Blue
Ihaveneverhatedmyself 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 Amazon. 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 yearsold 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 saysoh 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 whiteGOLDINGacross 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.
