She pushes me inside. The kitchen counters are packed with chips and bags of cookies and cereal and liters of soda. There are sweating Starbucks cups on the coffee table in the living room, where Caleb, June, and Riley are unironically playing a round of Uno.
“Our funerals sounded like they sucked,” Dayton says, skipping by me to launch herself into a pile of pillows and blankets under the TV—a huge improvement over the uncomfortable couch. “And Ms. Chu and Mr. Treadwell don’t get back until late tonight, so Caleb set us up with a tiny going-away party!”
“It’s nothing much. Mostly just emptied out the pantry. Everything’s an upgrade after you live in an abandoned house,” Caleb says, his tongue wedged into the corner of his mouth as he examines his cards. He jerks his head toward the coffee table. “I got you a caramel Frap, though. Riley said it was your drink.”
“It is. Thanks. I brought movies,” I say, holding up the reusable shopping bag. “And I grabbed some bleach for you, Riley. If you wanted to do your roots before tonight.”
She looks at me for the first time. At least I think she does. Her head lifts over her cards, and her mouth opens slightly. “Really?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “I think as long as you’re holding on to me, the wound on your head will stay closed so you don’t have to worry about getting any chemicals on your skull. You don’t have to. I just thought you might like the option since there’s running water here?”
Riley gets to her feet and leads the way to the bathroom between the master bedroom and Caleb’s room. It’s nautical themed with a decorative wooden anchor and blue-and-white stripes painted on the walls. I’ve never pictured where Ms. Chu poops, but this would not have been my guess.
I put the box of bleach on the counter as Riley settles herself onto the lid of the toilet. She fusses with the sleeves of her shirt, pulling them down over her fingers as I mix the various bottles together. It makes me think of all the times I’ve done this before. Riley has always worn her hair unmanageably long, making it difficult for her to wade through and catch all the brown bits in the back. She always gets super antsy as the bleach starts to sting her scalp and talks faster and about incrementally sillier things to keep her mind off it.
Now that I think of it, picturing where the principal poops would have made an excellent addition to the bleach distraction game.
When I have the disposable gloves on and the bleach mixed, I stand between her legs, combing her hair back. She reaches out, settling her hand awkwardly on my leg. I watch her left wrist pop back into place. She rolls it with a sigh of relief and looks up at me with hazel confusion.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks.
I put the first blob of bleach onto the brown hairs in the center of her forehead, smoothing it back into her hair. The smell is instant and harsh. I lean back and turn on the bathroom fan with my elbow.
“When you were dead,” I say slowly, “this was the thing that kept me up at night. I couldn’t stop thinking about you being buried with your roots showing and how pissed you’d be if you knew.”
“Aren’t you mad at me? After the stuff I said to you the other night—about being bad at magic and how I wish you hadn’t brought me back. It wasn’t even true. I am glad that I got to see you again. And I don’t even know if I could do magic before. You’re right, we never had proof or anything.”
“We never needed proof,” I say with a shrug. “I never needed magic to work until I had to bring you back.”
“I was just so angry and so scared,” she says softly.
“We had a fight,” I say, echoing something Dayton said to me yesterday. “It’s not our first. It’s not even the worst one. Remember when you called me fluffy instead of fat?”
“Fuck a duck. It was eighth grade! I didn’t know anything about body positivity yet,” she groans. Her lips press together, and she cuts her eyes at the floor. “But last night . . . Mila, my brother tried to kill you.”
“Yeah, but I trapped him and left him for dead.” I aim the tip of the bottle behind her ear and squeeze purplish ooze around her hairline. “Aren’t you mad at me?”
“No,” she says, but it sounds uneasy. “I know that he would have killed you. I didn’t want to believe it. I spent all day yesterday telling him how chill it’s been having June and Dayton around this week. June can be ignorant, and Dayton is sort of flighty, but for the first time I kind of understood why he was friends with them. And then hearing him confess to what he did, I realized that I didn’t know why he was friends with them. Or anything else about him. It was like he became a total stranger to me. Except also not? I think he was capable of hurting people our whole lives; he just saved it for now.” Tears slide down the sides of her face, and her chin wobbles as she holds in a sob. “I don’t think he ever would have stopped if you hadn’t pinned him inside the house.”
“He kissed me,” I blurt, as I mush bleach-soaked hair between my fingers. “When Toby’s coven showed up and I went to your house. Xander let me get cleaned up, and I was in his room, and we started making out. But then I saw the mushrooms and—” I bite the inside of my cheek as my stomach churns. “I wanted him so much, Riley. I had a crush on him for years.”
“Yeah,” she says with a sniffle. “I know.”
Surprised, I yank too hard on her hair. She looks up at me, and the apology dies on my tongue when I remember that she doesn’t feel pain. “What do you mean you know? I never told you.”
She wrinkles her nose. “God, Mila. I’m your best friend. You think I didn’t notice that you were basically obsessed with my brother the whole time we’ve known each other? You know the license plate number on his car.”
Embarrassment crawls up my spine, making me want to curl up into a ball and hide. “You never said anything,” I say.
“Neither did you. Besides, I didn’t want you to ditch me for Xander and the honor society.” She turns her attention to the floor. “He was always interested in you, too.”
Xander was the gravitational force in my life for so long. My best friend’s brother. My secret crush. But he was a story I told myself. Bashful and successful and kind. Perfection watching the world with blue eyes. I didn’t know his soul was full of fungus. Does it matter that he loved almond milk and no-show socks and books about aliens if his love was pollution? As grimy and shiitake-brown as the smoke that rose out of Yarrow as it burned down to embers.
He told himself a story, too, as he memorized me in bits and pieces, the same way I tried to keep him. I wasn’t the solution to his problems or the decisive force that would absolve him of what he’d done. I wasn’t the girl who would be willing to burn if it meant staying with him.
We were both wrong, and we paid for it in different ways.
“Just my luck,” I say, my voice shaking and eyes burning. A tear splashes onto my cheek. “I killed the first dude who was ever interested in me.”
She wipes her eyes and gives me an icy glare. “You didn’t kill him. He lit the fire.”
I avoid her gaze and focus on pushing the mass of her hair to one side. “Your brother is dead. Your parents must be a wreck. And it’s my fault. Even if I had to do it, I’m still the one who did it.”
“And the creek technically killed me,” she says with a scoff. “I’m not mad at it. It was my stupid mistake.”
“Try telling that to Dayton, who’s only had Gatorade for seven days so you won’t have to look at a bottle of water.”
“You think I haven’t tried? She has way too many electrolytes in her system. I’m afraid she’s going to get ’roid rage.”
“Do you not know what electrolytes are?”
“Magic is real, and you are bleaching a dead girl’s hair. Everything we know about science and religion could be a lie.”
“Yeah, but it’s probably not. I’m pretty sure electrolytes are, like, calcium and other minerals your body needs.”
“Then why do we pay so much money for special electrolyte water? Did I spend my entire life getting ripped off?”
“Seems like it.” I laugh.
“Hey, Blister?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you. I’m sorry my brother tried to kill you.”