by Leah Raeder
No surprise in her face. She closed her eyes, leaned into the crook of my shoulder. Water steamed on our hot skin.
“Baby,” I said softly, touching the back of her head.
Her hands fell away. She was shaking. Crying.
I turned off the water.
A swift chill swept over us. I gathered her into my arms, this limp, lost little bird. We stood there, dripping wet and unmoving. Something hot spooled down my face. I hugged Ellis tighter, though she didn’t respond.
I was a fool to fear this. To hold out for something less frightening, less risky, because all that meant was something less real. This person in my arms was one hundred percent real, breathing and shivering and crying, alive.
But I was still afraid. Still holding out for another prince, not the one in my arms.
* * *
Silence on the way home. The ocean was on my side of the car. Ellis stared into the pines.
When I stopped for gas before Portland, she got out and sat on the curb, watching traffic streak past. I filled up the tank and went to sit beside her.
Neither of us said anything for a while. I took a long exposure photo, taillights threading through the dark forest, glowing red veins unfurling into the twilight.
Ellis turned to me. Her mouth was grim, eyes shadowed.
“I’m going with you to meet him,” she said. “And I’ll drive.”
* * *
The island postal carrier knew me by sight. She shook her head when I came jogging down to the mailbox.
Dammit. Still no autopsy report on Ryan.
You could tell a lot from the bruise patterns left by a person’s hands. Whether they belonged to someone male or female. To the father, or the mysterious girl who’d touched that gun.
I needed to know how Ryan had been beaten. If it had been one person or multiple. What size hands.
Ellis barely spoke to me that week. At best I got sulky, monosyllabic retorts. Aside from confirming place and time, Blue was scarce, too. Dane was excited to see me, but Dane got excited about pro wrestling and NASCAR.
I took the week off camming. Sat up late, alone, turning the tiny wooden animals in my hands. Obviously I was the cat, la gata, and Ellis was el pajarito, the little bird. So Blue saw himself as the snake.
La serpiente.
It made me shiver.
I walked to the tree house through drifts of citrus-colored leaves, lime and lemon and orange, crinkling like wrapping paper. The air had a dry bite, a hint of ash and bone dust. Ellis was coming down the steps as I went up.
“Where you headed?”
She stuffed her hands into her mackinaw. “To check on Brandt.”
“I’m coming with. I’m going stir-crazy here.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“What?” I said. “You’re coming to Boston but I can’t see my old house?”
“Fine.”
We walked in silence to the ferry landing. Halfway across the bay, she finally spoke.
“Brandt is self-conscious about his appearance.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“He’s noticeably disfigured, Vada.”
I glanced at her. “What happened?”
“It made the news in Chicago, actually. He went to our college. Some kids from Kenosha jumped him, beat him up. You know how intense their football rivalry is. He was the star recruit. Now he can’t get through a day without popping pills constantly.”
“Holy shit.”
“He doesn’t like talking about it.”
“Point taken.”
On the mainland all the paint had drained out of the world and soaked into the trees. Leaves rained from the sky, persimmon red, marmalade orange, dancing around our feet and swirling in midair and splattering across the streets in wild, fiery brushstrokes. My fingers froze. I took Ellis’s hand as we disembarked, and she didn’t let go. The heat between our palms pulsed like a heart. When someone jostled us on the ramp she gripped tighter, and I went warm all over.
At Commercial Street she turned for the East End. I pulled toward the Old Port.
“My cousin’s waiting.”
“He’ll survive for an hour. Trust me.” I tugged. “Let’s do an experiment.”
“What experiment?”
“If I tell you, it’ll corrupt the results, Professor.”
We wandered through the Old Port, past plate-glass windows full of local arts and crafts, lighthouses and lobsters stamped on fucking everything. A candy shop sold Maine blueberries that burst in your mouth like sun squeezed from an azure summer sky. I refused to give Ellis any till she let me feed her by hand. At first she balked, glaring, but after a while she gave in, and when her teeth touched my fingertips I held them there a moment too long. Juice splashed when she bit, tinting her lip purple. I pointed to the spot and watched her try to lick it off, laughing, then finally pushed her against a shop window and said, “I’ll get it,” and kissed her.
People passed us on the street. The cool fall breeze scattered my hair across my face. All I felt was warmth. Pure warmth.
When I pulled away, Ellis looked stunned.
I played it off, acting goofy, trying on ridiculous hats, posing with statues. I pecked a ceramic mermaid, smirking. We passed a narrow cobblestone alley and Ellis dragged me into it. I started to ask if she’d seen something neat but she pressed me against a brick wall, lifted my face, and kissed me. Not a second’s hesitation. I grabbed the lapels of her coat for leverage. Inside I was nothing but water and sand, my bones made of soft coral. All the submerged things.
We stopped, breathing into each other’s mouths.
“Remember?” I said, my hand sliding into her coat, against her ribs. “Do you remember the first time?”
Another rainy April afternoon in Chicago, water pouring over the city like melted pewter and nickel, gray and cold. I got off the L and shambled toward the exit. Two-mile walk home in this. Story of my goddamn life.
As I clicked through the turnstile, I saw her. Ellis, peering at the crowd as it streamed past, an umbrella tucked in the crook of her elbow.
“You’re here,” I said, flinging my arms around her. “I could kiss you. Actually, I will. Brace yourself.” I planted one on her cheek, then started laughing.
“What?”
“Your face is experiencing chromatic inflammation.”
She got mad when I pointed out her blushes, so of course I did it even more.
“I’m beginning to regret this.”
“Hey, who else kisses you just for being you?”
I pulled her out into the rain, and she opened the umbrella just in time. People flowed around us. Elle turned toward the bus but I drew her on, down Division.
“Let’s walk home.” I slid an arm around her waist and heat flared up my veins. “It’s not so bad now.”
Her ribs pressed against mine. I felt the breath she took. “Okay.”
On that day we’d known each other a year and a half and were card-carrying BFFs. Over hundreds of train rides and drawings and late nights, she’d opened up to me. Steadied me. Grounded me. She was there when my own family wasn’t, and vice versa.
I could not imagine my life without this person.
The streets shone, coated with a mirror glaze of rain. Traffic lights leaked across the blacktop like spilled neon paint. We walked down Division, our steps slow, her arm circling me, and I thanked God I’d forgotten my keys and panic-texted her because this—this was worth it.
We passed a strip mall and I stopped. She followed my gaze.
“Gelato?” she said skeptically.
“Yep.”
“But I’m cold.”
If I kissed you, I thought, you wouldn’t be.
And then:
Why the fuck am I thinking about kissing my best friend?
I headed for the café. She ran after to keep the umbrella above us.
We pooled our money. Only enough for one person.
“You pick,” she said.
&nbs
p; “No, you. Come on. I dragged you here.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“I’ll be happy if you’re happy.”
This went on for another minute until the server said, “You can do half and half.”
Ellis got pistachio and I got mango. Mine tasted like whipped clouds drenched in sunlight. My eyes fluttered closed. Elle laughed and I scooped up a spoonful, extending it across the table.
“Taste.”
Her gaze fixed on mine as she opened her mouth. When her lips closed on the spoon I couldn’t look away. So red, a rich carmine red, as if she’d drunk blood.
“I want to taste yours,” I said, and knew exactly how dirty it sounded.
She set a spoonful in my mouth. I didn’t taste a damn thing.
The rest of the walk home was a haze of rain and neon, glowing bokeh confetti, red and yellow and green. We didn’t touch now and when our hands grazed accidentally we both gasped, then pretended we hadn’t. Stop it, I thought. She’s your best fucking friend. We’d had so many close calls, tiny intense moments, our eyes meeting as our legs tangled on the couch and what had been innocent seconds ago now felt like being electrocuted for crimes we hadn’t yet committed. But it passed, we laughed, she spun a finger in her hair and I smiled and thought, You just like that she likes you. It’s nothing more than that.
So why the fuck couldn’t I stop thinking about that spoon in my mouth, after it had been in hers?
When we turned onto our block I stepped out from the umbrella. Rain hit me like a waterfall.
“Vada—”
I took off running.
She didn’t catch me. It wouldn’t have mattered. I was soaked immediately, shivering as I catapulted up the stairs and ran all the way to the third floor before I remembered I didn’t have my keys, because I was the forgetful idiot and Ellis was the faithful friend, always there for me. My fidus Achates.
I was calm when she reached the landing. In a way, the inevitable is calming. The if is gone. All that remains is the when.
We didn’t speak. It was long past that anyway. Her hair was stringy and rain-dark, her shirt pasted to pale skin. She’d walked the rest of the way without the umbrella, to put us on even footing. Both soaked and shivering.
Sometimes someone says “I love you” so clearly that adding the words would only ruin it.
I don’t remember who moved first. I just remember her arms around me, and her face in my hands, and the feeling that I couldn’t spend another second of my life not kissing her. So I did. Now I tasted it, creamy pistachio, sweet like a spring forest. And a tinge of metallic rain. And her, just the way I’d imagined she would taste. I couldn’t stop kissing her. Not when she fumbled at the door lock, or when I pushed her up against my bedroom wall and began to unbutton her shirt. Or even when all that remained of me was a blur of hue and light, a watery painting of a girl, dripping onto the floor in pools of rain tinted a million different colors.
(—Bergen, Vada. Just Like I Dreamed. Watercolor on paper.)
Ellis laid her palm over my right ribs.
We always knew we’d get matching tats. Every day at work I’d seen cautionary tales—cheesy quotes, cliché platitudes—and vowed we’d be better. Weirder. Quirkier. We’d pick something only two people on earth would understand. A memory so vivid it would rip us straight out of the present no matter where we were.
Mine: a spoonful of pistachio gelato, melting, painterly streaks trailing down my ribs. Hector did a perfect job copying my drawing. Hers: a spoonful of mango. I’d inked her myself.
My art, my ink in her skin, forever.
“I remember everything,” Ellis said. “Was that the experiment?”
“There was no experiment. I lied. I just wanted to hold your hand a little longer.”
She stepped away, shaking her head. But she looked infinitely pleased.
I tried to picture Blue here instead. It was impossible to imagine anyone else in her shoes. There was no one like her.
As we walked I snapped photos, her jacket and hair vibrant against the leaden sky. Metal and rust. We angled toward the wharf, to the cyclone fence hung with locks, and searched in tense silence till we found it. The brass lion’s head. VB + EC carved into the patina.
“I used to come check on this guy,” I said, rubbing the lion’s nose. “Every day. I convinced myself that when you were finally over me, you’d take him down.”
The wind lashed her hair across her face. “Does this answer your question?”
We were both quiet on the way to the promenade. She padded up the porch steps while I stood on the lawn, remembering. A year ago I’d walk into our house and find her curled on the sofa with a comic book and hot cocoa, an extra mug waiting. I’d leave my scarf and boots on and pull her outside. Come with me, Elle. The sun is falling and the water looks like paint on fire. Come see.
“Vada?”
I pointed. “I used to sit in that window and watch you go for runs. There’s the hallway with the floor that creaked at night. You’d wake up and make me check for ax murderers. And there’s our old bedroom.” I looked at her. “We didn’t pretend anymore. No more separate rooms. Remember?”
In the distance, the sorrowful clang of a ferry bell, the seesaw screams of gulls. Here, a dull ache in my right arm and the center of my chest. And somewhere far away, a wrecked car rusted in a scrapyard and a gravestone grew lichen in a cemetery near the sea.
I walked past her, into the house.
Inside: big and open, rafters exposed, red iron staircases, track lights. Ellis said I liked it because it looked like a gallery. All over the whitewashed brick, in pops and splashes of color, was something that stopped me dead.
My art.
Paintings. Drawings. Tattoo plans. Casual sketches, pencil-smeared and water-stained. Even the ballpoint napkin doodles. Everything I’d left behind or given her over the years.
I moved through them, feeling detached from the body beneath me.
It was like looking at my own work and a stranger’s at the same time. Definitely my style: jagged lines, dark and bold but breaking unexpectedly, splitting into fragments, as if I was so unstill I couldn’t see the world as solid. Watercolor washes bled through ink drawings, dripping down the paper. Wildness. Rage. An intensity I could only capture by hinting at how much I couldn’t capture, how I fought with brush and pen until they turned on me, shattered my lines, splattered paint.
When I reached the most recent ones I felt clammy, sick. It shifted from the fantastical—phoenixes and chimeras, weed-fueled weirdness—to human realism. Blythe dancing alone in a club, the only one in full color amid a sea of shadows, my tats alive on her arms. Armin in the DJ booth, one hand raised as the crowd gazed at him in rapture. Raoul, the only boy I’d semiseriously dated, flying kites with his kid brother, and Hector hunched over a customer with the needle, and strangers and one-night stands.
And Ellis.
Over and over. Five years of her.
My best friend. My world. My everything.
I stood in the middle of a stranger’s life work. My arms hung slack, hands useless.
Ellis came to my side. “What are you feeling?”
Crazy urges. About kerosene, and a match.
“Anger,” I said.
“At me?”
“At me. For taking this away from myself.”
She started to say something and a creak sounded from upstairs, the noise that used to terrify her at night.
“Emily?” called a man’s voice.
“Be right back.” Ellis squeezed my arm. “Don’t burn the house down.”
Reading my mind, like always.
When she returned I’d slid to the floor beside the fireplace. Either the house was freezing or I was having some kind of episode. I huddled against my knees, shaking. Ellis knelt beside me and took me in her arms.
“Baby, it’s okay.”
Not really. Not when I was sitting in a mausoleum filled with ghosts, specters drawn by some cock
y, arrogant girl who knew she was good, knew she could draw like the devil, knew she had a big bright future waiting and all the time in the world to grow into it.
I wanted to scream at that girl. Smug idiot. These are the last things you’ll ever create. The last things you’ll communicate to the world.
Why did you let fear control you? Why did you let it hold you back?
Ellis lifted my face, brushed tears away with the heel of her hand. “Vada.”
“Emily.”
She went very still.
“I’ve known since summer,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She released me, sat back on the floor. “You didn’t say anything.”
“I was waiting for you to explain. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” She swallowed. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”
“Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”
Her jaw flexed. “It’s not my ‘real’ name. My real name is Ellis.”
“Why did you change it?”
“Because it wasn’t me.” The muscle in her throat rippled. “It was someone else. Someone my parents named. Someone my parents made. This is the me that I made.”
Her eyes were wet. Great.
“Ellis, I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter. But why didn’t you tell me, in all these years?”
“Because I’m not her. I don’t want you to see me as her.”
I started to speak but movement caught my eye.
A man stood on the stairs.
“That’s Brandt,” Ellis muttered, helping me stand.
“How rude. Are you not going to introduce your . . . friend?”
That voice, deep and playful, like the vibrato of a double bass. He was blond and broad-shouldered, but lean. Handsomer than I’d imagined: vulpine jaw, wry features, same dashing squint as Ellis. A Zoeller thing, apparently. Scars distorted his face, white jags of lightning pulling at the skin. His nose had a slight crook where it had once been broken.
“Hi,” I said, staring.
“Hi.”
Brandt smiled, revealing a gold molar. It was oddly disarming. If anything, the scars accentuated how too-perfect that face must’ve been before.
He slung his arm around Ellis and ruffled her hair. She elbowed him and he faked a pained gasp and when she apologized, he ruffled her hair again. They could’ve been twins.