Chapter 8
Blue
I have never hated myself as much as I do right now.
I’m staring at the zipper of Melly Sorcha’s Halloween costume, which I’ve just pulled clean off the bodysuit it’s supposed to be attached to, and Melly is making a small high sound in the back of her throat that I can’t identify as a laugh or a cry or some third thing girls make when a guy breaks their clothes in a hallway.
I would like to tie myself to a goal post and let the freshmen take target practice on me.
I look at her. I look at the zipper. I look back at her.
There is no fucking way this is happening.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I get out. It has been ten full seconds, and it has been the worst ten seconds of my life. I finally remembered that I’m a person with a mouth that can speak. “Melly — I — Jesus.”
She bites her lip.
Then her whole face splits open into the biggest grin I have seen on a human being in maybe a year, and she throws her head back and laughs.
She laughs hard.
She laughs so hard she has to put a hand against the wall.
I’m holding the zipper like a life raft.
If I let it go, it will release some force that will end my life on the spot.
I look down at her costume — the whole back of the bodysuit has fallen open along the line of her spine from the base of her neck to about her tailbone — and the white of her skin is right there. I look away so fast my neck cracks.
I push my bedroom door open and gesture for her to come in.
I can’t fix this in a hallway.
She steps past me, still laughing, but it’s quieter now. She walks into my room with the costume open down her back, and one hand clutched at her chest, holding the front of the bodysuit against her. I shut the bedroom door behind us, and the music from downstairs quiets.
I cross to my closet.
“I’m sorry,” she says behind me, no longer laughing. Her voice has gone soft. “It’s a costume from . It was cheaply made. I had no idea it would break so easily. It must have been your big hand.”
I don’t say anything because I don’t trust what would come out of my mouth.
I pull a t-shirt off a hanger. Just a regular Wolves t-shirt. Black. Old. The kind I wear under my hoodie when it’s cold.
I turn around to hand it to her.
She looks down at the shirt in my hand.
She says, “Oh.”
I see her brain start moving. I see the small spark in her eyes that I used to see across a high school cafeteria at fifteen years old when she got an idea, and which I have always — always — been on the receiving end of. She looks up at me.
“Oh my God.”
I don’t like the way she says oh my God.
“What if I dressed up as you for Halloween?”
I close my eyes for one second, knowing that I’m dealing with a really drunk Melly right now.
I open them.
She’s grinning at me.
I turn back to the closet because that’s the only useful thing I can do with my hands. I reach up and pull down my Wolves jersey — the away one, black with the white GOLDING across the shoulders and the white 8 on the back — and I hand it to her before I can think too hard about what I am doing.
Her eyes get huge.
“Oh.”
She takes the jersey off the hanger, and she holds it up to her chest in front of the mirror on the back of my door. It’s a cheap mirror, the kind they sell at Walmart for ten dollars, and she looks at herself in it for a second.
“Okay. What should I do?”
She shuffles over to my dresser. She grabs my hat off the top of the dresser without asking and puts it on her head. Then she grabs the original t-shirt I had pulled out for her, which is in my hand, and she holds that up in her other hand.
“Should I be you?” She looks in the mirror. “Or should I be hockey player you?”
She switches the shirts.
Then her eyes find mine in the mirror.
“Which one?”
I realize I haven’t said a single word.
I swallow.
“Whichever you want,” I manage. “I have my gear over there.”
She turns to look at where I am looking. I catch a glimpse — half a second — of her bare back over her shoulder, the line of her spine in the dim of my bedroom. I look away as quickly as possible.
It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.
Jesus Christ. She actually said those words to me. I focus on the drywall.
She takes the angel wings off her shoulders and holds them up by one strap. “Here.”
I don’t reach for them.
She sighs and walks behind me. She slides the elastic of the wings up over my arms and onto my shoulders. “You can be an angel. Uh, take a step forward. Don’t turn around.”
I do exactly as she says.
I stare at the wall of my bedroom in a way I have never stared at the wall of my bedroom before. I hear the soft sound of fabric dropping to the floor behind me. I hear the rustle of her stepping into something.
She walks around me in my jersey. She’s in nothing but my jersey and her white leg things. And the jersey is so big on her that it falls to her mid-thigh. I forget how breathing works for one full second.
She turns in a slow circle for me to see.
“What do you think, number eight?”
I swallow.
She is the smallest she has ever looked. The jersey eats her. The hat is sliding off the back of her head. She is grinning at me with her whole face.
I have not, in any of the years I have been carrying her around in my chest, been prepared for the feeling of seeing my own last name on her body.
It doesn’t matter that I know exactly what she looks like naked before. We were kids then. I have no idea what she’s like now. The mystery of what is underneath that jersey is somehow worse.
She walks to my gear bag in the corner. She crouches and digs. She pulls out my gloves and puts them on. She pulls out my helmet and puts that on too.
She turns around with a giant black helmet on her head and gloves on her hands and a jersey to her thighs, and she starts dancing — bouncing on the balls of her feet, knees moving, shoulders going — because a new song has come on downstairs and her body has registered it before her brain has.
She looks in the mirror.
“Okay. Maybe not the helmet. I’ll go with the hat.”
She bends over to put the helmet back in the bag.
Jesus Christ, save me right now.
I scratch my eyebrow and look at the ceiling. I have been a faithful son. I have called my grandmother on her birthday every year. I have not, in twenty-one years of life, killed a man. I deserve mercy.
She straightens up. She takes the gloves off. She sets them on my bed. She reaches up and pulls the elastic out of her hair and shakes the whole heavy weight of it out around her shoulders, and then she grabs my hat off the bed and puts it on backwards.
She crosses her arms. “What do you think?”
I nod. “Good.”
She turns to look at the back of my jersey in the mirror. “Golding.” She smiles to herself. “It’s cool to have your name on a jersey. I would love to have one that says Sorcha. Number fourteen.”
I tilt my head. “Because of your birthday?”
She turns and looks at me. “You remember my birthday?”
I nod. I’m not going to tell her that I remember every single thing she has ever told me, ever, including the names of all four of her dolls from second grade and the fact that her mother used to make her wear pink sneakers to school in third grade and that the pink sneakers were the bane of her existence.
I am going to nod, like a normal person, and I am going to let her think this is a normal level of memory.
She says quickly, “I know yours isn’t the eighth.”
I smile at her.
“What?”
Her eyes are searching my face, trying to read me. I realize that she can’t, and something undoes in my chest.
I press my lips together and shake my head. “Do I have to wear the wings?”
She picks her halo up off the bed. “This too.” She walks over to me and gestures for me to bend my head. I do, and she places the halo on top of my head and steps back to admire it. “There.”
I lift my head and try not to smile. I’m smiling anyway.
She smiles back.
We’re alone in my bedroom, and we are both wearing each other’s costumes.
The bass from the party is keeping time under our feet, and there is one of those quiet beats where I realize that I’m in my room with the only girl I have ever lost sleep over and we are both smiling at each other for no reason.
I look down. “I’m sorry about breaking your zipper.”
“It’s okay. Do I look okay?” She takes a step back. “Should I draw on a mustache or something?”
She looks around my room for a pen.
“Here,” I say, walking to my bag. I reach in and grab a black pen.
She pushes her face out and grins at me.
“Oh.” I had been planning to hand the pen to her. “Do you want me to draw it on?”
She nods. “Yeah. Go for it.”
I look at her glossy lips and her impossibly blue eyes and the small dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose that I had forgotten about until exactly this moment, then I uncap the pen.
It doesn’t start drawing at first. I have to scratch a little against the soft skin above her lip.
“Are you okay?”
She nods, eyes closed. “Yes. I get my brows waxed. This is nothing.”
I look up at her eyebrows to see. They look like eyebrows to me.
I focus back on the mustache. The pen finally bleeds ink.
I make a few long lines and then go back over to make them thicker, the way I have, exactly one time in my life, drawn on a freshman’s face when he passed out on the floor of this same house.
“That side’s done. Now the other.”
She starts giggling. She pulls back and covers her mouth. “Oh my God. I’m sorry. If you told me this was how my night was going to go, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
“Yeah,” I agree.
She presses her lips together. She keeps her eyes open and looks up at the ceiling. Stanley was right; they fucking sparkle like diamonds.
I draw the other side. I don’t draw it as well as the first side because the angle is harder and my hand has, somewhere in the last sixty seconds, started doing a small unhelpful thing.
“There,” I say.
She runs to the mirror and bursts into laughter. “Oh my God. You suck! You drew it on crooked.”
I walk up behind her so I can see what I did. It’s not that bad.