Eight
When Cella called, I had to lift a cucumber slice from one eye to find and answer my phone, careful not to smudge my freshly painted nails. It was halfway across my aunt and uncle’s bathroom, too close to the tub, ringing with a jingle from a Dutch chocolate ad that Cella found hilarious.
Inside the tub, Annalisa groaned with serious anguish over the noise.
Her head, tipped back against the opposite rim, was unfortunately close to my vibrating phone.
Endless black hair floated around her. Her bathing suit was half hidden by patches of pink-tinted bubble bath.
Her feet stuck out, propped on the rim to let her toes dry.
She whined louder with every second my phone rang.
I stood, letting the cucumbers fall. The bathroom air was thick with steam and incense. Getting to my phone felt like walking through gelatin. I swiped a finger through Annalisa’s mud mask, then touched it to her tongue when she opened her mouth to tell me off.
I answered the call. Cella cut herself off mid-greeting to ask, “Is somebody vomiting behind you?”
“Concern yourself not, fair lady,” I responded over Annalisa’s gagging, returning to Aunt Francesca’s unbelievably plush bathroom mat, where I lay on my back holding the phone by my ear. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing’s up,” she said. I let my silence do the talking. “Okay, fine, canItalktoyouaboutmydate?”
In a brief moment of panic, I let the phone drop and tried to run a hand through my hair, only to be blocked by the cat-ear headband Annalisa had forced onto me to keep my hair out of my face mask. Remembering my nails, I anxiously palmed the rug fluff instead.
“What’s happening?” asked Annalisa, who had wrapped a towel around her head and replaced her drowned cucumber slices. “I can feel your psyche erecting walls from here. You’re regressing into turtle mode. Break free of your mortal shell.”
I need to tell her, I thought, as I had been thinking for the larger part of the forty-four hours since Mason had kissed me.
I tried to hear it in my own voice, to practice the intonation of it in my head. Mason kissed me.
It didn’t sound too bad, just incomplete. Confessing only half of the truth, the half that didn’t make me look bad, felt as dirty as the forest floor where Mason had kissed me. And where I had, debatably, depending on one’s interpretation of events, kissed him back.
Mason kissed me, and I let him. Enthusiastically.
Still incomplete. Where was the line drawn? How much does a person have to confess in order to tell the truth?
How do you even confess to someone you’ve never kept a secret from?
Seven years old, fresh off the Trade, I had ignored every warning and learned the hard way that tolerance to the sun was not the same as immunity.
Five hours after the first rays hit my skin, I was huddled beneath a flat overhanging rock in the forest, cupping dirt in my palms and pressing it to my arms and cheeks for relief when Cella found me.
She lived in the closest neighborhood to the Whispering Woods and had come to look for spirits.
She had gone through her occult phase at an alarmingly young age, and she seemed so extraordinary to me right then, standing over me in a forest most adults wouldn’t brave, with her brown pigtail braids and a Poké Ball clipped to her belt.
Clutching an amethyst facial roller and a handful of thyme for protection.
She was disappointed when I told her I wasn’t a ghost child, but she fretted over my condition anyway.
I felt exceptionally ordinary as she wiped the dirt from my brow and applied every last one of her Gengar Band-Aids over my flaming sunburn (peeling them off before I went back inside hurt like hell).
Her knees were scraped and bleeding from several stumbles on the uneven ground.
It was the first time I’d smelled human blood, and I hadn’t stood a chance at keeping my fangs at bay.
Cella had looked at my mouth, taken a tiny journal out of her fanny pack, and jotted down notes.
“You can’t tell anyone,” I’d said, too stunned to be properly horrified that I’d broken the Number One Rule of Vampirism—do not reveal yourself to humans—after meeting a single one.
“Don’t worry; this journal has a lock,” she’d said.
The first thing Cella had ever learned about me, before even my name, was my biggest secret. And she had still stuck around long enough to learn my name.
We never kept anything from each other.
But this seemed impossible: Mason kissed me, and I let him, enthusiastically, and I regret it with all of me but also can’t get it out of my head.
Several times since the incident, I had tried taking my own pulse to calm myself—press my fingers to my neck, close my eyes, clear my mind. I couldn’t even get a resting rate before the spotlight inside my head circled back to Mason, and my weak heartbeat kicked into high gear.
Mason had kissed me, and I had let him, and ever since, my head had been stuffed full of garbage noise, like, Mason has soft lips but his kisses are sharp.
I didn’t know how I was going to face him. I needed a strategy.
Mason kissed me, and I let him, and by the way, when you asked if I liked guys, were you thinking about all of the idol edits I begrudgingly watched with you during middle school lunch, huddled around your phone screen in hallway corners?
I’d been thinking about that a lot the last couple of days. I had tolerated so many hours of those edits.
“You there?”
I picked the phone back up. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“I’ve been holding off bringing it up to you,” said Cella.
“ ’Cause I know you don’t like Mason and you really don’t like that I like Mason.
But Diane found out one of her ex-ish partners was cheating the whole time, so she’s having conniptions, and Mom is having conniptions dealing with Diane’s conniptions, and Dad still believes I won’t date till he’s dead—”
“It’s fine, Cella. Tell me about it,” I said and stopped there.
I rolled over onto my stomach. Annalisa, with her cucumbers still on, muttered, “Oh no, he’s tossing and turning again.”
She had dragged me out of my room and into her parents’ bathroom an hour ago after, according to her, my two days of tossing and turning in bed had begun to shake the whole house.
After finding me with just my toes and the top of my head sticking out of my sheets—“turtle mode”—she had painted my nails plum purple-black and massaged oils into my scalp “for the sake of these ancient foundations.”
On the other end of the line, Cella sounded like she was tossing and turning, too, in a different way.
There were constant sounds of rustling. I listened to her gush about the gummy worm she and Mason had tried (and failed) to share Lady and the Tramp-style and pictured her rolling giddily in her sheets, squeezing a stuffed animal, kicking socked feet behind her.
***
The Mason Strategy was, for all the time I had spent developing it, simple: Do Not Engage.
If I went long enough without looking at him, I would eventually forget his face, and it wouldn’t be able to haunt the darkness when I closed my eyes.
The problem with the Mason Strategy, I was reminded on Monday morning, was that Mason drew eyes just walking into a room.
When he entered our art classroom on Monday, something immediately felt wrong, in that nothing felt wrong.
Mason came in and there was no buzzing, no itching.
I would’ve happily parted with the feeling—good riddance—but as it turned out, it was a lot easier to resist looking at someone when the sight of them made your skin crawl.
The marks were still there on his neck. They could have been mosquito bites. Often, unconsciously, he cupped his hand over them.
My only solace—and this was sad—was that since their date, he and Cella had become even more insufferable to witness.
It was all peeking pink glances between them.
Cella kept cleaning up nonexistent lip gloss.
My sketchbook was an oasis in the desert; I stared at it intently, drawing nothing.
I could hear them kicking at each other’s ankles.
Mrs. Glacier brought us outside for the second half of class to demonstrate how lighting impacted our color choices.
Students scattered around the trees behind the bus loop with boxes of colored pencils.
Two squirrels chased each other through the branches, and Mason said, “That’s us.
” He smiled with his tongue between his teeth when he was flirting.
He explained to Cella, unprompted, that squirrels didn’t dig up all of their buried nuts, which led to more trees, so maybe they were sitting under a tree planted by a squirrel.
Cella actually teared up at the thought. I wished for the sun to turn me to ash.
For his part, Mason didn’t bother me, though he cast furtive glances, like every time I spoke to Cella would be the time I outed him. I resolutely pretended not to notice him looking.
“Hey,” he said. “Callisto.”
Do Not Engage. Do Not Engage.
“Hello? You there?”
“Still with us, bud?” Cella squatted in front of me beneath the broad leaves of an Oregon ash and waved a hand in front of my face.
“A little busy,” I grumbled.
She peered at my sketchbook and whispered, “There are four lines on that page.”
Mason, enemy of the perfect whisper, snorted.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
He said, “A birdie told me Lara likes you.”
“Who?”
“My friend Lara?” I shook my head. “You met her the other day? Cheer team?” Nothing. “Hair like a candy apple, the movie kind that looks poisonous.”
I vaguely remembered a cheerleader with a high red ponytail. Met was generous. Mason said she thought I was cute. They wanted to go on a double date.
“No.”
Cella chimed in, gently, that she liked the idea.
“No.”
“Please? I could really use a girl friend, especially with my sister so messy, but I get so nervous thinking about getting to know her. I could really use you there. You know I wouldn’t ask if I thought she’d annoy you.”