Текст книги "Cam Girl"

Автор книги: Leah Raeder

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

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 cocky, 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.

“So this is the legendary Vada Bergen,” Brandt said. “Now I see why my cuz is so wet for you.”

“Oh my god,” Ellis said. “Boundaries, Brandt.”

“Sorry. You ladies care to join me in a drink?”

“You’re underage.”

“Relax. Vada doesn’t look like a narc. She looks like she’s fun at parties.”

In the kitchen he took two bottles from the fridge. The opener was exactly where I remembered, and I glanced up at Ellis, my chest tightening.

“Are we having a tender moment?” Brandt said.

I snatched the bottles from him. “Are you twenty-one?”

“Busted. Twenty in April.”

“Which day?”

“Eleventh.”

“Mine’s the tenth,” I said, and popped the caps. “Okay, you can drink with supervision. But don’t turn me in.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Ms. Bergen.”

Heat crept up my neck. I looked away.

The three of us wandered back into the living room gallery.

“You’re really good,” Brandt said.

I shrugged and he shrugged one shoulder, imitating me.

“I don’t know shit about art,” he said, nodding at a portrait of Ellis with her crooked, beguilingly boyish smile, “but anyone who makes Emily look that hot has talent.”

Ellis covered her face with her hands.

“She is that hot,” I fired back. “But thanks for the kudos. Means a lot, coming from a Philistine.”

Brandt grinned.

Ellis said, “I’m going to the bathroom. Then we’re leaving.”

We waited quietly till she was out of the room.

“Your cousin’s name is Ellis,” I said. “Stop calling her Emily.”

“I grew up calling her Em. Easy to slip.”

“You didn’t slip. You did it on purpose the first time you saw me here, too. This summer. I know you remember.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re a troublemaker.” I leaned on a sofa. “Tell me about your disability.”

“What disability?”

“You favor your left arm.”

Brandt tilted his head. “Sharp eye.”

“How much function do you have?”

He raised his right shoulder, grimacing. The elbow didn’t bend. “It’s like a parasite. Hanging off my body. Sucking me dry.”

“How’d it happen?”

“I got what I deserve.” Brandt laughed. “You can’t run forever. The past always catches up with you.”

My throat went thick. “Do you know who did it to you?”

“Do you know who did it to you?” He gestured to my right arm. “You favor your left, too. We match, Vada.”

Observant.

I took a long sip, eyeing him. This wasn’t anything. He was just trying to provoke me.

A bored kid, going stir-crazy in his house, like I was.

“I’ve dealt with depression,” I said. “You can’t will it away. If you need someone to talk to, I’ve been there.”

“You want to be my therapist?”

“No. I’m not even sure I want to be your friend.”

Brandt smirked. “Brutal. I like it.”

“Listen, I care about Ellis. A lot. If you’re part of her life, you’re part of mine. But I don’t tolerate people who hurt her. No matter if they’re blood relatives.”

“So I’ve heard.” He lifted his bottle. “You’re very protective of your personal punching bag.”

I actually felt the words hit, right in my solar plexus.

Brandt’s eyes gleamed. Same green as hers, but his were cold, unblinking. Reptilian.

“We should get going,” I said, pushing off the couch.

He moved into the kitchen doorway.

“What are you doing?”

No answer.

I stepped around him and he touched my arm. My hand snapped to his.

“You don’t want to fuck with me,” I said. “And you especially don’t want to fuck with Ellis.”

“Feisty.”

I grabbed his other arm and twisted it in the socket. He hissed in pain.

“Not feisty,” I corrected. “Dangerous.”

Tears sprang to his eyes. I released.

“Vada. Stay, please. I’m so fucking bored.” He slouched in the doorway. “You two are always off playing lesbian Martha Stewart. No one can hold an intelligent conversation. Jerking off southpaw is giving me RSI. My mind is lonely.”

His words and his voice resonated with me, familiar.

We had more in common than I cared to admit.

“Pro tip,” I said. “Don’t ever physically accost a woman. We’re much more likely to stay when it’s our choice.”

His head bowed.

“Is everything all right?” Ellis said, coming down the hall.

“Yep.” I gathered our bottles to toss in the trash.

“Those go in the recycling,” Brandt said.

Ellis frowned. “Since when are you environmentally conscious?”

“I’ve always cared deeply about the Earth. I want it to be pretty for the day I assume control.”

The recycling bin was near overflow. I rinsed the bottles and dropped them in, nudging aside wood chips and shavings.

“He’s right,” I said. “Apparently he composts.”

“Portland chicks dig sensitive tree huggers. Right, Vada?”

“That’s the other Portland.”

“My bad. What kind of guys do you dig?”

“The kind who aren’t douchebags.”

“How about the kind who aren’t guys?”

Ellis looked at him, then me. “Let’s go before it’s dark.”

Was I actually flirting with her cousin? Fuck.

Brandt walked us to the door. He made Ellis promise to visit again soon, and wheedled me to join her, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. He really was lonely. As Ellis trotted down the front steps, Brandt brushed my coat sleeve. I stopped.

“I’d never hurt her,” he said. “She’s all I’ve got left.”

“Good. She’s all I’ve got left, too.”

When I was halfway across the porch he called, “That’s not true.”

I glanced back.

“You’ve still got a great ass,” he said.

On the last day before Boston, the air crackled with static.

I rowed out with Ellis beneath the gray sky. We shared a joint, lay on our backs in the skiff and stared up at rain clouds, watching our smoke rise and twist above us like nebulas, and I thought, Tomorrow, everything changes. Reality splits. In one universe, I choose Blue. In the other, Red.

“What are you thinking?” Ellis said.

“I feel like Neo picking a pill. Hashtag weed thoughts.”

We both sat up, hugging our knees, sneaker toes touching. The boat rocked, a stray wave slopping over the gunwale and dousing my calf. I shivered.

“You?” I said.

“I was thinking about this Japanese art called kintsugi.”

“Did you see this in an anime?”

“No. Shut up.” She pushed my toes away, but I pushed back. “Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it’s been through. And I was just . . .”

I pushed her toes again. “Just what?”

“Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.”

I stared. “That’s beautiful, Ellis. Where’d you hear about it?”

She smiled sheepishly. “Death Cab for Cutie.”

Ellis said she wanted to show me something at the cabin. We rowed back and trekked through the woods, through a sea of dry leaves fluttering around our shoes like golden paper cranes. Up in the tree house she had a log fire burning in the wood stove, and in the last good light she’d set up an easel, a primed canvas, and a tray of paint. I stood in the doorway, dumbstruck.

She uncapped a tube of green acrylic, raised it to my face.

I hadn’t smelled anything like this in almost a year. It hit like a drug. My eyes watered from the faint plasticky scent, the gesso on the canvas. I edged away, dizzy, tumbled onto the sofa.

“Vada?”

When she touched me I grabbed her waist, crying.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” She pulled my coat off, wrapped her arms around me. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to do this.”

“Is this another experiment?”

“No. It’s just something I always wanted to do.”

“You wanted to paint with me?”

“Yeah.”

I let go. Scrubbed hot saline from my cheeks and stood.

At first I didn’t dare touch the canvas. I showed Ellis what to do: mix colors on the palette, keep the paint wet, apply and blend. She rolled her sleeves up, fastidiously avoided spattering her clothes. Unacceptable. I dipped a finger in red and dragged it down the front of her shirt.

“Now that you’re dirty,” I said, dabbing paint on her cheek and chin for good measure, “you can fucking relax.”

Her eyes went wide. I laughed.

Ellis didn’t have a subject—she just put colors down, gleefully watching them interact, like a kid playing with a chemistry set. Yellow and red turning into mandarin orange, blue and green becoming Atlantic teal. My throat burned at the scratch of bristles on canvas and the muddy rainbow swirling in the water cup. But I made myself take it. I can do this, I thought. I can feel this even though I can’t really be part of it anymore. Through you.

Ellis tried to paint a line across the canvas with cautious, self-conscious strokes, but it kept going wonky.

“Why do I suck at straight lines?”

“Because you’re not straight?”

“Neither are you.”

“Those damn bisexuals, always getting the best of both worlds. Who do they think they are?”

She rolled her eyes. I laid my weak hand on her wrist.

“You’re trying to control it from here. It’s too close to the brush.” I ran my hand up her arm, slowly, over fair skin sprinkled with freckles and paint. Up to her shoulder, her collarbone. “Do it from here.”

I kept my hand there. When her arm moved I felt the smooth pull of threads beneath the surface. My palm slid over her neck, her back, feeling the delicate loom of muscle moving against my fingertips.

“If I could give this to you,” she said, “I would. I’d give anything to make you happy.”

I hugged her from behind, burying my face against her shoulder. “You make me happy.”

For a moment Ellis was still. Then she turned and cupped my jaw and I thought, Kiss me.

“You’re totally clean,” she said, sounding puzzled.

She smeared turquoise on my cheek.

“Hey.”

Royal purple next.

“Very funny.”

Jade green.

“Ellis—”

We both grabbed the palette.

Then she flipped it onto my shirt and it was all-out paint war.

Ellis had the advantage of surprise and squeezed a handful of red paint into her palm before I caught her. It splattered all over both of us, bright as blood. My hand slipped and hit the canvas and left a dripping scarlet print. We both stared at it, impressed, then lunged for more. I fought her for the blue tube and it burst in our hands, shooting everywhere as we screamed. Yellow spilled on the sofa. Green slathered the window. In the middle of absolutely wrecking Ellis with paint I got more on the canvas, too, and suddenly there was an unspoken cease-fire as we both attacked it, Pollock style, flinging paint with our bare hands. Exhilarated, I popped tube after tube and hurled it half-blind, hitting the wall and floor as much as anything. Who fucking cared? This glorious mess was me. This was the color and energy and motion that had been locked in me for a year, finally breaking loose.

I fumbled in the tray, finding only empty tubes. My fingers and toes tingled. Crazed, breathless. We both looked like we’d faced a paintball firing squad.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

Ellis closed the small space between us and kissed me, so hard I rocked back on my heels. I tasted paint, spearmint, salt water. Our arms wrapped around each other, and the numbness at the edges of me spread until all I was sure was real was the bell toll of my heart, a vague sense of blood ringing through my veins. I kissed that sweet pink mouth again and again and pulled back to look at her.

“It’s on your glasses.”

She tossed them onto the coffee table.

Down to the couch, her beneath me. Dabs and dashes of paint everywhere, on skin and clothes and upholstery, as if this were a van Gogh close-up and if you stepped back far enough, it would condense into a clear image. My hair fell around her face in a cup of shadow and she tucked it behind my ear.

“This is how I remember you,” she said. “Just like this.”

“Covered in paint?”

“That, but also the light in your eyes. The fire.”

I laced my fingers through hers. “I think we’re lying in Process Yellow.”

“Want to move?”

“I’m not letting you go anywhere.”

Ellis gave me that aw-shucks tomboy smile, ever so slightly crooked, and I couldn’t help myself. The words were out before they hit me.

“I love you,” I said.

We both stared, a little shocked.

“I love you, too.”

We’d said these words a thousand times. But right now it felt like the first.

It was too intense for a kiss, for the way I wanted to touch her. Too pure to let some ephemeral thrill dilute it. Too perfect just like this. I guess she felt the same because she simply held me, so tight each breath we took made it hard for the other to breathe. Skin colliding, bones smashing, twisting together, crashing into each other. As close as we could get. This could be the last night I hold you like this, I thought. And I don’t ever want to let go.