Fingers pinching the top of the card, I’m tempted to rip it to scrap paper. But Ruby would never create something to make me feel guilty. Only to feel loved. Still, the guilt pushes through my veins, roiling and acidic and spreading, spreading.
After last March, I knew I didn’t deserve friends like that—I didn’t deserve friends at all, when all I did was betray them.
But now, I allow myself one text. Line after line of her attempts to contact me, most of which I never even read, and I finally type three words that I’ve felt for months and months. Miss you too.
I push these thoughts away at the Daniels residence because I’m busy turning a little girl into a plume-tailed bird.
“Spin,” I tell Leah. She obeys. “Yep—you are the most magnificent child-peacock there ever was.”
Jonah isn’t home because he’s already at the restaurant working on my party dinner, but Silas, Bekah, and Isaac all agree on Leah’s magnificence, from her shiny blue leotard to the fanned-out feather tail to the way I rimmed her eyes in white and black face paint. She dances around, as giddy about my party as I am. The other three refuse to tell me their costume selections, on Jonah’s order.
“All right,” I announce. “I have to go home to get dressed.”
Originally, I considered dressing up as a dolphin as an homage to my soul’s former vessel, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is—even for someone as talented as me—to create a dolphin costume for an almost-seventeen-year-old human girl.
Besides, I want wings because, well, don’t we all? Sometimes I bend my arms behind my back and feel the protruding shoulder blades—technically the scapula, but they feel like broken-off wings. Everyone thinks we evolved from apes, but I’m not totally convinced that we didn’t once have wings, at least some of us.
For one night, I want my wings back. But not the wings of a mighty bird, beating powerfully enough to make noise against the air. I want to drift dreamily in the breeze, to let the wind direct me. I know, I know: butterflies are used in bad metaphors about metamorphosis, about bursting forth from a cocoon, born again and in flight. But I’m not dressing as a butterfly to prove that my caterpillar days are behind me—no. No symbolism. It is enough to choose things for their beauty.
My wings are wide and diaphanous—nylon stretched over thin, arced wire. I painted the inner parts with the eye-aching, perfect blue of a sunny day, but the edges are black as if dipped in ink. Between the two colors, I painted little rivers of veins like a leaf’s surface.
The true showpiece is not my meticulous wings but my vintage dress. I paid a small fortune for it, but this beauty is worth every nickel. It’s from the 1930s, a tight-fitting flapper dress slicked in glossy black beads. The hem ends in a fringe right about my knee, and the straps split into these fabulous V shapes across my bare shoulders.
Okay, fine, I’ll admit I’m wearing a very padded strapless bra, but this dress deserves truly divine cleavage, you know?
I’m wearing black satin pointe shoes, which don’t feel wonderful on my toes, but they look wonderful to my eyes and make me feel graceful, so there. I glued thick black lashes to my eyelids and lined them in a shimmering navy color. For once, I forgo the red lipstick for a cherry-blossom pink because that’s how the makeup spirit moves me.
Jonah wanted to pick me up, but I begged him not to. If there’s ever a night to zoom through town on my Vespa, it’s the night when I’m the most glamorous butterfly to ever waft the earth. I drive slower than usual, so that my wings are pushed straight back, and I feel somewhere between a superhero and a pageant queen waving in a parade, my true self.
Jonah’s waiting outside Tony’s, done to the nines in a black tuxedo, complete with tails and a white bow tie and vest and oh my stars. My hands go shaky as I park the Vespa.
“Happy birthday,” he says, before I even dismount. “Where’s your helmet?”
Oh, please, like I was going to mat down the hair I spent forty-five minutes on just for a two-minute ride at twenty-five miles an hour. As usual, Jonah out-parents every actual parent in the world. “So what are you supposed to be? Just, like, fancy man?”
He smiles and stiffens his arms at his sides, toddling back and forth on each foot. “Penguin.”
When I don’t react at first—for sheer, gobsmacked delight—his shyly prideful smile fades to doubt. “No? I thought it would go with your dress, and . . .”
I stop him with a kiss because it’s perfect and also because I’ve never kissed a boy in a tuxedo, and you know what? I could get used to it. I throw my arms around his neck and pull myself up to him a little, delighted by how anachronistic it feels, full-on making out in public while wearing vintage formalwear. Heavens to Betsy, forget this party, I’ll take him home and have a party of our own. But he straightens up, collecting himself again, and I’m surprised to find my pink lipstick has left no mark on his mouth. I’ll have to try harder next time.
“You look . . .” he begins, swallowing up my dress with his eyes. “Well. You know how you look.”