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Dressed like this.
His eyes widen as he puts it together.
“You kind of look like her. The hair… your eyes.”
“You think so? I’m convinced she stole me from a hospital somewhere.”
He bursts out laughing. It’s so easy and uninhibited and I can tell he laughs a lot. Even though he’s just had a fight with his mom, he seems really relaxed. That relaxes me.
“She says I look like an owl with these on,” I confess sheepishly and pull my glasses off.
His laughter dies. “Then, she must never have seen an owl before. And, don’t you need them to see?” He sounds offended.
“I do… it’s just that she says I look better without them.” I say the words like they don’t matter. But they do, so very much. It hurts to know that the way I look drives my mother crazy. So much that she’s always trying to change me.
“I’m not sure how you look when you’re squinting like a creep ’cause you can’t see, I think you’re pretty right now.”
I drop my face again, this time to hide my smile.
“No one’s ever called me that before,” I admit shyly. Even my mother only ever says, “You’d be pretty if…”
“Then everyone else needs glasses.” He says that so easily. I turn to face him fully for the first time. He starts to say something, but then his eyes widen suddenly and he looks back at the door.
I follow his gaze and sigh in relief when the knob doesn’t move. I can hear the distant noise of the party, but that’s been there all night.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“Did you say you’re the Fly Girl—I mean, your mother is here?” The alarm in his voice brings my eyes back to his.
“Yeah.” I nod.
“Oh, shit. My mom’s gonna flip.” He’s wide-eyed as he looks back toward the door.
“But, it’s just a party, isn’t it?” I ask in confusion. Granted, it’s the nicest party she’s ever taken me to, but we walked right in.
“The Listers are here.”
“How do you know about them?” I ask. That lump in my throat is back and my heart’s beat thumps wildly.
“The fight your mom had with his wife at the All-Star Games last year was all anyone talked about for months.”
I look to the curtain and feel a sense of terrible foreboding coming over me. I heard Mama tell one of her friends that if she ever got within ten feet of him again she would “light his ass on fire.”
My stomach drops and I stifle a fretful groan as I imagine what’s happening outside this room. “It was nice to meet you. But maybe you should do what she said and go back upstairs. I’ll just go back behind the curtain.”
He ignores me and stands up and walks over to the window. “What were you doing over there?”
“I told you, I just needed a place to wait for my mom.” I dart around him and get there first. I bend to pick up my notebook and clutch it to my chest.
“What’s that?” He nods at it.
“Just a notebook,” I say impatiently and flash the front at him.
He doesn’t leave, instead, his eyes train onto my notebook. “Happily Ever After?” he reads the words I’ve scrawled on it.
“Yeah.”
“That’s like fairy tales, right?”
