Page 30 of Tilly in Technicolor
Tilly jerks in surprise, almost jabbing me in the throat with her shoulder.
“Nothing!” she shrieks, slamming her laptop shut so violently it will be a miracle if the glass isn’t shattered. She scuttles across the floor on all fours like a fleeing beetle, leaving me crouched down and, quite frankly, totally bewildered.
“Mind your own business, Oliver,” she grumbles, finding safety at the foot of the bed.
I’m not sure why that stings. It’s not like I was being nosy. I was… well, she has me so damn curious to know more about her and I have no idea why.
“Sorry,” I mumble, fiddling with my backpack to keep my hands busy. There’s a long silence, and I stand, slinging my bag over my shoulder, assuming the conversation is over.
“I liked your post today,” Tilly says, surprising me. She’d seemed so thoroughly annoyed by my Instagram account when I first showed her, I didn’t think she’d ever bother looking again.
“Oh. Er. Um. Thank you.”
Wow. That was articulate. Poetic, even. Why does my brain go fuzzy and my tongue feel three sizes too big when I try to talk to Tilly?
“It seems like most days you do pictures that all have the same color,” Tilly continues, plucking at the hem of her dress. “Why was today’s four different ones?”
Every muscle in my neck and back tenses up. Last night while I was angrily lying in bed and blaming Tilly for my sleeplessness, I’d scheduled an Instagram post that was a study of birthmarks: a cropped image showing the mole above Cubby’s right eyebrow, Micah smiling as they looked over their shoulder splattered with freckles, the café au lait splotch on Mum’s forearm as she kneaded dough, and even my own mole on the left side of my nose.
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to explain to Tilly that I put that collage together out of some sort of weird, artistic spite at being able to name the color of all those marks and not hers. Lying doesn’t come naturally to me but I figure now is as good a time as any to give it a go.
“Just mixing things up, I guess,” I say, keeping my head down as I walk over to my bed and pretend to look for something in my bag.
The other mattress squeaks as Tilly gets up and starts moving. It’s like every cell in my body tries to turn and watch where she’s going, but I keep my eyes down.
“You had a lot to say about the color of the freckle above that one girl’s eye,” Tilly says, invading my periphery by sitting near me on the edge of my mattress. “Is she… Do you know her well?” Tilly asks.
“Yes,” I say, eyes flicking to Tilly’s face before moving away again. But, Christ, my vision gets tangled on her lap, the way the pale pink fabric of her dress falls over her thighs. I slam my eyes closed, but it does little good; I can now picture the curves of her legs in ridiculously vivid detail.
Awesome. Great. First those freckles, then her hands, and now her legs. Wonderful. What other body parts can I add to this obscene fascination my brain seems to have with Tilly Twomley?
Even self-imposed rhetorical questions generate endless responses from my highly literal brain. I start counting backward from one hundred in Portuguese to distract my imagination from wandering any further south than the slope of her collarbones and that small divot at the base of her throat.
Needing space from Tilly and apparently playing into this constant orbiting we do around each other, I stand and shuffle back until my legs hit the edge of the other bed and force me to sit again. She’s like an asteroid striking my axis off-balance and sending me spiraling around the room.
“Are you two like… a thing?” Tilly asks, but her voice sounds far away through my scrambled thoughts.
It takes me a second to replay the conversation, then I burstout laughing. I look at Tilly, and her mouth presses into a frown.
“God, no,” I say, laughing harder. I pull up the photo. “That’s me,” I say, pointing to my corner of the graphic. “That’s my mum’s arm, and that’s Micah’s shoulder. They’re dating my best mate, Marcus. We all live together.”
Tilly’s eyes are fixed on my phone, her hair falling over her shoulder. The way the light slices through the raven strands creates a rich and moving violet. Pantone 19–3716, Purple Plumeria. It makes my breath knot in my throat.
I swallow past it.
“And this is my twin sister. Cubby,” I say, hoping I sound normal.
Tilly’s eyes go wide and her mouth flashes an electric grin before something a bit more neutral. Well, as neutral as Tilly can be. Even her calmest moments seem to shoot off sparks.
“I didn’t know you had a twin! That’s so cool. Is it weird? Having a twin?”
I shrug. “No weirder than you and your sister, I imagine.”
There’s a pause while Tilly blinks at me, and the silence has me worried I said something wrong, but then she bursts out in her signature, sonic boom of a laugh.
“That was a good one,” she says, snorting. “Is your sister into… uh… color… curating… erm… media with…”
“Photography and digital media curation for businesses, with an emphasis on color theory and psychological applications,” I say, appreciating her effort to remember my university plans. I realize I’m smiling at her.
