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“It does hurt.”
“And we have to do it anyway?”
“You’ll thank me later.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
The door opened. Annie emerged slightly pink, walking with the careful dignity of someone recalibrating her entire relationship with her body. She sat down next to Sage. A beat of silence.
“Well?” Sage asked.
Annie considered. “I’m going to say something and I need you to not make it weird.”
“Okay.”
“…I kind of get why people do that.”
Sage stared at her.
“Don’t make it weird,” Annie said.
“I’m not making it weird—”
“Your face is making it weird—”
“My face is just my face—”
“Sage Thompson,” the aesthetician called pleasantly from the doorway.
Sage stood up. Squared her shoulders. Looked at Isabelle.
“If I die,” she said, “tell Cal I died thinking about him.”
“First…you’re not going to die. Second, I think he’d be flattered.”
“Why would he be—”
“Go.”
Sage did not die.
She did, however, say several words the aesthetician politely pretended not to hear, gripped the edge of the table hard enough to leave marks, and at one point made direct, desperate eye contact with the wall and whispered why in a tone usually reserved for existential crises.
When she came out, she walked straight to Isabelle, grabbed her by the shoulders, looked her dead in the eye and said: “I get it.”
Isabelle nodded. “I know.”
“Cal is going to—” Sage stopped. Blushed violently. “Never mind.”
Isabelle’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, sis? Please, tell me what Cal is going to feel when he—”
“Never mind, I said never mind—”
“Your face just told me everything—”
“Isabelle.”
