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“So is black the only color option you have?”
Ema turns to give Spoon a flat stare, who’s poking at the nail polish bottle on her nightstand. When he meets her eyes, he grins, a funny, flickering thing. “I thought so. Don’t worry, I brought my own – never come to a hangout session unprepared.”
He digs through the front pocket of his backpack, pulling out glass bottles. They clink together when he tosses them onto the bed, at least a dozen. “Red, and orange, and blue, and purple, and – oh, wow, I forgot how sparkly that one was. Look, it’s like if sunshine were made of nitrocellulose.”
She’s starting to regret agreeing to paint his nails. One absent-minded mention that she was planning to re-do her own today, and suddenly he’s moving his surprisingly extensive collection into her room.
“You really did come prepared,” she says, settling cross-legged on the mattress. It dips, and bottles roll towards her. “You have more colors than nails.”
“Draw and quarter me for wanting options – and, actually, toenails exist? Not that I’m asking you to touch my feet.”
She leans over and flicks him on the forehead. He doesn’t even look up, arranging nail polish bottles into a rainbow on her sheets. “I’m thinking one of the glitter ones,” he says, tapping against glass. “Thoughts, opinions, desperate objections?”
“The green one’s nice. Would really bring out the corpse in your complexion.”
He almost laughs, mouth quirking up like it does when he’s trying and failing to play serious. “Well, I know one person who’s even paler than me, don’t I? Ema. Come on, we can be sparkly together. Like the Cullens.”
“I have my own, thanks.”
“I know you have a whole dark, grungy brand to maintain, and everything,” he says, poking her shoulder with the bottom of a bottle, “but change isn’t so bad, is it? Especially when you’re matching with your bestie? Come on.”
“No,” she says, like she’s not considering it.
But he must know, because he pushes. “It’ll help establish us as, like, a classic duo. Like Snoopy and Woodstock. Or Sherlock and Watson. Or Bert and Ernie, except not gay. Well, yes, gay, but not gay for each other. You get it.”
“I really don’t.”
“And,” he barrels forward, “I bet Rachel will like it. Right? Green’s, like, her favorite color, isn’t it?”
Ema’s brain stutters and stops with the sudden turn of topic. She narrows her eyes at him, frowning. “I – what?”
“Yeah, green. Figured you’d remember that? She mentioned –“
“No,” she says. “I fucking know. Why would you even say that?”
Spoon blinks at her. “Because of your, like, incredibly humongous, super duper large, clearer-than-glass crush on her?”
“I don’t –“ There’s a balloon expanding in her chest, stretchy plastic against the flesh of her lungs. “Shut the fuck up.”
“I didn’t realize it was a secret? I just thought it was something we weren’t talking about because she was always around…” His voice fades, something uncertain in his tone. “Is now when you finally murder me and dump my body in the woods somewhere? At least get a little serial killer-y with it, and bury me with some flowers or something.”
“Maybe.” She sighs when he tilts his head to one side, like his only response is vague curiosity. “No. But I don’t – I don’t have a thing for Rachel, Spoon.”
“Uh,” he wavers. “But you, like, definitely do?”
“I don’t.”
“You do. I’m not trying to be pushy, or anything, but I’m practically a super-massive-crush expert, at this point, and you’re so impressively not subtle when -“
She interrupts, because if she has to listen to Spoon run through all the different shades of red her face has ever turned in front of Rachel Caldwell, she might catch fire. “Oh, so we’re talking about Mickey, now?”
“Yes. Obviously.” He adjusts his glasses. “At least I can admit it when I want to kiss my friends.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, Mickey Bolitar. Mr. Christ and I have not yet had the pleasure.”
She rubs a hand over her eyes, even though she knows it’ll smudge her makeup. Eyelids stretch and pull. “I take it back. Maybe I am going to kill you.”
“And go through the painful pining process alone? No.” When she opens her eyes again, Spoon meets her gaze with his hands held up, like a proposal for peace. “I’m just putting it out there. You and Rachel - me and Mickey. We could at least talk about it between ourselves.”
He picks up the green nail polish bottle and taps it against her hand, which has fallen back into her lap. The glass bounces on bone, gently. “It’s a classic slumber party activity. I think. I’m mainly going based on movies, here, so I take no responsibility for the potential spread of misinformation.”
“So you’ve decided you’re sleeping over, now.”
He just shrugs, a smile spreading, like the slow blossom of a flower.
“God. Fuck.” She takes the polish from him, squinting at the floating shine as she sighs. “Fucking shit. Fine.”
“We don’t actually have to, if you don’t want to,” he says. “Talk about it. I’m, like, 85% kidding? The other 15% is super psyched about the fact that you just said okay, though.”
“Tell Rachel about this,” Ema warns, “and I will tear you apart and put you together again, backwards.”
“As would be deserved of one who betrayed a friend,” he says, voice easy – but she can tell, by the steel of his eyes and mouth, that he’s not joking. He holds out a hand to her, level. “How about this? You paint my nails. I paint your nails. We do our best not to get polish all over your fancy blankets. And we talk about whatever you want to talk about, whether that be Rachel-related, or not Rachel-related. Agreed?”
She twists the cap off and takes his hand in hers, a silent answer. When she starts to brush polish over his nails, she has to pull his hand down to rest on her knee in order to keep it steady. She sucks in air through her teeth.
“You might be right,” she says. It’s thick in her throat.
“I’ve been waiting forever and a day to hear you say that. What is it I’m right about?”
“About me,” she says. “And Rachel. My fucking – I don’t know. Shit.”
He clicks his tongue. “Love can be a confusing mistress of the psyche.”
“I’m not confused. It just fucking sucks.” She squints down at his nails so she doesn’t have to meet his eyes, leaning further over. They’re short, with a few jagged edges – like he’s been biting them down. She used to do that, before she starting painting them all the time. She can picture his teeth at their edge, the dull clack together, the tear.
“It sucks,” he echoes. “Okay, sorry – I’m a very love-happy guy, so. Not sure I totally follow?”
“I don’t want to mess it up.” It’s more of a mumble, sucked down the neck of the nail polish bottle. “The friendship thing.”
“What… makes you think you’ll mess that up?”
“Because.” She swallows. “It’ll just make things – I don’t know. More complicated.”
She’s pretty sure, actually, that it’ll be horribly, painfully, pitifully simple – Rachel’s expression falling into subdued discomfort, pinched at the mouth and sorrow at the eyes, pulling her hand away from Ema’s shoulder. Slowly slipping back into the crowd of the cafeteria, of the hallway, spending less and less time in Ema’s life until she’s gone for good. A quiet, crumbling break.
The simple part is the silent part, the brutal and the inevitable – it’s Ema, alone. Terrifyingly familiar, sickeningly easy. She could remember how to live there again, if she had to.
She doesn’t want to, is the thing. She wants her friends’ soft looks and dumb laughter and casual touch at the fingertips. They’re the most beautiful people she’s ever met, all three of them, and every day she learns something new about her friends that only makes them even more complex and wonderful and absolutely fucking atomic, and she can’t give that up for a stupid crush. Even one that blows bubbles in the cavity of her chest every time she comes to mind.
“More complicated,” Spoon says, slowly, like he’s feeling out the shape of the sound. “I understand that.”
“Is that why you haven’t said anything to Mickey?” She tears her eyes away from both the smooth nail polish and her own problems to see his reaction. He just smiles, half-baked, as if she said something funny.
“Kind of,” he tells her. “Complicated isn't always a bad thing, is it? But, um, Mickey’s life is complicated in a bad way, right now, I think. Still working out stuff with his dad, and Abeona, and all that? I don’t think me getting all last-fifteen-minutes-of-a-romcom on him would help very much.”
She tugs his unpainted hand onto her knee, spreads his fingers out flat, just to take a moment of pause. She’s seen the way Mickey looks at Spoon - the kind of unabashed adoration you only read about in gooey romance novels, laid raw every time Spoon opens his mouth or taps his fingers in weird polyrhythms or crinkles up his eyes under his ridiculous glasses. Complicated as Mickey’s life might be, at the moment, his fondness has always been painfully obvious.
Obvious, Ema realizes, to her. She starts, stops, hesitates. “Can I give you some advice? Or are we just doing a listening thing right now?”
He’s focused on his finished hand, admiring green glitter. “Advice always appreciated.”
“I think you’re being a coward.”
“Wowie. Okay.” He looks up, head tilted with confusion. “I don’t think that actually counts as advice?”
“No -“ She stops, and starts again. “I just think you’re being kind of fucking stupid.”
“Still… not advice. Expand, please?”
“Thinking it’s not a good time to talk about it is… fair,” she says. “Things are really fucking weird. But. Do you really think - do you think that’s actually why you haven’t said anything?”
“Yes,” he says, a little thin. “I do?”
“I’m not trying to be shitty. Sorry, I -” The brush wobbles, and she has to go over it again, smoothing it out. “I should have put this less like a dick. What I mean is - I think maybe both your lives would get better if you just talked about it? Mickey really cares about you.”
“Mickey would care about the world’s smallest marine leech as long as it wasn’t a total irredeemable douchebag,” he says, like it’s a joke – but it isn’t.
She watches him push his glasses up, and almost tells him to be careful with his nails. Instead, she says, “Not the same way he cares about you.”
For the first time in a long time, Spoon doesn’t say anything. He traps his bottom lip between his teeth, silent, until he looks back up at her. “I was going to say something similar about you and Rachel,” he says, finally. “Funny. You know what they say about coincidence.”
The nails of her free hand dig into the flesh of her palm. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mickey really likes you, idiot. It’s obvious to pretty much everybody, except you, apparently.”
His expression twists, for just a second, before it’s swallowed up by his usual infuriating zeal. “If that were true, hypothetically - Rachel would still like you way more than Mickey likes me. You know, if we’re scaling it accurately.”
“That’s literally not true.”
“It literally is,” he says, “but you can’t get mad at me, regardless, because I said it was a hypothetical. So… agree to disagree?”
“I hate you,” she says. She interlocks her fingers with his, anyway, and doesn’t let go even when she feels the small smudge of wet polish against her skin.
“Agree to disagree, again.” He detangles their fingers so she can keep painting, after a gentle squeeze. “I think you had a point, though, earlier. This does, in fact, suck.”
“The glitter?”
“Of course not the glitter - the glitter’s fantastic. Nothing in the world is better than this nail polish, right now, Ema. I’m talking about the crush thing.”
“Thought you were -” She chews on the inside of her lip as she tries to remember his words. “- a love-happy guy?”
“The duality of man. The duality of person who has a working brain. Makes things suck, sometimes, I think.”
“Yeah,” Ema agrees, “we’re kind of completely fucked.”
“Totally and definitely.” He stares down at his nails as she does the last careful stroke of color, holding them up in front of him when she pulls away. “Thanks for doing these. Holy crap, they look so good. Have I swayed you towards sparkly stuff in any way, shape, or form?”
“No. Maybe.” She sticks her hand out towards him, middle finger extended, the others curled towards her palm. “Only one. Deal?”
“Okay, deal. Extremely deal.” He brightens back up like a lightbulb. “We should definitely go back over my middle nail in black, and then it’ll be like we’re matching but also we’re not and it’ll be so super cool. Inverted matching. Complementary opposites.”
“Do you really know fucking nothing about color theory?”
He shushes her as he takes her hand, quick but still careful. “You know what I mean. It ties into the rivalry thing. Perfect appetizer for our theatrical debut as enemies, yet foils. Incredibly incredible.”
“You’re just saying whatever the fuck right now, aren’t you,” she says, stony, but she feels herself smile when he drums his fingers along her knuckles. “Chill for a second, or you’re gonna get nail polish everywhere.”
“Oh, shit, right -“
“Here -” She leans over to her nightstand to grab black polish and acetone, permanent fixtures since she first fell in love with Faith Lehane at age ten. “If we’re gonna re-do one of them, we might as well do it now.”
She wipes away glitter and replaces it with ink. As it starts to dry, Spoon holds his hand up and flips her off in order to showcase his one black nail. “This is incredible,” he says, again, with creeping awe. “This is the best day of my whole entire life.”
“You get so excited about the weirdest shit.”
“Someone has to be excited about nothing, Ema, or else the concept of nothing is gonna get an absolutely terrible inferiority complex about it.” He shakes his hands around, trying to get them to dry faster. “Plus, it’s like I’m carrying a little piece of Ema around with me. I think that’s nice. Don’t you think that’s nice?”
It’s sweet, sweet enough that she can’t help but smile at him as she rolls her eyes, a quick and quiet thing. She scrubs the last remnants of her old polish off her nails while they wait for his to dry, just for the sake of it. And when he takes the bottle back from her, his brush strokes are a little clumsy, not nearly as practiced as she is. Polish ends up at the edges of her skin, at the line of her nail, already starting to dry black and green.
Even on her skin, the green polish shimmers under her lamp light. Spoon catches her watching it, slowly turning her hand around to catch the reflection of light, as he paints the other. “See,” he says, unabashedly smug. “You do like it. The glittery part got to your brain.”
“It’s not so bad,” she admits. “Rachel likes darker greens than this, though.”
“Next time,” he says – and when she flips him off, it glitters.