb interrupted angrily. “Why should they get to occupy an entire annex of the building? They’re not even mall employees.”

  “Calm down, calm down,” Grady said, raising both arms defensively. “There’s not much I can do here on my own. I don’t foresee they’re going to pose any problem so long as they confine themselves to that end. And I’d advise the same to all of you,” he said, raising his voice as he scanned the room. “By morning the roads and parking lot should be cleared enough to let you all go home. But until then, no more running around the building willy-nilly. It’s just not safe, and I can’t be in ten places at once to keep an eye on you.”

  After glancing disinterestedly at the mall cop, everyone pretty much ignored him and went about their business.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any sign of Mike?” I asked Grady as he turned to go.

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  “We’re also missing a clown named Colin.”

  “See, that’s exactly why you all need to just stay put,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll keep an eye out for them. Be back in an hour or so to check in.”

  Caleb watched Grady exit the food court before turning to me.

  “I can’t believe he won’t do a damn thing about the Sons of Anarchy down there,” he muttered. “They shouldn’t be able to get away with that crap.”

  “For once, you and I are in agreement. But what are we supposed to do about it?”

  “Don’t look at me. Isn’t that your specialty?”

  He was right. This was exactly the sort of thing I was supposed to be good at. And yet here I was, stumped. And tired. And, wow; I really needed to pee. Is this how a sitting president felt midway through the first term? I used to get a little rush every time I got to work my magic, so to speak, but the responsibility was starting to weigh too heavily. Everyone looked to me to solve their problems, but who did I get to lean on when I needed help? This whole “playing God” thing was getting to be exhausting. I glanced up at the helicopter circling the ceiling and a synapse fired in my brain. Like Caleb said, I was really good at this, and well, one last hurrah might not be a bad thing.

  “Hey, Raj,” I said, raising my voice above the toy’s loud whirring. “Were there any more of those helicopter kits?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why?”

  “Grab some of your guys. We’re going back to Craftworks.”

  • • •

  We brought everything back to the food court to assemble. My team of junior engineer wannabes huddled together, hard at work on building six more copters (and a few Star Wars RC X-Wing Fighters—they’d insisted) while the rest of us squeezed out dozens of bottles of glue into plastic sandwich baggies. Ariel, no surprise, had already tapped into the cases of glitter we’d found in bulk. She shook a handful into her palm, threw it up in the air, and looked enchanted as it fell flickering around her.

  “Yo, Tinkerbell,” I said, teasing her. “Don’t OD on the pixie dust. We need it for the bombs.”

  Raj approached me with a progress report on the modifications he and his friends were working on.

  “We superglued ‘L’ hooks to the underbellies. If we reverse direction fast enough in the air, the bombs should slide off and generally land in the vicinity of where we want ’em. Did I tell you what a bang-up idea this is by the way?”

  “About twelve times already. But thanks. Let me know when everything’s ready on your end.”

  “You know,” said Caleb later, holding open a baggie with his free hand while I emptied a bottle of glue into it with my right. “This is pretty much an overt declaration of war. It’s going to be a lot harder, after this, to carry out your stealth prank on Brian, whatever it is.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I’m considering making this my swan song. I’ve had an epiphany interacting with those a-holes tonight and am finally starting to see that I’m better off now than I was before; well, apart from the whole being saddled to your sorry butt all night. There’s been nothing fun about that.”

  “The feeling is mutual. Hey, there we go again, agreeing on things.” He paused for a moment. “Still, I would have loved to have seen whatever grand scheme you had planned for your ex. Your mind can be a scary-yet-enthralling place.”

  “Aha! I knew you were secretly loving our spy games,” I said, ribbing him with both our elbows. “But yeah, it’s weird. I thought I was angry at Brian, and don’t get me wrong—he’s a total lowlife. But I think the person I’m most fed up with is myself. What could I have possibly seen in that creep? In any of them?”

  Caleb silently shrugged, scooping a pile of pink glitter and adding it to the glue-filled baggie. How maddening. Here I am chastened and contrite, and he says nothing, a silent acknowledgment that, yes, I’m a detestable diva. Then again, he didn’t use the opportunity to make another one of his sardonic remarks. For someone who can read most people like a flimsy paperback novel, I still couldn’t figure this guy out.

  For obvious reasons, everyone wanted to come along when we executed our strike, which made me wary.

  “I don’t want anyone getting hurt, so don’t get too close. For any of you filming it on your phones, just stay alert.” I gave these orders to our rag-tag commandos as we approached the intersection between Worthington’s and Teasers, the site where we could get the most Eastern Prep kids all at once. “The plan is to catch them off guard, but if they open fire, everyone needs to fall back.”

  Our glitter bomb blitzkrieg would only have been more exciting had a forty-piece orchestra been playing Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as a soundtrack in the background. Instead, the buzzing clamor of the model aircraft drowned out the music that was emanating from Teasers and was enough to draw pretty much everyone from their encampment. I recognized a few of the kids as the same ones who’d badmouthed me when I’d first arrived at the food court at the beginning of my shift. Brian and Prince Harry were in the thick of it, craning their necks at the choppers with bemused, “That’s the best you can do?” smirks. As soon as one bomb dropped, I knew the spectators would disperse, so the plan was to drop them all on one command. I didn’t see Rachel or the Itneys in the crowd yet, but I couldn’t wait much longer to give Raj the go-ahead signal—he’d warned they wouldn’t be able to fly that many models for too long without a midair collision.

  “Now!” I shouted dramatically, waving my free hand in a large clockwise motion, as if on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Raj and crew, with laser-like precision, maneuvered their whirring ’copters into position over the heads of our primary targets and, at my cue, started offloading the cargo. In a gooey, almost slo-mo fashion, the globs of glitter began their descent toward our unsuspecting victims. As the sticky, glittery gunk landed in their hair and glommed onto their clothing, the faces of Brian, Prince Harry, and several of their surrounding toadies morphed from derision into a hilariously unintentional reenactment of Munch’s The Scream.

  “We nailed ’em!” I shouted into Caleb’s ear, as if he couldn’t see for himself. “This is even better than I hoped!”

  “Their expressions are priceless. You’d think a flock of pigeons just torpedoed them with bird shit!” he shouted back.

  I turned to high-five Ariel, but she had disappeared into the crowd. Chad was also nowhere to be seen.

  Brian and Prince Harry tried to sling off some of the goop, to little avail. Even though we couldn’t hear them, we didn’t need a lip reader to tell us what they were shouting. The crowd around them seemed highly amused by the whole thing. I got the sense they might have enjoyed seeing the “big men on campus” squirm as much as we did.

  Once the glitter bombs had been dropped, I signaled Raj to begin one last flyover before we hoofed it back to the food court to await Eastern Prep’s almost certain retaliation.

  The helicopters arranged themselves in a V-formation and began the dramatic, choreographed finale we had practiced earlier. Instead of scattering to the four winds, the audience below looke
d up, mesmerized, perhaps wondering what fresh hell we were going to unleash next. At that moment, I looked up to see Ariel leaning over the side of the parapet of the floor above. She gave a thumbs up to someone in Teasers and I craned my head to see who it could be. I spotted Chad standing next to the deejay’s turntable and wondered what was up.

  Ariel disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, her hands mysteriously cradling something. She reached out and flung the contents into the flight path of the helicopters. Glue-free glitter fell in small tornadoes, whirling in the air as though magically tossed by a coterie of errant fairy godmothers. What was she doing? We didn’t plan this. But it was breathtaking.

  Though prepared for myriad responses to the earlier bombardment ranging anywhere from mild annoyance to outright anger, it would have taken Nostradamus to foresee what actually happened next. As the glitter fell like ticker tape onto upturned faces and outstretched arms, a pulsating beat began to pour from Teasers’ speakers and out into the hallway. The volume was maxed so high you could no longer hear the helicopters whirring overhead, though they were just above arm’s reach. The deejay was playing one of those inimitably danceable beats that you can’t help but lean into, and rather than devolving into chaos, most people were smiling and spinning as if Ariel was dispensing laughing gas instead of glitter. Several of our crew rushed in to join the festivities, paying no heed whatsoever to my earlier words of warning. Caleb and I glanced at each other in disbelief. In addition to exacting unholy vengeance on Brian and his minions, thanks to our good fairy, Ariel, we’d apparently unleashed an epic rave. Everyone—well, almost everyone—had put their differences aside to share the newly minted dance floor. Brian and Prince Harry were nowhere to be seen, while Rachel and the Itneys appeared to be having a telenovela-style squabble in the far corner.

  “Now what?” Caleb yelled into my ear.

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” I yelled back, leading him in the direction of the dance floor.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Unless I Be Reliev’d by Prayer

  The combination of sweat, glitter, and endorphins was intoxicating as we joined a circle taking shape on the dance floor. At the center, Alfredo’s slammin’ pop-and-lock moves drew cheers and whistles from our erstwhile foes while Stacy Scott upped the ante with some crowd-inciting freestyle. Public school and private school kids intermingled as if we’d known each other since kindergarten and were now carousing together at our senior prom. Perhaps the United Nations could learn to resolve international conflicts with that great equalizer, the dance-off, I mused.

  On the other side of the circle, I caught Ariel’s face intermittently as she jumped up and down like a spastic terrier. My poor, “fun-sized” friend was attempting to peer over the rows of people crowded in front of her. I beckoned her to stand by me for a better view, but just then she was lifted up above the crowd in one fluid movement. A chivalrous Chad had hoisted her to a seated position on his right shoulder as if she weighed no more than a gallon of milk—which, truth be told, was probably the case. Thunderstruck, Ariel found my eyes in the crowd and stared at me with incredulity, silently mouthing, “Oh. My. God!”

  “Happy Birthday!” I mouthed back at her, knowing that she’d be replaying this moment—and, perhaps, this whole night—in her head for a long time to come.

  Meanwhile, I was again surprised that Caleb and I had somehow managed to find a happy medium with our movements on the dance floor. Certainly I’d had to temper some of my more intricate steps, but he wasn’t nearly the clodhopper I’d expected him to be in spite of his accidentally treading on my toes a few times.

  “Oh god—my bad!” he said after one such incident. “Are you alright?” He grabbed my shoulder with his free hand and brought his face close to mine so I could hear him through the din.

  “Watch it, mister. I’m not the sort of person you can just walk all over,” I said teasingly.

  “That I know,” he said with a grin. “Don’t worry.”

  The music downshifted to something a bit slower, and a few people on the floor paired up as if to slow dance. Oh no. The deejay had been spot-on till now, but I suddenly found myself wishing a plague upon his house. Caleb and I were finally getting along okay, but that was a far cry from wanting to sway arm-in-arm with him to some cheesy light FM song. Besides, I had urgent business to attend to, and by business, I meant business.

  I yanked Caleb in the direction of Ariel and Chad. The football star had gently placed my colleague back down on the ground and they were looking at each other a bit expectantly.

  “Ariel, I need your help,” I said, firmly.

  “Wha—? Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Are you sure it can’t wait? I mean, I thought you said the copter run would be our last act of defiance!”

  “Ariel, please, please, please come with Caleb and me. I need you! I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.” My loyal friend sighed and gave Chad a sweet shrug, clearly hesitant to part ways with him but bound by what had become a sisterly allegiance to me.

  “Well, thanks for the lift.” She glanced at him and then averted her eyes in a blush.

  “No problem, Tink.” As he said this, Chad reached down and brushed a bit of purple glitter from Ariel’s face with the palm of his hand. I hadn’t the time to be sufficiently flabbergasted by this wholly unexpected kernel of romance I perceived between them. With Caleb and Ariel struggling to keep up, I shuffled as quickly as I could away from the party.

  “So where are we going, your highness?” he asked.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know.” I grabbed a men’s silk tie off an accessories kiosk en route. “We’re going to need this.”

  • • •

  Three people, one pair of handcuffs, and a three-by-five-foot bathroom stall; Harry Houdini couldn’t have thought up a dicier tight spot for one of his great escapes, but here I was, finally attempting to soothe the savage beast—my bladder.

  Caleb was standing with his face toward the stall door, blindfolded by the yellow-striped necktie so he couldn’t see a thing. That, paired with the handcuffs and the grimace on his face, made him look like a hostage in the final hours of a long and intense negotiation for his release.

  The embarrassment factor was excruciating in more ways than one. I’d wanted to turn on all the faucets in an attempt, I’d hoped, to keep Caleb from hearing the sound of me peeing. It seemed absurdly wrong to have any guy—let alone, this one—hear me tinkle. But alas, they were those automatic dealios that turn themselves off after ten seconds to save water. I’d hoped my chatterbox coworker would keep up her mile-a-minute play-by-play of the night long enough to drown out the sound.

  Common girl knowledge the world over: Pulling down a pair of tights is hard enough with both hands, and virtually impossible with only one. So like an Elizabethan lady-in-waiting, Ariel dutifully stooped next to me, helping me shimmy my red tights and undies down past my knees. The skirt of my jumper hid the money shot, if you will, so even if Caleb had wanted to sneak a peek (and he didn’t seem interested at the moment), he wouldn’t have gotten to see much beyond the awkward visual of me hunched on the can. Ariel was wrestling with the protective seat cover made of tissue paper.

  “It keeps slipping off the seat,” she said. “I hate these stupid things!”

  “Never mind! I’ll crouch.” I whispered this into her ear, just wanting the nightmare to conclude.

  It was a tremendous relief to answer the now-insistent call of nature, but having held it in for so long, the process of elimination took mortifyingly longer than your average bathroom break. When it was clear that I’d finally emptied the kettle, so to speak, Ariel ripped off some toilet paper and handed it to me before we repeated the painstaking process of hiking my tights and unmentionables back north of the border.

  “What are you guys doing back there, lacing up a corset?” Caleb said. “I thought girls took longer than guys in the bathroom because they were primpi
ng. I didn’t realize a simple pee was an undertaking on par with sequencing the human genome.”

  I was about to respond but held my tongue when we heard the sound of the ladies’ room door squeaking open. It was shame-inducing enough to have my bathroom break turn into a team sport, but to have someone find us crammed unnaturally together in the stall was enough to make all three of us clam up and assess the situation.

  A cadre of high heels clomped across the marble floor accompanied by a garble of voices a few decibels higher than the roar of a jet engine. Ariel’s face registered semi-panic.

  “I canNOT. Even. Deal,” Whitney said in a rage. “You do not do something like this to Whitney Elaine Emerson and live to tell—hiccup!—about it.”

  “Whatever, you’re not the only victim here,” Britney shot back. “C’mon, don’t be a booze hog. Hand it to me.” We heard the sound of liquid jostling in a glass bottle. “Uggh, this is rotgut. I’m not sure we should be drinking it straight.”

  “Like, what do you mean? It’d be safe if we were lesbians?”

  After a confused pause, both girls erupted into inordinate peals of laughter until Britney abruptly halted midsnicker and added. “Seriously, couldn’t you have at least added some, like, Apple Pucker to mask the turpentine taste?”

  “Sorry, I’m not a freakin’ ‘mixologist’—you told me to swipe something that would get us shitfaced. Well, this stuff is the beverage of champions according to Nate’s frat party postmortem e-mails. I’m already feeling a little bit cross-eyed, which proves this is hardcore hooch. Oh—speaking of Nate, we’re, like, technically still together, so not a word to him about any of this mess.”

  I tried in vain to get a glimpse of the girls through a crack in the stall, failing to see why Whitney would be so worried that her college boyfriend hundreds of miles away would actually dump her over Ariel’s little make-under. Not that I’d seen the results, but I didn’t get the impression it was anything that a few weeks’ time and a trip to a salon for some color corrections wouldn’t fix.