Snark and Stage Fright by Stephanie Wardrop Read Free Book Online Page A

started out so promisingly, I suggested, “Maybe I have a brain tumor?” I really wanted to see him smile. I really wanted him to hug me and kiss me and tell me that he understood.
    But instead Michael rubbed his eyes and peeled himself off the wall, saying, “I think I’m going to go to sleep, okay?” Then he kissed me on the top of my head like I was his little sister and turned toward his room.
    I felt tears stinging the backs of my eyes as I croaked out, “What happened to tucking me in?”
    He stopped, took his hand off the doorknob, and turned.
    “Oh, I have been looking forward to it all day, believe me. But this day has been exhausting, George. You and Catalina were all but hissing and scratching at the beach, and then when we get back, you have some kind of confrontation with my grandmother. By the way, do you have any idea why I had to spend ten minutes explaining to her that you are not a ‘gold-digger’?”
    “Oh, that … I guess, I, um, made a joke to that effect earlier,” I admitted, then added hastily, “but only after she insulted me and my dad and the school where he teaches. She assumed I wanted you for your money, which is insulting to you more than me, really … ”
    “Well, explaining your sense of humor to my family is exhausting. And complications like tonight’s, with Forrest. After that … ”
    I slumped against the doorway to my room. So I had embarrassed him by my ungracious acceptance of a drunk forced kiss. I feared my lower lip was thrust out like a petulant child when I snapped back, “I’m sorry that my being molested by some alcoholic with grabby hands has created complications for your family—”
    “That’s not what I meant. I meant … I am trying to figure out what I should do about it all. About how to handle you, and my family—”
    “Handle me?” I repeated. I bit my lip then, hoping the pain would distract my brain from releasing the tears pooling in the corners of my eyes. “I complicate things for you around your family because I don’t belong here and everyone knows it. Some have made that pretty clear.”
    Michael opened the door to his room and said, “You keep saying that, that you don’t belong here. But George, do you want to be here? Because a lot of the time, you don’t act like it.”
    “I don’t know,” I admitted. I should have said I want to be with you , but I couldn’t explain to him that since arriving on the Cape I had felt like Alice when she goes down the rabbit hole—and everything she says and does is wrong until she doesn’t even know who she is anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if a guard stopped me at the door to the church tomorrow and the Red Queen yelled, “Off with her head!”
    Michael’s jaw set in that familiar way again and he said, “Then sleep on it and let me know in the morning,” before he went into his room and closed the door.
    I didn’t sleep much that night.
    I was too terrified by the idea of walking into that perfect white New England church tomorrow and having all of the wedding guests, all of Michael’s family, gape at me like I was a monster just risen from the sewers and come to terrorize their perfect seaside village. They’d all know I was the horrible girl who had mocked the family matriarch and fallen into some bushes, and would no doubt be buzzing that I had smote Forrest Ritter, international literary treasure. But I was even more scared of going across the hall to Michael’s room and begging him to talk to me, of telling him that it wasn’t just his family and Catalina I wanted to see disappear. I wanted the whole world and everyone in it to evaporate and just leave the two of us on one of his massive beach towels with nothing but the sea and the sand and each other.
    I lay on the crisp white sheets of the guest bed, staring up at the blank white ceiling, and I found myself remembering every mean or stupid thing I had said all day. And then my brain cast back further into memory, to a