Cam Girl

She didn’t catch me. It wouldn’t have mattered. I was soaked immediately, shivering as I catapulted up the stairs and ran all the way to the third floor before I remembered I didn’t have my keys, because I was the forgetful idiot and Ellis was the faithful friend, always there for me. My fidus Achates.

I was calm when she reached the landing. In a way, the inevitable is calming. The if is gone. All that remains is the when.

We didn’t speak. It was long past that anyway. Her hair was stringy and rain-dark, her shirt pasted to pale skin. She’d walked the rest of the way without the umbrella, to put us on even footing. Both soaked and shivering.

Sometimes someone says “I love you” so clearly that adding the words would only ruin it.

I don’t remember who moved first. I just remember her arms around me, and her face in my hands, and the feeling that I couldn’t spend another second of my life not kissing her. So I did. Now I tasted it, creamy pistachio, sweet like a spring forest. And a tinge of metallic rain. And her, just the way I’d imagined she would taste. I couldn’t stop kissing her. Not when she fumbled at the door lock, or when I pushed her up against my bedroom wall and began to unbutton her shirt. Or even when all that remained of me was a blur of hue and light, a watery painting of a girl, dripping onto the floor in pools of rain tinted a million different colors.

(—Bergen, Vada. Just Like I Dreamed. Watercolor on paper.)

Ellis laid her palm over my right ribs.

We always knew we’d get matching tats. Every day at work I’d seen cautionary tales—cheesy quotes, cliché platitudes—and vowed we’d be better. Weirder. Quirkier. We’d pick something only two people on earth would understand. A memory so vivid it would rip us straight out of the present no matter where we were.

Mine: a spoonful of pistachio gelato, melting, painterly streaks trailing down my ribs. Hector did a perfect job copying my drawing. Hers: a spoonful of mango. I’d inked her myself.

My art, my ink in her skin, forever.

“I remember everything,” Ellis said. “Was that the experiment?”

“There was no experiment. I lied. I just wanted to hold your hand a little longer.”

She stepped away, shaking her head. But she looked infinitely pleased.

I tried to picture Blue here instead. It was impossible to imagine anyone else in her shoes. There was no one like her.

As we walked I snapped photos, her jacket and hair vibrant against the leaden sky. Metal and rust. We angled toward the wharf, to the cyclone fence hung with locks, and searched in tense silence till we found it. The brass lion’s head. VB + EC carved into the patina.

“I used to come check on this guy,” I said, rubbing the lion’s nose. “Every day. I convinced myself that when you were finally over me, you’d take him down.”

The wind lashed her hair across her face. “Does this answer your question?”

We were both quiet on the way to the promenade. She padded up the porch steps while I stood on the lawn, remembering. A year ago I’d walk into our house and find her curled on the sofa with a comic book and hot cocoa, an extra mug waiting. I’d leave my scarf and boots on and pull her outside. Come with me, Elle. The sun is falling and the water looks like paint on fire. Come see.

“Vada?”

I pointed. “I used to sit in that window and watch you go for runs. There’s the hallway with the floor that creaked at night. You’d wake up and make me check for ax murderers. And there’s our old bedroom.” I looked at her. “We didn’t pretend anymore. No more separate rooms. Remember?”

In the distance, the sorrowful clang of a ferry bell, the seesaw screams of gulls. Here, a dull ache in my right arm and the center of my chest. And somewhere far away, a wrecked car rusted in a scrapyard and a gravestone grew lichen in a cemetery near the sea.

I walked past her, into the house.

Inside: big and open, rafters exposed, red iron staircases, track lights. Ellis said I liked it because it looked like a gallery. All over the whitewashed brick, in pops and splashes of color, was something that stopped me dead.

My art.

Paintings. Drawings. Tattoo plans. Casual sketches, pencil-smeared and water-stained. Even the ballpoint napkin doodles. Everything I’d left behind or given her over the years.

I moved through them, feeling detached from the body beneath me.

It was like looking at my own work and a stranger’s at the same time. Definitely my style: jagged lines, dark and bold but breaking unexpectedly, splitting into fragments, as if I was so unstill I couldn’t see the world as solid. Watercolor washes bled through ink drawings, dripping down the paper. Wildness. Rage. An intensity I could only capture by hinting at how much I couldn’t capture, how I fought with brush and pen until they turned on me, shattered my lines, splattered paint.

When I reached the most recent ones I felt clammy, sick. It shifted from the fantastical—phoenixes and chimeras, weed-fueled weirdness—to human realism. Blythe dancing alone in a club, the only one in full color amid a sea of shadows, my tats alive on her arms. Armin in the DJ booth, one hand raised as the crowd gazed at him in rapture. Raoul, the only boy I’d semiseriously dated, flying kites with his kid brother, and Hector hunched over a customer with the needle, and strangers and one-night stands.

And Ellis.

Over and over. Five years of her.

My best friend. My world. My everything.

I stood in the middle of a stranger’s life work. My arms hung slack, hands useless.

Ellis came to my side. “What are you feeling?”

Crazy urges. About kerosene, and a match.

“Anger,” I said.