When We Collided(42)
My wings are wide and diaphanous—nylon stretched over thin, arced wire. I painted the inner parts with the eye-aching, perfect blue of a sunny day, but the edges are black as if dipped in ink. Between the two colors, I painted little rivers of veins like a leaf’s surface.
The true showpiece is not my meticulous wings but my vintage dress. I paid a small fortune for it, but this beauty is worth every nickel. It’s from the 1930s, a tight-fitting flapper dress slicked in glossy black beads. The hem ends in a fringe right about my knee, and the straps split into these fabulous V shapes across my bare shoulders.
Okay, fine, I’ll admit I’m wearing a very padded strapless bra, but this dress deserves truly divine cleavage, you know?
I’m wearing black satin pointe shoes, which don’t feel wonderful on my toes, but they look wonderful to my eyes and make me feel graceful, so there. I glued thick black lashes to my eyelids and lined them in a shimmering navy color. For once, I forgo the red lipstick for a cherry-blossom pink because that’s how the makeup spirit moves me.
Jonah wanted to pick me up, but I begged him not to. If there’s ever a night to zoom through town on my Vespa, it’s the night when I’m the most glamorous butterfly to ever waft the earth. I drive slower than usual, so that my wings are pushed straight back, and I feel somewhere between a superhero and a pageant queen waving in a parade, my true self.
Jonah’s waiting outside Tony’s, done to the nines in a black tuxedo, complete with tails and a white bow tie and vest and oh my stars. My hands go shaky as I park the Vespa.
“Happy birthday,” he says, before I even dismount. “Where’s your helmet?”
Oh, please, like I was going to mat down the hair I spent forty-five minutes on just for a two-minute ride at twenty-five miles an hour. As usual, Jonah out-parents every actual parent in the world. “So what are you supposed to be? Just, like, fancy man?”
He smiles and stiffens his arms at his sides, toddling back and forth on each foot. “Penguin.”
When I don’t react at first—for sheer, gobsmacked delight—his shyly prideful smile fades to doubt. “No? I thought it would go with your dress, and . . .”
I stop him with a kiss because it’s perfect and also because I’ve never kissed a boy in a tuxedo, and you know what? I could get used to it. I throw my arms around his neck and pull myself up to him a little, delighted by how anachronistic it feels, full-on making out in public while wearing vintage formalwear. Heavens to Betsy, forget this party, I’ll take him home and have a party of our own. But he straightens up, collecting himself again, and I’m surprised to find my pink lipstick has left no mark on his mouth. I’ll have to try harder next time.
“You look . . .” he begins, swallowing up my dress with his eyes. “Well. You know how you look.”
“I do.” With a curtsy, I accept his speechlessness as the compliment that it is.
He leads me to the side walkway, where there are lights and laughter twinkling from the patio. I’m holding my breath in excitement and all the extra air in my lungs makes my heartbeat more pronounced, thuddier against my rib cage.
Jonah opens the gate entrance, and my guests cry “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” so loudly that it’s like walking into a wall of sound, and the tears spring to my eyes, blurring everything into blobs of color and glowing light.
There are two picnic tables pushed together, lengthwise, with big pillar candles in lanterns down the center. The leaves are deep jade, crawling up the wooden trellises, and there are white fairy lights everywhere and Chinese lanterns that glow like planets suspended in the galaxy. And benches are filled with my mom and these beautiful people who barely know me and will not only show up but show up in costume. I can barely make them out, but I see the feathered pink flamingo costume that my mom was perfecting for herself this morning.
There should be a word for this feeling: spectacuclarity or burstsomeness. It’s too much to dam inside my body, and I cover my face just moments before the tears spurt out. I don’t even want to try to stop myself from feeling everything, from reacting the way I really feel, because I am only turning seventeen once, and I am honestly trying to live this life while I can. The emotion swells around me, into this huge, humid feeling that I must be doing something right.
“Viv,” Jonah whispers. “Please tell me that’s a happy cry.”
I slide my hands down an inch, so my fingertips rest right below my eyes. Jonah’s eyebrows are turned down, those dark eyes concerned and desperate to read me.
“This is literally the most wonderful thing that anyone has ever done for me,” I choke out. Then I laugh, partially so everyone knows I’m okay and partially because I feel half-hysterical with love and gratitude. “This is already the best night of my life, and it just started!”
Jonah guides me to my seat at the head of the table, and I clear the tears from my eyes to take in all my guests. Isaac is an owl, with a yellow construction-paper triangle taped to the noseband of his glasses. The bottom of Silas’s nose is painted black, and he’s wearing a sweatband around his head that is mounted with two long black socks—droopy puppy ears covering his own. Bekah is in what looks to be a store-bought bumblebee costume, perhaps a relic of Halloween past. Whitney’s dress is covered in glued-on white cotton balls, and little black sheep’s ears stick up from her curly, wild hair. My mom, the flamingo. Leah, my peacock, my tiniest friend. And, between them, Officer Hayashi.