Beautiful Secrets (Cranksepticeye Fanfiction)

~12.13~ Melting

"I don't see why he can't meet you here. I was hoping to see Melchizedek's nephew all dolled up in his fancy suit." I was standing in front of Anna so she could tie my bow tie. When I was a kid, she used to comb my hair and tie my necktie before we went to church on Sundays. She had always looked like she was so proud, and that's how she was looking at me now.
"Sorry. No time for a photo session. I'm picking hum up from his house." It was kind of a stretch, considering I was picking him up in the Beater. Mark was catching a ride with Shawn. They guys on the team were still saving him a seat at their new lunch table, even though he usually sat with Jack and me.
Anna yanked on my tie and snorted a laugh. I don't know what she thought was so funny, but it made me edgy.
"It's too tight. I feel like it's strangling me." I tried to wedge a finger between my neck and the collar of my rented jacket from Buck's Tux, but I couldn't.
"Isn't the tie, it's your nerves. You'll do fine." She surveyed me approvingly, like I imagined my mom would do if she'd been here. "Now, let me see those flowers." I reached behind me for a small box, a red rose surrounded by white baby's breath inside. They looked pretty ugly to me, but you couldn't get much better from Gardens of Eden, the only place in Anston.
"About the sorriest flowers I've ever seen." Anna took one look and tossed them into the wastebasket at the bottom of the stairs. She turned on her heel and disappeared into the kitchen.
"What did you do that for?"
She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a boutonniere, small and delicate. White Confederate jasmine and wild rosemary, tied with a pale silver ribbon. Silver and white, the colors of the winter formal. It was perfect.
As much as I knew that Anna wasn't crazy about my relationship with Jack, she had done this anyway. She'd done it for me. It was something my mom would have done. It was only since my mom had died that I realized how much I relied on Anna, how much I had always relied on her. She was the only thing that had kept me afloat. Without here, I probably would have drowned, like my dad.
"Everything means something. Don't try  to change something wild into something tame."
I held the boutonniere up to the kitchen lamp. I felt the length of the ribbon, carefully probing it with my fingers. Under the ribbon, there was a tiny bone.
"Anna!"
She shrugged. "What, are you gonna take issue with a tiny little graveyard bone like that? After all this time growing up in this house, after seeing the things you've seen, where's your sense? A little protection never hurt anybody - not even you Ethan."
I sighed and put the boutonniere back in the box. "I love you too, Anna."
She gave me a bone-crushing hug, and I ran down the steps and into the night. "You better be careful, you hear? Don't get carried away."
I had no idea what she meant, but I smiled at her anyway. "Yes ma'am."
My father's light was on in the study as I drove away. I wondered if he even knew tonight was the winter formal.

When Jack pulled the door open, my heart almost stopped, which was saying something considering he wasn't even touching me. I knew he looked nothing like any of the other students at the dance would look tonight. Mostly because there were only a few options for everyone. For the girls, there were only two kinds of prom dresses, and they all came from one of two places: Little Miss, the local pageant gown supplier, or Southern Belle, the bridal shop two towns over.
The girls who went to Little Miss wore the slutty mermaid dresses, all slits and plunging necklines and sequins; all those were the girls Anna would never have allowed me to be seated with at a church picnic, let alone the winter formal. They were sometimes the local pageant girls or the daughters of local pageant girls, like Eden, whose mom had been First Runner Up Miss South Carolina, or more often just the daughters of the women who wished they had been pageant girls. These were the same girls you might eventually see holding their babies at the Jackson High School graduation in a couple of years.
Southern Belle dresses were the Scarlett O'Hara dresses, shaped like giant cowbells. The Southern Belle girls were the daughters of the DAR and the Ladies Auxiliary members, the Emily Ashers and the Savannah Snows, and you could take them anywhere, if you could stomach it, if you could stomach them, and stomach the way it looked like you were dancing with a bride at her own wedding.
Either way, everything was shiny, everything was colorful, and everything involved a lot of metallic trim and a particular shade of orange folks called Anston Peach, that was probably reserved for tacky bridesmaids' dresses everywhere else but Anston County.
For guys, there was less obvious pressures, but it wasn't really any easier. We had to match, usually to our date, which would involve the dreaded Anston Peach. This year, the basketball team was going in silver bow ties and silver cummerbunds, sparing them the humiliation of pink or purple or peach bow ties.
Jack had definitely never worn Anston Peach in his life. As I looked at him, my knees started to buckle, which was starting to become a familiar feeling. He was so handsome it hurt.
Wow.
Like it?
His hair looked silky and soft, curling in a perfect wave off the side of his head. I wanted to run my fingers through it, but I didn't dare touch him, not a single hair. Jack's suit fell from him, perfectly fitted to his figure, in silvery gray strands, delicate as a silver cobweb, spun by silver spiders.
Was it? Spun by silver spiders?
Who knows? It could've been. It was a gift from Uncle Macon.
He laughed and pulled me into the house. Even Ravenwood seemed to reflect the wintry theme of the formal. Tonight the entry hall looked like old Hollywood; tiles of black and white checkered the floor, and silver snowflakes sparked, floating in the air above us. A black lacquered antique table stood in front of iridescent silver curtains, and beyond them, I could see something that glinted like the ocean, though I knew it couldn't be. Flickering candles hovered over the furniture, tossing little pools of moonlight everywhere I looked.
"Really? Spiders?"
I could see the candlelight reflecting off his shining lips. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to want to kiss the side of his face. The most subtle dusting of silver shone on his face and in his hair. He was just gorgeous.
"Just kidding. It was probably just something he found in some little shop in Paris or Rome or New York City. Uncle Macon likes beautiful things."
The familiar drawl came out of the dark hallway, accompanied by a silver candlestick. "Budapest, not Paris. Other than that, guilty as charged." Macon emerged in a smoking jacket over neat black pants and a white dress shirt. The sliver studs in his shirt caught the glint of the candlelight.
"Ethan, I would greatly appreciate it greatly if you could take every precaution with my nephew tonight. As you know, I prefer him home in the evenings." He handed me a boutonniere for Jack, a small wreath of Confederate jasmine. "Every possible precaution."
"Uncle M!" Jack sounded annoyed.
I looked at the corsage more closely. A silver ring dangled from the pin that held the flowers. It had an inscription in a language I didn't understand, but recognized from The Book of Moons. I didn't have to look too closely to see it was the ring he had worn night and day, until now. I pulled out Anna's nearly identical boutonniere. Between the hundred Casters probably Bound to the ring, and all of Anna's extended Greats, there wasn't a spirit in town that would mess with us. I hoped.
"I think, between you and Anna sir, Jack will survive the Jackson High formal all right." I smiled.
Macon didn't. "It's not the formal I worry about, but I'm grateful to Annette, just the same."
Jack frowned, looking from his uncle to me. Maybe we didn't look like the two happiest guys in town. "Your turn." He picked up another boutonniere from the hall table, a plain white rose with a tiny sprig of jasmine, and pinned it on my jacket. "I wish you would stop worrying for one minute, This is getting embarrassing. I can take care of myself."
Macon looked unconvinced. "In any event, I wouldn't want anyone to get hurt."
I didn't know if he was referring to the witched of Jackson High, or the powerful Dark Caster, Sarafine. Either way, I'd seen enough in the last few months to take a warning like that seriously.
"And have him back by midnight."
"Is that some powerful Caster hour?"
"No, it's his curfew."
I stifled a smile.