This Darkness Mine
Mindy McGinnis
Dedication
For my sister.
She’s the nice one.
one
I’m digging splinters out of my gums again.
The closest music store carries only cheap reeds, and Mom and Dad won’t pay shipping for something that weighs practically nothing. The end result is me leaning over the girls’ bathroom sink with Brooke’s tweezers, trying to focus on the sliver by my canine rather than on my best friend’s morbid fascination with the process.
“Some space?” I ask, pulling back from the mirror. It’s hard enough to do this without her shoulder rubbing against mine.
“Sorry, Sasha,” she says. “It’s just so gross.”
Which is exactly why she’s leaning in. That’s the kind of girl Brooke is. She’ll pop the zits you can’t reach and offer to skin everyone else’s cat in bio, but the downside of having that for a friend is that she’s also intensely interested in any open wounds you might have. I’m back up against the mirror, my breath fogging exactly where I need to see before she speaks again.
“I’ve never even heard of people getting reed splinters in their gums. . . .” She lets her sentence die out, like I’m supposed to provide a more likely explanation for the slivers of bone-white wood that work their way out of my gums.
“Reeds break.” I shrug. “And no one else practices as much as I do.”
Brooke nods in the mirror, because there’s no point arguing about that. I arch an eyebrow at her and she shrugs, letting me know she won’t interrupt again.
I pull down my lower lip, resting the tweezers on the callus that’s developed on the inside. The latest splinter is barely poking through, a hard white tip in a sea of soft pink. Getting a good grip on them is always the worst part. Each near miss creates a scraping noise I can feel as well as hear, a tiny vibration that passes through the roots of my teeth. But leaving it there isn’t an option. The last time I ignored one I got an infection and couldn’t play for a week, after which Charity Newell challenged me for first chair. I retained my seat, but she looked oddly hopeful afterward—so I hadn’t crushed her.
I pinch down on the tweezers at the right moment, the tip of the splinter flattening under the pressure. Behind me I hear Brooke taking a deep breath as I pull, the end finally coming free, the tiny round hole in my gum filling with a dot of blood. I run my tongue over it, the tang of copper fading quickly. Brooke takes her tweezers back from me, inspecting the tiny fleck of wood still stuck on the end.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I rinse my mouth out with water and do a quick check to see if there are more. “No,” I tell her, which is sort of true.
Like a lot of things, it only hurts if you let it.
Brooke keeps an eye on me throughout lunch, like she thinks I’m going to cough up a femur or something. We’re at our normal table, tucked into a corner where the band geeks and literal drama queens find a measure of peace. We can talk about wet versus dry embouchure without any unwanted sexual innuendo from idiots, and the word thespian gets by without giggles. Which is not to say that we don’t have our own brand of shortcomings. If I hear one more joke about Heath’s trombone . . .
“God, take a shower, Harver,” Lilly says, but her eyes show something less than disgust as they follow Isaac Harver across the cafeteria. Brooke’s too.
“That’s easily three days no-wash, maybe five,” Brooke says.
“You would know,” Lilly says, rubbing the tips of her squeaky-clean blond curls between her fingers.
“Two weeks, baby.” Brooke flips double Vs for victory toward the football players’ table. She hasn’t let them live down the eighth-grade bet to see who could go the longest without showering. They ignore her, so she decides to pester Lilly instead.
“Like you’d pass up the chance to shower with Isaac,” she says.
Lilly’s narrowed eyes are still on him as he flops into his seat at the table by the window, the one that all the stoners claimed at the beginning of the year and no one had the guts to oust them from.
“Is there a prerinse involved?” Lilly asks, and Brooke busts out laughing.
“Omigod, you whore.”
I smack down my spoon, not caring that chili splatters across Brooke’s sweater. “Do you mind?”
“What?” Her eyes are wide and confused, but Brooke can’t quite pull off total innocence. She knows exactly what she did.
“You should watch your language,” I tell her. “One day it’s going to bite you in the butt.”
“I think you mean ass,” Brooke says, and Lilly ducks her head so I can’t see her smiling. But I know she is.
“Seriously, Brooke. Remember when Miss Upton dropped the f-bomb at band camp?”
“That one time?” Brooke adds, and Lilly can’t smother her laugh.
That joke needs to die already.
“She was almost fired over it,” I remind them.
Summer band camp doesn’t exactly bring out the best in people, especially by midweek. Hauling heavy instruments in hundred-degree weather, blowing every breath you’ve got into music you haven’t learned yet, and fresh breakouts around your lips as your mouthpiece jams every drop of sweat right back into your pores makes you cranky. It’s not ideal, but it still wasn’t okay for the flag instructor to toss out the big no-no when a girl lost her pole grip and Miss Upton took one in the face.
“I think you’d swear if your nose was broken too,” Lilly says. She sneaks a glance at me and adds, “Maybe.”
“Yeah, and anyway, she didn’t actually say fuck,” Brooke goes on, ignoring my wince. “It was more like—” She dumps some milk into her palm, huffs it up her nose, covers her face with her hands, and makes an inarticulate noise that might or might not be a swear. I can’t tell because I’m already pushing back from the table to avoid the white froth Brooke is spewing everywhere.
“What?” she asks. “Too much?”
“No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend,” Lilly says.
Brooke waves her off as she wipes her face with a napkin. “Who cares? Unlike Sasha, I can survive without a trom . . . boner.”
And there it is. At least once a week. Why couldn’t I date a drummer?
I wad up my own napkin, tossing it into my chili, where it immediately starts to soak up grease and sink.
“Seriously. Why are we even friends?”
Brooke stops laughing, managing to look dignified even with twin rivers of milk flowing from her nostrils. “I really don’t know,” she says.
And somehow, I feel like I didn’t win that one.
There is nothing as beautiful as silver against black.