Her bouncing stopped immediately as she patted her hair to make sure those curls were still in place. “Lily!” We were less than ten feet away, but Clementine was big into shouting. “Can I pick out another dress to try on?”
Lily sighed. “Yes, just not the one I’m wearing tonight.”
“Yippee!” Clementine dive-bombed from the bed and rushed toward Lily’s closet where Hyacinth was looking for her own dress.
“Okay, I could smell the hairspray fumes and burning hair from the porch.” The door swung open and in stepped someone I hadn’t expected to see right that minute. The curling iron almost slipped from my hands.
“Jesse!” Clementine went from running to the closet to sprinting toward her brother. She tripped on the dress right as she made it to him, but he caught her before she crashed and burned.
After giving her a quick hug and greeting his other sisters, his eyes shifted to me. Everything about him seemed hesitant, unsure. I knew I mirrored the feeling.
“Hey,” he said, staying firmly planted in the doorway.
“Hey,” I said. My heart thundered to life with two lame words exchanged between us.
“How was your week?” His voice wasn’t quite cool, but it wasn’t warm either. It was almost . . . conventional. Maybe that was worse than cool.
“All right,” I said with a shrug. “How was your week?”
“All right.”
We had that repeating each other thing down.
“Don’t we look beee-u-teee-ful, Jesse?” Clementine asked, tugging on his hand to get his attention.
“Positively,” he replied with a smile. So he could still form one, just not for me. “Did a fairy godmother come wave her wand your way or something?”
“No, silly,” Clementine replied before her face wrinkled up. “Rowen? Are you a fairy godmother?”
“Definitely not,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” Lily said as I moved on to the next chunk of hair. Three down, three hundred to go. “I think you’re working some magic in here.”
I made a face at Lily in the mirror. She didn’t need magic to make her any more beautiful than she already was.
“Are you going to the dance tonight?”
I had to look up to see who his question was directed at. Jesse was staring at me again.
I nodded. “Yep. I’ve got my dancing boots ready to go.” Could our conversation get any lamer? I didn’t want to answer that. “What about you?”
Jesse shrugged. “I don’t know. It was a long week, and I’m pretty tired. I might just lay low and catch up on some sleep.”
He got a trio of groans from the girls. I kept my own groan inside.
“Come on, Jesse. You always come to these things. If you don’t come, all the single girls will revolt,” Lily said.
“I’m sure the dance and everyone at it will get along just fine without me,” he said, glancing my way once more before slipping back outside the door.
“Keep lying to yourself, Jesse!” Hyacinth shouted after him. “You’re not fooling any of us!”
“He’s been acting so strange lately,” Lily mumbled.
“That’s because Jesse’s in love,” Hyacinth announced.
I choked on . . . nothing. Yep, I just choked on nothing.
After the three girls gave me strange looks, I kept my head down and focused on Lily’s hair, praying Jesse and love wouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence again.
“He is not in love,” Lily said. “If he was, we’d know about it. Jesse can’t keep a secret like that to himself.”
“Just think about it, Lily,” Hyacinth said, marching toward us. “He’s acting strange, he’s all moody, he gets this strange look on his face all the time, and I caught him checking out bouquets of flowers last week when he took me to the store and thought I wasn’t looking. He’s definitely in love with somebody.”
Lily rolled her eyes. I was about to continue on with the lame conversation theme and ask about the weather when Hyacinth angled herself toward me.
“What about you, Rowen?” she said. “Do you know who Jesse’s in love with?”
That time, I did drop the curling iron. Thankfully, no skin or carpet was damaged.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Hyacinth. Quick acting like Nancy Drew and go get changed. There’s no mystery here. Jesse isn’t in love, and if he was, I’m sure you wouldn’t be the first he’d tell.”
Hyacinth wandered back over to the closet where Clementine had just emerged with yet another dress ten sizes too big. “Yeah, yeah, well, maybe he’s in love but doesn’t even know he is. You know?”
“You watch too many movies,” Lily said.
“And you don’t watch enough.”
After that, the conversation was kept to a minimum as the girls changed and I finished Lily’s hair. By then, Rose and Neil had already been hollering at them for the past ten minutes that the Suburban was leaving, so I helped Lily get zipped into her cotton summer dress, helped her pick out a pair of boots, and flew down the hall to my bedroom.
Josie was planning on picking me up, so I had a few minutes to spare but not many. I threw on one of my old dresses that wasn’t black or especially dramatic, pulled on the boots Jesse had gotten me, and ripped a brush through my hair. Instead of throwing my hair into the side French braid I lived in at Willow Springs, I kept it down. I wasn’t cooking or cleaning, so I could, literally, let my hair down.