Page 34 of Darling

Peter spared one more irritated glance at Ominotago before following Nibs, Curly, and Tinkerbelle out into the restaurant.

The instant he was out of the room, one of the waitresses who had stripped down entirely to street clothes crammed a baseball cap over his short hair and declared, “I do not like him at all.”

“I don’t, either, girl,” the drag queen in gingham scoffed. “He gives me the creeps.”

“He’s not all bad,” the queen named Bella said. “He tips crazy well, and if you’re nice to him, he brings you gifts.”

“I don’t need gifts from that man,” the waitress replied, raising an eyebrow and cocking his hip. “I buy my own shit. See you bitches tomorrow.” He slung his backpack over his shoulder, rolled up one leg of his pants, and clipped it so it wouldn’t get in the way of his bike chain. “Your makeup is fucked up,” he said to Wendy on his way out the door. “Dorothy will give you a hand.”

Wendy looked over to the vanity.

The drag queen in gingham—Dorothy—waved a hand, so Wendy went to go sit next to her.

Ominotago pulled out a chair and settled into it, looking at her watch. “I’m giving this about twenty minutes before I check on the other guys. I’m not leaving them in some stranger’s kitchen.”

“Were you crying, darling?” Dorothy asked, with a generous amount of sarcasm.

Wendy started for a moment before realizing “darling” was just being used as an endearment; this person didn’t know Peter’s nickname for her or that it was her last name.

“I’ve had a hard night,” Wendy said quietly. “You don’t have to help me with this or anything. I don’t want to get in the way of you getting ready.”

Dorothy threw her head back and laughed, showing a gold tooth in the back of her mouth. “Oh, I like this one. She’s polite.”

Up close Wendy could see the cracks in the plaster. Dorothy was older than Wendy had thought, and her makeup was significantly complex. Her face was pulled back with what looked like tape or pins of some kind and tucked into her wig cap. Her chin had to have been waxed to be this smooth this late at night. She had obvious highlighter dusted onto her cheekbones, but a much more subtle, expensive looking highlighter smoothed over the bridge of her nose, onto the sides of her jaw, and over her clavicle. Her lipstick was three different shades from the same color family layered from dark to light, creating the illusion of much fuller lips. It was like seeing a pointillism painting from a distance and knowing it was made up of dots, then leaning in close and realizing the dots were actually Rubik’s Cubes, painstakingly arranged to form a much larger picture. Wendy was impressed.

“I like this one better,” said the drag queen by the door, who had finally put her other lash on, while waving a hand at Ominotago. “Her makeup actually looks good.”

Ominotago was busy doing something on her phone and didn’t acknowledge the compliment. Wendy had only known Ominotago for approximately thirty minutes, but she already felt safer with her than she had with Tinkerbelle. Ominotago was much more serious, and she hadn’t backed down to Peter at all, hadn’t given him a single inch. Whatever fight she and Peter had before Wendy arrived had already been won, and it was extremely clear that Peter was the loser. Wendy wasn’t stupid enough to ask about the whole Peter/Tinkerbelle/Ominotago dating time line, but she was curious about it. Who was first? Tinkerbelle? Ominotago? How did he even manage to get Ominotago to like him? That alone seemed like a monstrous feat. Had he treated Ominotago as aggressively as he seemed to treat Tinkerbelle? Ominotago wasn’t scared of Peter, that was obvious, but she did seem to dislike him a lot. And where did Curly fit into this? Did he fight Peter over giving Ominotago a nickname before or after Peter and Ominotago dated? What happened when Ominotago and Tinkerbelle started dating? They hadn’t stated it out loud but they were clearly very much together. She couldn’t imagine that reveal going over very well. She hadn’t known Peter for particularly long, but there was no way that a boy who had spoken to Nibs the way he did in the kitchen without waiting for an explanation wouldn’t have gone ballistic to hear that both of his ex-girlfriends had started seeing each other.

Especially because of how besotted Tinkerbelle clearly was with Ominotago. Wendy remembered how Tinkerbelle had beat her hands against the police car window in hysterics, and the relief with which she’d clutched Ominotago when the other girl was finally free. It was almost embarrassing how romantic it was to watch. If there hadn’t been explosions and sirens accompanied by the sounds of Charles’s sobs, Wendy would have felt extremely awkward. Almost like she’d stumbled into the climax of a movie set where the main characters were finally making out, accompanied by the soaring strings of the score.

“Hey, kid, look, do you want me to do this shit or not?” Dorothy was saying.

Wendy snapped out of her thoughts to see Dorothy holding a makeup wipe in her hand and looking impatient.

“Ground control to Major Tom,” Dorothy said. “Either give me an answer or get out of the chair.”

“Yes,” Wendy said quickly.

Dorothy sighed in irritation and began roughly wiping the makeup off Wendy’s face. “Okay, here we go.”

“How do you get it to look like that?” The drag queen who had complimented Ominotago’s makeup asked.

Ominotago finally looked up from her phone for a second. “I do it with my fingers. I just picked a bunch of colors that went together and kept at it until it looked okay.” She returned to texting. She clearly didn’t care.

The queen leaned back in her chair. “You are much more talented than you give yourself credit for, girl. That shit looks like a J. M. W. Turner painting. Dorothy, you see this baby doing yellow under her eyes and fading that to blue and pink, purple in the shadows?” The queen sucked her teeth and nodded. “Opulence.”

Dorothy looked over Wendy’s shoulder at Ominotago, who seemed irritated at the attention. “You can’t teach that,” Dorothy said.

Dorothy finished polishing all of Tinkerbelle’s work clean off Wendy’s face. “You want the same thing or something different?”

“Tink—uh, my friend did my makeup like this because she wanted me to look different. Not like myself,” Wendy answered.

“Like a disguise?” Dorothy asked, raising a slim eyebrow. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into?”

Bella snorted, and Wendy turned to her, but Dorothy wrenched her chin forward.

“You sound too timid to be one of Peter’s girls,” Bella said softly. “He likes them spicy. You’re too white bread and tap water.”