SCARLETT SAW RIGHT through me. "If you tell anyone, I'll kill you, I swear it." Then she added in a tiny voice, "Promise me."
"I promise."
What else was I going to say? I'd never had a friend sick like that before. In fact, I wasn't sure I would call Scarlett a friend, regardless of her health. Still, I didn't have any plans to mention it.
"How long—?"
"I don't know." She reached into the backseat and pushed away a few empty Diet Pepsi bottles and came back with a cigarette. She pressed it hard against the back of her hand and lit it. "Doctors don't know shit." She inhaled deeply, and the ember glowed against the smooth white skin of her hand.
I wanted to tell her that I didn't think she was supposed to be smoking, but so far this was the most we'd ever talked without any outright hatred, and I didn't want to ruin the moment.
She saw me staring at the cigarette.
"Don't judge me," she said, and took a long drag. "There's some things you don't know." She unbuttoned the top button of her jacket. "You ever wonder why you never see me without this jacket?"
"Once or twice, maybe." Of course I wondered, everyone did. Especially considering the grungy sleeves. I never understood why someone who cared so much about her appearance would wear a pizza delivery jacket with sleeves full of muck.
"You think I'm too poor to buy a new one, I can tell." That thought had crossed my mind, I have to admit, but I didn't say it.
"When I was a little girl," Scarlett said, "I woke up one morning and discovered I had breasts. I was in the sixth grade, and my dad had already left, and my mom resented me because I started to get attention from her boyfriends." She scraped around the floorboards searching for something as she spoke.
"About a year later, I started getting really high fevers, the kind they take you to the hospital for. One night at the emergency room they got worried that my temperature was so high I would die, so they put me in a tub full of ice." Scarlett found what she was looking for, a small plastic disk of blue and pink eye shadow. She adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see her eyes.
"It only took me a few seconds to melt the whole thing. I burned the nurses' hands when they tried to take me out of the water." She dug into the disk of eye shadow with the applicator.
"My mother was horrified; the hospital told her they couldn't do anything else for me, so she took me home." Scarlett carefully applied the makeup to her eyelids. "They wouldn't let me back in school because they thought I'd burn it down. I'd already tried to once, and that was before I even had powers, so I guess I can't really blame them. I spent a lot of time at home." She flung the case of eye shadow somewhere in the backseat and reached down for a bottle of makeup remover.
"Finally I got this scholarship to a special school for people like us, where they train you to control your powers. It was a bunch of spoiled rich kids, but it was okay, I didn't need to stay too long to get the hang of my powers." She reached over down by my feet and felt around. I scooped up a handful of cotton balls and handed one to her.
"I came home during the first Christmas break and found out that my mom was real sick, and she wasn't getting any better. The doctors said that it had been exposure to my high levels of radiation, before I'd learned to keep it under control.
"And then I started throwing up every day." Scarlett doused the cotton ball with makeup remover and began to wipe away the trails of mascara left on her face by her tears.
She tossed the used cotton ball in the back and I handed her another one. "You know how expensive it is to get chemo? Even with government aid, it still costs a shitload. And Mom's too tired to work most of the time
because of it. I picked up four extra shifts last week just so they wouldn't repossess her wig."
Scarlett pulled a mascara wand out of a pocket inside her jacket and began to apply it to her lashes. "What about you?" I asked.
Scarlett stopped with the mascara and turned to look at me. She shook her head. "You still haven't figured it out, have you?"
I scratched my eyebrows. I thought I knew everything, thought I was a smart kid, but there was still more to her story, another surprise. She unbuttoned her jacket all the way and opened it up. I looked at her belly in shock. The bag spread over her stomach like a pouch of colorless Jell-O and rested in her lap.
"It's a colostomy bag," she said. "What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means I won't be winning Miss America this year." She dipped her mascara wand into the tube. I'd heard the term before, but I didn't know what it really was. She could see the confusion on my face and sighed.
"It means I shit through a tube in my stomach, okay?" Oh. I stared straight ahead.
Scarlett turned her attention back to her eyelashes in the mirror and began reapplying the mascara. She applied countless layers of black on her lashes, trying to make them longer and longer.
She saw my eyes grow wide as I stared at the bag, and I knew I should have hidden my reaction. I thought she'd kick me out of the car right then and there, but she didn't.
"He took me to dinner a few times, made out through a couple of movies, and we talked about our first time being special. But that night we both got out of work early and I started kissing him, working on his neck—he can't resist that, it drives him absolutely crazy—and we couldn't help ourselves. So we went at it right there in the parking lot." She blinked her eyelashes and began to wipe away the excess.
She said that last part wistfully, and it surprised me—that she'd waited a long time for anything she really wanted. It was the first time I really identified with her. I knew what it was like to wait for what you really want. "The parking lot's full of gravel, you know, so he didn't really say anything when I told him I wanted to keep my jacket on; who wants a bunch of gravel digging into your skin? I told him to take it slow, because he's usually so fast about everything else. I really wanted to enjoy it. "She rested her head against the windshield and sighed. "I'd been waiting such a long time. I was so into the moment, I didn't care that he was getting close to my bare stomach. Maybe I even wanted him to find out." She stared at her eyes in the rearview mirror. "I thought about how the scene would play out when he reached down and felt the bag. I could picture the look on his face, the shock of discovering it." She suddenly pushed the rearview mirror away so she wouldn't have to look at herself. "Then I thought, well, if that's the worst thing that could happen, what the fuck. Better to know now than later. But the more I thought about it, I realized there was something even worse he could show."
"What?" I asked.
"Pity," she said. She turned and stared directly into my eyes. "And I will not be pitied. Ever." She took a deep breath, which made her chest look even bigger.
"So I told him to get his fucking hands off me, got in my car, and went home." She stared out the window. "I don't even know why the fuck I'm telling you this."
what I'd do next. I reached out my hand and, without using my powers, squeezed Scarlett's hand, and this time she let me.
"Why would you ever let someone fall in love with you if you aren't going to be around to enjoy it with them? I know you think I'm pretty cruel sometimes. It's true. I can be. But I'm not that cruel. I wouldn't wish this on anyone."
We breathed the same air for a minute, and I watched Scarlett stare out the window.
"Maybe you should talk to him," I said. I hadn't read the handbook for these situations. "Maybe if you saw him and told him what was going on, I don't know, maybe he's just waiting to see you again to talk about it."
Scarlett took her delivery cap off. Underneath she was patchy and bald from chemo. Her blond ponytail was a hair extension woven, rather sloppily, underneath the cap. She reached under her seat and pulled out a new cap with a blond ponytail.
"What are you talking about? I see him every night," she said, and adjusted the cap so the ponytail looked even in the back. "So do you."
I didn't want to hear what came next, but she said it anyway. "It's Golden Boy."