What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(50)

—

A GIRL at the desk next to Hercules’—Lakmini, Day thought her name was—wrote him a note; must have been a hot note because he fanned himself with it. But Miss Dayang Sharif couldn’t have cared less what the note said, no way.

—

WHO ARE THE Homely Wenches of today?

—

SHE WROTE about her first boyfriend, Michael, her first and only boyfriend to date. She’d been in love with him and they broke up but the love didn’t. In fact the love got—not truer, just better. Their friend Maisie’s parents were away on the same weekend as the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final so Maisie opened up her house to “all my Eurovision bitches,” which turned out to be not that many. Just Maisie, Day, and Aisha, until Michael showed up, with two friends, Luca and Thalia. A taxi pulled up outside of Maisie’s house and Michael, Luca, and Thalia got out, the three of them dressed in silk sheaths—real, heavy silk. Maisie rushed to the front door: “What? Who are they? Are the Supremes really about to come in right now? I must have saved a nation in a past life . . .”

—

IT TOOK DAY A COUPLE of hours to get around to talking to Thalia and Luca. She only had eyes for Michael. For the first time she was seeing that he had everything she coveted from pre-Technicolor Hollywood. Hip-swinging walk, lips that tell cruel lies and sweet truths with a single smile, eyelashes that touch outer space. If Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth had had a Caribbean love child, that child would be Michael just as he was that night. They hugged for a long time, and later they talked on the balcony outside. “Thank God for the Internet,” he said. “I wouldn’t have found Luca and T without it. All sorts of nutters out there, but mine found me . . .”

He settled on the name Pepper. Day remembered the rest of that night in stop-motion—galloping, shimmying, the speakers turned up so loud that the singing shook the air and the beat of the music was like being knocked on the head. The backbeat was a hammock you fell into. Ring a ring o’roses, pan flutes, trumpets, and yodeling—Day was holding hands with Luca, who held hands with Aisha, who held hands with Maisie, who held hands with Pepper, who held hands with her, dancing around in a circle with bags and coats stacked in the center, cheering for the countries whose stage performances made the most effort or projected the most bizarre aura. Luca and Thalia became Day’s too. “For life, yeah? Not just for Eurovision . . .”

Thalia didn’t even like Eurovision. She said she’d come along to meet Day. “This one’s always going on about you,” she said, gesturing toward Pepper.

—

DAY’S STEPDAD, Anton, who’d had trouble remembering Michael’s name, hailed Pepper with joy, even as he teased Day about the times she’d said Michael was the one. Day just shrugged. Pepper wasn’t always on the surface, but whether she was with Pepper as Pepper or Pepper as Michael, Day had found the one she’d always be young with, eating Cornettos on roller coasters, forever honing their ability to combine screams with ice cream.

—

SO . . . WHO is a Homely Wench?

—

DAY WROTE about Luca, muscular and much-pierced Luca, and how that first Eurovision they spent together his hair was the same shade of pastel mint as the dress he wore. He and Thalia were a bit older, in their early twenties. By day he sold high-fashion pieces: “Everyone wants to fly away from here but not everyone can make their own wings . . . so they buy them from me . . .” By night he was an unstoppable bon vivant, deciding what kind of buzz was right for that night and mixing the pharmaceutical cocktail that had the least tortuous hangover attached. He’d had nights so rough he could hardly believe he was still alive: “But this can’t be the afterlife. Ugh, it can’t be.” Luca laughs long and loud and his body shakes as he does so. He’s better at forgetting than forgiving; he says this is the only thing about himself that scares him. Speaking of him Day’s father says, “So . . . vulnerable,” at the same time as her stepdad says, “Brazen!” Neither is quite right. When Luca was younger he got kicked out of his parents’ house for a while; they’d hoped it’d make him less brazen, but it didn’t—he stayed with friends and got brasher, and when he came home it was like he took his family back into his heart rather than the other way around. Day knew Pepper and Luca were together. She’d also heard that Luca liked to pursue straight men. Thalia referred to this tendency as “Luca’s danger sport.” Pepper said Luca’d be fine. “He’s got us.”

—

OH, AND THALIA—DAY had to talk about T. Thalia’s aesthetic was the most civilian (Pepper had learned the most from her YouTube makeup tutorials) and Thalia was her full-time name. She was composed, reserved, she lived with an older man none of her friends had met; the only reason her friends even knew about the older man was because of a week when T had been ecstatic because she’d sold five triptychs and received a really considered, insightful note about them from the buyer. But then she found out the buyer was her boyfriend, so she was furious for a couple of days, and then the fury mingled with elation again. Luca argued that the boyfriend was merely investing in an artist who’d be famous one day, and whenever Thalia heard this she said, “Care,” to indicate that she didn’t. Thalia painted scenes onto mirrors, dramatic televisual two-shots from stories that had only ever been screened in Thalia’s mind. Her mirror paintings left gaps where the facial features of the characters would normally be, so that your face could more easily become theirs. T’s brushstrokes are thin, translucent, and mercurial in their placement; they swirl into one other. Her colors are white and silver. Around the images Thalia paints a few words from the script: an alphabet frame. Day’s favorite was a voiceover: