Twenty
I pause outside the door, hand poised to knock. I didn’t need more band-practice content this week, and the website is completely up and running. The format is simple (goodbye Papyrus font) but professional. All of the songs they’ve recorded up to this point have been uploaded with easily sharable links, and I made a press kit full of the graveyard photos and a bio on every member. Hazel even told Odette they have two more gigs lined up: playing at a club next week with two other bands, and a birthday party for someone at Hazel’s school.
The faint sounds of music leak through the heavy wood, and I lean in a little, resting my forehead on the door. Just admit it. You want to see him. Things are normal-ish at school, and we’re texting about the project, but it’s been more than a week since the party. There hasn’t been a single book recommendation or plan for more fieldwork, and I think I might miss him.
I wait another minute, but if they’re already playing, they’ll never hear me out here. I jiggle the knob and it turns easily.
Are we “just walk into each other’s houses”–type friends?
Odette and Poppy and I passed that mark ages ago, the cadence and schedules of each other’s families now as ingrained as our own. I know better than to drop by Odette’s on a Sunday night. It’s her mom’s one day off, and between cleaning houses and night school, not a single thing is going to come between her and dinner with her kids. Poppy’s house has a very vigorous Wednesday game night. They don’t necessarily hate visitors at that time, but if you do show up, you will be conscripted into playing, and they’re all terrible losers. The point is, I know them well enough to know that when I’m walking through that door, it’s the right moment, because I know when all the wrong ones are.
What if I walk through this door and Ash’s parents are finally home?
I crack my knuckles until I can feel my pulse in my fingertips, then stick my head over the threshold.
“Hello?”
The distant rise and fall of what I think might be “Not Tonight, Never Tomorrow” is my only answer.
“I promise I’m not an intruder,” I call out as I close the door, sealing myself and this awkward step in our friendship inside.
I slip my shoes off and race to the stairwell.
I take the basement steps two at a time, only to stop short when I see the band is down one very important monster.
“Ash isn’t here,” I announce as the music sputters to a halt.
Hazel just raises one eyebrow.
I try again. “I’m here to work on the website and socials.”
“I gathered.” She bends and twists some knobs on a glitter green pedal.
“Is he… home?” I look toward the stairs, but I can’t remember if I saw his car in the driveway.
“Nope.” She slides her fingers along the neck of her guitar, and an angry yowl explodes from the speaker behind her.
“He’ll probably be here later,” Mateo says, putting me out of my misery, and reminding me of the fact that I’m pretty sure I saw his bare ass at Hazel’s party.
“Hi, Marlowe!” Julian waves vigorously in my direction.
I feel waterlogged with disappointment. I should have called first, but Tuesday is always band practice day, and there have been enough half smiles and eye rolls in class that I felt us settling back into a routine. He didn’t mention he wouldn’t be here. I grip my bag tight.
“Where is he?” Look at me, easy-breezy Marlowe.
“He’s—”
“Maybe you should ask him that yourself,” Hazel says, cutting off Mateo.
“Okay, I will,” I say, cracking my knuckles again. “Does he have a laptop around here? I’ll just get to work.”
“There’s one in his room,” Julian supplies, and I’m up the stairs before anyone can say anything else.
I have promoted myself from “walk into your house”–level friends to “spend time alone in your room” friends, and the level-jumping I’m doing is drastic, even for me. Both Meemaws, the alive and the dead one, would swat my knuckles and tell me to have a little shame. But I don’t. I’ve committed to being here, and seeing him, and taking a thorough litmus test to make sure we’re back to normal. I have thrown myself so far down this path that there’s no escaping now.
The pale gray walls and rows of bookshelves in Ash’s room soothe me like slipping into a warm bath or putting on noise-canceling headphones. Every cell quiets.
I take my time, brushing fingertips against the spines of old friends, and making note of colors and titles that pop out and yell take me home.
He reads more widely than I thought. Horror, mystery, some nonfiction, and several well-worn graphic novels riddled with dog-ears. I float along, heady with all these little snippets of insight, and his desk advertises the potential for more details. His bullet-gray laptop sits right in the middle, and the surface is littered with guitar picks and scraps of paper covered in lines and chord progressions in deep forest-green ink. I hold up my phone and take a picture. It’s the perfect tableau for their socials. Snippets of the process, but not too personal. I caption it: Musical genius at work, or absolute chaos—the desk of our lead singer, Ash Hayes. I post it straight to the band’s Gabber, and make myself at home. I do promise the universe, and the deceased Meemaw, that if the laptop is password protected or looks personal, I will acknowledge that it isn’t meant to be used.
I lift the screen up, and I’m immediately in. There’s no password and there are no questionable tabs; it’s worse. His desktop is a mosaic of every assignment, saved document, and single thought he’s ever had. I can barely see through all the files, just stacked on top of each other. I’d almost prefer porn virus pop-ups.
The urge to put everything neatly into folders grips me so hard I’m almost breathless, but I find my one sliver of self-restraint left and just pull up the band website. I filter through and delete the spam comments on pictures and old posts, and question whether some of the more sexual comments are bots or just weirdly honest members of this community who deserve to shoot their shot.
I play the latest streaming track, “My Dear Abigail,” as I upload it to the New Music tab, and my foot taps to the melody and my own nerves.
“I was told I’d find you in here.”
I swivel in his chair like a mastermind villain, smiling as hard as I can. My foot vibrates harder. “I’m sorry. I hope this is okay. You weren’t here.” I was aiming for breezy, but it comes out solidly accusatory.
“Yes, I know.”
“I came into your house, and then your room, and I know that’s indicative of a really deep friendship, and I totally understand if you don’t feel that way.” My crimes spill out of me, unprompted. “I get it if you’d like to establish some boundaries, but I panicked in the moment and—”
He leans over me and taps on the laptop, silencing the music.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Again. Just in case that didn’t translate.
“I don’t mind that you’re here,” he says, dropping his backpack on his beige linen duvet.
No, not beige. Ecru? The pale cream color on the inside of an eggshell. A made bed, and a desktop in shambles.
“Marlowe?”
I snap back into the present. “Yes? Here.”
“I asked how the website is going.”
I swivel hard, back toward the laptop. “Really well! Your engagement has steadily climbed since the graveyard pics, and I’ve added this sliding header at the top, so the pictures can just rotate, and we give the people what they want.”
“Looks great,” he says. Reaching from behind me, he moves his long fingers across the trackpad. His forearm tenses with the movement, and my eyes trace the delicate network of veins lying under his skin.
Odette’s words ring in my ears. Hot. Yes, and yes. Josh was hot in a way that the sun is—all in your face, almost blinding, and sometimes burning you to nothing in its wake. Ash is less obvious, with asymmetric angles, and the distraction of his piercings and loose clothes. Like moonlight. Softer, slower to realize, but it can still make your head spin.
“Where were you? On a date?”
He pulls back, and suddenly he’s across the room, dropping rings and a spiked ear cuff on top of his dresser. “That’s a weirdly specific question.”
I wait, because it was, and I hope if I imitate a lamp, no sudden movement or sound, he might just answer me anyway.
“And if I was?” he continues, which is still not an answer. His black-and-white-striped button-down goes next, and he’s left with the white T-shirt below.
“That would be amazing,” I say, the world’s most enthusiastic lamp, with a leg that’s bouncing so hard it’s likely to rocket to the moon. “They would be a very lucky girl, or guy. Or person.”
He nods, unclipping a chain from his belt. “And how do you think they would feel about my good friend Marlowe, who spontaneously pops up in my bedroom? Do I need to start checking for you under my bed at night before I fall asleep?”
I flush, and I hate it when he’s so right, and I’m again displaying such a lack of common sense it’s shocking I can function in the world at all. “I’m more of a back-of-the-closet kind of girl.”
He smiles a little at that. Like I’m funnier than he wants to admit. “I was at the dentist.”
“Oh.” Oh. I stand up, not sure if I’m supposed to leave at this point, or what direction to put my body in. “Dental hygiene is important.”
“Extremely.”
“Combating that plaque buildup, and flossing? Don’t even get me started on flossing.” For the love of God, will somebody just push me out the window.
He just looks at me expectantly.
I’m not ready to go, or for him to go downstairs and get wrapped into a sea of sounds. I’m embarrassingly needy and starved for his attention after days and days of surface-level smiles.
“Teach me to put on eyeliner,” I blurt into the space between us.
“Marlowe—what?”
He has whiplash, and I know it’s my fault, but I push forward. “I’ve been meaning to learn, and you…” I wave toward the smudges around his eyes. “You’re good at it.”
“I don’t think this is the technique you’re looking for.”
“Is too.”
Laughter creaks out of him, and my veins are full of bubbles. I’m a soda someone shook too hard. I walk over to his dresser. Sunscreen and a few telltale sticks of liner are stacked carefully in a pencil cup shaped like a cactus. I pull out a purple one and hold it out.
“What is with you today?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t bother to hide that I’ve gone off the deep end. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of pretending I don’t want to be here.
What do you want, Marlowe?
He pulls me over to his bed and we sit on the edge. He pulls off my glasses. “I would, again, like to go on the record that I don’t really know how to do this the fancy clean way. I’m more of the messy, smudged, most-likely-to-play-you-a-little-metal-if-you-get-too-close style.”
I breathe through my nose as he tilts my jaw to the side. “You just like the look of it?”
He exhales and I can feel it. It’s all faint toothpaste, and cedar, and leather cuffs. “I liked how annoyed my dad was when I started wearing it. Look up.”
A light brush of pressure skates the underside of my eye. “Are your parents off on another work trip?”
He grunts, and I think that’s a yes. “Two weeks,” he says shortly.
It’s a long time to come home to an empty house. My heart spasms. I can’t imagine what project would make them think they can just drop everything. Drop the company of their son. “Does it still annoy him? The eyeliner?”
“I couldn’t tell you, but now I like it regardless of him. Close your eyes.”
I oblige, and the pressure of his fingertips sears my face.
He slides the liner across my lash line. “That’s what it’s all about, right? Figuring out who we are and what we like and trying everything until we find the answers? Stop trying to blink.”
I hold my face as still as possible, as if I’d ever tried to be in charge of my eyelids before.
“Perfect.”
I blink.
“Or terrible,” he says after a beat. “It could go either way.”
I jump off the bed and run to the mirror hanging over his dresser. He’s right: it’s not the knife-sharp precise lines that swish along the eyelids of the girls at school. Purple is slowly spreading away from my eyes like a bruise, and it’s both terrible and perfect. I smile at the bunched muscles between his eyebrows as he waits for my verdict.
“Do you think anyone will wonder if I’ll play them some metal if they get too close?”
“Only if they’re smart.”
My phone meows. There he is, texting more and more. Picking up right where he left off—two years full of plans, I-love-yous, and more than one picture I would die if my momma saw, and Josh is just strolling back in to say: Why are you in a picture on Hayes’s desk?
The words are a jumble. I read them again, the meaning slipping away from me.
“Bad news?”
I look up, and Ash’s eyes are wary. I wonder what my face is doing.
“It’s… um… it’s Josh. Again.”
“Oh, really?” The end of that sentence asks for more information, but I have nothing to give.
I text back a?.
Dots appear immediately, and then disappear. Ash is looking at me like my phone is going to bite us both, but then a message pops up and it’s a shared picture from NMTM’s Gabber. The latest one that I just took of his desk.
Why is there a picture of you on Hayes’s desk?
I zoom in, and then look up at the source material. A Polaroid I missed. Carefully leaning against a framed picture of the band is the picture Hazel took of us at her party. My smile is strained, his is nonexistent, but our faces are close.
“I shared a picture of your desk.” I nod over at it, as if he wouldn’t be able to follow my train of thought. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to think of something for the band socials.” I clear my throat. “Josh is asking me why you have a picture of us on it.”
“And what did you tell him?” His voice is soft.
“I… I don’t know.”
He steps closer, and the heat from his chest wraps around me. “Well, I’m going to go practice. You’re a smart girl, Marlowe, I’m sure you can figure out why I would have a picture of us on my desk.” He’s out the door before I can respond, and I’m left holding my phone like a bomb.
I wobble as his words sink into my skin. I do not feel like a very smart girl right now, and the possibilities threaten to shift things so drastically, we won’t be able to come back from it.
I type out the words even though they may make me a coward.
I don’t know.
Dots appear, and then disappear for good.