65 ~ The Roxanne That I Knew-4

I loosened my grasp. “Sorry.” Reese was sitting on the floor near her closet, where the hems of the fabric of her multicolored shirts hung on wooden hangers grazed against her shoulders, and her knees were brought somewhat closely to her chest, just barely, so she could reach her toenails as she shook a bottle of Essie, darkish yellow hue illuminated through the transparent glass of the bottle, and I could hear the clinking of the little metal ball confined inside as it rattled against the glass. Hot pink foam spreaders separated her toes as she unscrewed the white handle of the brush and the heavy scent of acrylic filled the room. “It’s kind of embarrassing that you still remember them,” she commented, glancing up from her feet, pressed against each other on the carpet, to glimpse the thinning pages of Veronica’s old magazine. “It probably still has Jesse McCartney and Hilary Duff in it too, right?” Veronica shook her head as Reese leaned forward, her chest pressing into the rounded surfaces of her knees, and she glided the nail polish brush against the nail of her big toe, coating it with a streak of a dark shade of yellow, supposedly to make the new pair of flats she bought earlier that week, and her hands were gentle and precise. Veronica tapped one of the pages of the magazine. “Just Jesse McCartney,” she corrected with a small, crooked smirk that made me pause for a moment as I proceeded to braid her hair. The smile was small, superior with a faint sense of sweetness to it as well, and the crooked tip of her lips made her look almost as if she held a secret behind those lips, and it pleased her. “I was so in love with him when I was a kid. I used to listen to his songs over and over again.” I hesitated, my fingers lingering in the strands of her hair, and I felt the smallest of blows as the memories of listening to Michael Jackson on repeat invaded my mind. But I felt Reese’s gaze look up from her freshly painted toenails, only three of the nails coated in the polish, and I swallowed down the dull pain of the remembrances of listening to Smooth Criminal so many times that it practically became our National Anthem, the soundtrack to our friendship, and then I continued to braid Veronica’s hair. I had almost finished the single braid I had woven together with the dark blond strands of her hair when Veronica flipped through several of the thin pages of her magazine, a faint layer of gloss lingering on the surfaces of the articles depicting Raven-Symone’s moisturizing routine, and landed her gaze on the embarrassing stories column and asked, her voice distracted, “So, how are things with you and The Star, Mandy?” I didn’t want to welcome the numbing sensation of hesitation in my fingers as I heard her address Orion by his particular moniker, the volume of her voice dropping low to a mumble as she continued to read one of single paragraphed entries, OMGs and embarrassing! scattered throughout the “articles.” But my fingers paused as they handled her tresses, the locks draped over my fingers like the wings of faeries, and I hoped that maybe her reading would distract her from the question—or rather, from me answering it—but then I caught Reese looking up from her nails again, having finished all five of her toenails, completely coated in the yellow hue, and now the brush hovering over the nail of her big toe of her other foot, and I could see that her eyes were glancing in my direction without angling her face away from its downward trajectory, and I wondered if her fingers felt the same numbing feeling of hesitation as her fingers gripped the white handle. “We broke up,” I muttered, resuming my task of braiding her hair and tugged on the strands just the slightest bit harder, just enough to cause Veronica to now pause, tilting her head back to catch a glimpse of my countenance suspended over hers, but I could interpret if the look she held in her eyes was because of the small yank to her hair or because I confessed that we had broken up. Reese, across the room, was leaning back and away from her knees, the nail polish brush dropped a dot of dark yellow polish on her shaven legs but she didn’t acknowledge it as she stared at me, a mixture of sentiments clouding her own eyes. “A few days ago,” I continued. “It wasn’t really working out.”