“Hey, kid.” He grinned, his eyes falling over my bare curves.
“Mike!” I scrambled for something to cover myself with. “Shut the door! My dad might walk past.”
“Relax, baby.” He looked behind him, closing the door, then sauntered across the room. “You look gorgeous.”
“I look like a girl in her underwear.” I leaned in front of the mirror again, forcing the silver stud against the unyielding hole in my earlobe. “I’m just trying to get this damn thing to go in.”
“Need help?”
“Nah, I’m fine.” I glanced away from the mirror long enough to see his smiling eyes trace my shoulders and ribs, fixing on my blue lace undies.
“New?”
“Yeah, I bought them to match my dress.” I slapped his hand off my hip.
“What about this? Have you always had a strapless bra, or is that new too?”
“No. It’s new.”
“Well, you look very sexy—” his voice dragged, “—a little too sexy for an unmarried girl.”
“Stop it.” I slapped his hand away again. “I can’t concentrate while you keep doing that.”
“Here, let me try.”
“Okay, but, good luck.” I placed the earring in his waiting hand. “I haven’t been able to get one in that hole for over a week.”
The warmth of his breath touched my neck as he leaned close, stud in fingertips, and fumbled against my earlobe until I heard a small ‘pop’. “All done.”
“Thanks.” I rubbed my ear. It burned a little.
“Is the other one okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just this one—it keeps closing. I don’t know why.”
“Start wearing your earrings and it won’t happen.”
“I can’t. I hate sleeping in them. So?” I leaned my butt on the dresser, rolling my hand in the air. “Did you want something?”
“Oh, um—” He unfolded his arms. “I came to see if you were hungry. I uh, I haven’t seen you eat anything today.”
“That’s because I haven’t,” I remarked, pushing past him.
“Ara?” he whined. “Why, baby?”
“Because, maybe if I don’t eat, I’ll die.” I flopped backward on my bed with a huff.
“Ara, grow up, you don’t mean that.” He stood above me, his arms folded.
“No. But I also kinda do.”
“Well—” he grabbed my hand and pulled me to sit, “—then you need to get some help, baby. That’s not normal.”
I forced a smile, tilting my head. “Mike. You worry too much. I’m fine. Really.”
“Ara? Sane girls don’t say they’re trying to starve themselves to death.”
“I didn’t really mean it—not literally.” I stood up. “Now go, let me get dressed or I’ll be going to the ball in my underwear.” I waved my hands down my body.
“Huh,” he scoffed, “you should. You’d be the belle of the ball, Ara.”
“Suck up.” I opened my door for him.
“Oh, in case I didn’t mention it,” he said, pecking me on the cheek as he passed, “you look hot like that.”
“You might have.” I rolled my eyes and shut the door.
The black and white image fused with colour as my mind came back to the present. All around me, night had fallen into complete silence; the crickets hushed, even the voices downstairs—leaving a kind of stillness that left me breathless, listening carefully for any signs of life. When I looked back at the girl in the mirror, my eyes flashed from her pale face to the wiry shadows behind her, the resonance of a familiar gaze lingering in my immediate memory—a reflection from the world I lived in. My head whipped up. I spun around and ran to grasp my windowsill, hope filling my heart as I held back the call of his name on my lips, leaning out into the dusk air.
But below, the quiet street was empty; the streetlamp, spilling circles of white light onto the pavement, flickered a few times, and that same silence I’d come to hate greeted hope and I with a wall of emptiness.
I backed away from the window—away from the absence of anything that resembled life, then turned to my mirror and waited for the girl in the blue dress to look at me again. The face we thought we saw was not David—merely physically manifested wishful thinking; the only thing outside my window was the beginning of another night. And for the rest of my life now, that’s all there’d ever be.
I closed my bedroom door and headed down the stairs, seeing my dad’s eyes tear up like sudden rain.
“Dad?” I glided down the stairs. “You okay?”
“You look so pretty, honey. Just like your first ballet concert.”
“Uh, yeah, well, just don’t lift me onto your shoulders this time.”
“Why, not? You’re still my little girl.” He looked up at me where I stopped on the last step.
“I’m not a little girl, Dad.”
“Honey, you’ll always be my little girl.”
“I wonder what’s taking Ara so lo—” Mike stopped dead as he walked in; his arms dropped, his lips split into a pearly smile, and his eyes, from behind a small black mask, glistened. “Ara.”
“Hey, Mike.”
He leaped up onto the step. “Aw, baby, look at you.”
“You like it?” I brushed my hands down my hips.
He shook his head slowly, considering my dress. “More than the outfit I saw you in when I re-pierced your ear.”
Dad’s eyes narrowed; I looked away, clearing my throat.
“Come on then.” Vicki held a camera up and waved us off the stairs. “Time for pictures.”
“Really?” I groaned, taking Mike’s arm.
“Ara, this might be the last ball you ever go to,” Vicki reasoned. “I want memories.”
“Oh, fine.” I huffed, and Mike grinned at me with a kind of enthusiasm that wasn’t there when he was forced to escort me to the last ball we went to.
But I didn’t share his excitement.
Vicki posed us in awkward and weird places to snap her memories, but the world slowed down around me, and I stood in the warm embrace of my fiancé, smiling for reasons I could only pretend I felt, watching everything move as if it were on screen—a film with no volume. The voices, the wind, the laughter, all gone—everything in my world was silent, empty—wrong. This should have been David; it was always supposed to be David, but once upon a time, I’d have said the same about Mike.