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“The theme for the winter ball is Enchanted Forest.” She sighs wistfully, picking at the seam of a cushion. “I’m gutted I can’t make it.”
“You’re not going?”
Her eyes roll into the back of their sockets. “I have a really important exam on Monday. I’ll be in the library all weekend.” Poking me with a bony finger, she adds, “You’ll pick me up a goodie bag, yeah?”
My heart quickens. “It’ll be just your brother and me?”
She laughs. “Your husband, you mean. Yes, and like two hundred other guests, plus just as many journalists.”
Her words and their implication sink in around me. “I’m not going.”
The look she tosses me suggests I’m insane. “First of all, I doubt you have a choice, and second of all, I’d bite the hand off Hitler to change the day of my exam and get to go.” She leaps off the sofa and sticks her arm out to help me up. “Come on, girl. Last week, all you’d talk about was how you wanted to get out of here. I’m giving you a golden ticket out the front door, and you’re deciding you’d rather hang out on this sofa, listening to that annoying bitch”—she jabs a finger toward the kitchen television, where Bessie is melting butter on her shiny studio stove—“drone on all day.”
Reluctantly, I set my coffee cup down, plunge Bessie into darkness, and trail after Aisling. She doesn’t head to my bedroom like I thought she would; instead, she takes a sharp left to the elevator bank and taps away on the screen. “Where are we going?”
“My place. I had a dress made before I realized I couldn’t go.” Her gaze trails south, judging my black hoodie and sweatpants combo. “Let’s hope it fits.”
She steps into the waiting elevator and looks up at me expectantly. My eyes narrow. “You got real knives down there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’re not worried I’ll stab you?”
Flattening her hands and swishing them around like The Karate Kid, she says merrily, “I’ll break your neck before you get that far. Come on!”
I find myself laughing, oddly pleased that she trusts me.
Her apartment is half the size of the penthouse and twice as messy. It’s what I imagine a college dorm to look like: yesterday’s pants strewn over the arm of the sofa, browning plants standing meekly in corners, looking like an impulsive Whole Foods purchase. Her bedroom walls are cheery with Polaroids of her and grinning friends stuck to corkboards and quirky quotes like Namaste in bed hanging in large frames.
A tinge of envy seeps into my chest. This carefree student life, where your only worry is what bar you’re drinking at that night and when your next essay is due, was never an option for me.
Aisling distracts me by tugging out a dress from an overstuffed wardrobe. A slinky, strappy camisole, crafted from green velvet fabric the color of moss and finished with pink embroidered flowers snaking around the deep thigh slit.
“Okay, here me out. These ball bitches are so predictable. They’ll all go as Helena from Midsummer Night’s Dream. Floaty pastel gowns, flower crowns, rose gold jewels. So, I thought I’d go as a tree instead.” She blinks when I splutter out a laugh. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” I take the dress, letting the delicate fabric fall through my fingers. “This is beautiful, nothing like a tree at all.”
“Try it on.”
I do, and despite Aisling whining that it makes my boobs look much bigger than it does hers, it fits like a glove. As she fills me in on these women she calls the “ball bitches,” she curls my hair and pins it back with an emerald-encrusted clasp, paints my face with a chocolate-y smoky eye, and adorns my neck and wrists with jewels that probably cost more than a decade’s rent for Mak’s and my apartment. I find myself tuning out, not listening to the story about a woman called Vittoria, and how she’s on the arm of a different aging Mafia boss at every ball. Instead, I can’t help but think—is this what it’s like to have a girlfriend? A real one. The only girls I’ve ever been close with are the ones from the pustosh’. Crammed into the same room and faced with the same career path of opening your legs for the Vultures, we were friends by default. I knew they weren’t real friends because the last time I saw any of them was when the nuns were shoving us out onto the street with our paltry belongings in trash bags.
“Romy?”
“Huh?” I glance up at Aisling, who’s looking at me expectantly down the length of her makeup brush as she dusts highlighter on my nose.
“I said, you look amazing. My brother will be drooling.”
The thought of Donnacha drooling raises a flush on my chest that isn’t part of my outfit.
We move to the living room, where Aisling keeps the wine and anecdotes flowing until the burner cell phone on the coffee table vibrates. “God, I hate it when this cell goes off. It’s a special one that gets past the signal block in the building, but of course, the only person who has my number is my brother,” she mutters, glancing at the screen. “And he’s ready to go.”
We stand, me a little wobbly on my borrowed stilettos after three glasses of Whispering Angel, and Aisling folds me in the elevator with a peck on my cheek.
My heart thumps against my chest on the way up, my gut brewing with the unknown. When the doors slide open a few moments later, Donnacha is leaning against the wall of the elevator bank with his hands stuffed into his pockets.
He’s wearing a suit jacket the same fabric and color as my dress. A bow tie that echoes the pattern of the embroidered flowers on my thigh and a chocolate silk handkerchief elaborately folded into his top pocket, the exact shade of my eye makeup. His dark curls rebel against the sharp cut of his suit, roaming wild and thick around his ears.
Those fissures in my heart, they grow a little wider. Like the Devil has worked his fingernails into the cracks, prying them open.
