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I brightened, nodding. “Yes.”
Gabriel beamed. “Yeah. I’m getting the hang of this.” He nodded toward North’s fingers. “Go ahead and do the pink. I’ll need that back in a minute.”
I twisted the top of the pink polish bottle.
“Baby,” he said in a deeper tone.
I found his hand and drew it around, placing it on my knee.
“What are you doing?” North asked.
I picked out the pink polish brush, and hovered it over his pinkie.
“Nope,” North said, he pulled his hand away, tucking it under his thighs. “I have to draw a line at pink.”
“Oy,” Gabriel said, and he snapped his fingers at North. “You let her use the pink ...”
“Or what?” North asked. “You’ll kick my ass? Try it.”
“North,” Kota said behind us. “Let her use the pink if she wants.”
“You can’t be serious,” North said.
“Hey, I’m next after you. You wait, I’ll end up with something orange and pink or something.”
“That’s what I’m getting,” Gabriel said.
Nathan and Luke started chuckling.
“You guys are assholes. She gets what she wants. It’s her birthday.” Gabriel focused on my toes. “I’ll wear my favorite color and her favorite color together. The rest of you chickenshits can go fuck off.”
I held the bottle of pink, not sure if I should get in the middle of this.
“Fuck you, Gabe. You started this.” North shoved a hand onto my knee. “Get it over with so I can wash it off.”
“No one gets to wash off the polish tonight,” Kota said. I turned around to look at him. He was sitting back, his arms over his chest, though relaxed and half gazing at the television.
I didn’t want to make North mad at me, but I didn’t want to back down because Gabriel and Kota were both practically telling me to do it. I took the brush out again with an idea. I planted two small dots in the center of the pinkie nail, and slid them together to make a small heart. “There,” I said. “Just a little.”
North held up his finger, examining my work. “I almost want to say this is worse.”
“I like it,” I said, and it looked good on him. With all the black, with all the dour expressions, that little pink heart was like the tiny soft spot I knew he had.
North drew quiet, staring at the heart. While his eyes softened, his mouth drew taut. Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t going to say it out loud.
“If you’re done,” Kota said, yawning. “I’ll go next.”
North grunted, getting up on his knees and crawling away. Kota took his place behind me. He sucked in a deep breath, wrapping his arms around my stomach as he drew me closer.
“Hey, hey,” Gabriel said. “I’m trying to work here.”
Kota ignored this, drawing me in. Gabriel moved closer, coddling my other foot.
Kota planted a palm on my thigh on one side and drew up his knee on the other, holding out his fingers. “What color do you want?” he asked close to my ear.
“Do you want green?” I asked.
“I’ll take pink or green,” he said. “It’s your birthday zombie party.”
“I haven’t been watching the zombies,” I said, leaning over a little to snag a hunter green bottle off the coffee table.
“That’s probably a good thing. You get enough nightmares.” He buried his face into my shoulder. “Can you tell me something?”
“What?”
“What did the mask look like?”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“Not up close. We’ve spotted him wearing all black but we only caught his back.”
“It was ...” I started to say, and then stopped. I didn’t know the differences in masks. “It covered all of his face. Just eye holes. There was a shaped mouth and nose, but there wasn’t much detail.”
“Japanese?” he asked. “Was it like an Asian style?”
“I don’t think so.”
He released my waist, twisting. “Nathan?”
“What?” Nathan called back from the kitchen.
“Don’t you have an old encyclopedia set somewhere?”
“You mean an iPad, don’t you? Who has encyclopedias anymore?” There was the sound of Nathan scuffling off to one of the rooms. He returned with a tablet. He held it out for Kota.
Kota took it, planting it on the floor beside us. He let me have his left hand. “Paint this hand,” he said. “Let me look something up.”
I used the deep green on his nails, covering the pinkie. When he didn’t move, and was still searching the internet on the tablet, I started working on his other fingers.
I had finished his middle finger and started his forefinger before he found what he wanted and tilted the tablet toward me. “Here,” he said. “Show me what it looked like.”
I scanned the tablet screen. He did an image search looking for white masks of various styles. Some were Asian, and it wasn’t those. I studied the masks and then pointed to one. “Kind of like this, but without the colors.”
He scrolled down the page. Finding a similar one. “This?”
I glanced at it and then pulled back the brush so I wouldn’t paint his hand. My heart smacked against my ribs. It looked almost exactly like it. “That’s it. What is it?”
Kota took the tablet back, tapped at the mask. “Venetian,” he said. “They used to wear them to carnivals.”
“Who wore them?” North asked.
Kota typed in a search looking for Venetian carnival masks and their meanings. “Looks like these were reserved for the lower class. The citizens.”
North snorted. “Citizen? Like he’s supposed to be an everyday person?”
“If he put any thought behind the mask at all. It might just be he found one he liked and used it.”
I leaned over, checking out the article and reading. “Volto?” I asked.
“The article says it’s Italian for face.”
It almost made sense, in a strange way. The masked man was just a face. “He wore all black. He could have worn something like a black ski mask or something similarly disinteresting. Instead he wore this.”
“He probably did it to scare you.”
“He wore it twice, but wanted me to trust him each time. If this guy ... Volto ... if Volto ...?” I couldn’t think of the question to ask.
Kota yawned, pushing his lips against my shoulder to cover it. “Are we calling him Volto?”
I tried to glance back at him. “If he’s not giving us a name. Are you tired? Should we go to sleep?”
Kota smiled into my shoulder. “I just got here and you’re sending me to bed.”
“You’re tired. And we’ve got school tomorrow.”
“Not bored with your birthday, are you?”
I shook my head. “I’m having fun. I feel kind of guilty since Victor isn’t here.”
“He’d be here if he could,” Kota said. He rubbed his free hand at my back. “I think North is right. You do worry too much.”
“You’re not worried?”
“I’m always worried.” Kota used my shoulder to nudge his glasses up. Then he traced his nose against my back for a moment before pulling up again. “But that’s my job.”
“What’s my job?”
“To let me worry about things for a while.”
I finished his forefinger and his thumb and he held his hand up, glancing at the color. “You’re not doing the other hand?”
“Not unless you want me to,” I said. “And you’re tired. Maybe we should sleep instead.”
“You’re not listening to me about not worrying.”
“It’s been a long day.”
He seemed to catch my hint. I loved what we were doing, but after the last two days and having to show up at school tomorrow, I was wearing out fast. I didn’t want the others thinking I was bored. I was just tired.
He patted my thigh to get me to scoot forward. “All right guys,” he said. “Let’s wr
ap it up.”
Gabriel groaned. “What? We just started. And she didn’t paint my nails yet.”
“We can do it tomorrow. It’s late. We need to be on top of things for school. We really should all go home tonight.”
Gabriel grunted. He glanced at me, his eyes wide. Did he expect me to argue? A finger hovered over my lip. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I’m staying here,” North said. “I’m not going home with fuck face lurking around out there waiting for her.”
“Me, too,” Silas said.
Kota sighed. “Okay. We’ll all stay here. Everyone start cleaning up.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Fine. Just hang on a second. I’m almost done. Don’t let her walk away with oddly mismatched toes.”
