Page 54

It starts with a tube of red lipstick.

I buy the lipstick on the way home from my little curb meeting with Sloane. It’s the same shade as my original one, the one Diablo loved so much. It isn't hard to find. I mean it's a drugstore red, $4.99, the cheapest ballsiest thing I’ve ever bought.

Then it sits on the edge of my bathroom sink for two days, taunting me, daring me to put it on.

Because here is what a tube of red lipstick means to a woman like me.

For a period of time, red belonged to the Diablo. It existed only between eleven p.m. and somewhere way too late, on the face of a woman who wasn't real and could not be traced back to the girl who said good morning to the sides of people's faces. Agnes wore beige. Agnes wore whatever you wear when the entire point is that nobody remembers you were in the room. That was the arrangement I made with the world at about age nine, and it kept me safe for a long time. Stay small, stay quiet, stay the color of a wall. Nobody messes with something they can’t see.

Except Sloane was right. It didn't work. I turned myself into wallpaper and they hurt me anyway. Invisibility was never a fortress. It was just a smaller, sadder place to hide while life happened around me.

So the red lipstick is not about the guys. I need to be clear with myself about that, standing at a cracked mirror in a bathroom that all mine. This is not war paint for a fight with Beck Cross. It isn't a costume for Diablo, either.

It’s the first time in my life I am going to wear the loud thing and the quiet thing on the same face, in the daylight, on purpose, and dare the whole world to look.

I open the tube.

I take a deep breath to steady myself because the last thing I need is red lipstick down my chin. I mean, hell, it’s just a lipstick I remind myself, not a loaded gun. But my body is catching up to what my head knows, that this is one of the bravest things I’ve done in twenty-eight years of surviving. Braver than CamALot and Diablo. Braver than any night in the nine-dollar slip, because on the website I had a fake name to hide behind. Here, there’s only Agnes, busting out. All of her.

I put it on.

And then I make myself look.

There she is. Both of them. The careful one and the reckless one, the angel and the devil, Agnes and Diablo, in one unremarkable bathroom mirror. I don't flinch away from either one. I look at the woman in the glass, all drugstore red mouth and a heart that’s been through it and I think, there you are, girl. I've been hunting for you my entire life, and you were sitting under the beige the whole time.

I don't cry. I'm done crying. I laugh instead, at the drama of it, at the $4.99 drugstore bravery of it, at the woman in the mirror I'm looking straight at. My laughter rings off the bathroom tile, loud and ridiculous and all mine, bitches.

Then I cap the lipstick and put it in my bag, its permanent home, and I think about the plan. Such as it is.

No more beige. No more hiding behind a misspelled name on a temp form. No more sitting in a dental office answering somebody else's phone, waiting for life to come get me, because the hard lesson of the last weeks is that it doesn't work that way.

You want to be seen? You walk out into the light where they can actually see you.

I don't know what's out there for a woman like me. Red mouth, no cover, both halves showing at once. I don't even know if the thing I want most is still on the table, or if I burned it to the ground for good with everything else I owned.

But I am done hiding to find out.

For the first time since the worst day of my life, I look at the woman in that mirror, and I cannot wait for tomorrow.

18

AGGIE

At the end of my shift, the red lipstick is still on my mouth. This shit’s got some real staying power.

Before I head home, I check it twice in the break-room mirror and pat myself on the back for my $4.99 bargain. Then I push open the front door of the dental office to head home.

And I stop dead on the mat.

Because three men in the most expensive suits anybody's ever seen on this side of town are standing in the strip-mall lot, between the nail salon and the payday-loan place. Beck. Elias. Theo. At my workplace. In my life. Looking about as at home as three tigers at a bus stop, and not one of them looks like he cares.

Here's the ridiculous part. I'd been planning to go see them. All day, between phone calls, I'd been working up the nerve to do the bravest, stupidest thing I could think of. Finish my shift, take the bus across town, walk into Ardent Capital as my whole self, red mouth and all, and see what kind of mess I could stir up. Diablo would have called it balls-out. Agnes would have called it a death wish.

Turns out, I don't have to go anywhere. The guys came to me.

While I’m trying to get over my shock, every instinct I built over twenty-eight years screams at me to shrink, go beige, run and hide. Then I remember the drugstore red on my lips, and disappearing is off the menu. For good.

So I walk right up to them. Red lipstick, cheap blazer, dental-office lanyard and all.