Eight #2
I beckoned her closer and reminded her, as quietly as physically possible, that Mason thought I was gay.
“Is what I would say,” Cella added loudly, “in another universe, maybe!”
“Nonsense,” chirped Mason. “You told me you aren’t really into guys.”
“You did?” said Cella.
I laughed, two crisp ha’s, and tightly said, “Forgot.”
“So then . . .” said Cella, clasping her hands.
This was unfair, though she had no way of knowing it, because I’d never tell her.
Just like it had been unfair each year she’d begged me along to the homecoming dance.
I went because she couldn’t go alone even though Cella liked the dancing part and I had no interest. We ended up separated every time.
It was always her on the dance floor, invited into selfies by girls who wouldn’t recognize her face in them the next morning, dancing with boys who didn’t ask her name.
Me, in a corner away from the roar of rushing blood, accepting noncommittal conversation from girls with bad attitudes, dark eyeliner, and tattoos their parents didn’t know about.
They weren’t intimidated by my “mean mug” and always seemed, in the moment, enough like myself.
We kissed because I had nothing else to do.
It was unfair, but not as unfair as having a vampire as a best friend, so I agreed every time. Cella always found me soon enough anyway. This is a bust, she would say, even as her face glowed. Inevitably, she always left for my sake.
“Fine,” I said.
***
Lara was a year younger but taller than I’d noticed, not in the stringy, graceful way that Annalisa was tall, like there was air between her joints, but like a piece of rubber stretched out.
She had a rubbery bounce, too: in her step, in her quick smile, in her singsong way of speaking and the bob of her curls.
I had tried to stall by reminding Cella and Mason that we needed to finish our project, but apparently nothing mattered anymore, and, “It can wait until tomorrow.” So there I was with Cella on a Monday night, crossing through the mall parking lot I had watched from above last week.
Lara and Mason waited on a bench outside of a Brazilian restaurant owned by Lara’s cousin.
They had come together straight from their respective practices, hair still slightly damp, but they cleaned up well.
Lara’s brown skin glowed in the early evening light. Mason’s too.
Lara had deep doe eyes and was warm to the touch when she laid a hand over my forearm across the table.
She talked with a curling accent. And she talked a lot, which was good for me; I could mostly get along by just nodding.
Mason had been right, she and Cella really did get on.
Lara seemed like she could get along with anyone—our waitress listened with rapt attention to her list of animals she believed were aliens. At the top of the list were meerkats.
Mason tried to order with the appropriate pronunciation. His mouth wobbled around the sounds.
When the waitress got to me, I told her I wasn’t getting anything.
“Are you sure?” asked Lara. She reached across the table to touch my forearm, which I was beginning to understand was not a gesture so much as a punctuation mark. She was touchy. “I don’t mind getting the bill.”
“It’s not that,” I reassured. “Someone forgot to text me the plans more than half an hour in advance. I just ate a really big dinner. I’ll still get your bill, though. Nope, that’s final.”
Mason’s brows had crawled up beneath his curls. Didn’t expect me to be so polite? Joke’s on you.
“Nice going!” Lara punched Mason’s shoulder, the equivalent of an exclamation mark. The hand on my forearm squeezed.
Actually, I’m still on this date, so joke’s on me.
I lifted her hand, and she watched curiously as I turned her wrist side to side. Her body had beautiful lines, long and fluid, strong where it needed to be but feathery otherwise. Like a cattail. I thought she would be nice to draw and told her as much. I felt her grow warm.
She really was mesmerizing, the way she moved, the way she always seemed to be in motion and every movement connected. She flowed like water, like thin sketch lines running into each other. I tried to focus on this, to imagine her as a drawing in progress.
Next to her, always in the shot, was Mason’s scratchy outline.
I couldn’t narrow my vision enough to lose sight of him, his hand holding Cella’s across the table and his flirting, which he did with his mouth—chewing the bottom lip, licking water droplets from the top, smiling slowly with one side higher than the other.
He was thick charcoal, impossible to rub out.
He was the eraser marks you got for trying.
He was the deep indent in the next several pages because you pressed too hard.
When the waitress returned with three plates, Lara took a bite, hummed happily, then tapped her fork against her lip in thought.
“I was pretty surprised when Mase told me you wanted to take me out. Don’t take that the wrong way, you’re gorgeous, but I never would’ve thought you liked me.
I always got the impression you didn’t like anybody.
Minus the obvious.” She nodded toward Cella.
Pointing her fork at me, she added, “Never would’ve thought you were such a gentleman, either. ”
Mason was conveniently taking a long, long drink of water.
“. . . Right,” I said. “Yeah. You’re, um, great.”
She said she would like to see me again. And if that went well: “You should come to Blake’s Halloween party. Both of you. I’ve never seen either of you there, how’s that possible?”
Because I would rather eat a tray of garlic knots. “We weren’t invited.”
“That’s not a thing. Who told you that’s a thing? As long as you’re in costume, and you’re not, like, freak old or freak young, they’ll let you in. Blake takes it pretty seriously.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cella nodding like a bobblehead.