“I love you, Annie,” I tell her. Her knees are stiff and fat as she stands as straight as she can, wobbling left to right. The wind tickles her tuft of troll hair as she looks around the truck. I kiss her cheeks, even though they’re covered in bright orange goo, and she smiles and grabs my hair with a sticky fist. “Be good and be kind,” I tell her. “No matter how pretty you grow up to be.”
I hand her back to her father, holding the back of my hand over my mouth. Kit presses his lips together as he carries her back inside. When he returns, he has sweet potato all over the front of his shirt and along his arms.
“She left her mark on both of us,” I say, holding up my hair. He laughs, and it breaks the tightness between us.
It’s not until we are inside of the airport that he speaks to me again.
“Helena,” he says.
“You don’t have to say anything,” I say quickly. “Seriously, it’s all good.” I mess with my ticket, compulsively folding and unfolding, pretending to search in my purse for something that isn’t there.
“It’s not all good. Stop telling me what to do.”
I hold up my hands. “Go ahead then,” I tell him. “I’m all ears, Kit Isley.” He glares at me for saying his name like that, but I don’t care.
We stand near security, my duffel at my feet. Families have to part to pass us; an older couple turns around to give us a dirty look.
“You’re gonna take five minutes to get your shoes off and into a tray. Plenty of time to pay me back,” I say to them. Kit covers his mouth and turns away.
“What?” I say. “They are.”
He grabs my wrist and pulls me out of the traffic.
“Don’t be rude to the middle-agers,” he says. “They didn’t even have microwaves when they were young, and that’s really, really sad.”
“Look, that’s not my fault,” I say, pointedly. “We lived without iPhone 6+. Sometimes life is hard.”
He grabs my shoulders and shakes me. “Stop making jokes. I’m trying to be serious.”
“Mmkay.” I rub my temples and squint up at the ceiling lights. Anything to not look at him. The hypocrite.
“Helena, I know you hate this stuff, but just bear with me for a minute. You rushed here with that small bag five months ago. You came to be with us when we needed you, and you took care of my little girl. There’s no one I’d trust her with more than you. I’ll never forget that.”
I clear my throat. “You’re welcome,” I say, shuffling my feet.
“I haven’t said thank you yet,” Kit says.
“And you don’t need to,” I rush. “I really should get going.” I grab my bag and head for the end of the line, but Kit grabs my wrist and pulls me back. I have a Ginger Rogers moment where I am suddenly full of grace and flair, and then I land against his chest with an Ooomph.
He pulls me into such a tight hug that for a minute I lose my breath. I’m stiff at first, my face pressed against his shoulder, but he’s hugging me, and I really need to be hugged. It’s all just too much. I start sobbing. That’s not the surprising part; I’m a crier. The surprising part is that Kit is crying too. I wrap my arms around him, and we cry together as the people, who didn’t have microwaves and iPhone 6+ when they were young, walk past us. Before he lets go, he presses his lips to my ear. “Thank you, Helena. I love you.” I’m dropped from his arms, and all of a sudden I’m watching his back disappear into the crowd. It’s a good day for hurting. I get the feeling that all of that was Kit’s way of saying goodbye for good. I could let that be it. Take my goodbye and be on my way for the rest of my life. But, I’m angry. Angry at the things Della said. She gave me a value today, stuck a price tag on my forehead that said: not as pretty as me! I wonder how long that value tag has been there, and if perhaps all of her friends were chosen by being not as pretty as her. I don’t even remember why we were best friends. Had she been different? Had I been blind?
I board my plane, squeezing through the center aisle to get to my seat. I’ve never felt like this before. Usually I swallow my feelings, deal with them in the privacy of my own mind. I just gave up five months of my life to help someone who said I wasn’t as pretty as she was. What the fuck was that? I scoot into my seat, which is in the very back of the plane, and take a selfie. All of my selfies look shocked, sad, confused, or insanely happy. This is the very first angry selfie. It sits right next to FUCK LOVE. So, I call it FUCK BEST FRIENDS. At this rate I won’t believe in anything by the end of the year. Except maybe Greer, who is waiting for me at the airport, wearing a purple tutu and holding a unicorn balloon.
I hug her so tightly she yelps, then I take my balloon and plan out my future.
Fuck love, fuck Florida, Fuck Kit Isley and his prettier-than-me girlfriend.
Greer doesn’t like Della. She tells me this as we stand on the top deck of the ferry, drinking apple juice from paper cups and watching the sun set in shades of pinks and purples.
“How dare she,” she says. “Why is he with someone like that?” Greer sounds genuinely bitter. She’s spitting out one-liners aimed at Kit and Della, and it’s almost making me smile.
“You’ve never met her,” I point out. “She’s not all bad.”
“Oh sure,” she says. “But how many girls have we met just like her? They’re everywhere. They make reality shows about them now.”
“True,” I say. “But she was my best friend. I didn’t see her that way.”
“You don’t see a lot of shit, Helena. You have a blind soul.” I pour my apple juice into the Sound.
“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?” I try to keep the offense out of my voice, but Greer knows me too well. She kneads my neck like she can rub away the insult.
“Had … had a blind soul. It’s waking up—to art, people … men.”
“Yeah? It’s kind of painful,” I say. “Like being dropped into ice water.”
“That’s the nature of the truth, though. What’s fun about being dropped into ice water? That’s why half the world walks around wearing rose-colored glasses, watching comedies and reading romance books.”
I look at her out of the corner of my eye. I like comedies and romance.
“If you’re such a realist, why do you dress the way you do?” I ask her. “You dress like a fairy, wearing the same color every day.”
“I dress the way I want the world to look. I’m living out my fantasy visually. But I’m not sheltering myself mentally.”
I always sulk for a few minutes after she makes sense. It’s not fair that she’s so pretty and so wise. And if I were dressing the way I wanted the world to look, it would be a beige bitch world. I’m wearing a tan hoodie because I suck, and because my soul is visually impaired.
“They don’t do it on purpose, you know.”
“Who?” I ask. The wind is whipping her hair around. Strands of gray keep getting stuck to her purple lips. She reaches up to pull them away with lavender nails. I back up slowly as she speaks, trying to be inconspicuous.
“The people who blind themselves to the truth. They’re just trying to survive.”
I’m distracted for a minute, my finger suspended over the camera button on my phone. “Who wants to survive without truth?”
Greer shrugs, and her shirt slips off her slender shoulder. Perfect. “Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges.”
I take the picture, then lower my phone to look at her. Greer is the truth. Right now, she’s the truth to me. The one person who cares enough to let me know that I still have on my blindfold. If I were one of the three, I’d be the shallow one. My life hasn’t been an extreme of any kind. My childhood typically dysfunctional, but typically functional. I’ve been so very underexposed that I turned into a beige bitch. What happened to pink? In third grade, I liked pink.
“Greer,” I say. “Do you still love Kit?”
I don’t know where that comes from. Greer has never even hinted a
t still having feelings for Kit. But how many times has she told me that art begins to flow from a source of hurt?
“Art is the blood that comes from a wound. You can’t let it scab; let it keep bleeding. Let it bleed until you have enough blood to paint with.”
Her face changes with my question. There is a shift in her eyebrows, a dulling of her eyes.
“The truth, Greer,” I say. I’m holding my breath. The answer to that question is so fragile I’m afraid the air from my lungs will break it. She turns to face me, holding the hair back from her face with both hands. The tattoos on the underside of her arms are visible against her white skin. BE THOU on one side, YOUR ART, on the other.
“Yes,” she says. “I am.”
I look away from Greer and back out at the water. Kit, the pied piper of love. How many others were there? Girls at work? Girls in his graduate program? I laugh at my own stupidity, but the wind catches the sound and carries it away.
“Oh shit,” I say, dropping my head into my hands. This was really messed up.
When we climb back into her car, we’ve yet to say anything else to each other. A line I have never seen before appeared between Greer’s eyes after her confession, and has yet to smooth away. I sit slouched in the passenger seat, my mouth dry, and a heaviness weighing across my chest. Her car smells like leather and lemons. I breathe it in as we follow the line of cars off the ferry. I remember the pictures I took and scroll through them to distract myself. There is a picture of her surrounded by the pastel sunset. It’s so vibrant. The light catches the top of her exposed shoulder, where there is the hint of a tattoo. It’s beautiful. I post it to Instagram—because it’s probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken—hoping Kit sees it. Look what I have of yours. It’s purple!
I caption it with Greer’s words. Who wants to hide from the truth? Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges. #TRUTH
The ride from the Kingston ferry to Port Townsend is about an hour, depending on how fast you’re driving. During that hour, the photo of Greer gets three thousand likes, and my Instagram gets a thousand new follows. I track the likes to two blogs who reposted the picture, crediting me, each blog having over thirty thousand followers. I read through the comments on the photo, blushing at the things they say both about Greer, and the mysterious photographer. Kit is not one of those likes. He liked someone else’s picture a few minutes after I posted the picture of Greer, so I know he saw it.
“Whoa,” Greer says, when she opens her Instagram. “That’s a great picture.”
“A fluke,” I say. “I’ve never taken anything as good as that before.”
She puts the car in park outside of the cannery. “So, maybe today is the start of great pictures. Make sure your next one is better.”
I purse my lips. “Okay.”
I make to open my door, but Greer grabs my hand and squeezes it.
“I’ve moved on, Helena,” she says. “You can love someone your whole life and not know why. You can even live with it. This doesn’t change our friendship.”
I smile tightly. “Of course it doesn’t. Because he’s not mine. If he were, you wouldn’t be okay with me.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “I want him to be happy.”
“That’s easy to say until the person you love is happy with someone else. Girls always choose men, and men always choose the wrong girls. It’s an endless cycle.” I wonder if she was helping herself or helping me when she forced me to go to the wedding with her.
This time, she doesn’t try to stop me when I get out of the car. The beige bitch can say things that make sense too.
There’s a lot of rebuilding to do after your heart breaks. For instance, you have to rearrange your perspective. What is important now that I have no desire to eat, drink, work, play, love, sleep, talk, or think? Healing. You have to focus on the minuscule, stupid things that make you happy every day. Like taking out your box of socks and touching each one. Posting beautifully depressing pictures of Port Townsend to Instagram, which generate thousands of likes. I get paid by third party advertisers to wear this and post that. I’m just a beige bitch with something to say. Wine makes me happy. Every night I drink an entire bottle and stare at my favorite wall. I even like the way it feels when I wake up to a headache, my stomach rolling from a hangover. It gives me something to focus on other than the melancholy of my heart. My mood changes by the hour, which makes me feel like a crazy person. Like yesterday, when I stood looking at the water and didn’t think about drowning myself, I felt proud. But two hours later I held a bag of rat poison in my hands and wondered if it was delicious. Greer tells me I have to take back my power.
“What power?” I ask her.
She screws her face up in deep thought before she finally says, “Do you know how in Pirates of the Caribbean when Calypso…”
I’ve never met anyone who delivers Disney analogies with such a punch. I get it. I think. It makes me laugh in any case.
I’m different. Kit showed me things, so I focus on that—the things I’ve learned rather than the things I’m not getting to experience. I’ve noticed that people don’t really look you in the eye, because their eyes are somewhere else. Pointed inward. I make it a point to look everyone in the eye so they know I’m seeing them. That’s how Kit made me feel—seen. I want to see people. I’ve also noticed that the more you see people the more they want to trust you with their secrets. Phyllis tells me that she gave a baby boy up for adoption when she was fifteen. A customer tells me that she collects rocks the color of her ex-boyfriend’s eyes, and that her husband thinks her rock gardens are just a love of minerals. A stranger tells me that she was raped two weeks ago. It goes on and on. When you care, people can feel it. And then, in my new position as town secret carrier, I realize that Kit made me a better person.
Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
A month after Kit’s swift departure back to Florida, a package arrives for me at the cannery with his return address scratched in the upper left corner. I weigh it in my hands, and let my fingers explore through the envelope. Pages. Pages, and pages, and pages. I don’t open it, because I know what it is. The words that he wanted to say. That we didn’t have time to say. I have those words too. I’m not ready. For weeks, I carry it in my purse just to feel the weight of it on my shoulder. Unopened. A little bit ignored. I’m afraid to touch those pages. They could tell a very different story than the one I’m expecting, but Kit’s approach and appearance in PT makes me believe.
One day, shortly after Christmas, I walk to a bar on Water Street—called Sirens. There is still tinsel draped across the back of the bar. One side of it has come loose of the tape and loops down lower than the rest. It depresses me. I slide onto a barstool and order whiskey straight up, turning my back on the droopy tinsel. The bartender slides the glass over without meeting my eyes. Seasonal depression. Yeah, me too, buddy. I take a sip and flinch. Drinking is a good plan. You want to ignore your inner pain and pour fermented corn down your throat so you can ignore your pain some more. It’ll burn harder than your heart.
“Bad day?” A man’s voice—chalky, rich. He’s sitting directly across from me on the other side of the bar. He’s in the darkest corner, which makes it hard for him to be seen. I wonder if he planned it that way.
“Did the whiskey give it away?” My voice is raspy. I lick my lips and look away. The last thing I feel like doing is bullshitting with a stranger in a bar.
“Plenty of women drink whiskey straight up. You just
look like you took a sip of battery acid.”
I laugh.
I turn to him, despite myself. “Yeah. It was a really bad day. But, they’re mostly like that.” I spin my glass on the counter and narrow my eyes on the shadows, trying to see his face. His voice is young, but his presence is old. Maybe he’s a ghost. I make the sign of the cross under the table. I’m not even Catholic.
“A man,” he says. “And a broken heart.”
“That’s fairly obvious,” I say. “What else causes a woman to walk into a bar at three o’ clock on a weekday and drink battery acid?”
Now it’s his turn to laugh. Young—definitely young.
“Tell me,” he says. And that’s all he says. I like that. It’s like he just expects you to spill all of your secrets, and I’m sure many do.
“Tell me,” I say. “Why you’re drinking alone in the darkest corner of the bar, trying to pry the hurt out of strangers.”
For a minute he’s quiet, and I think I’ve imagined the whole conversation. I take another sip of whiskey, determined to keep my face still as I watch the place where he sits. A ghost!
“Because that’s what I do,” he finally says.
I’m surprised he answered, though it’s a cheap, noncommittal answer.
“What’s the point of making conversation if you’re going to be guarded and give me rehearsed answers?”
I can feel his smile. Is that even possible? It’s like the air carries everything he does and lets you know.
“Okay,” he says slowly. I hear him set down his glass. “I’m a predator. I wait for women to tell me what they want, and then I convince them that I can give it to them.”
I laugh. “I already know you’re a man. Tell me something new.”