Page 55 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
This was after Adam had been texting me for weeks on end—they were mostly emojis, which I had mixed feelings about—and had delivered a bouquet of doughnuts straight to my doorstep. “Adam,” I clarified anyway.
“Oh. Cool,” she replied, then held up her phone to show me something in her shopping cart. “Hey, do you think this dress looks cheap?”
It was all very anticlimactic, and I’m sure Cate had forgotten what we were talking about by the end of lunch. But I remember every detail from that exchange because it was from then on that I vowed to stop getting my hopes up. To stop wantingmore—from others, for myself.I had people to sit with at lunch, people who were nice to me, a relatively secure position on the social ladder, and that was enough.
So I’m not expecting much when I tell Daisy in a restaurant bathroom that I kissed Cyrus.
She almost drops the paper towel in her hand. “You didwhat?” she asks, whirling around to face me, eyes wide. “Oh my god, when? Are you guys together now?”
And maybe I hadn’t managed to throw my hope away completely, because when I start talking, every unimportant detail spilling from me in an excited rush, Daisy nodding fast and clapping a hand over her mouth at all the right parts, I feel it rising up beneath my ribs. The delight of finding a real, true friend, someone you can talk to about anything, no matter how serious or silly.
“I’m so happy for you,” Daisy gushes, then pauses, scanning my face like a bridesmaid seeing the bride in her wedding gown for the very first time. “Are you happy it happened?”
“I … don’t know,” I confess. Now that the initial giddiness from the kiss has had time to settle, and my brain cells aren’t being compromised by my hormones, more questions have popped up. Do I still go through with my revenge plan? Do I make him my boyfriend? Are we dating now, or are we something else?
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Daisy asks.
“There’s just a lot for me to process,” I say. “It happened so suddenly and it wasn’t what I expected and … I’m still not sure where to go from here.”
She doesn’t push me for details, but she does offer me a gentle smile in the mirror. “Well, if you ever want to talk about it—I’m here.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, which feels too light, insufficient. It means more than she could possibly know.
As Daisy finishes drying her hands, I unzip my makeup bag and start gently dusting powder around my nose and cheeks. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice her watching.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asks.
“What? This?” I swish the brush I’m holding in midair.
“Yeah. Your makeup is perfect all the time,” she says, her voice half-curious, half-admiring, which takes me by surprise. I’ve only ever seen her barefaced, and I’d figured from our first night in Shanghai that she simply wasn’t interested in makeup.
“I’ve had a ton of practice,” I tell her, then hesitate, unsure how to word my next offer without sounding like I’m making a rude suggestion or pushing her into something she isn’t comfortable with. “Do you want me to do your makeup for you? Just for fun?”
She flushes. “Oh, I was just curious. You don’t have to— I mean, it’s probably a lot of trouble, and your products look pretty expensive—”
“I literally dream of doing my sister’s makeup,” I assure her, pulling her closer to the mirror and angling her face toward the vanity lights with my free hand.
“You have a sister?” she says.
“Not at all. Which is why this is a dream come true for me,” I say as I examine her features up close. They’re softer than mine, doll-like and sweet, so I go for a more natural look, dipping my brush into the warm browns and baby pinks in my palette.
“I’ve attempted to do my own makeup before,” Daisy tells me, closing her eyes to let me dab concealer below her brow bone. “Emphasis onattempt. But I swear it just made me look even worse, and I almost poked my eye out with the mascara wand. I just … I don’t know how to do the things that others girls seem to do so effortlessly,” she says, her voice small. “I don’t know how to pose for photos, or curl my hair, or walk in high heels. I’ve asked my mom before, but she’s very practical—not in a bad way or anything, but she’d tell me to just go read or study instead of wasting time trying to look nice.”
“Well, you do already look nice, and you don’tneedto know how to do this,” I say, smudging blush in a circular motion over her cheeks. “But if you want to, I can teach you. Also, for what it’s worth …” I hesitate. Do I break the illusion? Ditch the false image I’ve crafted of being naturally confident, naturally beautiful? It feels safe, is the thing. It’s something I can hide behind, so nobody can ever mock me like they did at my old schools. But how can I ever be truly loved and known if I’m always hiding? So before I can lose my nerve, I push myself to go on. “I didn’t know how to do those things either. It took alotof trial and error—if you’d met me two years ago, you wouldn’t even think I was the same person.”
She blinks, stunned, like she hadn’t even thought it possible, but there’s no trace of mockery in her features. “Really?”
“Really.”
A brief beat of silence.
“Leah?” she says, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
“Yeah?”
“When I first saw you, I thought you would hate me,” she admits.
“I get that a lot,” I say with a snort. “It’s just my face, unfortunately.”
