“My help with what?” Paige asks, turning her attention back to her own reflection.
“First, you have to promise me you’re not going to get pissed,” Cass says, and I feel like I’m watching the world’s most cautious tennis match. And I’m the ball.
Paige puts the lid back on her lip-gloss and slides her lips together, puckering closely to the mirror while her eyes move to look at Cass in the reflection. “Pretty sure I can’t promise that. Just a hunch,” she says, holding her sister’s gaze and gripping the edge of the sink.
“Nate invited Rowe to come to the game with me and Ty tonight…to meet their parents. She doesn’t have anything nice to wear, and I’m not good at makeovers, so we’ve pretty much just been flailing in our attempts for the last two hours, and we have to leave in like thirty minutes,” Cass says, letting out an exhausted sigh when she’s done.
Paige doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t even blink. But her eyes slowly move from Cass to me in the mirror. I let her study me, lifting my shoulders into a tiny shrug and sucking my top lip in against my teeth. Paige and I are worlds apart, and I can’t say I’ve warmed to her. But I wasn’t trying to win some contest over Nate. I can’t even truly be with him.
The longer she looks at me, the more uncomfortable I get, and I keep waiting for Cass to break the silence. But she doesn’t. Finally, after seconds that felt like minutes, Paige pushes back from the sink and spins around.
“Stand up,” she says, her chin in her hand. “Jewel tones. You’re definitely jewel tones.”
She spins around, and starts thumbing through the overstuffed hangers on her side of the closet. I look at Cass when she does and mouth “Jewel tones?” Cass just shrugs and nods toward Paige, telling me to pay attention. “She’s good at this,” she whispers.
“How do you feel about jumpers?” She’s holding up a one-piece cotton…thing…that is like a tank top and shorts sewn together. I scrunch my nose at it, and she drops her posture with a heavy sigh. “Fine. No jumpers.”
She works through several more hangers, but I notice there’s one she keeps coming back to. Finally, she just stops and looks down, her hand on a deep-blue cotton dress. “Come here,” she orders, so I slide my feet toward her. “Turn,” she says, flipping me so I’m now facing Cass, my back to her.
If I weren’t so shell-shocked from her helping me, I might have seen it coming. But without warning, Paige unzips the back of the dress I’m wearing, and the garment falls to the floor. My mother, my doctor and the surgeons who fixed me are the only ones who have ever seen my scars. Cass and Paige are both seeing them now. They’re too big to conceal—running from my hip, up to my right ribcage: deep divots, where bullet fragments penetrated my skin and lodged themselves into my body, and cuts where emergency surgeons had to go in and remove them. I can’t bring myself to look Cass in the eyes, and their silence is making me start to shake.
“Here,” Paige says, turning me to face her head on. My eyes are glued open, wide, as I turn; when I finally square myself with her, I’m expecting to see the disgust and judgment on her face. Paige is, perhaps, the last person I would ever want to see this. I try to keep my gaze focused on the clothes beyond her shoulder when I face her, but she reaches her hand up to my chin and tilts my eyes to meet hers.
“This…” she swallows hard, and then her lips curl into a soft, tight smile—her eyes sympathetic, and, for the first time since I’ve met her, real, “this is my favorite dress. It’s long enough that you can sit at a game and not have to worry, but it will show off your shoulders and really accentuate your legs and the color of your eyes. Arms up.”
She slides the dress along my arms and over my head, pulling the draping of the skirt down quickly over my scars without ever once mentioning them. There are a few small snaps along the back, and she pushes them in place before she reaches her hands into my hair and starts to gather the waves into her hands. She moves me closer to the mirror as she does this, and then she meets my eyes. “You should wear your hair up. Like this. It’s pretty,” she says, giving me a quiet but reassuring face. I’m unable to stop my eyes from watering, so I wipe the palm of my hand up both cheeks and sniffle.
“Thanks,” I say, and she reaches for my hand with her free one, squeezing it once before letting go.
Chapter 13
Nate
“Yeah Mom, we’ll just meet you there. You’re already parked. It would take you and Dad a long time to walk over here…Okay, love you.” My parents wanted to come see our room, but it’s still pink. In fact, Ty and I decided just to leave it pink—and, just to show Cass and Rowe how much it doesn’t bother us, Ty went to the Target in the city and bought Barbie comforters and pillows for our beds.