Nadia has my face in her hands and I'm trying not to blink.
"Stop moving."
"I'm not moving."
"Your eyelids are twitching. That's moving."
She drags the liner across my left eye in one smooth stroke and I hold my breath like that's going to help. Kira is behind me doing something to my hair that involves bobby pins and a level of patience I could never have with another person's head. The three of us are crammed into the bathroom and Nadia's playlist is shaking the speaker on the sink and I can feel the bass in my molars.
"Open," Nadia says, and I open my eyes and she tilts my chin left and right studying her work. "Okay. You look dangerous."
"I don't want to look dangerous. I just want to look—"
"Like you didn't try?" Kira says from behind me, a bobby pin between her teeth. "That ship sailed twenty minutes ago babe."
My phone buzzes on the edge of the sink.
ETHAN:don't leave yet. riding with us. be there in 10.
I show Nadia the screen. She reads it and makes a face that I choose not to interpret.
"Us being?" she asks.
"Him and his friends probably."
"So a car full of boys."
"It's just a ride."
"Mhm." She caps the eyeliner. "And the outfit is also just clothes."
I look down at myself. It's a fitted top Kira let me borrow — dark green, sits right at the waist — and jeans I bought last week that I haven't had a reason to wear until tonight. Nothing wild. Nothing desperate. But more effort than I'd ever put in during high school and all three of us know who the effort is for even though I haven't said his name once.
A horn outside. I grab my phone and my bag and Nadia catches my arm at the door.
"We'll be there. If you need us, text."
"I'll be fine."
"I know. Text anyway."
The car is a black SUV that belongs to someone I don't know. The driver is a guy with locs pulled back and music already too loud. Two more in the back seat. Ethan is in the front passenger side and when he sees me coming he opens the door and slides to the middle of the bench seat so I can take the window.
"You look nice," he says.
Two words. You look nice. The same thing you'd say to your aunt at Thanksgiving. I buckle my seatbelt and say thanks and the guy driving glances at me in the rearview and then at Ethan with a look Ethan either doesn't catch or ignores.
The party is at the student center on the east side of campus. The committee did what they could — colored lights, a DJ who's playing everything too loud, a banner that says WELCOME FRESHMEN with one of the letters already peeling off. The line to get in wraps around the building and I can feel the music through the ground before we even reach the door.
Inside is wall to wall people. The kind of packed where you lose someone the second you look away. Ethan walks in ahead of me and immediately a girl grabs his arm — "Ethan! Oh my god come here, there's someone you have to meet" — and he turns back to me and mouths *one sec* and disappears into the crowd with her.
One sec.
I stand there. Surrounded by people I don't know, music so loud my thoughts have to shout to be heard, wearing Kira's top and too much eyeliner and I'm alone. I should've gone with Nadia and Kira. At least with them I'd have someone to stand next to while I pretended to enjoy myself. I pull out my phone to text them and realize I don't even know if they're here yet.
I find a spot near the wall. Not hiding, just strategically existing where nobody's going to step on me. The DJ switches to something with more bass and the floor fills up. I watch people dance from the side the way I've been watching most things in my life — from a distance that's close enough to see everything but far enough that nobody notices I'm not part of it.
A guy shows up in front of me. Tall. Smells like he bathed in cologne before coming out. He's holding two cups and extends one toward me.
"You look like you need this."
"I'm good."
"It's just juice."
"I'm still good."
He doesn't leave. Leans against the wall next to me. Starts talking about something — his major, his dorm, the fact that the DJ is playing the wrong version of a song. I'm giving him one-word answers and looking over his shoulder for Ethan because it's been fifteen minutes and *one sec* has turned into a lie.
Cologne guy shifts closer. His arm goes above my head against the wall and suddenly the space between us is halved and he's leaning down saying something I can't hear over the music and I feel his breath on my ear and my body goes tight.
Then a hand on my shoulder.
"Yo, she's with me."
Ethan. His grip is firm. Not rough but there's a weight in it that wasn't there a second ago. Cologne guy straightens up, looks at Ethan, looks at the hand on my shoulder, and makes a quick calculation.
"My bad, bro. Didn't know."
He walks off with both cups and Ethan watches him leave with a jaw that's set harder than necessary.
"You good?" he asks, turning back to me. His hand is still on my shoulder.
"I'm fine. He was just talking."
"He was hovering. There's a difference." He steers me away from the wall, hand sliding from my shoulder to my back as we move through the crowd. "I swear I'm gonna be fighting dudes off you all year."
He says it easy. Light. The way he'd talk about the weather or a game score. Fighting dudes off you — like I'm something he has to protect, not something he wants. He's already scanning the room for his friends while his hand sits on my lower back doing absolutely nothing to him and absolutely everything to me.
He finds his boys. Introduces me. I smile and shake hands and make conversation I won't remember in an hour because his hand left my back two minutes ago and I can still feel where it was. He's laughing with someone, easy and open, and I'm standing in the circle but not really in it, smiling at the right moments, holding a cup someone handed me, being Ethan's friend at a party with Ethan's friends.
Around midnight I need air. I don't tell him I'm leaving because he's in the middle of something and I don't want to be the girl who announces her exits. I push through the crowd toward the hallway where it's quieter and the lights are brighter and my ears are ringing from two hours of bass.
The bathroom. I push the door open.
A girl at the sink. Mascara running in dark lines down both cheeks. She's gripping the porcelain with both hands, head down, shoulders shaking in that way where you know she's trying to stop crying and her body isn't listening.
I almost back out. Almost. But she looks up and our eyes meet in the mirror and there's something in her face that's so raw and open that leaving would feel like turning away from a car accident while someone's still inside it.
I pull paper towels from the dispenser. Run them under the water. Walk over and hand them to her without saying anything because I've been the girl at the sink before and the last thing I wanted was someone asking me what happened.
She takes them. Presses them to her face. Her hands are shaking.
"Sorry," she says into the wet paper. "This is so embarrassing."
"Don't apologize."
She laughs but it comes out broken, like a hiccup. "My boyfriend — ex-boyfriend. I just saw him kissing my friend. Like right there in the middle of the party. Everyone could see."
She pulls the towels away from her face and looks at me and she's pretty in the way that makes what just happened to her even more confusing because you look at her and think who would be stupid enough to cheat on this girl.
"Did you just find out?" I ask.
"That he was cheating? No. People told me. I didn't believe them." She drops the paper towels in the sink. "I believed him over people who actually cared about me. How dumb is that?"
"It's not dumb."
"It is." She looks at herself in the mirror. Wipes under her eyes with her thumb. "I gave him a whole year. A whole year of my life and he just—" She stops. Inhales. Straightens her back. Smooths her hair. Puts herself back together right there in front of me piece by piece like she's done it before.
"I'm Stella," she says.
"Bella."
"Thanks, Bella. For the paper towels and for not asking me if I'm okay because I really would've lost it."
She leaves. The door swings shut behind her.
I check my face in the mirror. Nadia's eyeliner is still holding. My hair is still mostly where Kira pinned it. I look like a girl who's having a normal night at a party and not like a girl who just held a stranger together in a bathroom while the boy she came with forgot she existed for the second time this week.
I wash my hands because I need something to do with them. Dry them. Walk back out.