Rouge(50)

“Take My Breath Away” is playing all around us in Mother’s dark closet. Tom and I are dancing. I’ve never slow danced with a boy before, apart from once in Stacey’s dream. I watched Stacey do it with Gabriel Gardner at our grade six dance, while I waltzed with Ms. Said. They put their hands on each other’s shoulders and rocked like they were on a boat. Their arms were so straight, like zombies. Later, Stacey said it was so hot.

Slow dancing with Tom Cruise is nothing like that. It is incredible. His cold, sticking hands on my shoulders, only a little lower than his thanks to Mother’s shoes. His red eyes locked with my eyes. His smile making my skin shiver and burn like it’s freezing and on fire at the same time. He’s lighting me up on the inside. Like I’m a candle in Grand-Maman’s dark church. He tells me he has a castle by the sea. In a land far away. He doesn’t tell me this in words so much. We speak in another language. A language of eyes. Tom’s eyes. And his smile full of white teeth, sharp and long.

“I like your shoes,” Tom says, just like Tom would. He’s very serious about it. “Wow,” he whispers, shaking his head at my feet. “They’re so pretty.”

“Thank you,” I whisper. I don’t tell him that they’re Mother’s.

“So pretty,” Tom repeats. Not looking at my feet anymore. Looking into my eyes, the color of mud. “Like you.”

And when he says this, tears fall. I lower my head so Tom can’t see.

“I’m not,” I say, shaking my head. I shouldn’t be telling him the truth about how I feel. “Mother’s the one who’s beautiful,” I say to the red shoes. “Not me.” The words just fall from my mouth like leaves from a tree. There’s a game the girls at school play called Honestly. We sit in a circle and take turns closing our eyes. When you close them, you ask the circle, Am I beautiful? and people raise their hands if they think Yes and don’t raise them if they think, No, sorry. And someone counts the hands for you, and that’s how you know honestly. The last time we played, every girl, when she closed her eyes, sang, No one is raising their hand, no one is raising their hand, and we all laughed, though mostly we raised our hands. When it was my turn, I closed my eyes and sang, No one is raising their hand, no one is raising their hand, and no one laughed. How many hands? I asked when I opened my eyes. One, said Valerie, who was our Counter, who Mother said looked like a gopher. She’d had three hands. Well at least now you know honestly, Ashley said. She’d had five. I nodded. Now I knew honestly. Ashley looked at me like sorry, like maybe she was the one who’d raised her hand. But I knew who it was because I’d peeked. Stacey. She’d even glared at everyone like seriously? Later, I told Mother about this game and she looked at me for a long time. I don’t want you playing that fucking game ever again, she said.

Why?

Because it’s stupid, that’s why. She lit a cigarette. On the TV screen, Grace Kelly was about to change from a beautiful evening dress into an even more beautiful nightgown while Jimmy Stewart sat in his pajamas and watched from his wheelchair. Go, Mother said to me, eyes on the screen.

I thought we were watching right now.

I don’t want you watching right now.

Where do I go?

She shook her head at the screen. I don’t know. Run. Climb a tree or something, okay? Climb a rock. Be a kid.

So I went outside and sat on a rock until it was dark. Until I heard Mother’s voice calling me. Sounding soft now. She looked beautiful in the doorway watching me walk toward her. If she closed her eyes in any circle, I know everyone in the circle would raise their hands.

Now Tom lifts my chin so my eyes look right into his eyes, blue-green again. Tom’s face is inches from mine. Still serious, a little angry, maybe. Glowing like he’s lit by his own personal sun. So beautiful, I can’t breathe. “Forget about Mother,” he hisses.

“Forget about Mother?”

“Her Beauty’s a lie, a trick. Not like yours.” And he smiles like I’m sweet. When Tom says the word Beauty, it sounds like he’s uttering its name.

“Mother is the moon to your sun,” he says.

And then in Tom’s eyes, I see the sky and the sea all at once. Creatures gliding in deep, dark water. Above the waves, the bluest sky going up and up into black space. Eclipsed suns and a Milky Way of stars. I’m shivering and shivering from his touch.

“The moon is pretty,” I whisper, lost in the universe of Tom’s eyes.

“The moon is nothing,” Tom snaps. For a moment he looks angry. The universe goes red. Then he smiles again. “Without the sun, what’s the moon? Just a rock in the outer dark. Its illumination just a trick. Just a trick from the sun’s light, which it steals. And that’s what Beauty is too.”

“It is?”

“Definitely,” Tom says. He seems so sure. A smoke surrounds us like fog, like it does sometimes in movie scenes when people dance.

“Beauty,” Tom says through the smoke, “is a mystery, Belle. A spell. Some have it for real like the sun.” He smiles at me. “Or like this rose right here.” He takes the rose and tucks it behind my ear. “And you can have it for a while. You can bloom and bloom. But Beauty also disappears. Just like that. Here one day, then poof. Gone. Smoke and mirrors.”

“Where does it go when it goes?”