22. Sloane #3
That was weeks ago now, the end of October, the last big party before the season swallowed the team whole.
Margo made me go. Margo made me into something, actually — poured me into a costume that was technically Sandy from Grease but mostly an excuse for the leather pants, did my eyes in a way that made me look like a person who wasn’t afraid of anything, and sent me out the door of the still-standing Sailmaker with a you can thank me later.
Beau went as — and I will treasure this until I die — a hockey player.
Just himself. A jersey and a black eye drawn on with Cash’s eyeliner and the words it’s a costume, I’m a guy who plays hockey delivered with total sincerity to anyone who asked, which was the funniest commitment to a bit I’d ever seen and which made me laugh, the real one, in front of two hundred people.
We weren’t living together yet. We weren’t even — I hadn’t let myself call it anything yet.
But we walked in together and we didn’t leave each other’s orbit all night, and at some point he had his hand at the small of my back in the leather pants and I had a hand fisted in his jersey and we were dancing in a crush of vampires and sexy nurses and one guy dressed inexplicably as a traffic cone, and I caught Vivienne watching us from across the room with an expression like she’d bitten down on foil, and I caught the rest of the room watching too, and I understood, somewhere under the noise and the eyeliner, that this had stopped being a performance I could see the edges of.
That’s the night people decided. I know it now, looking back.
Halloween was when Sorensen and the theater girl stopped being a rumor people were testing and became a thing people just knew.
So when the fire happened weeks later and the news went around that I’d moved into the Raven House, nobody was surprised.
They’d watched the whole thing coming since a girl in leather pants laughed at a man whose costume was himself.
The campus figures it out, the rest of the way, the way campuses do.
It travels — Sorensen’s living with the theater girl, the fire, the moving in, the walking-home, the way we’re never not within reach of each other now — and by the second week it’s just a known fact, the kind of thing people have stopped finding interesting because it’s stopped looking like a story and started looking like a couple.
I see the girls between classes, the three of us crammed into a corner of the campus center, June with a hot chocolate and Margo with the gleam she gets.
“So,” Margo says. “You’re living there.”
“My house caught fire, Margo. I’m aware you were present.”
“You’re living there, in his room, in his bed, and don’t insult me by pretending there’s a cot involved, because Cash tells Wren everything and Wren tells me everything and there is no cot.
” She points a fry at me. “I’m not even going to ask if it’s still fake.
I watched him kiss your knuckles in a truck on the worst morning of your life when he thought no one was looking. I have my answer.”
“It’s—” I start, the old reflex, the deflection.
“It’s real,” June says quietly, into her hot chocolate, with the soft certainty she gets about things she’s sure of. “It’s okay that it’s real, Sloane. You’re allowed.”
And I look at the two of them, my friends, the people I’d die for, and I think about lying — I’m good at lying, I could deflect this into next week — and then I think about Beau finding the camera in Burlington, and the cleared drawer, and I’d rather be cold with you than warm without you, and I’m so tired of pretending the thing I’m doing isn’t the thing I’m doing.
“It’s real,” I say. Out loud. To witnesses. The first time I’ve said it to anyone, including myself. “I don’t — I don’t know what to do with it. It terrifies me. But it’s real. We both know it’s real. We stopped pretending weeks ago and just didn’t tell the paperwork.”
Margo doesn’t whoop, which I appreciate. She just reaches over and squeezes my hand, once, and June beams into her hot chocolate, and for a second I’m a normal girl with normal friends admitting a normal good thing, and the floor doesn’t open, and nobody leaves, and the world keeps going.
I let myself have it.
That’s the thing I’ll think about later, when it all comes apart — that for a few weeks in the dead of November I actually let myself have it.
The bed and the drawer and the walks home and the study sessions and the goal he found the camera for.
The way he reaches for my hand without thinking now.
The way I’ve started reaching back. The fact that the rule I wrote in pen — don’t forget this is fake — is so dead and buried that I’ve stopped even visiting the grave.
It’s real. He knows it. I know it. The whole campus knows it.
I lie in his bed the night before he comes home and I let myself, for once, not catalog the exits.
I let myself listen for the truck without being ashamed of the listening.
I let myself believe, against the entire evidence of my life, that maybe this is the thing that doesn’t get taken, that maybe I’m finally in a room where the floor holds.
I should know better.
I do know better, somewhere, in the nine-year-old part of me that’s never once been wrong about this. She’s quiet right now, that girl, lulled by the warm and the want and the cleared drawer.
But she’s still in there.
And the thing about my life — the one reliable thing, the only law I’ve ever been able to count on — is that the floor always opens eventually.
It’s just been waiting for me to get comfortable enough to forget.