Chapter 11 Chapter 11

Chapter 11 Chapter 11


There is a specific kind of cruelty that comes with a gift you give yourself.

I had been thinking about that since Thursday, since the moment I stood in front of my mirror with cold eyes and a quiet decision sitting in my chest like a stone that had finally found the bottom of the water. I had been thinking about what it meant to want something and then hand it, carefully and deliberately, to someone else. A gift-wrapped, with a bow, with your own hands.

I had done it twice now.

Once with words, “I'd encourage it, go for it, you'd be so cute together” and once with three hundred and fifty dollars I had volunteered without being asked.

Today I was doing it with a dress.

Chloe's bedroom was warm and bright and smelled like the vanilla perfume she had worn since ninth grade, and every surface was covered, bed, chair, floor, the small bench at the foot of the wardrobe with options. Dresses, skirts, two pairs of heels that were variations of the same heel but in different colors that Chloe claimed were completely different.

She was standing in the center of it all in a slip dress the color of champagne, turning slightly, watching herself in the wardrobe mirror with the evaluating squint she always got when she was deciding whether something was right or just good.

"The champagne one," I said from the chair, where I had been sitting for forty minutes with my legs crossed and my voice perfectly calibrated to sound like a girl who was having a normal Saturday.

"You said that about the green one too."

"The green one was also good. This is better."

"Better for what?"

Better for a midnight kiss with a boy who looked through me at a basketball practice while he counted the minutes you were cold, I said to myself before answering her, "Better for the masquerade aesthetic. It's soft but it catches light."

Chloe turned again. The dress moved with her, that particular liquid quality of good fabric that made everything look intentional.

"You think he'll notice?" she said.

The question sat in the air for half a second.

"He'll notice," I said.

She smiled at the mirror not at herself actually but at the version of the night she was already building in her head. The midnight version. The first kiss version. The version where everything went the way she had planned it with the careful, hopeful precision of a girl who had spent weeks earning something she believed was real.

It was real. That was the thing I kept returning to, the thing that made all of it more complicated than it should have been. Chloe's feelings were real. Chloe was not performing this the way I was. She woke up thinking about him and it showed in her face without her meaning it to, and there was something in that, something genuine and unguarded that I could not be angry at no matter how many times I tried.

I was not angry at Chloe.

I was not angry at anyone.

I was cold. And cold was so much more useful than angry.

"Sit," I said, standing. "I'll do your hair."

She sat at the vanity and I stood behind her and separated her dark hair into sections with the practiced ease of ten years of doing this for each other before every event that mattered. My hands moved through familiar motions, twist, pin, pull and I watched her face in the mirror instead of my own.

She was happy.

Genuinely, specifically, this is exactly what I wanted happy.

My fingers kept moving.

"He texted me this morning," she said, watching herself in the mirror with a small, private smile.

"What did he say?"

"Just see you tonight." She paused. "Three words. But the way he…."

"The way he says it…."

"Yes." She exhaled. "Exactly. The way he says things."

I twisted the last section of hair and pinned it and stepped back to look at what I'd made. Clean, elegant, the kind of style that looked effortless and was the opposite. It was my best work, which was weird I was choosing not to examine.

"Perfect," I said.

She looked at herself. Her face did the full-brightness thing.

"Si." She reached up and grabbed my hand where it rested on her shoulder. "Thank you. For all of this. For…" she stopped. Squeezed. "Just. You know."

I looked at our hands in the mirror.

Mine over hers.

"I know," I said.

I stayed another hour. I told her the champagne dress. I suggested the lower heel. I picked the perfume, something light. I assembled my best friend for a night that was designed to end with a kiss that should have been mine to want and wasn't.

I was very good at this.

I left at six-fifteen.

The cold air outside her house hit my face and I stood on her front step for a moment and breathed it in, that clean winter cold that asked nothing and gave nothing, and I let myself feel it, just for a moment, just in the private dark between her door and my car, the full weight of what the evening was.

Then I put it somewhere it couldn't reach me and walked to my car.

My phone buzzed as I reached the driver's door.

Unknown number. Which was strange. Silver Ridge ran on a tight social network.

I opened it.

“You spent four hours making someone else look good for a night you should be getting ready for yourself. Interesting choice, Princess.”

The cold air pressed against the back of my neck.

I stood next to my car on the empty street and read the message twice. Then three times. My thumb hovered over the screen.

“Who is this,” I typed even though my ounch tells me he's the one .

The reply came in eleven seconds.

“Someone who's been watching you make wrong choices for three weeks and is running out of patience.”

My heart was doing something complicated and I refused to let it. I leaned against the car door and looked at the
lit windows of Chloe's house, her shadow moving behind the curtain, still getting ready, still glowing.