Page 17 of House of Hearts
If the next girl is nervous, she refuses to show it. She presents her card with all the haughty arrogance of someone who has never been told no in their life and has no intention of hearing it now. Her confidence might be impressive, but it dies brutally at the hands of the doorman as he rips her card in two.
“Wh-what the hell are you doing?” she sputters, whipping around like someone might come to her aid. “You can’t do that!”
The masked jester speaks his first word of the night, loud and clear for the world to hear: “Fake.”
Bright splotches of color stain her cheeks, and her tone scales higher in her throat. “Please! This isn’t fair! I—I deserve to get in. I’ll get it next time. Let me keep playing! I—don’t touch me, damn it!”
A current of gossip swims downstream, the whisper traveling the length of the line and ending in a mocking peal of laughter: “How embarrassing!” “Oh my God, I’d die if that was me.” “Who is it? Do you recognize her?”
She might not have a mask, but the girl conceals her burning faceas she shrugs off the jester’s arm and storms out on her own. Her tulle cape slashes past me in her retreat, and just like the boy who disappeared into the shadowed mouth of the manor, her silhouette is swept away by the storm.
The jester turns our way next, and although I know my card is legit, I’m suddenly worried I hallucinated the whole experience with Calvin. I can’t shake the visual of a kid in a liquor store, sliding a false ID across the counter and hoping I’m not exposed as three kids stacked in a trench coat.
Birdie goes first.
Then Amber.
And then I’m sweating as I hand over my clammy card and the jester looks at me through the slits of his mask. It only takes ten seconds for him to examine my card, but it’s long enough for me to count each breath and feel my eyes dry out as I forget to blink.
I wait for the rip of paper. He’ll tear mine up next, shout out something about me being a good-for-nothing fake, everyone will laugh, and Birdie and Amber will tut apologetically before disappearing into the night.
None of that happens. Instead I’m escorted to the masquerade table, and I join Amber and Birdie in rummaging through the masks, relief washing over me. The night is far from over, but the first test is aced. Birdie has not only swapped her galoshes for heels, but she’s also swapped her face for the delicate snout of a deer.
“All we have to do is play their game,” Amber tells us from behind the feathered face of a peacock. Her new skin shimmers blue, and her dark hair is adorned with a fan of colorful feathers. “Before you can be a player, you have to be a pawn.”
The ballroom is ripped out of a storybook.
Silver slants across the checkered dance floor as the moon winks at us behind a shawl of black clouds. The night sky pierces through the domed ceiling; the storm is on full display beyond the glass. I shiver with each jagged streak of lightning and the distant roar of thunder.
All around me, beautiful gowns glimmer like fallen stars. The chaos from before has washed away, and I’ve been plucked from my everyday life and thrown back into a medieval court.
Among all the finery, there’s a singular portrait hanging over us on the far wall. The first thing I notice about the subject is her hair. Similar to Emoree’s, it’s a riot of red against swan-pale skin. It swims down her scalp and grazes her oval cheeks in loose waves. There’s a Pre-Raphaelite softness to her jaw and a lost quality in her gaze, her eyes wandering all the way off the canvas and onto me.
Anastasia Hart, the plaque reads.
I turn and meet my own eyes in the wall-length mirror ahead. I might not be able to see my face, but I stop to admire the dress on me for the first time. Amber had promised it was no big deal to borrow, but it feels like one tonight.
It hugs me just right, the fabric bluer than a bruise, the same shade as the sky before the sun comes out. Despite it all, I feel like a wine stain, out of place and needing to be scrubbed out of the gown.
“We look like the start of a bad joke.” Birdie snickers, brushing a curious finger along her mask. “A peacock, a deer, and a rabbit walk into a ballroom.”
I’m the rabbit in this equation. My mask transforms me into a whiskered creature, prowling across the dance floor. Neither a girl nor a beast but something else entirely.
“That’s fine as long as I’m not the punch line.” Amber snorts in response, twisting and turning so that her dress twirls alongside her. “Come on! Let’s at least have fun before the madness starts.”
She drags us out to the dance floor and giggles at my yelp. I don’t know about the rest of them, but my only frame of reference for a school party is my homecoming ball sophomore year. Em begged me to attend, and we spent the entire semester trying to scrounge up the money for the tickets. It was fun because Em had a way of making everything feel festive, but it didn’t prepare me for this.
This is a far cry from a school gym with a Kool-Aid punch bowl and party streamers and the PE teacher playing chaperone in the corner. There’s a massive gilded cage in the center of the room with a goddamn aerialist hanging from a lyra hoop. She’s angled to tell the time like a human clock counting down to midnight.
“This has to cost more than my tuition,” I mutter, and Birdie giggles at that.
“More like all of our tuitions combined,” she adds over the elegant hum of a violin.
A server spins through the crowd, her metal hoopskirt fashioned to hold dozens of glass bottles. She interrupts our conversation to offer drinks, and just like the man’s at the door, her face is a painted Venetian smile. The liquid sloshing in each bottle is a curious storm blue. They’re all corked and labeled with an identically scrawled note. Two words in a delicate cursive script:Drink Me.
Before I can think too hard about it, I knock back one of the bottles. There’s a hint of blueberry, bubbling and sweet, but I can’t say for sure what it is. It’s…good.
Birdie and Amber clink their own cups with a shared “santé” before the attendant moves on to the next unassuming victim. With that, we’reoff, the three of us swept up in the revelry of the dance.
