‘Not in front of you perverts. We’ll do it later,’ I said, hoping they would not call my bluff.
‘As if you will – you’ve never even kissed anyone,’ Nicola said, utilising this sensitive information like a trip-wire, her arms folded and a smug grin crossing her face.
Violence filled my mind, and I thought about the times I had started fights with cousins and the children of my parents’ friends when we were young. Always by surprise, always with disproportionate force for the situation at hand. I hoped Nicola, I hoped all of them, wouldfeelthe hot threat of it even if they did not understand what it meant. My rage was not something I often thought about, but there it lay in my body anyway, never far from reach. It was long-tinted with guilt provoked by my mother, who could never abide little girls feeling dark things. In this moment, however, I took comfort in the fact that it was a military-grade secret weapon I could deploy in this infant knife-fight at any time. For once, I felt older than the rest of them, more adequately equipped.
‘Fine, but you’re not watching,’ I said, standing and holding out my hand.
Fran put his in mine without hesitation. This is how to be a friend, I wanted to shout back at them – take note. We went inside, and I led him down the stairs to my room, closing the door behind us. It gave me a few moments of silence to let my mind catch up.
‘You’re right, they’re not that nice,’ he said. ‘We can just say we kissed, I don’t –’
I will never know what Fran was going to say, or whether we would have found our way there in our own time organically, because I stepped forward and kissed him. Perhaps the initial motive was silencing the teen coven on my deck upstairs, but they were gone from my mind the moment my lips touched his. I had wanted to kiss Fran and so I did. And for once, my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time. It was a chaste kiss, my first, and his too, but it felt more expansive than all of the world’s oceans and the whole wide blue sky. I kept my hands on his face, holding it lightly as I stood in an electrical storm. He hovered his hands in mid-air, then let them come to rest on the tops of my arms. We were frozen in time; we were perfect. After what could have been minutes or hours, Fran stepped back, half a smile on his face.
‘Was it okay that I did that?’ I asked, suddenly horrified at the idea he might not have wanted to kiss me at all.
‘Yeah, it was definitely okay,’ he replied. ‘You wanted to, though, didn’t you? It wasn’t just because . . .’
‘I wanted to kiss someone so they would shut up about it,’ I started, and I saw his half-smile become a straight line. ‘But I wanted to kiss you even before now, I think – I just didn’t realise it.’
‘Okay . . .’
‘I would like to keep kissing you, actually, if you wouldn’t mind. Not now, but like, in general. In the future.’
Fran’s smile came back tenfold and a small laugh shot out of him like the crack of a party popper.
‘I think that sounds good,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to kiss you before today, too. Just so you know.’
We went back up to the party, and I do not remember what happened for the rest of the afternoon. Girls giggled, cake was eaten, presents were opened. Who even cares. It was all filler, delaying my chance to keep doing the thing I actually wanted to do for my birthday, and every other day after that.
8
Parties (and their less attractive siblings, gatherings) have always oriented around sunsets here – ice-cream skies the main attraction, or at least the entertainment, though it is often the people and their spectacles that eventually pull focus. Tonight’s has all the markings of a hall-of-famer. Peachy orange has not come to play, folks. She has no intention of being upstaged by any member of the pink family, not when she contrasts so well with the sky’s cerulean blue. She knows her colour theory, and it is all complements from where I am standing. I, meanwhile, feel as though my heart has been ricocheting around my ribcage all afternoon, ready to burst free. My panic attack has spawned an army of mini panic attacks, and they are working together, orchestrating a coup. This is my first public event, the first time I will be around people to whom I am not related, since I lost my noodle, one might say.
And that is enough to manage, but it is not even the part I am giving myself potentially lifelong, non-reversible heart damage about. After weeks spent mostly indoors, hiding, keeping odd hours, and one chance encounter with his inferior brother, every cell in my body is now aware of how likely I am to see Fran tonight. And I want that almost as much as I know I will not handle it well. While my conscious mind has been busy avoiding this point, my subconscious, or perhaps my body, my cells, have been signposting to this night since I arrived home. The neighbourhood Christmas party. We loved this tradition, and then as we got older we loved skipping it, together. Perhaps he will skip it tonight, but I could never. Fran does not know it, but we are locked in a game of emotional chicken, being played out entirely in my head.
I do not necessarily have the capacity to handle seeing him, but I want him to want to see me. Or, I want to have seen him, for it to have gone well. Or, I do not want to do any of this at all, and it is still external expectations running the show. I don’t know – don’t ask me, I’m mental, remember? I half hope a brutal stomach bug has swept through his entire family, Martin having had to dash to the toilet and remain there since our little chat, that I will not have to see him, nor be the one to chicken out, or have him not want to see me. This is what social interaction does to me when I am feeble; I am not cut out for navigating the nightmare of being perceived. And people do this for fun.
Olivia offers to do my makeup; she must sense that I would appreciate one less task. I love the feeling of the different brushes on my face, and the metallic particles that fall from my eyelids to the tops of my cheeks like snow as she blends. We do not talk much, the acidity of the day still lingering, both in need of some recharge time. She holds up a small mirror when she is done, and I admire her work without looking directly at it.
‘You have a very even skin tone,’ she says.
‘Do I?’
‘Obviously you do. Just take the compliment.’
‘Okay, thank you.’
People’s praise seems to communicate a lot more about what they value, or are concerned with, than anything to do with the recipient. I find it interesting, as a sociological study, but bewildering on a personal level when the focus is something I have never considered. And I worry my mounting silence is communicating Olivia’s lacking in this area; the initial compliment perhaps only a mode of transport to this subject in the first place.
‘You also have very . . . even skin,’ I finally say.
‘Thanks. Pregnancy pigmentation absolutely wrecked me, but I’ve been working on it,’ she replies.
I watch her, wondering if she is being seen and known as much as she would like. Maybe no one has noticed the work she has put into evening up her skin tone until now, and maybe it is not even about skin tone but about all of the work she has put into becoming this new postpartum version of herself, a rebirth after birth. I wonder.
‘I brought down a dress of mine I thought you might want to wear,’ she says, packing up her makeup bag to head back upstairs.
‘Thank you,’ I reply.
