She nods, eyes closed. “Yes. I get my brows waxed. This is nothing.”
I look up at her eyebrows to see. They look like eyebrows to me. I focus back on the mustache. The pen finally bleeds ink. I make a few long lines and then go back over to make them thicker, the way I have, exactly one time in my life, drawn on a freshman’s face when he passed out on the floor of this same house.
“That side’s done. Now the other.”
She starts giggling. She pulls back and covers her mouth. “Oh my God. I’m sorry. If you told me this was how my night was going to go, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
“Yeah,” I agree.
She presses her lips together. She keeps her eyes open and looks up at the ceiling. Stanley was right; they fucking sparkle like diamonds.
I draw the other side. I don’t draw it as well as the first side because the angle is harder and my hand has, somewhere in the last sixty seconds, started doing a small unhelpful thing.
“There,” I say.
She runs to the mirror and bursts into laughter. “Oh my God. You suck! You drew it on crooked.”
I walk up behind her so I can see what I did. It’s not that bad.
She looks at me in the mirror. “God,” she says, “I think you got taller since I last saw you.”
I shake my head. “And you’re exactly the same.”
Her brows pull together.
I smile. “It’s not a bad thing.”
She looks at me in the mirror. “I’m exactly as you remember?”
I nod.
She is exactly as I remember her. She is the same girl that I watched fall asleep with her hand on my chest, exact same girl, with the exact same eyes, and standing next to her in the mirror — me in white wings and a halo, her in my jersey and a backwards hat and a crooked mustache I drew on her face — I see for half a second what Benson clocked across the kitchen island when she walked in two weeks ago.
Same blue eyes.
Same dark hair.
We match.
I don’t know what to do with that information.
A new song comes on, and she turns around fast. “Can I leave my costume in here?”
I nod. “Can I leave the wings and halo in here too?”
She shakes her head. “Nuh-uh, sir. You’re coming with me.” She pauses. “Unless you want to go back to hating me?”
I look down at her. “I don’t hate you.”
Her face — it falls. Just a little. Just enough that I see it before she puts it back up. She doesn’t believe me.
She thinks I hate her?
I’ve spent years building a wall between us that was supposed to make her stop wanting me, and what it’s actually done is make her think I don’t want her. Those are two very different walls, and I’m beginning to understand that I built the wrong wall.
“We can be friends,” I offer, resorting to Benson’s advice.
She brightens. The whole room lifts.Thank you, Benson Reeve.
