Page 13 of Fade into You
Instead, she introduces me—introducesme—to the people who just made my worst nightmare a reality, and I have thebelated realization that this is Dade. This guy unironically dressed up in a zoot suit and a fedora, all over the top like this ishisspecial night. And the girl. The blue-haired girl with the eyebrow piercing who was talking over me, laughing at me, is his friend. I am supposed to make nice with these people.
My knees buckle when Kayla lets go of me and I nearly collapse into the open seat. Before I can even take a breath, the rude goth-grunge girl jumps up and runs off, knocking her hip into the table and spilling some kind of whipped-cream rainbow-sprinkle coffee drink across the tabletop and down the front of my shirt.
Perfect.
Dade falls all over himself to get me a handful of napkins from the dispenser at the next table over. “Sorry about her,” he’s saying as he almost touches my boob with the wad of napkins. “She’s kind of a train wreck, I—”
“It’s okay, I got it,” I tell him, snatching the napkins from him. Then, as quietly as possible, to Kayla—who by the way I hate right now for even making me have to ask—I whisper, “How bad was it?”
Her eyes dip down, inspecting my shirt. “It’s not that bad.”
“No, I mean the reading.”
For fuck’s sake, was she even paying attention?
“Oh!” she shouts. “Right, yeah. You were great.”
“Really?” I try to ask quietly, with Dade literally leaning in to listen. “Are you sure it wasn’t terrible?”
“No, it wasn’t,” she says, adding, “Right, Dade? Wasn’t she great, Dade?” And then, closer to me, she lowers her voice. “You didn’t stutter at all, FYI.”
“Yeah, it was… it was rad. Really. Sorry, again.” And as he’s talking, he willnotstop looking at my chest. “About Jessa. I mean, the drink. Spilling.”
“No, it’s okay,” I mutter, pointlessly dabbing at my shirt, the crumbs of napkin sticking to the fabric only making it worse.
“Here, lemme see.” Kayla is dunking a stack of napkins into her ice water, and when she presses it against my chest, the cold shocks a gaspy shriek out of me right in the middle of the next performer’s intro.
“Okay, okay!” I push away from the table. “You know wh-what? I’m just gonna go to the bathroom and try to…” I gesture to my humiliatingly stained shirt that is becoming increasingly transparent as the water spreads. “Just—I’ll be back.”
I make my way to the bathroom, weaving between mismatched tables and chairs and outstretched legs, trying to pull my jacket closed. When I reach the bathroom doors—signaled by the Barbie and Ken dolls affixed to each like hood ornaments—I swing the Barbie door open, Barbie’s tangled mat of blond hair flopping in front of her face.
I try to hold my breath through the cloud of skunk smoke as I rush to the sink. When I look up into the dirty mirror, there’s the rude blue-haired girl with another girl I recognize from school. Natalia or Natasha or something like that. God, I hope she wasn’t out there witnessing my train wreck too. Both of them are squished together, giggling in the bathroom stall without a door, their voices too quiet to understand, the words only meant for each other, I guess.
Suddenly I feel like I’ve walked in on something intimate, butI can’t make myself stop watching as Blue Hair brings the joint to her mouth, inhales, and then presses her lips against Natalia/Natasha’s mouth. God. The tendrils of smoke curl around their faces like strands of hair floating underwater. I can’t remember ever witnessing anything assensualas this. At least, not in real life, anyway. When they part, the smoke escapes in puffs with their laughter.
I’m staring, I realize only when they both look over at me.
Then I do a fantastically horrible job of pretending that I was just looking at myself in the mirror and not at them. Leaning in and squinting at the ridiculous stain all down the front of my shirt, I turn the hot and cold knobs all the way on to get even the smallest stream of water pressure. I pull the bottom of my shirt into the water, but it’s barely reaching.
They’re clearing their throats and coughing and looking at their feet as I turn the water off. I pretend they’re not there as I go into the next stall—the onewitha door. I hang Kayla’s jacket on the wobbly metal hook and try again to ignore their whispers next to me. I hear the highlighted hisses of words like “she” and “shut up” and more coughs and wheezing laughter.
After pulling the shirt off over my head, I inspect the damage more closely.
Fucking ruined.
I pluck the jacket off the hook, weave my arms into the rough denim sleeves, and straighten it out, stretching the unforgiving fabric hard to close the buttons over my bra. Kayla’s words replay in my head, the ones about how she never plans on fitting into this thing again. Stained, damp shirt in hand, I exit the stall and go back to the sink. In the mirror I see, first, my cleavage,embarrassingly obvious against strained buttons. And then I see them again, Blue Hair passing the joint back to Whatshername, giving me a weak smile as our eyes meet in the mirror. I plunge my shirt under the water now, scrubbing with palmfuls of milky pink soap from the ancient dispenser on the wall.
“You want some of this?” Whatshername asks me in the mirror.
“Wh-what?” I stutter in spite of how hard I’m trying to be cool and calm and not give either of them, especially Blue Hair, any indication of how utterly defeated and devastated I feel right now, or how my ruined shirt is making me want to actually cry, or how hard I’m working not to let that happen.
“Well, you keep staring at us,” Whatshername snaps. “You want some, or not?”
Blue Hair extends her arm toward me, holding the stump of joint delicately between her thumb and index finger. “Here,” she utters quietly, taking a step out of the stall. “I’ll share.”
“No thanks,” I tell her, and I watch as she brings it to her lips again and inhales, and before my brain gives me permission, the words are out of my mouth. “I’m actually trying tokeepall my brain cells.”Oh. That felt good.Those tears instantly absorb back behind my eyes, that lump in my throat dissolves. “No offense,” I add, and I hope she has enough brain cells left to be able to tell I definitely meant to offend.
“None taken,” she croaks, and then releases a lungful of smoke into the air, obstructing her reflection in the mirror.
