I stare at Henry’s and Lauren’s pictures. They’re both posing like they’re on a modeling reality TV show, and above their heads is the caption: BEST-LOOKING.
Lauren Finch is pretty. Not just because she has good skin and the right clothes. She has the right everything. She’s universally appealing. Her nose is tiny, her eyebrows are close to her eyes, and everything about her is bright and brilliant, like someone turned up the highlights on her real-life filter.
She doesn’t have to wonder if guys will like her because of her race. Nobody will tell her she’s “pretty, for a white girl.” She’s just pretty, period.
I don’t stand a chance.
Because I will never be bright and brilliant like Lauren. I have pale skin and dark hair, and my eyes are too small. She’s colors and candy; I’m pencils and smudges.
I close the yearbook, tired of wishing I were someone else and tired of feeling like everyone expects me to be someone else.
“I know you aren’t putting that away without asking me to sign it.” Emery plops onto the metal stool next to me. Her shoulder bag drops to the floor like it weighs fifty pounds.
“I thought you’d ditched class after lunch or something,” I say with a grin.
“And ruin four years of perfect attendance? Never.” Emery scrunches her nose and pats the table. “Come on, hand it over.”
I slide the yearbook toward her and laugh. “You might struggle to find any free space.”
Emery tucks a curl of auburn hair behind her ear. “Kiko.” She frowns. “You haven’t asked anyone else to sign this?”
I roll my eyes like it’s only a stupid yearbook and why would I care?
It doesn’t fool Emery, who sighs like I’m a little puppy who just won’t learn. “You can act like you don’t care now, but in ten years, when you look back through this, you’re going to wish you had made more of an effort.”
Sometimes I can’t tell whether Emery knows she’s the only person I talk to, or if she just talks to so many people that she never really notices. “Okay.” I shrug dismissively. “I’ll ask Mr. Miller to sign it after you.”
Emery snorts and scratches her pen hurriedly against the inside cover. A small tattoo of an arrow sits below her wrist. When she’s finished, she slides the yearbook back toward me.
“Thanks,” I say.
She taps her taxicab-yellow fingernails against the wooden table. “Are you going to Lauren’s party tonight?”
My body freezes. “Lauren Finch?”
“Yeah, here,” Emery says, pulling out an orange card from her bag and placing it on top of my yearbook. “They’ve been passing them around to the seniors on the down-low.”
I look back down, reading the rest of the text.
Pre-Graduation Party at Lauren Finch’s House
TONIGHT at 7pm
362 Arlington Road
I’ve never been invited to a party before. Not one without chaperones and sleeping bags, anyway. I don’t know why, but it feels intimidating.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Emery interrupts my thoughts. “You hate parties and people and loud music. But literally everyone is going. You can’t honestly miss the last real high school party of our lives.”
“I don’t hate those things,” I correct. I mean, I don’t think I do. I’ve never had the opportunity to find out.
And then I think of Mom. I think of her going through my yearbook, inadvertently reminding me how I’ll never be as pretty as the other girls at school, how pretty she was when she was my age, how I’ll never be as pretty as her, and I suddenly want to be anywhere other than my own house.
I read the card again. It’s tonight. I don’t have to work.
I shake my head, deflated. “I can’t. My mom doesn’t even let me wear makeup—in what alternate universe would she ever be okay with me going to a party?”
“Stop letting your mom control your entire life,” Emery says in her pretend-robot voice, which always makes me laugh.
“You might be brave enough for parties and tattoos and doing whatever you want, but I’m not,” I point out.
Emery lights up and claps her hands together. “That reminds me, I’m getting a new one done next weekend. Do you want to come with me? You can meet Francis. She’s amazing. Honestly, if I didn’t already have this set plan for medical school, I would totally be a tattoo artist. Her shop is incredible.”
She lifts her bag up, sticking out her tongue like it really does weigh fifty pounds, and rummages inside for her sketchbook. Unlike mine, which is completely black on the outside, Emery’s is covered in stickers, concert tickets, and tape. When she splits the book open, I watch her flip through sketches of cartoonish women, all dressed like futuristic gangsters and armed with some kind of weapon or another. She stops at a black-and-white image of a girl with pigtails and a giant bubble between her lips. She’s holding two pistols—one has LOVE written on the barrel, and the other reads HATE.
“That’s amazing,” I say, a little breathless. Emery’s love of art is probably the reason we’ve managed to stay friends for the last four years. That and our shared experience of having parents who don’t let us invite friends over. “Where are you getting it?”
“On my side. I think it’s going to be really painful. Will you be my emotional support?” She pushes out her bottom lip.
“Yeah, I’ll go with you.”
Her voice goes up an octave. “You could get one too, you know.”
“You want to see my mother actually murder me, don’t you?”
Emery laughs. “Okay, but at least come to the party tonight?”
And because I feel like saying no will ruin her good mood, I say, “I’ll think about it.”
Tracing my finger against the edge of the orange card, I tighten my mouth. I don’t have it in me to be rebellious. I should—in the course material for Overbearing Mothers 101, I’m probably the perfect example of a person most likely to rebel. But I hate confrontation. And disappointing people. And drawing attention to myself.
Besides, what would I do at a party?
People terrify me. I’d probably spend the whole night wishing I had the superpower to make myself invisible. I don’t know how to be any other way. Having fun with lots of other people isn’t an easy thing for me to do, especially when it’s with people I don’t feel comfortable around.
That’s why I need Prism.
I want to get away. I want to start over, so I can figure out who I really am and where I fit into the world.
Someday I’d like to feel comfortable enough around people to actually say the things I want to say. I’d like to look around and not feel like I’m the outsider. I’d like a life that just feels calm.
And I need to get away, so I can stop feeling guilty about what happened between my parents. So I don’t have to feel like the dark smudge in somebody else’s life.
I stuff the card between the pages of my yearbook and replace it with my sketchbook.
? ? ?
I draw a girl with arms that reach up to the clouds, but all the clouds avoid her because she’s made of night and not day.
CHAPTER THREE