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?”
“Where we all go in the end.”
“Where’s that?” I ask, afraid. Thinking of my father. I remember almost nothing about him. Just a lullaby he sang to me once about a goose and a duck. Mother says he’s in heaven now, he’s all the stars I see, and if I look up, I’ll see him there in the twinkling lights, looking down on me. Waving. Now I feel bad about taking off the bracelet with Father’s eye.
Tom just smiles at me like I’m sweet again. Where we go isn’t up there with the stars, his face says. Trust me. I don’t want to know where we go.
“When Beauty goes, it fucks with people, Belle.”
“Fucks with them,” I say, mesmerized by Tom saying the word fuck. My own mouth saying a word Mother once smacked out of it.
Tom nods slowly. He leans into me close. “They’ll do anything to get it back. Even stealing Beauty that doesn’t belong to them.”
“Really?” I whisper. “They do that?” I think of Mother’s mean face.
“Oh yes. It happens all the time,” he says softly. He fingers the rose in my hair.
I flush. Lower my eyes to Mother’s shoes. “That’s so bad.”
“It’s the worst,” Tom says, sighing like he knows. His breath like a breeze on my neck. I’m sure he knows all about this. People must try to steal Tom Cruise’s Beauty all the time.
“But you know what you have to do, of course,” he says. “When they steal it.”
“Take it back,” we say at the same time. And then I smile.
“How?”
And now Tom smiles too. Tom’s smile. My body is jelly. Cold hands on my face making me shiver even as I burn. The smell of him like oceans and sky and something else, something that makes me think of creatures gliding in deep water. “Magic.”
Suddenly, his expression darkens. Like the sun on his face went behind a cloud. His smile disappears. “I have to go.”
“No! Wait. Take me back with you, Tom Cruise,” I whisper. “Please.”
There’s a flash of anger in his eyes. Then he sighs. Strokes the side of my face with his cold, sticking hand. Not like Mother does. Not like I’m some pet. Like I’m his lover. I don’t know what a lover is exactly, but somehow I know that’s what I am to Tom Cruise.
“My name’s not Tom,” he says. “It’s Seth.”
“Seth?” But you’re Tom Cruise, I know you are. He looks exactly like the Tom I saw in the movie except for the red in his eyes sometimes. But Tom’s face says he’s just told me his name. And that it’s a secret. Like the rose. Like this dance. Like the fact that I’m his lover. And I can keep secrets, right?
Don’t fucking tell anyone, Stacey said when we first started hanging out. Just after the Honestly game. I went up to her in the schoolyard the next day while she was with the grade seven girls. You raised your hand for me, I said, and all the girls smiled sideways and Stacey told me to fuck off. Later, though, she came up to me. Hey, she whispered. They’re just being little cunts, the girls in your grade. That’s what she called them, the girls in your grade, though technically it was her grade too. Come over sometime, she said. Maybe we can rate each other or something. Okay, I whispered. I had no idea what she was talking about. And that’s how it started. After school we’d go to her house, which it turned out was only a block from my apartment. It felt like a different world with its huge rose garden and its many floors. She’d lead me through the bright red flower beds spiky with thorns, and then through the back door, down to her basement. There she’d change into a black bodysuit and lower the lights. Tell me to sit on the plaid couch covered in the hairs of her many golden dogs. Then she’d turn on Flashdance and dance it for me until she collapsed. My job was to rate her ability to be Jennifer Beals on a scale from 1 to 10. At first I gave her all 10s, but then I learned to give her an 8.7 or a 9.2 sometimes so she’d trust me. So she’d know I was really honestly watching each time. Don’t fucking tell anyone we do this, Stacey said. It’s secret.