Carolina Isle Read online

  She kept Ariel in her head as she walked into Dr. Peterson’s classroom. And because she was Princess Ariel, she didn’t knock. Sara gave a wildly exaggerated performance, a caricature actually, of Ariel. The truth was that Sara created a character who looked like Ariel but who acted like the people her father had described. She felt a little bad doing it, but when she saw the eyes of her audience, she knew she had them. At one point, Sara haughtily asked Dr. Peterson if he was gay since everyone knew that only gay men were on the stage. Dr. Peterson was a notorious womanizer, so that got a lot of repressed snickers from the class. Sara kept it up for about ten minutes, then pretended that she was in the wrong classroom and had actually wanted fourth-year calculus. Once outside, she leaned back against the cool concrete-block walls and breathed again. Her heart was pounding. All her life she’d tried to take the attention away from herself; she’d never wanted anyone to know how bad it was at home for fear that she’d be put somewhere worse. But today Sara’d made a true spectacle of herself—and found that she’d enjoyed herself.

  When Dr. Peterson opened the classroom door, Sara stood upright. He looked her up and down and she could tell that he didn’t like what he saw. Now that Sara was herself again, she felt overweight and timid. “You’re in,” he said, but he was shaking his head as though he couldn’t figure out how she’d been able to transform her dirty self into a princess for even ten minutes.

  So it turned out that meeting Ariel changed Sara’s life. That summer she started in the drama department, and since she was a whole year behind the other kids, she had to take more hours. She never got a summer vacation, but Sara loved every minute of it. When she graduated, she went to New York with a nearly empty bank account, but with the conviction that she was going to set Broadway on fire.

  Two years later, she was broke and had to get a job as an undersecretary in a big office. Sara could act, but she couldn’t sing or dance, and in New York she was competing against people who were great at all three. She would have gone to L.A. to try her luck, but she’d been brainwashed that the only real theater was in New York. And she always felt that she was right on the edge of making it big.

  Through all those years, Sara exchanged letters with Ariel. No e-mail, no faxes, nothing new or modern, just old-fashioned letters. Ariel wrote three or more letters to each of Sara’s because Ariel had more time. With each of the letters Sara came to enjoy them more. I can’t wait to tell Ariel! became a constant thought. When Sara went to New York, where she knew no one, and where she failed at one audition after another, it was Ariel’s ever-cheerful letters that kept her going. Ariel was Sara’s anchor, the one who was always there, the one person in the world who knew where Sara was and what she was doing.

  Then, when Sara turned twenty-three and was beginning to realize that she just might never make it on the New York stage, she had another one of those life-changing events. The CEO of the company Sara worked for, R. J. Brompton, pointed at her and said, “That one. I want her.” That’s all he had to say. He was so revered, and his word was such law, that Sara could believe that she’d been chosen to test out a new guillotine.

  It was worse. He’d chosen her to be his personal assistant. Not his secretary—he had two of those. His PA. Sara soon learned what the duties of a personal assistant were. She did anything her boss asked of her. She was a wife without the sex—not that Sara wanted the sex or that R. J. Brompton had a wife. No, she thought, humans have wives and families. And after eighteen months of working for R.J., Sara was sure he wasn’t human. No human could work as much as he did. He was a robot who gave her more money every time she told him she wanted a life and that she was leaving his employment.

  By the time Ariel’s letter saying she wanted to exchange lives reached her, Sara knew exactly how she felt. She hated herself for having no spine and not being able to tell R.J. what he could do with his job. She hated herself for not having enough talent to make it on Broadway. She had come to hate everything about her life, and more than anything, Sara wanted to do something besides work for R. J. Brompton.

  It was because Sara was so tired and so fed up with R.J.’s 3:00 A.M. phone calls that she was going to agree to try Ariel’s impossible scheme.

  The idea of having Ariel’s life of leisure, with nothing to deal with but a mother who sounded rather lonely, was the best idea she’d heard in years. Of course the idea of exchanging lives would never work, but it sounded nice. Three sirens went by and Sara thought of the quiet of a small Southern town. She had to haul a big basket of laundry down to the basement tonight and she dreamed of dropping her dirties in a hamper and having them reappear, clean and pressed.

  She grabbed a Post-it note, wrote “Love to!,” then put it in an envelope and addressed it. She’d mail it on the way to the laundry.

  “Leave everything to me,” Ariel wrote back, and Sara did. But then, she was too tired to do anything else.

  Chapter Three

  ARIEL FELT BAD THAT SHE’D LIED TO her cousin, but she knew it was necessary. If she’d told Sara the truth, she would never have considered exchanging places. And wasn’t it true that all was fair in love and war? Ariel just hoped that her cousin would forgive her when she found out that she had done everything for love.

  It had started over a year ago when Ariel was in New York with her mother on one of their twice-yearly clothes-buying trips. Ariel had to attend some boring fund-raiser with her mother and a lot of other old people who wanted to show off how much money they had.

  For the first hour Ariel made small talk and listened to people tell her how quaint they found Arundel. Their tone said that they couldn’t imagine living in a place that had no food delivery, but still, it was an adorable little town. “So clean,” they said.

  When her mother’s eagle eye was turned away, Ariel tipped a waiter a twenty to replace her mother-approved ginger ale with champagne. It was while she was slowly sipping her champagne (to make it last) that she saw him. Him. For Ariel, it was one of those moments when the earth stood still. Maybe the other party guests kept moving and talking, but for her, the world stopped revolving. When she saw the man walk into the room, she knew she was seeing her future. She was seeing the only man she would ever love.

  R. J. Brompton. Of course she knew who he was. Sara had sent photos and newspaper clippings. But photos didn’t show what he was really like. You could feel him. Sense him. He had a presence about him, an aura, a charisma such as Ariel had never experienced. In all her trips with her mother, she had never seen anyone like R. J. Brompton.

  Sara had described him in only bad terms. She said he worked her half to death, and that he had no idea that she should have a life of her own. He called her during the night and asked her where the papers on a land sale were. She would tell him she had put them in his briefcase, then he’d ask where his briefcase was. More than once, she’d had to pull on jeans and a T-shirt and go to his apartment in the middle of the night to find something or to write a letter for him. She said that as far as she could tell, he never slept.

  As Ariel stood there watching him shake hands with people, now and then glancing at the blonde on his arm, she knew that someday he’d be hers. She came out of her trance to look into the eyes of the woman with him. She was glaring at Ariel in a way meant to tell her to back off, that R.J. belonged to her. Ariel just smiled. She knew from Sara that R.J. changed women more often than she changed shoes. Next week there would be another mindless blonde—or a redhead, whatever—looking up at him with adoring eyes.

  For the whole party, Ariel stayed within viewing distance of R.J. Each time he glanced in her direction, she turned away, as though she’d been looking at someone behind him. But he wasn’t fooled. After an hour, he walked toward her. And though she pretended she didn’t see him, her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid it would leap out of her chest. If she hadn’t had so much inside information from Sara, she would have turned and smiled at R.J. But she knew he was used to that. Sara said that she couldn’