Turbine and Tux

The tuxedo hung in my locker like a promise I'd made while slightly drunk on spite. I'd rented it two days ago from the only shop in town, a place called Mr. Petrov's that smelled like mothballs and old candy, and the man had asked me twice if I was sure about the size. I was sure. Mostly. I'm Gia Sharpe, twenty-seven years old, and I had a plan that was about seventy percent pettiness and thirty percent survival.

But right now the plan could wait, because Andy Malone was climbing.

He was forty meters up a turbine tower in the last light, orange harness glowing against the steel, and I sat on the bunkhouse porch with a cup of terrible coffee watching him work. We'd both started at the wind farm company the same week, three years ago, both of us green and useless, and somewhere in the last year he'd become the person I called first when anything happened, good or bad. When my husband died in a climbing accident two years ago, I was alone, and it was Andy who found me at camp and sat with me on this exact porch until four in the morning. He never once said anything stupid. He never once said what he actually felt either, though I found that out later, and that's a story for later in this story too.

The sunset did the whole thing, orange and pink smeared across the Carpathians like the sky was showing off. Andy reached the nacelle, gave me a little wave I probably wasn't supposed to see, and I raised my cup at him.

That was when Dee Lawson came around the corner of the bunkhouse at a jog. Dee works the camp's main office, has for years, and I've known her for three years through the weekly supply coordination, which sounds boring and is, but she's the only person at this camp who has ever known where anything is.

"Gia," she said, slightly out of breath. "Bad news. School night's moved up."

"What? No. It's Thursday. School night is Friday."

"It was Friday. The supply truck broke down at the pass, rod through the block, and the fundraiser gym needs the deliveries tonight or the whole thing falls apart. Organizers are panicking. I'm panicking. Everything is tonight."

I looked at her. I thought about the tux hanging in my locker, which I could not actually see but felt anyway, the way you feel a dog staring at you.

"Tonight works," I said.

"You have a tux in there, don't you," Dee said, in the flat tone of a woman who has already done the math.

"I have a plan in there."

"Is the plan wearing a tux?"

"The plan is me wearing a tux to the fundraiser in town, with a date, so that Angelo Middleton sees me walk in with someone who isn't a disaster, and understands that everything he's been telling people about me is garbage."

Angelo. My ex, brief and shiny, lasted a season when I was twenty-six before I caught him cheating. Afterward he went around telling everyone I was too much to handle, which is a fun thing to hear about yourself, especially a year after burying a husband. The fundraiser at the school gym was his home turf. Hence the tux. Hence the plan.

"Okay," Dee said. "But the supply run is tonight, so your plan and my truck are the same truck. Andy's driving. Go tell him before he comes down."

Telling Andy took about nine seconds. He came down the tower, pulled his helmet off, and his hair was flattened into a rooster shape that I decided not to mention.

"Supply run moved to tonight," I said. "Dee says you're driving."

"Sure. That's fine. Why are you smiling like that?"

"Because you're also coming to the fundraiser. As my date."

He paused. "As your..."

"Fake date. Sort of. It's complicated. Angelo will be there. I need to look like my life is incredible."

Andy looked at me the way he looks at a turbine reading that's slightly off, like he's deciding whether to mention it. "Fake date," he said. "Right. Fine. Yeah. I'll go put on something that isn't coveralls."

That was suspiciously easy, is what I thought then.

The general store in town had a bowtie selection of exactly one bowtie. I wanted black. The rack offered neon orange, the shade of a traffic cone that has given up on shame. I held it up under the fluorescent light and it somehow got brighter.

"That matches nothing," the store guy offered helpfully.

"It matches spite," I said, and bought it.

Andy was loading the last of the supply boxes into the camp truck, and when he saw the bowtie he laughed so hard he had to lean on the tailgate.

"You're not wearing that with a tux."

"I absolutely am. Angelo hates orange."

"That's insane. I respect it."

The forest road down from camp was mud the whole way, spring doing its spring thing, and Andy drove with one wrist draped over the wheel like someone who has driven this road a thousand times, which he has. The tuxedo bag was in the back with the boxes, because I am an idiot, and around the second switchback the tailgate latch, which Dee had warned us about twice, gave up.

The bag went out with a box of canned peaches and a bag of oatmeal. We heard it hit the road.

"Oh no," Andy said, and braked, and we were both out of the cab before it fully stopped.

The bag had rolled twenty meters off the shoulder into a patch of brambles, of course it had, and the peaches had rolled further, and the oatmeal had burst like a small snowdrift in the mud. Andy went in first and got a bramble across the forearm for his trouble. I went in after him and got the brambles' full opinion of me.

"There," he said, holding the bag up like a rescued baby. "Tux intact. Peach casualties unknown."

"Two cans are dented. We say nothing."

He handed me out of the bushes and I discovered that mud had gotten into one boot and most of one knee, and that his shirt had a dirt stripe across the chest, and then we both looked at each other and started laughing and could not stop. It was the kind of laughing that hurts, the kind where you look at the other person and start again. Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed that his hand was still on my arm, steadying me, and that I hadn't moved away from it.

"Okay," he said finally, wiping his eyes. "Fundraiser. Orange bowtie. Mud. We're going to look incredible."

"We are going to look like we fought a forest, which we did, and lost."

The school gym had been decorated by people with enthusiasm and no budget, meaning paper streamers and a folding table of baked goods and a raffle drum. It was packed and loud and warm. I put on the orange bowtie in the truck mirror while Andy changed his shirt, and when I turned around he said, quietly, "Wow," and then pretended he hadn't.

The plan was working for about four minutes. Then Angelo Middleton found us.

"Well, well," he said, loud enough for the people around us to hear, which was the point. "Gia Sharpe. Heard your husband got lucky, missing this dump."

The gym did not go quiet, but something near us did. Andy, who had spent three years being the calmest person at the camp, crossed the distance in one step and punched Angelo in the shoulder, hard, the way you punch a friend at a bar, except Angelo was not his