65 ~ The Roxanne That I Knew-5

“Well, of course it wasn’t.” I felt that similar numbing sensation of hesitation in my fingertips as I grasped the dark blond ends of Veronica’s hair, gathering them with one hand and using my other hand to wrap a neon pink elastic band around the locks, when I heard Reese’s monotone voice addressing me, her lips muttering the words, and her gaze focused on her toenails, gliding the brush across her bare nails of her other foot, and suddenly the scent of the acrylic made me want to vomit onto her white, thick carpeting, and I just stared at her as she painted her nails, quietly, without even flickering her blue eyes away from her nails for a millisecond to gauge my reaction to these words, as if they had never been uttered to begin with. Even Veronica tilted her head up from the worn pages of her reread magazine to look at Reese, and only when she sensed another pair of eyes observing her, she looked up at us both. “Well, he was Roxanne’s boyfriend after all. You didn’t think that that wasn’t important, did you? Whether you admit it or not, your relationship was doomed to die.” Veronica glanced down, quickly flipping a page of her magazine. “Geez, Reese,” she muttered. She shrugged one shoulder as she angled her face away from us and where we sat, propped on the edge of the bed with the duvet crumpled underneath me and on the floor, with her braided hair in my hands, and she resumed her nail painting, the smooth and calm strokes of her fingers irritating me somewhat, her blatant disregard prickling an irksome feeling in my skin as I dropped Veronica’s braid against her back, and dropped my hands into my lap. I felt myself rolling with turmoil as I wondered if I should’ve responded, if there were words that I should’ve retorted as she tranquilly painted her nails, but the words felt dry and petite in comparison to the feeling that rendered my countenance slack with emotion and tongue still, and I barely heard her as she said, “It’s true. It was doomed.” She finished with her nails, and then delicately twisted the white handle on the Essie nail polish bottle, and then set it down beside her thigh. She leaned forward and blew gently on her toes before continuing. “And you want to know why? Because it was wrong.” Her eyes glanced, briefly, toward me but they averted me when I shifted the direction of my pupils to meet her hesitant gaze. “Roxanne was probably rolling in her grave all summer.” “You don’t know that,” I mumbled, quietly, and I bypassed her figure in my eyesight altogether and looked down into my legs, curled beneath me, and my hands held lightly against them. “You didn’t know her.” She smiled almost sadly, almost to herself, and eyelids shimmering with champagne hued eye-shadow and elongated eyelashes fluttered closed for a brief moment, and there was a twitch that jerked the corner of her lips as she stared down at her knees, brought to her chest, the skin so smooth and hydrated that the light emitting from the light bulbs in the center of the ceiling fan cascaded in a sheen of illumination on her round knee, and she just shook her head, a wisp of hair dislodging from behind her ear and brushed against her cheekbone. There was something glinting and glimmering in her eyes that felt so familiar, but so out of place at the same time, as if it I had seen it somewhere else but not swirling in her blue eyes as she gazed upon her legs. “But I did know her,” she murmured, her voice nearly inaudible despite the fact that the room was silent, only a distant car honking its horn filling the silence that her voice left after her sentence. “We modeled together, remember? For years.” There was something in her voice that made me shift my weight on the edge of her bed, an unsettling sensation pooling in my fingertips, and closed my eyes, stealing the wish of whoever spotted a falling star in that moment that she would just focus on her nails again and stop, stop talking, stop pretending that she knew best for everyone, even her. “We were friends in middle school, actually, before you.” She smiled again, her lips crackling with sorrow. “And then she met you, and suddenly, it was like we weren’t friends anymore.” And suddenly, it was like we weren’t friends anymore. I stared at her, smoothing her hand down the suave skin of her leg, the faux golden bands of her rings and the ersatz jewels glinting underneath the light that casted a yellowish hue on the white carpet, and the tips of her fingers touched the top of her foot before she swallowed, blinked, and took her hand from her leg, pressing it into the carpet, leaving a hand shaped impression in the plush carpeting, and stood up, lifting her toes off of the ground as she walked, her steps unbalanced, toward her dresser and placed the Essie bottle back in the midst of her collection of glass nail polish bottles clustered together beside her television, the black screen reflecting my position on her bed, my legs tucked beneath me with only the tips of my socks unconcealed, and my eyes were wide. “You were friends with her?” I asked as she straightened the bottles of nail polish, the glass clinking together quietly as she stared down at the white and black handles pointed upward. On the floor, Veronica turned a page hesitantly. There was something in her countenance, how her facial muscles were tight as if she were constricting hidden emotions, how her lips were pressed together as if she were trying to stifle words to say or sounds to make, how her eyes were trained on something that couldn’t look back at her, it had always felt familiar but it wasn’t until I saw her now, fingers delicately grazing a bottle of O.P.I. that I realized where I had seen that look. I had seen it transpiring on her father’s face at the funeral, on her stepfather’s face that night when I stole the hula girl and Braverly pamphlet from her jeep, on Orion’s face when he admitted that he still loved her that night after I heard Roxanne as his ringtone for the first time, and on my own face, staring into the mirror after splashing cold water on my face with the bitter taste of vomit lingering in my mouth as I remembered bloodied razor blades and stolen bottles of pills. Maybe I had even seen it lingering on Debbie Beatle’s face but never questioned it, never wondered out loud or privately if there was a piece or fragment of herself that grieved Roxanne too, and instead I ignorantly gave her a glimpse of my profile as I turned away from her. Just like I had turned away from Orion when he asked me if I would still be with him if she were here to witness our kisses, our clasped hands, our laughter mingling together as we playfully argued about soundtracks, and just like how I had turned away from Roxanne that night when they pulled her from that bedroom. And I could feel myself pulling away now, again, as I silently watched her shift the bottles of nail polishes around on the surface of her dresser, clinking the glass together, and running her index finger across the tops of the handles of the brushes submerged within the bottles, and I wished that I could’ve escaped without Veronica glancing from her magazine pages or Reese from her collection of nail polish bottles, gleaming in the light that bathed them from the ceiling fan, the breeze emitting from the rotating blades cooling my warm face as I looked away from her. She had been friends with Roxanne, before she even knew my name and before I even had a friend, when I would sit at the ends of the narrow tables in the cafeteria as not to disturb the obviously already established cliques that giggled while they ate and shared their food, offering each other French fries or potato chips, and I would occasionally imagine what would happen if one of those girls would leaner further down the table and ask me if I wanted a potato chip or something. But I could never think of something to say in reply, and that was okay because they only time they ever spoke to me was when one of the girls invited another friend and asked me to move a little further down. Roxanne was friends with Reese then, maybe text messaging each other during lunch or something, smiling as she read the replies while absently nibbling on her sandwich. Debbie Beatle had been her friend too. She had encouraged her to make some kind of a move on Evan Dillinger that night, just a few days before she died, and suddenly everything about Roxanne seemed muddled and bewildering, as if someone had spilled a glass of water over the image I once knew of her and distorted it into something else, into someone else. Debbie and Reese were just pieces of the puzzle that Roxanne never bothered to mention, tucking them into her pocket and out of sight, another splinter of herself that she hid from me, like her plan to die that night. The Roxanne that I knew and the one that slowly started emerging were starting to contrast each other, and I didn’t know which version of her to believe in. So when I stood up from her bed, bypassing Veronica on the floor in front of me, the dog-eared page of her magazine grazing against my ankle, and she glanced up, asking when I was going, and I could see the wave of Reese’s dark hair as she looked over her shoulder at me, and I thought I saw a small sense of vulnerability in her gaze as she looked at me, I told them, “I think someone left me a voicemail. I’m just going to go listen to it.”