Page 11 of House of Hearts

Joker Night blows in with a late-summer storm Saturday night.

Thunderheads sap the last of the heat, and a fierce wind slashes through all Birdie’s hard work.

The hour and a half before was filled with primping, curling, spraying, teasing, back-combing, and a million eye-shadow swatches on my wrist. Now I feel like a drowned rat thanks to this torrential rain, but Amber’s more optimistic.

“I knew the waterproof setting spray was a good call. Your makeup still looks amazing,” she shouts over the storm.

For as rich as she and Birdie are, we’re all still sharing one flimsy umbrella, our heels held in cheap plastic bags.

“Is that narcissistic of me to say since I’m the one who did it?

Oh well, who cares, it’s true. I did a great job. ”

I shiver and rub the goose bumps on my arms. My dress is ill-equipped for the chill snaking through the air, but I’m sure the party will fix that.

“Does it even matter how I look if they’re handing out masks?” I ask.

Birdie presses in tighter to the left of Amber. Her hair is darkened by a mix of gel and rain. “The masks are the perfect accessory! Plus, even if we don’t get into the Cards and we have to rip off our masks and go home, at least we look good for some post-party selfies.”

Somehow I don’t see that as a great consolation prize. I brush Emoree’s pendant under my collar. The chain is slick and cold against my throat. “How does this work again?”

“We’ll have to find that one out together.” Birdie smirks. “We’ve never been before.”

All around us, the storm has made a mess of the school’s landscaping. The ground has become one big mudslide. Each step forward dredges us deeper, the way a stone drowns on its last skip.

Birdie’s teeth chatter, and she clutches the umbrella handle tighter. “All in favor of running the rest of the way there?”

“Yes, please.”

“Then let’s run, girls!”

I shouldn’t laugh at the way Amber squeals in the rain.

I shouldn’t clutch Birdie’s hand and giggle as we dash out onto the lawn.

There’s something electrifying in this moment, though.

The ridiculous dress Amber gave me that feels like I’m playing dress-up, the pelt of cold rain spraying against my exposed skin, the roller-coaster flip in my stomach as we get closer.

“You know what they say about fairy tales?” Em’s singsong voice flutters through my thoughts. “ Everything comes in threes.”

That might ring true tonight, but I know better than to believe in perfect storybook endings.

Even the real fairy tales never ended in happily ever after.

The Little Mermaid hacked off her tongue for the Sea Witch, and the prince didn’t want her in the end, so she turned to sea-foam.

If anything, I’m not a fairy tale but a lesson for the Lockwells.

The House of Hearts is monstrous at night.

An awning separates us from the storm, and we take turns shaking off the rain like a pack of wild dogs.

Dozens of students mill around us, all of them in various states of disarray.

Girls who’ve managed to make an immaculate red-carpet appearance and ones with mascara running down their cheeks.

Guys shucking off their white button-ups and wringing rainwater out onto the ground.

“Thank God we’re mainly unscathed,” Birdie mutters as she checks her reflection in a compact.

I can’t even think about what I look like at the moment because I’m too busy staring at the world around me.

Lamplight illuminates the windows above us, a wash of orange burning onto the shadowed lawn where we stand.

There’s a frieze of martyred saints directly above our heads.

Strange but fittingly morbid for the night.

I make eye contact with an imp-faced gargoyle overhead, its mouth slashed in an eternal scream.

Birdie chuckles and jabs me with her elbow. “I was like that the first time I saw this place, too. Isn’t it something? I can’t wait to see the inside for the first time.”

Unfortunately, the first thing we see inside is a bold printed sign.

Play Your Card. Win a Mask.

The man holding the sign is silent behind a Venetian mask. Its face is split into an exaggerated smile with painted gold lips, and it has haunting mesh eyes. Even the cheeks are bloodied with a gory red heart on the left and a black diamond on the other.

“Sick mask, dude,” a freckled guy in the front of the line says. “Where’d you get it?”

I recognize the boy as one of the incoming freshmen who stood for the ceremony.

According to Birdie and Amber, wasting your Joker card as a freshman is the worst possible move to make.

In their words: “ Why ruin the next four years for yourself if you don’t get in?

You’ll forever be blacklisted from future Joker Nights and you’ll spend your whole Hart experience knowing you wasted your shot. High risk, high reward.”

The jester says nothing in response, just taps the demand on the poster.

Freckles offers up his card with a fumbling hand and a sheepish wince.

The masked man examines it, holding the Joker to the light like a cashier examining a counterfeit bill.

After a long moment of consideration, it’s finally deemed legitimate, and the boy is spared his misery and sent ahead to the table of masks.

With a snap of nylon strings, he dons the moon-faced gaze of a barn owl, his freckles concealed by a faceful of snowy-white feathers.

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 face as 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.