Page 69 of Drawn Together
My cheeks burn and tick up. “Thanks, guys.”
“Something's missing.” Lennon taps her fingers to her mug before standing up and traipsing off to her room. “Come with me.”
She yanks me into her room, and I don’t dare protest.
It’s kind of funny to think I have never seen Lennon’s room before. I’m not sure what I expected, but considering how detailed she is at Nook and Cranny, and that I have never once had to ask her to clean up her areas of the apartment, I just assumed she is an overall tidy person.
I am very wrong.
When it comes to her room, Lennon is chaotic and messy—the floors are covered in laundry, a neon orange bra hangs from the mirror above her dresser, and there is a duvet halfway on her bed and half on the floor. Shoes. So many shoes. Heeled boots, high top tennis shoes, sandals, knee-high heels, and Crocs are scattered all around. She tosses a half-empty diet coke bottle over her shoulder by the nightstand, and I lean to the right to narrowly dodge it.
“They’re here somewhere,” she mumbles to herself, as I make eye contact with a stuffed animal that looks like a croissant smiling up at me.
“Ah, here.” She turns around and lifts two hands, holding up a pair of gold earrings against me. “Gorgeous with your skin tone.”
The gesture is so precious that I hate I can't take her up on it. “Oh, I can’t really wear earrings. My hair gets all caught up in them.”
Last time I did was senior year prom, and Mom had to cut my hair around the golden studs, leaving me with fly aways by my ears nearly for two years. Sloane called them my ‘angel wings.’
Lennon frowns. “Do you ever straighten it?”
“I used to every day,” erasing myself piece by piece, “but I haven’t in years.”
It was more of a hassle than anything. I couldn’t reach the back very well, it would end up curling back up if I didn’t take my time, and just never felt fully worth it. Even straight hair didn’t make me any more desirable to have around, so why bother?
“Do you want to?”
Do I? The last time I dressed this nice was for my job interview with Edith, and before then, I’m not sure honestly. Lennon puts the earrings to my skin again, as if to prove a point of just how much it would elevate this look. I wonder what it would be like this time, straightening my hair—not so I would look more like the girls Austin always hung around, but so I would look nice for me. To not get curly tendrils stuck in my lip gloss, or to be able to wear earrings and feel like a woman who is going out on a date. The thought makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, so I check the time, and there’s still well over an hour to spare.
I smile in the mirror facing Lennon. “That would be really nice.”
Turns out that agreeing to let her straighten my hair turns out to mean a whole lot more than my hair. Before even pulling out a straightener, she is touching up the makeup that I spent forty minutes on. She eventually pulls up my hair in pinned back sections, the heat of her straightener warming the back of my neck. Each pull and brush of my hair feels like she’s trying to lull me to sleep.
“You’re really good at this.” I sound like I’m underwater.
“Well, it was my full-time job.”
“Hm?” I tilt my head, but she scolds me for moving, so I straighten back. “What was your full-time job?”
“Hair and makeup for actors and actresses on movie sets. Didn’t I tell you that when you first moved in?”
It takes the will of an elephant to not jerk around. “Um, no. You did not.”
“Oh, well I used to. I’ve worked on some really cool sets, and usually it meant Stephan and I could go to movie premieres. That’s why I was gone a lot in the beginning; I had to fly to LA for a night or two and come back, just to repeat it again in two weeks.”
Seriously, how much more am I going to find out about this girl? Does she have her travel agent license? Does she own a boat? What else is there?
I want to ask just that, but at the same time, I love the thought of learning Lennon piece by piece. Like the falling of the sunset, getting to be her friend has been slow, inching down and all at once lit up by the stars across the city skyline. I hope she keeps the surprises coming. I hope that the longer we live together, and the closer I get to her and Fletcher and their friend group, I find myself more and more in place.
“That’s amazing. Have you worked with anyone I would know?”
“Probably. What’s that movie that came out last year? The romance where they’re stuck on the island, and he is supposed to like to marry her sister or something?”
Well, I’m awake now. My voice is as shrill as a siren’s. “You worked on Island of a Thousand Kisses?”
“The sister has a lovely waterline.”
“Wow. Well, that is good to know. What else have you done?”
