The Shadow Prince

chapter two DAPHNE

“It’s do or die, Daphne,” CeCe says, with a sassy, almost devious tone as she wades through the sea of red balloons that separate her workstation from mine. Despite her flame red hair and freckled skin, she always reminds me of Billie Holiday with her warm, old-school, jazzy vibe. “Ask him while you have the chance.”

I know she’s right. Mom could be back any minute, and I am more likely to get a positive answer from Jonathan than her. Especially after the look Mom had made when she answered the phone call that came about ten minutes ago. I figured it must be the bank again, considering she took the handset outside and then all the way into the bungalow she and I live in behind the flower shop. It is calls like this that make me so determined to do what I have in mind.

“Go for it, Daph,” CeCe says, and pushes me through the bouquets of red and orange balloons we’ve been inflating for Ellis High’s September Social. Jonathan and his magenta apron come into view.

I clear my throat. It’s not that I’m reluctant to do what I need to do—it’s that I know I’m a terrible liar. But is it lying if you’re just omitting a small portion—okay, about 56.2 miles’ worth—of the truth? “Hey, Uncle Jonathan …,” I start to say, but the loud clank of the bell over the front door of the shop interrupts me.

Jonathan looks up from the ribbons he’s been cutting into balloon strings. “Can you get that?” he asks, referring to the customer who must have just entered the shop.

“Indie’s up there,” I say. “She can handle it.”

Jonathan balks. “You know she doesn’t have cash register privileges yet.”

I give CeCe a stricken look. I don’t want to lose my chance.

“I’m on it,” she says, and then mouths to me, “Do it!” as she disappears into the balloons on her way out of the back-room workshop to the storefront.

“Welcome to Paradise Plants!” I hear Indie say so enthusiastically, I can imagine the unsuspecting customer jumping at the sound of her voice.

“So … Uncle Jonathan,” I try to say so nonchalantly that it ends up sounding pained instead. I turn away slightly so he can’t see the blush that hits my cheeks. I grab a stray balloon by its string and twist it into the nearest bouquet of red and orange. No big deal. Just doing my work and striking up a conversation with my favorite uncle, who isn’t actually related to me. “Um … so … when I’m done with this, do you think I could get off early? I mean, the decorations are being picked up in a few minutes, and I know we still have some cleanup, but CeCe said she’d stay later so I could beg off a little early. If that’s okay with you?”

Jonathan cuts one more ribbon and then squints his eyes in a way that makes me worried that my not-quite-lying omission of the truth came tripping off my tongue so fast that he didn’t comprehend my words and I’m going to have to start over again. Then he gives me a jolly grin. “Need extra time to get ready for your dance date, eh?”

“Yeah,” I say, concentrating a little too hard on tying the strings of my balloon bouquet into a big knot. “You know me. Gotta look my best for that big date!”

“Daphne,” Jonathan says, his tone shifting ever so slightly lower.

I glance at him and see that his grin has disappeared.

He shakes the spool of ribbon in my direction. “Cut the crap, honey. I do know you. Enough to know you rejected both the boys who asked you. Even after that sweet Richards kid sent you a chocolate-dipped-fruit arrangement from that store in Hurricane. You threw it in the trash.”

“Because I’m allergic to strawberries. You know that.”

“Yes, but you could have let me eat them,” Jonathan says with a pout and drops the spool on his worktable. He reaches into the front pocket of his bright magenta apron. “And I also know where you plan on going this evening instead of the dance.” He pulls out a folded-up flyer and splays it out on the worktable. He stabs one of his large fingers at the words: ALL-AMERICAN TEEN TALENT COMPETITION HOSTED BY SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY. ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Oh.

Crap.

The flyer must have dropped out of my apron when I hung it up during my break. I’d been keeping it in my pocket for good luck. Load of good that had done me.

“Jonathan, I can—”

He holds up his hand in a stop gesture. “Just be glad I found this and not your mother. You know the conniption she would have if she found out you were planning on sneaking off to Cedar City for the evening. You made a deal with your mother not to leave Ellis Fields again without her permission.”

Yes. I know all too well. In my almost seventeen years, I had been on one, and only one, trip outside of my hometown.

Ellis Fields is a tiny speck that you can only see on a Google map of southern Utah if you zoom in real close, tucked into Apollo Canyon and surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but desert and red-rock formations in every direction. My mom is so rooted here that the town legend goes that her ancestors were here even before Ellis was founded. And leaving it isn’t exactly easy, especially when your mom forbids it and you don’t have a driver’s license yet. A lesson I’d learned the hard way when I was almost thirteen years old. After fighting with my mom for, like, the ten thousandth time about how she never let me go on class field trips or even to the Zion outlet malls, which are a forty-five-minute drive outside town, I’d tried to run away to Saint George on my bike. But I crashed while careening down Canyon Road. I ended up sitting on the side of the remote highway, dehydrated, with a flat tire, a broken arm, and a concussion until Mom and Jonathan found me an hour later, merely one hundred yards from the NOW LEAVING ELLIS FIELDS—COME BACK SOON! sign. I did eventually make it to Saint George that day, but it was to spend the weekend at Dixie Regional Medical Center.

That’s when the infamous deal had been struck. While hopped up on painkillers and still freaked out about my near-death experience in the desert, I’d agreed to stop pressing my mom about leaving Ellis—and not run off again—and she’d agreed to give me a longer leash once I got my driver’s license. I’d been dreaming of ultimate freedom, but at just over two months shy of my seventeenth birthday, with still no license in hand (no thanks to my mom), I was beginning to think I’d been duped into a really bogus deal.

“But look”—I point at the flyer—“second prize is twenty-five hundred dollars. That’s exactly what Mom needs to replace the flower cooler in the front of the shop—and you know the bank isn’t going to give her another loan. It’s one night, Jonathan. Please?”

“But what about first prize?”

“What about it?”

“It says here”—he practically stabs the flyer with his ribbon scissors—“that if you win first prize, they’ll haul you off to Las Vegas for the next round of competition, and then possibly New York City after that. It won’t just be one night then. Your mother would never stand for it, and I’d be a dead man for letting you get into this mess.”

“Who says I’m going to win first prize?”

Jonathan rolls his eyes. “One thing you don’t need to be is modest, Daphne. You and I both know you’ve got first place in the bag.”

“Well, I’ll never know if you don’t let me go.” I give him a teasing smile. “I might stink at singing and nobody in this tiny town knows the difference.” Ellis High School is so small, we don’t even have a real music department.

“Please, Daph. I’m from Manhattan. Don’t tell me I don’t know amazing singing when I hear it.”

“Then let me go and prove it to myself. If I win first, then I’ll bow out and take second place and the prize money.”

Jonathan takes a swig of Diet Mountain Dew from his ginormous Jersey Boys mug. I can tell he’s swishing the soda in his cheeks like he does when he’s contemplating a difficult floral design. He swallows hard. “Sorry, honey. No way, no how. Your mother would kill me if I let you leave Ellis and something bad happened to you out there.”

I wrap my fingers through the strings of the balloon bouquet I’d forgotten I was even holding until now, and bite back the urge to make a frustrated urrrrrrg.

“How were you even planning on getting to SUU in the first place? Don’t tell me you were planning on driving without a license?” Jonathan asks with an accusatory tone.

“No.” I’ve had a driver’s permit for over a year, but state law requires forty hours of driving time behind the wheel with a parent or guardian before I can apply for a license. Since Ellis is only 4.6 square miles and my mom won’t let me take the car out on the highway, it was taking an eternity to rack up the hours needed to get my license. There’s nowhere in Ellis you can’t get to on your bike, she always says, but I know she’s dragging her feet on the issue so she won’t have to fulfill her end of our bargain. And the more I point this out to her, the more excuses she comes up with for not being able to take me driving. At this rate, I won’t have a license until I’m eighteen and can get it without her consent. “There’s this new senior at school who has a boyfriend at SUU. She says I can hitch a ride with her to Cedar City and back. That’s why I need to get off early.”

A very cross-sounding tone comes off Jonathan. Telling him I am hitching a ride with someone I barely know isn’t helping the situation, but I don’t have many options. Most of my school friends haven’t had licenses long enough to be legal to drive with another teen in the car, and CeCe, who claims to be night-blind, wasn’t too keen on the idea of navigating the canyon roads after dark. Not that she’d be excited to drive me out of town in the daytime, either. I swear, it’s like half of the adults I know are just as reluctant to leave Ellis as my mother. Despite being from the big city, even Jonathan rarely leaves town other than his yearly pilgrimage to the designer outlets in Primm, Nevada. It’s, like, once people come here, they never want to go anywhere else. Mom calls Ellis an oasis in the desert and our own private paradise—hence the name of our shop—but at an average temperature of 105 degrees in the summer and the looming walls of red-rock mountains on every side, this town feels more like a stifling prison to me sometimes.

“But what if you took me instead? That way, you know I’d be safe. Maybe I could even get an hour of driving time on the way? We’ll tell Mom we’re going to movie night. She’ll never even know we were gone.” I smile. “I’ll let you give her the prize money. We’ll tell her you won it from a design contest or something.”

Jonathan shakes his head while making a nuh-uh-uh kind of noise, which reminds me of the way Frankie Valli sings. But behind the scolding tone, I catch something else. Just a hint of sympathy. Just a little bit of give, maybe?

That was something I could work with. I say in a singsong voice, “You’d be both of our heroes, Uncle Jonathan.”

A smile starts to edge at Jonathan’s lips as though he likes the idea of being a hero. Then he quickly shakes his head as if trying to get water out of his ear, and the happy look is gone. Along with the tone of sympathy. “Sorry, sister. Not happening.” He picks up his scissors and cuts a ribbon with a snip so abrupt that I know I’ve pushed it too far with that one.

I didn’t want it to come to this, but I know what tactic I need to try now. The truth.

“Fine, Jonathan. You want to know the real reason I need to go to this competition—besides winning the money for Mom, that is?”

Jonathan makes another sharp snip. “If it will explain why you’d break your deal with your mother over some silly teen idol contest.”

“Mrs. Arlington, the cashier at the music shop on Main, who gave me this flyer, said that there would be talent scouts from SUU, the University of Utah, and other colleges at the competition,” I tell him, knowing this tactic may very well backfire. College is another one of those topics my mother and I don’t see eye to eye on.

“Daphne, you and your mother will discuss this when you’re older.…”

“Yeah, right. Mom’s big plan for my postgraduation future probably involves me getting some online associate’s degree in business management, and then inheriting the flower shop from her. But I’ve got bigger dreams than making corsages for other girls to wear to dances and wrapping up ‘I’m sorry’ flowers for every doghouse-ditching guy who comes into this place. I graduate in less than two years and I want to go to college. A real college.”

Assuming Jonathan is right about my voice and I can manage to land a scholarship somewhere—anywhere—that is.

Getting a scholarship was step number two on my “prove to the world I can become a music star all on my own” master plan. (Step one being two hours of self-imposed music practice a day, no matter my homework load.)

“Opportunities like this competition don’t exactly come this close to Ellis very often. But if I can’t even get fifty miles away from here for one evening, how am I ever going to convince Mom to let me go away for school?”

Jonathan puts down his scissors. “Your mother has her reasons for wanting to protect you.”

“Which are what? Her own paranoia that the outside world is some big, bad place? What does she think is going to happen to me ‘out there’ anyway? Is she afraid I’m going to sneak off with some guy and get pregnant, just like she did? Or is she more afraid that once I step foot outside town, I’m never coming back? Does she think I’ll abandon her, just like my father?”

Jonathan’s lips pull into a tight, thin frown and I know I’ve struck on something. A remorseful tone wafts off him as he sighs.

Truth is, I don’t know how to make it work. How do I go after my dreams and not end up leaving her in the red dust of southern Utah because she refuses to budge from this spot? “I love my mom, but someday I am going to have to leave. I need to know what else is out there in the world. I need to know if I can make it on my own.”

“Daphne. I know you can make it on your own—but this is a conversation you should have with your mother. Later when …”

“Later will be too late.” I place my hand over his large fingers before he can distract himself with cutting ribbons again. “Please, Jonathan. Let me go tonight—”

The shop’s bell interrupts me once more, only this time it’s much louder, like someone has opened the front door in a hurry. I wonder if Indie has sent another customer running.

But instead, a few seconds later, Indie comes bounding into the back room. Or at least she tries to before hitting the barricade of balloons.

“Hol-y amaze balls, Daph-ne,” she says, jumping up to see me over the balloons. “You will never guess who is in the shop—like, never, ever in a mil-lion freak-ing years!”

When Indie gets excited, she talks in short, staccato notes and acts like she’s had five espressos in the last half hour, even though Mom says she’s supposed to be on a strictly stimulant-free diet. I’m not sure where Mom got this information, nor where she found Indie. Despite being on a limited budget—because she flat-out refuses to accept any child support from “that man”—my mother has a tendency to bring home strays. Of both the animal and human variety. Most of her person rescues stay only long enough to collect their first paycheck, but others become part of the family and never leave. Like Uncle Jonathan, who’s been with us for so long, I can’t remember when my day wasn’t greeted by one of his Technicolor aprons, and CeCe, who’d practically become my sister since my mom brought her to the shop five and a half years ago, looking like a drowned rat—CeCe, that is, not my mom. I still am not sure where Indie is going to fit into the mix.

“Come on. You have to see him!” she says when I don’t follow her.

Jonathan and I glance at each other, and he chuckles. He always says that a flower shop is the worst place in town for meeting cute guys. You’d have better luck at the library. Because the guys who come in here already have someone to buy flowers for.

“She’ll learn.” Jonathan laughs again with a merry tune, the tension between us melting away. The skin around his eyes wrinkles with his smile all the way up to the graying hair at his temples. I can’t help thinking that I won’t allow myself to grow old while waiting for my Prince Charming in a place like Ellis. My mom thought she’d found her prince once, but he’d hopped off like the frog he really was before I’d even been born.

As far as I’m concerned, no guy is worth waiting anywhere for, nor following, for that matter—prince or not.

“I’m ser-i-ous, you guys.” Indie grabs my arm through the balloons. “You have to see this or you will nev-er be-lieve me. Crap, where did I put my phone?” She drags me, with that red and orange balloon bouquet still in my hands, to the front with her. Jonathan follows, making a bemused humming sound. I hope he doesn’t think our discussion is over.

The first thing I notice is a long Hummer limousine idling in the no-parking zone in front of the shop entrance. But before I even have the chance to be irked by the illegal parking job, or wonder why or how someone had gotten a limo for the dance around here anyway, Indie jerks my attention to the flower cooler, whose motor is chugging and buzzing like it’s about to die any second. Or rather, Indie turns my attention to the back of the man who is standing in front of the cooler.

“See,” she whispers.

The shop’s fluorescent bulbs reflect off the back of the man’s leather jacket, and his boots are just as shiny. He wears dark wash skinny jeans that look far too tight for comfort. In fact, everything he wears looks stiff and perfect, like someone else picks out a new outfit for him every time he steps out of his house. Considering it’s ninety-eight degrees outside, that person hadn’t done a very good job. The woman next to him looks just as crisp in a black suit and a patent leather briefcase that coordinates with her glossy red heels. She clutches the briefcase to her chest as if she’s afraid one of the potted azaleas is about to fling itself at her.

I glance at CeCe, who is ringing up a bundle of red roses and baby’s breath for a very nonoriginal customer at the register. She shrugs to show she has no idea what Indie is going on about.

The leather-jacket man seems intent on a bunch of ranunculus blooms, which are wilting in the half-dead cooler. The glossy woman clears her throat. The man brushes his long, wavy hair over his shoulder and turns toward us.

Indie squeals. CeCe swears.

“It’s really him!” Indie says. “It’s the—”

“Joe Vince,” Jonathan says. He makes a move like he wants to block the man from my view with all three hundred pounds of himself.

I hold my hand up to stop him.

The man’s lips part into a cheeky grin. He winks at Indie and then looks at me. “ ’Ello, Daphne,” he says. “It’s been a long time.”

I let go of the balloon strings.

“Dad,” I say.

“What are you doing here?” Jonathan demands.

“Didn’t your mother tell you?” Joe says to me in his British accent, which must have once charmed my mom off her feet. “A judge granted me custody. I’m taking you to live with me in California.”

A loud bang echoes above my head as one of the red balloons bobbing against the rough popcorn ceiling bursts.