Saturday Night Read online

  Saturday Night

  A Night to Remember: Book One

  Caroline B. Cooney

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Preview: Last Dance

  A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney

  Prologue

  FIVE GIRLS SAT BEFORE their mirrors, playing with eye shadow, blusher, electric curlers, and jewelry. Saturday night, and a formal dance. Lovely gowns, sparkling necklaces, throbbing music, sweetly scented flowers.

  But the five girls were thinking only of love. And one girl was loved too much, and one was not loved at all.

  Thunder rolled across the autumn sky like an announcement that it was time to leave for the dance. Lightning streaked above the bare branches of the trees, and the last leaves whirled through the blackness of night and settled on the wet pavement.

  Tonight, both the loveliest of dreams and the worst of nightmares would come true.

  Chapter 1

  BETH ROSE CHAPMAN WENT to the dance because of a dress.

  Not a dress, really. The dress.

  Beth Rose had no fashion sense. No matter what she put on, when she got to school, it turned out to be wrong. She had a remarkable ability, she thought sadly, to look dowdy. I’m sixteen, thought Beth Rose, and I’m already matronly.

  If she chose bright colors, they clashed. If she chose pastels, she looked like a hospital patient. Gathered skirts made her look plump and tight skirts rode up her knees and bunched at the thigh.

  But not this dress.

  It was her great aunt’s. A month ago Beth was visiting her Aunt Madge and found it wrapped in a clear plastic dry cleaner’s bag, hanging on a rack in the attic. “I wore that to my senior prom in 1938,” said Aunt Madge, smiling gently to herself, touching the bag, but not the dress within.

  Beth Rose stared at the dress. A very soft gleaming pink. She was not permitted to wear pink. She had dark red hair and her mother categorically stated that pink was impossible. Aunt Madge and Beth Rose stood silently, admiring the dress. Aunt Madge said, “Try it on, Bethie.”

  She tried it on.

  Such an old-fashioned dress, and yet not one where people would giggle at her; not a dress where people would wonder why it hadn’t been given to the Salvation Army decades ago. Its style was unusual, but timeless. There were three fabrics: one of glistening pink and one of delicate, faintly gray lace (but Aunt Madge said it had always been gray). Then there were tiny bows of silvery ribbon tipped with pink along the sleeves, dancing from the falling shoulders to the tight lace-cuffed wrists.

  Aunt Madge had an enormous old mirror set in a mahogany frame that tilted back and forth. They tipped the mirror until Beth Rose was captured from her hair to her bare toes. “But my hair is red,” said Beth.

  “The pink is so pale it doesn’t matter,” said her Aunt Madge. “Anyhow, your hair is the loveliest red I know. Dark, not gaudy. Gleaming, not bristly.”

  Beth Rose touched her hair. Her mother always groaned whenever they went to the hairdresser. The hairdresser always groaned. Her hair was thick and unmanageable and uncooperative. It didn’t matter what shampoos and conditioners they used, it never changed. Beth thought it looked like a wig for someone who had had brain surgery.

  “Needs braiding,” said Aunt Madge, and her fingers began twisting and plaiting in Beth’s hair until the top had become a flattened cap of narrow braids that rested on thick waves falling to her bare shoulders.

  The neckline of the old prom dress dipped in scallops edged with the old gray lace. “I look so fragile,” breathed Beth, “as if I’m a museum piece.”

  “What you look,” said Aunt Madge briskly, “is perfect. No question about it, Brose. You must find an important dance and wear this dress.”

  Beth Rose stared into the mirror for a long time. The dress was a Cinderella dress. Transforming. In it she felt herself to be everything the dress was: soft, gleaming, fragile, timelessly lovely. “But I’m not really like that,” she said sadly. “In school I’m so ordinary, Aunt Madge. I’m always a C.”

  “What’s a C?” said Aunt Madge.

  “Average. I get a C in English and I get a C in math. I get a C in gym and all my friends are C-type people. A-plus people don’t even know I’m alive. And this—this is an A-plus dress.”

  “Which needs an A-plus occasion,” said her aunt.

  The girl touched her hair, her cheeks, her throat. She could not believe that lovely reflection was her. She said slowly, “Well, there’s the Autumn Leaves Dance. First week in November.”

  “That’s that, then,” said Aunt Madge. She gently took the dress from Beth’s shoulders, undoing the long, long row of tiny fabric-covered buttons in back, and put it up on its padded hanger.

  “Why Bethie,” Aunt Madge exclaimed, when she had finished slipping the dry cleaner’s bag over the dress again, “you’re crying! Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

  She could weep with her aunt. She never dared weep in front of her mother. Her mother just got impatient. “If you’d only try harder,” her mother would snap, as if Beth hadn’t struggled all her life with all her energy. But Aunt Madge never did that. Aunt Madge said, “Tell me, darling, is it the dress? What is it?”

  “It’s me. I can’t go to the Autumn Leaves Dance because nobody will ask me. I’m not the kind of girl boys ask.”

  Her mother would have said, “Nonsense.” Or else, “If you’d just try to be more attractive, easier to get along with. …”

  Aunt Madge made comforting little noises and rocked Beth as if she were an infant. She said, “Can you go alone to this dance or is it for couples only?”

  “Well, you could go alone,” said Beth. “Some boys will. But girls? They just don’t. I couldn’t do that.”

  “In this dress you could do anything,” Aunt Madge said.

  Through the flimsy bag the dress had an ethereal look to it, like a pink cloud of summer sunset blown by the wind. Beth Rose said, “I’m not brave enough, Aunt Madge.”

  Her mother would have said, “Nonsense, Beth. Don’t be a ’fraidy cat.”

  Aunt Madge said, “Nobody’s that brave. To go alone and know you’ll stand alone all evening while everybody else is a couple? Especially if there’s a lot of hand-holding and kissing. That’s the worst part. You stand there in some dreary corner, trying to look as if you like being alone. And of course everybody knows you’re a fake, and they stay away from you so they won’t catch whatever disease you’re carrying.” Aunt Madge shuddered.

  “So you see I can’t go,” said Beth Rose.

  “Yes, you can. The dress will make you different.”

  It was true. The dress had changed her. “Just think of me as your fairy godmother,” Aunt Madge said softly, and she waved a graceful wrist, its blue veins showing as if she were holding a magic wand. “And now you’re going to the ball to meet the handsome prince.”

  And of course Beth couldn’t resist. She took the dress home to Westerly and hung it in her closet and touched it like a magic charm every morning and evening, and bought herself a ticket to Autumn Leaves.

  But now it was seven o’clock on Saturday night, and the dance began at eight, and now she had to carry the plan out. She, the C girl, the average girl, had to put the dress on and actually appear at that dance.

  Alone.

  Panic washed over Beth like a rising tide, carrying with it the debris of all her past failures. I won’t be able to carry it off, thought Beth Rose. I’ll be laughed at. I’ll stumble around the walls of the cafeteria and end up with some teacher trying to be nice. I’ll sit on some metal folding chair for two hours while the teacher tries to think of something to say.

  She drew the plastic bag off the dress. The bag clung to the dress, as if not wanting to leave the shimmery pink and the gray lace, and Beth Rose thought, Please let me look lovely in it. Please let it work this time, too. Let me be special!

  Chapter 2

  ANNE STEPHENS WAS THE A-plus Beth was thinking of when she said no one ever noticed her. Beth was right. Anne had never even known Beth existed until this year, when they were in the same gym class and played volleyball on the same side of the net. Anne always served perfectly. Beth Rose always missed and afterwards her wrist hurt.

  Anne found her mildly irritating. A person should be able to do something right.

  But Beth Rose Chapman’s lack of ability was the last thing on Anne’s mind at seven o’clock the night of the Autumn Leaves Dance.

  Anne, too, had a full length mirror, but when she stood before it she saw nothing but perfection. Anne was unarguably the loveliest girl in the junior class at Westerly High. However, she was a little tired of seeing three reflections in her mirror every time she got ready to go out with Con.

  Her mother and grandmother participated in her dates as much as she did, Anne sometimes thought. They loved Anne’s perfection, they loved dressing her—as if she were a very tall Barbie doll—and they loved the sight and the thought of Anne with Con.

  Her grand
mother had bought her tonight’s dress. The older women took turns outfitting Anne. She was probably the only girl in the state whose family was dying to buy more clothes for her at any time.

  The dress for this, her first formal dance, was layers of deep electric blue, jaggedly cut, so that the skirt swirled unexpectedly, shifting with every breath, making soft whispery sounds as the brilliant blue fabric slid over itself. The neckline was not symmetrical, and her grandmother had had Anne’s hair done so that it was swept to the side, and offset the unusual neckline, and then bought Anne a rhinestone necklace with an art-deco star that trembled just below her throat, and another one to go in her hair. The sleeves were beaded, tiny tiny beads of exactly the same color as the dress, so that in some lights you couldn’t tell the beads were there, and in other lights Anne sent rainbows across the room as if she were hung with prisms.

  Anne ran her fingertips over the beaded patterns. How strange they felt beneath her fingers! How smooth, and absolutely perfect.

  Her mother adjusted the thick sash, moving it a little too high so that Anne twitched with wanting to push it back down. Her grandmother took out the rhinestone star in her hair and moved it an inch farther back, so that Anne could no longer see it, just feel its unaccustomed weight. Her hair was thick and gold, in as many layers as her dress, and its waves swept up majestically on one side and lay flat on the other.

  “She’s perfect,” said Anne’s mother contentedly.

  This was the final sentence Mrs. Stephens uttered before all of Anne’s dates. Anne smiled, fulfilling her part of the tradition, but she did not meet her mother’s eyes, even in the mirror. Because she was not perfect; in the last few weeks she had found out just how imperfect she really was; and if her mother knew. …

  “You know what?” Anne’s grandmother said. “This must be just about your third anniversary, too.”

  Yes, Anne thought. We were in junior high. Con was scrawny, with a shape rather like a chewed-on pencil. His hair was still being cut at home, and his mother was so bad at it he looked as if he had fur instead of hair. But I liked him. Oh, how I liked him!

  In ninth grade, Con grew seven inches. You could practically sit at the table and watch him grow. He was awkward that year, and never got off the bench in any of his beloved sports, because he could not control those suddenly long limbs. And then the following summer, his complexion cleared, his hair filled in, his braces came off, and his coordination returned.

  And he was handsome, and dark, and suave, and he knew it. Oh, how he knew it! Con would never admit it, but he was as fond of perfection as Anne’s mother. They weren’t seniors, but she knew that their yearbook the following year would have herself and Con as Couple of the Class. She was idolized by the younger girls. She, Anne Stephens, had the life and the boy they all yearned for, daydreamed for, maybe even prayed for.

  Anne bit down on her lower lip, feeling suddenly as if she might throw up. Instantly her mother and grandmother were next to her, anxious, wanting to be convinced that all was well. “I’m fine,” said Anne. “Just nervous.”

  “Nervous? You?” They both laughed.

  I have to get away from them, she thought. Just for a minute to pull myself together. But in the Stephens household there was no privacy. Never had been. Anne was community property here, even at seventeen years of age. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she told them, and shut the door on their warnings not to muss her dress.

  Nothing to be nervous about, Anne thought, and she wanted to laugh, but she didn’t dare. She had a feeling that if she laughed even a little bit, the laugh would grow into hysteria and she would turn insane on the spot.

  Oh, Con, she thought, what are you going to say?

  She didn’t really care what he would say, though. Con was not much of a talker. Even after three years of constant dating, Anne sometimes had the sensation that she didn’t know Con. He had a way of allocating his personality: he would permit a specific fraction to show at any given time, and the rest he kept to himself.

  It was not what he would say that worried her.

  It was what he would do.

  Tonight is truth time, Anne thought, staring into the smaller, much more brightly lit bathroom mirror. I think of Con as my rock, my life. But I don’t know that. We’re at the crunch, we’re at the top of the cliff, and I don’t know if I trust him. How strange. How awful. To love him as much as I do, and not trust him.

  She tried to kill the thought, as if it could filter out of the bathroom, travel across town, curl around Con’s mind, and whisper to him, She doesn’t trust you.

  Anne was shivering. She couldn’t see the shivers in the mirror. She felt them on the inside, and her flesh crawled and turned cold.

  Tonight. She would have to talk with him tonight.

  For the first time in three years, Anne was sorry that she and Con had gotten so close. Because she had no intimate girl friend to talk to. She had let them all drift away, sure that Con could be everything and everyone to her. And now when she needed advice, there was not a telephone number in all Westerly she could really dial and find a friend.

  I’m the most popular girl in Westerly, she thought, numbed with fear, and I’m the most alone. How did that happen? How could that happen? If you’re popular, then by definition you can’t be all alone.

  I’m all alone.

  I don’t even know if Con is here.

  Through the door her mother said, “Darling, you’re not changing your makeup, are you? I really think it was perfect.”

  Perfect. A person could come to hate that word after a few years, Anne thought. “No, Mother,” she said.

  For all that Mrs. Stephens had had a grim, poor childhood, she was really very innocent. For her there had been no happy adolescence: no dances, no dates, no boys in gleaming cars. Only Anne’s father—who was abroad more than half the year, selling blue jeans in Europe—had rescued her from that grinding poverty. And the greatest joy in Mrs. Stephen’s life was Anne; and Anne’s looks, and talent, and brains, and boyfriend.

  In school, Anne and Con were taking a gut course called Family Relations. The only reason anybody took this was to get three easy credits, and be able to talk quietly during filmstrips. But surprisingly, Family Relations was quite interesting. In the third week of class Con said to her, “That’s your mother. Right here listed under Classic Examples. It’s the old Smother Mother routine.”

  “She doesn’t smother me,” objected Anne.

  “She sure tries hard enough,” Con said, whose goal with the Stephens family was to get in and out the door with Anne as quickly as possible, and not have to hear what a perfect couple they made.

  “I love her, though,” said Anne mildly.

  “Yeah, but you have low standards,” Con told her.

  Anne laughed. “Low?” she repeated. “To love a mother like mine? To love my grandmother, too, even though they both interfere around the clock? You should try it some time, Connie. It takes one heck of a lot of effort to keep up those low standards of mine.”

  Standards, Anne thought, opening the bathroom door. What kind of standards do I have? I don’t know anymore.

  “Oh, Anne,” breathed her mother yet again, “oh, sweetheart, you look so lovely.”

  Con would not say it. He never noticed how she looked. It was one of their problems. Anne was accustomed to her own personal cheering section. Even when they infuriated her, her two fans at home could be counted on to list her various beauties and talents. Not Con. He’d just say, “What’ll we do Friday? I’m sick of going to the movies.”

  She’d told him and told him that her dress for the Autumn Leaves Dance was electric blue and she wanted white flowers. Heavily scented. But if she knew Con (and she did) he wouldn’t remember flowers at all. But if she knew her mother (and she did) Mrs. Stephens would have phoned in the flowers in Con’s name, and called Con to let him know, and Con would show up with the right flowers and everybody would pretend Con had done it.

  Once Con had said, “You’d better not turn out to be like your mother. Tough and domineering.”

  Anne thought, I’d be better off if I were tough and domineering. I’ve given in to everyone all my life, and I never even knew it till now. I never even noticed. I was so busy being perfectly beautiful and popular and smart I didn’t notice that I’ve never made a single decision in my life. Not stupid ones, not good ones. Con’s just as domineering as they are. And I never knew that, either.