They Dyed My Dress for the Dance. I Left the Group of Five novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Wash Lights

Quinn walks out through the lobby and a stranger running the lights puts his jacket over her and tells her what the dress really looks like; someone matched the dye to her eyes on purpose.

The lobby was worse than the ballroom.

The doors to the dance stood open behind me, and the music kept going.

Everyone in the lobby had a phone out.

I kept walking toward the exit, one hand holding the stiff hem off the floor.

Somebody said, "Is she crying? Get her face."

I wasn't crying.

I was counting steps to the glass doors.

Eleven. Ten.

A hand closed around my wrist.

"Quinn. Stop."

Lance had followed me out, still in his tailored blazer, still smiling the smile from his campaign posters.

He kept his voice low and sweet, so the people filming would only hear a boyfriend being patient.

"You're making this bigger than it is."

"Let go of my wrist."

"It was supposed to be funny. You're supposed to laugh, and then we all go get pizza."

"Let go."

"Come back in and take the second photo. We'll all fit if you stand on the end."

He squeezed once, gently.

"I'm not going to ask you again to be a good sport."

A shadow fell across both of us.

A man had come down the stairs from the lighting booth with a headset around his neck.

He looked a few years older than anyone at the dance, with dark hair pushed back and a thin scar through one eyebrow.

He didn't look at Lance at all.

He looked at the hand around my wrist.

"Let her go," he said.

"This is a private conversation."

"It's a public lobby. I can hear you from the stairs. Let her go, or I'll ask the campus police to watch the footage with me."

Lance's smile tightened.

His fingers opened.

I pulled my wrist back and rubbed the skin where he'd held it.

The man pulled off his jacket, a black canvas thing with grease on the cuff, and settled it around my shoulders.

He did it carefully, with his eyes on my face and never lower.

His knuckles brushed my collarbone as he straightened the collar.

My whole body noticed it.

"Come on," he said. "There's a loading dock out back. No phones."

We walked through the kitchen hall with Lance's voice calling my name behind us.

Nobody followed.

The loading dock was a concrete shelf with a rusty rail and a single yellow bulb.

I sat on the edge, in the jacket, with my feet hanging over the dark.

It smelled like cold air and dumpsters, and it was the first quiet place I'd had all night.

He sat down a few feet away.

"I'm Rhett. I run the lights for the dances. Student union pays me in cash and pizza."

"Quinn."

"I know. I've heard it about forty times in the last ten minutes."

I laughed once, and it came out wrong.

He didn't say anything else for a while.

Then I said the thing I'd been dreading since the stall.

"What does it actually look like?"

"The dress?"

"I can't see the colors. I've never seen them. I need somebody to tell me, and I need it not to be one of them."

He looked at the dress properly.

He took his time.

"The top is a pale pink, like the inside of a seashell. The skirt is a pale mint green, with the pink coming down in streaks, like a watercolor that got rained on."

"That's not red and green."

"Under my lights it is. I'll tell you why in a second."

He pointed up at the hall behind us.

"Somebody slid a note under the booth door at eight fifty. It said the wash lights should be crimson and evergreen at nine, for school spirit. Everything was supposed to be gold and white until then."

"Who?"

"I didn't see. I was on the board."

"Why would colored lights matter?"

"Because pale pink and pale mint in a regular room look almost white. Wash them in strong red and strong green, and they jump out like neon."

He kept his voice even.

"It's cruel, but it's clever. Anyone seeing it under normal light would think it was a slightly strange off-white."

"That's why I couldn't tell."

"No. Look at it, Quinn."

He gently turned the hem toward the bulb.

"Those tints are about as bright as the white cloth underneath. The edge of the pink is the same lightness as the ivory. Nothing in that dress is darker than anything else."

I held the stiff hem between two fingers.

"I can tell dark from light. That's the only thing I can tell."

"I know. Whoever mixed this knew it too."

The bulb buzzed over us.

I felt something cold open in my stomach.

"Dyes don't come out the same brightness as the cloth by accident," Rhett said. "Somebody checked each one against a gray scale and matched it, so you couldn't see it."

He looked at me.

"That wasn't a prank. Someone who knew exactly how you see made that."

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