On Rotation(17)

“I’m gonna piss myself,” she declared. “What if I use the men’s? There’s like, no guys here anyway, right?”

I looped my arm through Michelle’s just in case she decided to turn that idea into action.

“Girl, of course there are guys. We brought a guy.”

“Where’s the support, Angie?” To my horror, she tapped the girl in the sequined dress on the shoulder. “Hey. You. My friend’s a wuss. Wanna sneak into the men’s with me?”

The girl giggled, a tinny, happy sound. She had large, round eyes, with brows that turned up like a Precious Moments doll.

“I don’t know if I can use a urinal,” she said hesitantly.

“I’m sure we can figure it out,” Michelle said. She widened her stance and dropped into a squat. “Maybe we can back it up over it like this?”

“You realize men’s rooms have stalls, right?” I interjected. “Besides, the line’s moving. You’ll make it.”

Michelle did make it. No one pees faster than a bunch of girls terrified that they’re going to miss “their song” at a Bey concert. The line at the mirrors was another beast entirely, though; whatever time our fellow concertgoers had saved Valsalva-ing* the pee out of them was immediately squandered on making sure that their falsies were hanging on just in case their faces made it on the jumbotron. I squeezed past a row of girls reapplying their lipsticks to get to a sink. The girl from the line squeezed through beside me. She smiled. It was the same smile lone travelers had given me in hostels in Europe, inviting and shy and a little bit brave.

“I like your cat eye,” she said. “I can never get mine to look that clean. Plus, it’s hard to get eyeliner that’s black enough.”

“Drugstore, eight bucks,” I said, smiling back. Aside from cherry-red lipstick and foundation, she wasn’t wearing much in the way of makeup. “I have it with me, if you want me to do yours?”

She smiled brilliantly, revealing the tiniest, most charming gap between her two front teeth.

“Could you?”

We dried our hands. I located Michelle, who had found a sink on the far side, and gestured to her to join us. We made our way to the back wall, and I took the girl’s chin in my hand and tilted her head up.

“What’s your name?” I asked, uncapping my liner.

“Camila,” she said. “Yours?”

“Angie,” I said, then pointed to Michelle, who had an arm wound tightly around my waist. “The octopus is Michelle.”

“Nice to meet you, Camila,” Michelle said, squeezing tighter.

“Okay, now stay still. This eyeliner isn’t super forgiving, so if I jack your face up I’m making a run for it, okay?”

Camila laughed, then schooled her face into neutrality.

“Okay, okay. I’m trusting you!”

She was right to trust me; I’d been doing the same cat eye on my own face for the last three years. Camila maneuvered her way to the mirror to examine my handiwork, then giggled, pleased.

“Looks like I won’t have to beat you up,” she said. She looped an arm through the arm that Michelle had not already claimed. I would have found her easy touch presumptuous in any other situation, but Camila was like a puppy in the rain, lost, adorable, and searching for the first person who would offer her shelter. Who was I to turn her away? “I think you guys are sitting close to me. I’m in section 324. Do you think they’ll care if we sit together?”

I looked down at her, surprised and a bit impressed by her gumption. Before I could respond, Camila continued, her tone taking on a pleading edge.

“I’m here with my boyfriend,” she explained. “He’s not actually a fan, but I kind of made him come. But now it’s kind of weird, you know, ’cause it’s Lemonade? I don’t want to be singing ‘Sorry’ at him by myself?”

“Okay,” I said. “You can join us, but just warning you—my friends are a lot.”

Together, we walked to our section. Camila flashed the stadium worker a dazzling smile as she showed him her ticket, which was for the section to the left of us in the sparsely populated bleachers. He gave her a beleaguered look, just enough to let us know that we were inconveniencing him, and then let us through.

“We made a friend!” Michelle announced to the group, breaking out of my hold to bound toward Nia and company.

“Us too!” Nia said.

I peered around her, to where Diamond and Markus were standing, Diamond with her arm around a new guy who was not Markus, her face alight with the most genuine smile I’d seen on her since we’d met. From this distance, I could tell that the guy she was talking to was cute. My body knew that it was attracted to his before it could register that it had felt this particular attraction before, to his even brown skin and arms that were not thick with muscle but instead threaded with sinew and thick black hair that looked so much better up in a ponytail and would probably look best mostly hacked off—

You have got to be kidding me.

The boy turned around, a ready smile on his face. It was Ricky. Of course it was Ricky. And of course Camila was peeling away from me to lope toward him, because he was her boyfriend, of course he was, and my stomach was sinking deep into the cradle of my hips and the alcohol that I had drunk two hours before burned the back of my throat.