“Okay. Maybe not the helmet. I’ll go with the hat.”
She bends over to put the helmet back in the bag.
JesusChrist, 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 usedto 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?”
