by Tatiana Vila
“So, I need an overflow of sugar running through my body. It’s the only thing that calms me down.” I pointed my eyes at her. “And you know what a hard case I can be if I don’t wolf down sugary stuff.” That myth of girls turning into creatures of hell—okay, maybe not a myth—every time their moontime came was absolutely true. Not every girl was subject to this horrible allegory, but I was.
Though, when wasn’t I?
“Hah, you’re lying. It’s always ice cream with you in those days, tons and tons of ice cream, even the occasional brownie, but not Skittles or Snickers,” she said, looking at the bottom of the tote cuddling my hip. “You only use them when you’re enraged about something and when—”
“Ice cream has sugar. And guess what? Skittles and Snickers have sugar as well. It’s all the same.”
“And when,” she repeated, squelching my words aside. “Something involves your sister’s boyfriend. Actually, you only eat this stuff when it’s Ian—and when your Hot Tamales supplies have perished.”
Having best friends was a wonderful thing, so rewarding and special. A treasure, Gran would’ve said—a rail one could hold on to when falling. But sometimes, people knowing you like the back of their hands, or like those favorite songs blasting through their earphones, wasn’t that wonderful. It was, in fact, a royal pain in the neck. “I don’t care about that douche bag. He can go and choke the life out from him with his guitar strings if he wants.” I sneered, that fire I’d been working on so hard to smother since last night about to explode into a firestorm. I slid my hand into the tote and fished out the first chocolate my hand found. My heated body needed a good injection of cooling sugar.
“Since you spent more than twenty bucks in that machine, it must be pretty bad this time.” She arched her eyebrows, her eyes flying with possible ideas.
I peeled of the noisy paper from the bar and plunged my teeth into the hard-mushy concoction, biting out a mouthful of nuts and caramel. Though I wasn’t very fond of nuts—I’d always felt they tasted like wood—their marriage with chocolate was definitely good. “This time, however, lovely Ian doesn’t know it.” I mumbled between munches, the streams of sweetness sliding past my tongue and into my body. The fire was already decreasing, as if flaming trees amid a firestorm were being splashed with water.
“Okay, so, maybe it’s not as bad as you think. I mean, if he doesn’t know that what he did was wrong, maybe there wasn’t an evil purpose behind…whatever it was he did,” she added after realizing she still didn’t know what’d happened.
“It is bad,” I said, taking another mouthful of chocolate. Suddenly, one bar didn’t seem enough to cool me down. “And he did have a purpose.”
“Tell me what it was, then.”
I was about to explain that treacherous truce of his when I spotted the double J’s and Buffy walking toward us. They hadn’t seen me yet. Their prattle was all too interesting to pay attention to the rest of the human beings in the hallway. Taking my chance, I pulled Linda by the hand and dragged her toward the storage room standing a few feet away from the busy cafeteria, careful to avoid the trio—Buffy especially. Linda was utterly confused, I could see it from the corner of my eye, but she never said anything. She just kept along with my pace.
Knowing the storage room door would be unlocked around this time of the day—a secret only a few knew—I pulled it open, waited for Linda to pass, and silently closed it behind me. A dim shaft of sunlight sneaked through a small window, spilling a muted shade of the afternoon’s color over the edges of the lined shelves crowded with tools and materials of all sorts. The maintenance room was a relaxing place, one I’d especially visited before Linda’s arrival. It was the only place in school where I could find peace, and the small old couch in the corner made me feel at home. So with the quiet air pervading the room and—
Was that a leak? An incessant, rhythmic sound, like water droplets falling onto the ground, played in the air. Following the nagging, little noise, I realized there was a second sound trailing it. Gasps. Someone else was here. And with the awareness came a clear image. Besides us, I was certain there was more than one person haunting this shadowy room—and I was certain what the noises were. I turned to look at Linda and pressed my finger to my lips, asking her to not break the silence masking us. I tiptoed to the third row of shelves, the noises getting deeper, and stopped at the edge. Wanting to have fun for at least a few seconds, I readied myself and jumped into their space with mighty strength, screaming at the same time, “Busted!”
The girl unstitched herself from the guy as if she’d suddenly touched acid and jerked her head in my direction so fast that it was a wonder her neck hadn’t cracked. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if she’d had a heart attack in the process. But more than alarm, her eyes gleamed with humiliation, whereas the guy’s wide eyes froze in worry—at least, until he grasped the sight of me and realized I wasn’t part of the school staff.
“What a Kodak moment,” I told them with a wicked smile. “Just look at your rosy faces and swollen lips. You must be a passionate kisser, huh?” I asked the guy who was now straightening his shirt.
He threw me a quick scan from head to toe, one of those that guys specialized in, and stopped on my lips. “Want to find out for yourself?” he asked huskily, pushing away all trace of worry from his face.
“You idiot!” The girl slapped him on the arm and stormed away. She must’ve seen Linda before snapping the door close because she shouted, “Enjoy your threesome you morons!”
Since all his focus was aimed on me, the girl’s biting words didn’t reach their goal. His brain only seemed to be between his legs. “So…are you up for some tasting?” he asked, looking at my chest and suddenly finding it hard to detach his eyes from there.
If the circumstances were different, with no Linda waiting for me in one corner, and with no desire to punch him in the face for being such a prick with that girl, I would’ve considered his offer and maybe ended up making out with him. Despite his callous and poised attitude, the guy was really cute, and it’d been so, so long since I’d kissed someone that it was growing into a sharp pebble in my shoe. I couldn’t even remember what it was like pressing my lips against someone else’s, and that wasn’t normal. For anybody. I wasn’t an easy girl, I’d hardly had two boyfriends and never kissed a guy who wasn’t, but I had my needs and they were calling to me—especially now that my body was desperate to stamp out that ball of fierce fire inside of me. A kiss would’ve helped to the cause, no doubt.
But this wasn’t the place, and he wasn’t the guy. “Kind of desperate, are we?” I told him with a tilt of my head, stamping my hands on my hips.
“For you, always.” He slipped his hands through the arcs of my arms and settled them on my lower back. “I’ve always known there was some warmth inside all that coldness,” he said, looking down at me. “And I'm more than willing to have a sample of it.” He leaned his face toward mine.
I smiled. “If you don’t get out, right now,” I said calmly, though infusing the right amount of sourness to stop him midway. “I’ll chop off your friends there,” I glanced at his lower part. He shot a glimpse to the same area. “And have them for breakfast.” I ended with an innocent grin.
Maybe my voice had been more vinegary than I’d intended, or maybe the image hadn’t been so pleasant to his senses, because he released me a moment later and strode out with a final look at me—an anxious look. I tapped my shoulder inwardly for that one.
Linda, standing on the corner as if she’d been grounded, stared at me with awe.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you really just tell a guy you were going to chop off his…you know.” She motioned her hands to the area in discussion.
“It worked didn’t it?”
“Sheesh, no wonder why guys are so afraid of you.”
“Oh, what a cruel world, loneliness hunts me. I’ll never meet love.”
She shook her head. “And you really don’t care.”
“O
f course I don’t. The day I’ll decide I want a guy…he’ll come to me in a heartbeat, easy as that.”
“Coming from some other girl, I would’ve said she was bigheaded. You though…there’s no point in denying the truth, you can have whoever you want,” she said, suddenly wistful, dropping her eyes to her shoes. Brad’s image was most certainly piercing her mind. “And he’ll be really lucky, Dafne. You have a huge heart, even if you hide it most of the time,” she said, looking up at me.
I gave her small smile. “Yeah, yeah, I know the speech. But I'm sure the luckiest guy will be the one who finds this sweet damsel in distress.” I waved my hand in her direction. I paused and looked at her, fathoming her sorrow, and sighed. “Someday you’ll find your knight, Linda—because, believe it or not, knights are the heart-stirring and cool ones. Fairy tales just got it wrong, somehow,” I told her. “Brad was just the lame, spoiled prince with skin-deep beauty that stumbled in your way.”
She chuckled, the gleam back in her eyes. “I think I’ve never heard a better analogy.”
“Well, it’s true.” I shrugged. “Princes suck.”
She laughed. “Yeah, you never struck me as the princess type.”
“Never.”
“But you do have the heart of one. Just look at the nice things you told me.”
I snorted, but kept the barely-there-smile on my lips.
A groan spurted between us. Linda lowered her eyes to her stomach. “Looks like I haven’t totally forgotten it’s lunch time.” She raised her eyes to me once more, a plea brimming them.
“If you want to know what happened with Ian, you’re staying here.” I reached the bottom of my tote and fished out some supplies. “Rainbow or chocolate?” I held them up in my hands.
Being the curious person she was, she knew she didn’t have a choice. “Rainbow.” She sighed in resignation, plucking it from my left hand. “My stomach will resent this, you know.”
“It’s just this once, Linda,” I said, settling down on the floor. It was a little dusty, enough to trace random shapes with my fingertip, or to leave the faint print of my butt on it, but I didn’t care. I could wash my hands later. “There, you can have my throne.” I pointed to the couch in front of me.
She walked up to the old fella and bent to wipe off the surface with her hand. A small cloud of dust floated into the air. “I guess you’ve been here more than once.” She sat down on the edge, reluctantly, keeping her back away from touching the rest of the couch, her slender arms squeezed to her sides. She reminded me of those well-mannered girls in old movies, all straight and chin high, ready to have a cup of tea in the parlor. The only thing missing was the funny hat, the too long dress and the lacy gloves.
Her stiff posture, however, had nothing to do with old-fashioned manners. Unlike me, dust was a nagging issue to Linda. It would’ve been to anybody whose second name was “Tidy.”
“Once upon a time, this place and I used to be like two peas in a pod.” I peeled off the chocolate and sank my teeth into my second sin.
“I’ll take that as you spending a great deal of time here—because the simile is kind of loose.” She poured some of the skittles on her hand. “Two peas in a pod need to—”
“Stop with the mechanics,” I said annoyed. “I really don’t care. Just focus on my next words because I won’t repeat them. If I do, I may incinerate myself in a blast of fury.”
Before losing the impulse, I lunged myself into the explanation, telling her about the movie session, the humiliating tearful moment, the utterly embarrassing exposure, and the damned truce he’d tricked me on, leading me to a whole new level of hate. Being played was something that punched my thin boundaries of forbearance, and the fact that I’d been played by Ian, nonetheless, pushed those fences far into the stratosphere, blurring my limits of good judgment.
If Ian had thought I was a cold, uncaring person before, his mouth was going to fall flat open to the floor, and he was going to beg for mercy on his knees after the little artful revenge I had planned for him. He was going to think twice before tricking me, sweat thick with fear snaking on his forehead.
“There’s something I still don’t see,” Linda said, chewing the red chubby-button she’d shoved past her thin lips. “If he said he wanted to make a truce with you because he was Buffy’s boyfriend, then, wasn’t it obvious that he was doing it just for her?”
“Maybe it was, yeah,” I mumbled with the last piece of chocolate in my mouth. Whereas I’d engulfed my throat with three mushy bars while pouring out the anger boiling inside me, she’d barely eaten one quarter of the small bag filling her hand—the result of eating at a snail’s pace—one by one. “But that’s not what bothers me, Linda. The fact he fooled me into believing that he did care about the stupid truce is! I believed him. I believed he was doing it out of some goodness I’d considered impossible in him—with the ‘let’s be mature’ speech he gave me, I really thought it was true. I…I freaking believed him!” I threw my hands in the air. “I mean, how did that happen? I know him. I know how crafty he is with the opposite gender and still fell on his goddamn trap. Me, of all people.”
“Ah, so it’s a matter of pride,” she prompted with a smile. “He saw you crying, too, so it’s a double stab to your ego.”
“No, yeah, I mean, no, it’s not my pride that’s been hurt.” Okay, maybe a bit, but I wouldn’t admit it out loud. Okay, okay, the double-stabbing had hurt like hell. Shedding tears in front of him had massively killed my pride. Setting my feet on fire wouldn’t hurt as much. Him spotting me crying had been like the meteor crashing against the earth and killing the dinosaurs—a massive extermination of my ego.
I paused and breathed out a big gulp of air. “It’s just that…for a moment I thought—I know it’s dead crazy.” I cracked a humorless laugh. “But I thought we could get along. When we were there, I had this nice glimpse of what we could’ve had and, I don’t know, I liked it.” I looked down at my fingers, intertwined on my lap. “I saw a person who might’ve become a friend with time—a friend for Christ’s sake.” I added, awed by the stupidity of that idea.
“You know, I still don’t understand why you two don’t get along. I mean, you have so many things in common, with the artsy thing going on, even that indie rock band you both like so much—and I’ll bet you my Betty Boop ticker double or nothing”—she raised her wrist to show the oversized watch crowding the spot below her hand—”that these aren’t the only things. You’re, like, on the same wavelength.”
“Yeah, well, all of that is reduced to ashes.” I snorted, a tiny spike prickling my stomach. Okay, another confession. I’d always thought Ian and I shared a lot of things in common, despite all the hatred and snapping business between us. Linda’s heart-tearing bet—because I knew how important her silly watch, I mean ticker was for her—she had a thing for Betty Boop, who knows why—wasn’t necessary. She wanted to prove how sure she was of our compatibility as friends, and the problem was…I didn’t need such distressing means to acknowledge it. That glimpse at the stairs last night had just reinforced what was already lurking in the depths of my mind. I knew we were compatible. I knew it since the first day I stepped into school and saw him on that corner in the cafeteria, staring through the window at the gray sky as if it held all the answers in the world, musing. I knew he was an artist and that somehow, he used the sky as a way of inspiration, a bridge to his inner flyer, losing himself on the cottony clouds and bottomless blue—a shade of hypnotic azure during the bright days, dulled to an ashen periwinkle before rain, and a shade of soul-stirring sapphire after twilight. I knew the sky’s identity well, just as he did, because we both mused on it, we both breathed that peaceful energy, feeding our creative juices to then smear them out on the tangible or sculpt them.
Something inside of me recognized him, as a sibling would recognize another, or as an ant would recognize the scent of a coworker with its long antennae. We artists could somehow sense that trail that led us to the same colony, though
instead of pheromones, like ants used, it was an invisible thread that guided us to that recognition—and to that belonging. A belonging to a world where imagination and creativity fueled life. A world I had in common with Ian.
Had I felt compelled to close the distance between my table and his in that moment, to say hi and introduce myself? Well, yeah, he’d been the only—still was the only—person around me distilling that same arty vibe swirling inside me, and it’d been, after all, my first day at school. I hadn’t known anybody. So the logical thing would’ve been to approach him and discuss whether the sfumato technique was worth all the pain to create a smoother look, even if at that time I’d promised myself I wouldn’t expand my horizons and try to befriend people. But he had a pull and I couldn’t ignore it. Neither could the girl who plastered her face against his a few seconds later, sucking him in a lip lock without caring about the audience in the room. I remembered how my cheeks had flushed warm, as if I’d been the one who was kissing him that deeply, and I remember how I’d wanted to slap my face for such a childish reaction and turn my face away.
I hadn’t done any of that, though. I couldn’t stop staring at him with a stream of disappointment coursing through me. He hadn’t noticed, even if my stare had been unrelenting. He’d been too busy fisting his hand on the girl’s hair while his other one grabbed her butt. A very carnal-minded scene, which ended killing permanently my will to spark a chat. Guys like him, who didn’t care about public exposure of that kind—because, really, the only thing they’d needed was a bed—had only one thing in their mind: have fun, fun. I knew that type. It was, actually, over processed in my mind. They didn’t look to have friends in the female department. They looked for ways to lure them into bed. And as days passed by, my theory got only more solid grounds. Every girl that approached him, that sneaked a side glance in his direction, that threw a mischievous smile at him, always ended up in his arms in one way or another…to be discarded for a new one later.
The pull to be his friend was strong, but the disgust that’d built inside of me was stronger, which had only increased when he started dating Buffy. Maybe the ghost of that pull had reappeared for a few minutes last night, but it was buried deep down in the grave of my mind now, layers and layers of anger pressing it down.