Work Text:
On one of the rare occasions she biked past the Brandmans’ massive house before meeting KJ, Mac remembers thinking, Goddamn. The people in a house like that must have absolutely zero problems. She’s learned two big things from KJ since then. First, that they do deal with real problems she was too stupid to realize before; but also, that Mr. and Mrs. Brandman are world-class fucking experts at turning molehills into mountains, taking a stupid little mistake or problem that one of them (usually KJ) has made and carrying on about it like it’s the end of the world.
Mac still thinks that’s stupid, but right now, she thinks it might also be contagious. Because after just three hours inside their mansion, she has what she knows objectively is a stupid little problem, but she still feels like if she can’t fix it soon, she might have to jump out the window and hope she croaks on impact with the lawn.
The issue at hand: she and KJ are both laying in KJ’s room staring at the ceiling, Mac on the bed and KJ on the floor like the freak she is, and both of them are bored as shit.
See, KJ’s parents are out of town overnight for some conference in Cleveland, and in a brilliant, bullshit plan that Mac has no clue how she pulled off, KJ sidestepped the Brandmans’ attempts to find her an overnight chaperone by convincing them that a sleepover with her “incredibly responsible” friends was just as safe. Probably helped that her parents didn’t know Mac was coming, much less that Mac is the only one actually staying past 8:30 PM, because Erin isn’t allowed to spend the night at people’s houses and Tiff declared at the start of the evening that she would leave early with Erin in “an act of solidarity.” (Mac would think that meant Tiff plans to sneak into Erin’s room so Erin can be part of an all-night sleepover too, which would actually be a pretty good plan, except that Erin shares a room with her little sister — who would absolutely snitch — and also, if they were planning that, why wouldn’t they tell Mac and KJ about it? Tiff could have left them one of her walkies and they could’ve called between their houses? Whatever. Mac’s friends are weird sometimes. She’s learned to let it be.)
And Mac’s not a stranger to sleepovers anymore, okay. But she has no idea how to get through one at the Brandmans’, or with just two people. Before, the girls have always slept over at the Quilkin household. Tiff has the best gaming system known to man and enough games to last until they all collapse over their controllers, and her parents are so used to sleeping through late-night digital battles that they aren’t too disturbed by the sounds of a few extra girls in the living room. But KJ’s house doesn’t have video games. It does have a massive TV, but they’ve already exhausted their movie supply tonight, and torn through all the movie snacks to boot.
They’ve got movie-watching down to a science; but only between all four of them. Erin’s usually the one to pick what they watch: she’s seen more TV and movies than the rest of them combined, though it’s mostly older stuff, nothing fresh enough for theaters. Lately she picks a lot of sci-fi flicks, packed with colorful lasers and pieces of “futuristic technology” that look like something Mac would find (and smash) at the metal yard. Tiff is starry-eyed obsessed with those kinds of movies: they all take care to pass her water or soda every so often to keep her from going hoarse as she rambles about the lighting and the special effects, deciphering aloud how the filmmakers did it and how she could do it better.
KJ isn’t as vocal as Tiff, but at least a few times per movie, she busts out some comment that’s either bizarrely insightful or just bizarre—shit like “the way the camera pans up to the sky really makes you realize how much he’s lost,” or “this would be so much cooler in black and white” (an opinion no one else ever shares). And Mac makes a valuable contribution by declaring “I could take that guy” whenever some new fucked-up creature comes onscreen. This never fails to inspire a rousing debate. The others all agree she could kick ET’s wrinkly ass, but refuse to acknowledge that she’d have a shot against the dude from Ghostbusters, even though he’s literally a marshmallow. Dickheads.
Anyway, they finished both of the movies they’d rented before Erin and Tiff left. And Dylan managed to steal back the stick-and-poke supplies that Mac stole from him last week, which fucking blows because giving people tattoos would have been the highlight of the sleepover. The others would have been so surprised and impressed when she pulled the stuff out of her jacket and announced that Mac’s Kickass Ink was open for business. Whatever. She’ll get more eventually.
But for now, there's no gaming, no more decent TV, and no tattoos to get them through the night. And KJ is the biggest goddamn night owl Mac’s ever met, probably for the same reason she took the paper route job – because the fuck-you-o’clock hours of the night are the only time she doesn’t have to worry about her parents breathing down her neck. In her ideal world, she’d stay up until 3 AM every night, and during a sleepover, she should damn well get to. And there’s no way Mac’s gonna fall asleep like a baby while KJ’s still up and farting around. Not even if KJ’s bed feels like a goddamn cloud. No, Mac is here to entertain, baby. She just needs an idea of something to entertain with. She rolls to the edge of the bed and looks down at KJ, who’s still giving the ceiling a thousand-yard stare.
“Wanna play cards?” she asks. Surely the Brandmans have a deck somewhere.
KJ scoffs, her eyes flicking to Mac’s face. “Hell no. You always cheat.”
“It’s no fun otherwise!” Mac argues. “Maybe if you learned to cheat, then-“
“Then nobody would want to play with me either. No thanks.”
“Pussy.” Mac reaches for the memories from her brief and humiliating Sweet Valley High phase; the weeks she spent poring over every volume the library had, feeling alternately wistful and angry at every glimpse she got of richer-girl, normal-girl life. What did Jessica and Liz and all their friends and enemies do at sleepovers? Unfortunately, almost everything she can remember involves more than two people. “Makeover?” she suggests sarcastically, picking the lamest option she remembers, because she can trust KJ to know it’s a joke.
Instead of responding out loud, KJ turns her head towards Mac. Her eyes look extra dark, somehow, and extra wide, the way they get when she’s turning something over in her head.
Mac’s stomach does a funny little flip. “Kaje?” KJ has to know she was joking. Tiff and Erin actually lobbied for a group makeover at their first-ever sleepover, and KJ and Mac protested until Tiff’s mom told them to keep it down. Tiff and Erin ended up doing each other’s makeup while Mac and KJ offered color commentary from the sidelines, pretending to be ultra-knowledgeable fashion consultants: they adopted bad French accents in near-unison and made Erin choke on a Coke and ruin her lipstick.
The two of them haven’t always been on the same page about everything, not by a long shot, but Mac’s always thought that she and KJ have a mostly-unspoken agreement about this — that they feel the same kind of nauseous at the idea of wearing dresses and makeup, or ditching their nicknames to become Mackenzie and Karina, or any of the shit people tell them they’ll grow into one day. Before KJ, Mac used to get..worried about it, sometimes. She knows that all the shit idiots like to get on her case for, it just shows she’s practical and tough — she wears her brother’s old clothes so she doesn’t have to save and scrape for new ones, cuts her hair short so it can’t tangle or get pulled in a fight so easy, cuts her name short because Mackenzie sounds like someone who’s easy to mess with but Mac sounds like the moment when a good punch lands, that one perfect second before your hand can start to hurt or the other guy can get you back. But sometimes she’d still wonder if all those logical, normal decisions could add up to something that wasn’t normal, if maybe the guys who holler freak at her when she bikes past aren’t purely talking out of their asses.
But then came KJ, who shortens her name too and once dressed as Wayne Gretzky for Halloween and wears as little girly stuff as her mom will let her get away with. KJ, who Mac felt like she already recognized somehow the first time they met, who made a little voice in her head yell like me, she’s like me. And yes, KJ is kind of a freak — for fuck’s sake, she knows every stage of what happens when a body decomposes and has brought that shit up over lunch, when people were trying to eat — but she’s not, like…gross or fucked-up or something. She’s just weird. Weird isn’t so bad, especially if you’ve got someone else to be weird with, who you can roll your eyes with and act like everybody else are the weird ones compared to you.
Mac’s never thought to worry about losing that. About losing the KJ she knows to eyeliner and dresses and the things her parents want. Oh, god, what if KJ doesn’t just change, she decides that Mac should change too? If she wants to, like, put makeup on Mac, eyeliner and lipstick and shit – what if she likes how Mac looks in it, and then Mac has to live with that, knowing that every time KJ sees her face afterward she’ll think could look better, could look pretty, if only she would try –
KJ still hasn’t said anything.
“Jesus fuck, I was joking,” Mac says loudly and acidly, feeling like some scaly sci-fi-flick parasite is crawling up through her throat.
“I know that, Mac,” KJ says. The exasperation in her voice pops some of the little anxious bubbles in Mac’s chest, because an annoyed KJ is familiar ground. “I was just thinking, like…” Her voice is a little too high to sound casual. “Have you ever worn a suit?”
“Uh…no?” Mac doesn’t think anyone in her family owns one, even. Dylan and her dad have rented them a couple times for funerals and shit, but obviously she’s never…. “Have you?”
“Nope. But…” KJ’s eyes flick to her open door and the hallway beyond. “My dad never gets rid of clothes. Not the nice ones, at least. He still has suits from when he was a kid.” One corner of her mouth pulls up. “And he was really short back then, so they might even fit you.”
“Fuck you,” says Mac, who is a perfectly normal height. It’s not her fault KJ grows like a giraffe on steroids. Mac actually caught up to her not long after KJ turned 13, but before Mac could turn 13, KJ got another growth spurt, and today Mac has to tilt her chin annoyingly far back to see KJ’s face when she stands in front of her. It makes her feel dizzy.
“Seriously, though,” KJ says, a tiny waver in her voice. “We could. Only if you wanted to, I mean.”
Suits. Huh. Mac’s never thought about that shit before, because, well, why would she? No one’s ever going to hand her down one of those. And wearing a suit, it’s not exactly tough – well, maybe movie-action-hero tough, but not the kind of tough you get to be in real life. And it’s pretty much the opposite of practical.
But fuck, sleepovers aren’t that practical, fun isn’t always that practical, and here she is anyway. If KJ wants to do this, then agreeing is just the good-guest thing to do. And they need to kill time one way or another. And if Mac ends up looking stupid, well, KJ has seen Mac puke and bleed and even cry a couple times. This can’t be worse, right?
“What the hell,” Mac says, swinging her legs over the side of the cloud-bed. “Let’s go.”
KJ’s dad’s closet (her parents have separate bedrooms with closets and individual little bathrooms attached, can you fucking believe) is gargantuan. Mac’s the one to fling its doors open, but when she gets a glimpse of the contents, she finds herself faltering, unsure where to start.
As it turns out, she doesn’t need to. KJ goes for the clothes with the same almost-grim focus she gets on the hockey field, yanking pieces off the hangers quickly and methodically, like she has a plan. Like maybe she’s thought about this before, what she’d do with these clothes if she was left unsupervised. She doesn’t pause until she draws near the cluster of hanging ties, when she stops and looks back at Mac. “Do you wanna pick one?”
Mac would, but she kind of wants to see what KJ will pull out. “Nah, you pick for me. You’re on a roll.”
KJ turns and actually plunges into the ties with her whole body, like they’re jungle vines or some shit. Thirty seconds later, she emerges with ties hanging from both hands. Mac makes grabby hands in her direction, and KJ passes her a strip of shiny cloth. It’s light, bright green, like new spring leaves, and covered with even shinier black swirls.
“Badass,” Mac says. It comes out of her mouth almost reverently. It’s not the right word, she knows, but KJ clearly gets what she means, ducking her head with a proud little smirk. The tie in her other hand is deep midnight blue, flecked with shimmering golden dots. Pretty neat, even though Mac’s is cooler.
“You can change in the bathroom,” KJ says, shoving one of the piles of clothes she’s made towards Mac with her foot. Then she scoops up the other pile and darts out through the bedroom door. Mac’s not sure why she’s leaving, but maybe she’s trying to be polite? Whatever. She picks up her pile of clothes and carries them into the blindingly white bathroom.
The pants and jacket KJ gave her are deep gray; Mac reaches to compare the color to something and finds that she can’t. All the grays she knows are from metals, and storm clouds, and fucking…pigeons, and shit. Nothing right for this soft, slippery, fancy fabric. The shirt is white and crisp, apparently cleaned recently even though no one’s probably worn it for fucking years. The shoes are black and so shiny that Mac’s half-afraid to touch them in case her fingers scuff them up, and half-desperately wants to scuff them up, just to take the overwhelming gleam down a notch. She compromises by putting them on and imagining how scandalized Mr. Brandman would be if he saw her worn-out holey socks touching these shoes, although the pant legs are long enough that you can’t really see the socks at all.
Piece by piece, Mac puts it all on. She keeps her back to the mirror at first, but when she gets to the tie, she quickly realizes there’s no way she can get this thing on without a better view of what she’s doing. So she takes a deep breath and turns to face herself.
Back up for a second: Mac’s clothes don’t usually fit her that well. Even on the occasion she gets new clothes instead of taking what Dylan’s outgrown, the new things are a size or a few sizes too big, so she can keep wearing them for a while even if she grows. She knows clothes aren’t supposed to sag and bag the way hers do, but she kind of likes the way they prevent you from seeing what she looks like underneath. It makes her feel mysterious, which makes her feel safer — if people can’t figure out how much mass or muscle she’s working with or even what’s in her pants, maybe they’ll read her as more of a threat than a target, and leave her alone.
The few times she’s worn clothes that really fit, tight to the skin — like her ugly-ass church outfit, gifted to her by the one aunt with a bit of money and a hard-on for Jesus — they’ve always made her feel stupid as fuck. Not just stupid, but vulnerable, and raw like sunburned skin. Without her protective layers of jacket and flannel, it feels like anyone who looks at her is seeing far too much of her – all the places where she’s weak, too skinny or too soft – and yet not really seeing her at all. The girl in the bathroom mirror after she shits at Easter service, that’s not Mac. That’s fucking Mackenzie.
But…KJ’s dad must have been a real twig as a kid, smaller than Dylan’s ever been, because his old clothes actually fit Mac pretty well. Not skintight, but — they don’t sag or hang, especially once the shirt is tucked into the pants. Well, the blazer hangs a bit, adding a boxy shape that she likes. But even though she’s wearing two long-sleeve layers with that, the sight of herself still makes her feel like something’s been peeled away. Only not like her aunt’s dumb blouse and skirt, which strip off everything that keeps her safe, everything she likes about herself, and leave behind some pathetic chick she doesn’t want to recognize.
What she sees in the mirror right now? It makes Mac feel like…like she’s one of those rocks Tiff brought back from her summer camp in Arizona. Geodes. They look like normal rocks on the outside, but if you cracked one open or scraped off the plain gray outside, you’d find all these shiny crystals under the surface. And the crystals, they aren’t some soft lame part of the rock, they’d do some real damage if you smashed somebody with them. They’re still tough enough. They’re just bright and shiny and cool to look at, too.
Mac swore off trying to be pretty years ago. Trying only ever made her look bad and feel worse, and anyway, there were a million more important things to worry about. Pretty still isn’t the right word for how she looks right now. She doesn’t know the right word. But seeing herself in the mirror feels easier than it ever has.
And also, if she had sunglasses, she’d look a lot like the kind of movie-guy-in-a-fancy-suit who’s from the FBI or a secret government agency or some shit, which is fucking sick. Maybe she can find some sunglasses when she’s done with the tie.
However, the tie is proving to be a bigger roadblock than anticipated. It should be easy, because she’s good at knots; they never come undone once she ties them. That might get KJ in trouble with her dad, though.
“Hey, Mac, how you doing in there?” KJ’s voice floats through the door. “Need any help?”
“No,” Mac shoots back instinctively. “…maybe. Do you know how ties work?”
She hears KJ snicker, the asshole. “Come out and I’ll help.”
Mac unlocks and opens the door. Fortunately it swings in, because if she had opened it outward, she would have smacked KJ right in the nose. That girl has no fucking concept of personal space.
KJ immediately closes the remaining six inches between them and takes hold of Mac’s tie. Her hands move as fast as they did on the clothes hangers as she threads the ends up and around. “Why are you good at this?” Mac asks, half annoyed and half amazed.
“My mom taught me,” KJ says absently. Her fingers slow a little when she has to talk and move at the same time, but not much. “She always does it for my dad, so she says someday I’ll need to do it for-” Her mouth suddenly snaps shut so hard Mac can hear her teeth click together.
“For who?”
“All done!” KJ says, almost a yelp, as she gives Mac’s tie a final tug.
“For whoooo?” Mac prods again, widening her eyes to give KJ a creepy stare.
“For my husband, okay,” KJ says through gritted teeth. “Go look in the mirror.”
“What about yours?” KJ’s tie is still looped around her shoulders, untied.
“I can do it in a sec,” KJ says, actually taking hold of Mac’s shoulders and pushing as if she’s trying to spin her around. Jesus Christ, this weirdo. Is she that embarrassed about her mom being, like, kind of sexist? That’s not exactly news.
“Do you even know how, though?” Mac prods. “If your mom only taught you how to do it on your husband?”
“I can figure it out.”
“Or I can just do it for you,” Mac says, because she’s very generous. “Tell me what you did and I’ll do it back. That way we’re even.”
“What?” KJ says, blinking. “That isn’t – you don’t have to.”
“Yeah, dipshit, we don’t have to do any of this,” Mac says, grabbing both ends of KJ’s tie and pulling. “That’s the point. That’s what fun is. Now tell me how to do this right so I don’t strangle you.”
KJ rolls her eyes, but her smile takes any sharpness out of it. “Fine. First, you want the wide end to be longer…”
It takes her about four times as long as it took KJ, and KJ holds weirdly still the whole time, barely even breathing. What, does she think Mac’s so bad at this that inhaling too deep will fuck up her work, or something? Mac thinks about bringing it up, but decides the best response is just doing a damn good job with KJ’s tie, which she does, thank you very much.
Side by side, they step into the bathroom. In the reflection, Mac sees KJ’s eyes flicker to Mac’s outfit before her own. Mac feels unusually exposed under her gaze. KJ’s always looking at people like she can really see them, somehow, and having the suit on just…multiplies that. If Mac were a car, her hood would be popped right now, and KJ would be able to see all the guts and wires. It’s a little bit scary, but it would be a lot worse if KJ looked even a little bit judgmental or weirded-out. She doesn’t.
“You look really nice,” KJ says softly. Probably patting herself on the back for picking these clothes, which is honestly fair.
Mac turns to look at KJ, just so she can give her a decent compliment back, and finds herself almost choking on air.
KJ always looks pretty cool, okay. Even the first time Mac met her, in that dumb school uniform with the plaid skirt she hates, her face infuriatingly calm and guarded like she knew some shit Mac didn’t. Even in the dumb dresses her parents wrangle her into whenever they can, even when she’s roaring mad or embarrassed or sick as a dog from too much dairy, there’s always something kind of…magnetic about her, something that makes it easy to look at her and a little hard to stop.
That something is stronger than ever, with this outfit. Mac actually catches herself digging her heels into the ground, as if KJ could exert actual fucking gravity to draw her in. The deep black of her suit makes her hair and eyes look darker and deeper, too. Her jaw seems sharper, her shoulders broader and squarer, and she looks even fucking taller than usual, goddamn, are there lifts in her loafers or something? She can’t get any taller, okay, Mac can’t take any more of that dizzy feeling.
Mac’s seen this version of KJ before, in quick, occasional flashes. This is the KJ who, when Mac dared her to smoke a cigarette as fast as she could, gave her a slow smirk and finished it in three drags, barely coughing at all. The KJ who scored three goals in seven minutes at one of her hockey games and slammed the third one home so hard the puck ripped through the net. The KJ who Mac knows, though she’d never admit it, could almost definitely beat her in a fight. Sure, KJ’s never been through Dylan’s lessons in dirty fighting, but she’s quicker and taller and has bigger muscles, and if she really wanted to trap Mac for some reason, to pin her down or corner her against a wall or something, then she could. And Mac couldn’t actually hurt KJ, so she’d just have to let it happen. (They’ve never had a fight go that far, but Mac sometimes finds herself playing one out in her head, imagining how it’d happen if she and KJ went up against each other. Just to stay on her guard, or whatever.) The way mind-KJ looks when she boxes Mac in, looming tall, flushed and shining with triumph – well, that’s the KJ in front of her, more or less. A version stripped of the thin fog of worry that usually shrouds her, leaving her almost too bright to look at. But even if it hurts, you can’t stop looking.
“You look totally badass, Kaje,” Mac says through a dry throat. This time it is the right word. It has to be. It’s the best word she has. And it’s not like she’s going to say any of that weird shit her brain was churning out just now.
KJ’s mouth scrunches at the edges, like she’s trying not to let herself smile as widely as she feels like doing. She turns towards the mirror a little more, taking in her own reflection-
And instantly deflates. Her shoulders hunch up a little; her hand creeps towards her neck, like she’s reaching for the stupid silver necklace that usually hangs there.
“What’s the fuck’s wrong?” Mac demands. Is KJ really stupid enough to not like how she looks right now?
“My hair,” KJ says quietly. The hand by her neck reaches up to pull at a stray curl. “It doesn’t…it’s not right, with the suit. It’s too long.”
“You want me to cut it?” Mac offers.
KJ snorts. “Good one.”
“Seriously, though.” It was a joke when it left Mac’s mouth, but aloud, it sounds smarter than she gave it credit for. She could do that for KJ. Haircuts are classic sleepover shit, probably. “I could. I cut mine all the time.”
“I know that. But you can’t cut mine,” KJ says, curling a protective hand around her low ponytail.
“What, you don’t trust me?”
“Not with curls!” KJ says, batting at Mac’s bob like a cat might. “Your hair’s the straightest thing I’ve ever seen. And it still looks like fresh shit every time you cut it. No offense.”
Mac flips her off, but doesn’t protest otherwise. It’s not like she thinks her haircut is the fucking pinnacle of style.
“And – this is fun, but my parents will be home tomorrow,” KJ says, quieter. “And we’re still gonna live in Stony Stream. You know.”
Yeah, Mac knows. The things people have tried to say and do to KJ just when Mac’s been around – well, they can’t be a tenth of what happens when Mac isn’t there, and if KJ doesn’t want to add digs about her hair to that particular pile of shit, Mac can’t blame her.
Hell, there’s a reason Mac hasn’t cut her hair any shorter than a bob. She planned to go shorter, the first time she cut it. It was early in her paper route, right after some asshole tried to yank her off her bike by the hair. She’d been about to cut the first chunk off right at the roots. But with the scissor blades open, she’d thought about what Bryant Gibbs had said when he saw her in Dylan’s old jeans. Wondered what he might say if he saw her with Dylan’s old haircut next, and whether Dylan would be so willing to defend her this time. Her hand had jerked, and she’d ended up with one particularly weird, slanted cut in the eventual choppy bob. She has gotten better since that first haircut, though, no matter what KJ says. Last time, she even–
“Wait, wait,” Mac says, inspiration striking as she remembers the improvement she made last time. “You know what we could do that would be totally cool, and nobody’d have to know? Something like this.” She spins around and lifts the hair from the back of her neck, exposing the tiny shaved patch at the bottom with a flourish.
She hears KJ’s soft little gasp; feels it, too, warm breath ghosting over the back of her neck. Then there’s a tentative “Can I…?”
“Yeah, fuck, go for it,” Mac says. It comes out weirdly emphatically, considering she’s very calm about it.
Her skin is strangely sensitive there, though. She clenches her teeth so she doesn’t shiver as KJ’s chilly fingers graze her neck. Goddamn, that girl has bad circulation.
“Oh, it feels so nice,” KJ says, the pads of her fingers skating up and down the shaven patch.
“Awesome, right?” Mac says, pulling her hair a little higher to give KJ more petting room. “I just wanted to thin my hair so it wouldn’t tangle as much, but then it felt great too. Who knew.” Feels extra nice with KJ’s hands on it, despite the cold. “Shit, this could be, like, your lucky rabbit’s foot. Rub my head before hockey games or something. You athletes like that superstitious shit, right?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” KJ asks, ignoring Mac’s riffing.
Mac shrugs, her shoulder bumping into KJ’s arm. “Didn’t know you’d care?”
“But the texture,” KJ says softly, still stroking up and down. Her voice sounds just the way Mac felt, touching it for the first time. And yeah, okay, if she had let herself think about it for a second, she would’ve figured KJ would like this, that she’d feel the same way about it that Mac does.
“Well, told you now. So…would it help if I gave you one too?”
KJ’s fingers stop moving, still pressing lightly into her skull. “What did you do it with?”
“My dad’s clippers.”
KJ sighs. “My dad doesn’t have clippers.”
Rats. Mac blows a disappointed raspberry. “I could steal my dad’s? I mean, not tonight, duh, but next time?”
KJ’s fingers fall away from her neck. “You want…a next time?”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Of course there’s not going to be a next time. Because all of this – everything the two of them have done since Tiff and Erin left – is still weird, the kind of weird that’s only okay because it’s a sleepover, because they’re loopy from lateness and the five rolls of Sweet Tarts they split and they’ll forget all about it in the morning. And forgetting wouldn’t work if it happened again. Whatever happens tonight – this is all Mac can get.
“Nah, no, you’re right,” Mac says. “No next time. Just this time.” Just tonight. But since this is all they get, they should make tonight fucking count.
“Mac, I didn’t mean-”
“Shut up,” Mac says, hopping onto the bathroom counter. “Let me fix your fucking hair.”
KJ shuts up, and Mac grabs her low ponytail and stuffs it down the collar of her shirt, smirking as she remembers doing the same with a handful of snow last winter. Then she starts plucking out curls at the front, trying to make the whole thing look less obviously pulled-back. She’s working mostly at random at the start, just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, but a surprising amount does stick.
“How’s that?”
KJ looks in the mirror, gingerly touching one hanging curl. “...It’s better. Thanks, Mac.”
“No worries, just recommend my salon to your friends,” Mac says. “And also, find us some other fancy shit to go with this. Your dad’s gotta have more stuff we can fuck around with, right? Let’s go full hog.”
“Whole hog,” KJ corrects, but it’s absentminded; Mac can see that most of her brain is working on how to rise to Mac’s challenge. Taking a step back from the counter, she starts investigating its drawers, opening and shutting each one until she gets to the third one down on the left — eight tiny glass spray bottles lined up in neat rows. “Colognes,” KJ explains, handing one to Mac. “You can pick out what you like while I go get something.”
Then she leaves Mac behind to sort through colognes. She feels like she’s going to break the flimsy little bottles on accident, which kind of makes her want to break them on purpose, but she distracts herself from the urge with the smells of their contents. For herself, she picks one she thinks might be sandalwood; it smells like a fancy-ass version of the body wash she shares with Dylan. For KJ, one that reminds her of orange juice, tangy and sweet.
“Ooh, good pick,” KJ says on her return, spotting the orange-scented bottle in Mac’s hand. “I love that one.”
“Well, good, since it’s for you,” Mac says, spraying two pumps in her direction.
“You’re supposed to do it on your wrists or something!” KJ says, dodging the blasts. Then she halts, blinking weirdly in Mac’s direction. “Wait, you picked one for me?”
“Well, you got to pick a tie for me, so,” Mac says. (Okay, sure, she asked KJ to do that, and is realizing now that KJ had not asked her to pick a cologne for her, but whatever, it’s still only fair.) “Um, anyway, what’d you go get?
KJ digs into her pants pocket and produces…a light brown pencil? Wait, fuck, that’s not just any pencil. It’s eyeliner.
“What the fuck, KJ?!” Mac protests, pulling her hands up to protect her eyes.
“I’m not going to give you eyeliner, dummy,” KJ says, rolling her eyes. Keep doing that and they’ll stick that way, Mac thinks. “I was in a play one time, and they showed us how to do fake beards with these. Well, stubble, anyway. You want some?”
Huh. Mac doesn’t think Dylan or her dad look particularly good with stubble, but then again, neither of them has ever looked as good in a suit as she does in this one, right? “Fine, sure, fuck it,” she says, closing her eyes. “Just don’t give me some stupid little rat stache.”
“Oh, I’m definitely giving you a rat stache,” KJ says as she takes hold of Mac’s chin. But the tickling strokes of the eyeliner pencil don’t come near Mac’s upper lip, so Mac figures she’s safe. “Okay, done.” Goddamn, how is she so fast with this shit?
KJ’s good, too. When Mac looks at herself in the mirror, it looks…a lot less fake than she expected. She instinctively reaches up to rub at the stubble, and feels idiotic surprise when her hand meets regular skin instead of sharp hair.
“Mac! You’ll smear it!” KJ grabs her hand and starts wiping it down, finger by finger, with a tissue from the box by the mirror. Christ, she and Erin are both such fucking mother hens sometimes. But Mac’s learned to live with it by now. It helped when she realized they don’t do it because they think she’s not capable of doing shit for herself, but just because…they want to, or something. Takes different strokes to move the world, she guesses. And also, they’d do the same shit for Tiff, or each other, or a kitten they found on the side of the road.
“The beard looks pretty dope, Kaje,” Mac says, filled again with the spirit of generosity. “Want me to give you one?”
“Nah,” KJ says, dropping the eyeliner on the counter. “My mom doesn’t have a darker eyeliner, so it’d just look weird on me. Anyway, it wouldn’t – um.” Her cheeks redden a little.
“Wouldn’t what?”
KJ’s eyes dart over Mac’s shoulder. “I don’t think it’d look good on me like it does on you, is all.”
For a second, Mac’s mind is blank. Then it fills up with a memory of earlier in the night – KJ not protesting when Mac mentioned makeovers, Mac subsequently panicking, thinking What if she wants to put eyeliner on me? What if she thinks I look good like that?
Little did she fucking know, huh.
A snicker bubbles up in Mac’s throat. Pretty soon it’s a chuckle, then, like, a chortle or whatever, and then she’s hunched over and panting with laughter.
“What the hell is so funny?” KJ asks.
“Just thinking – oh, man, fuck –” Mac forces words out in between wheezes. “We’re like, so fucking good at – doing normal shit, huh? Like, check us out, we’ve got – dressup, and eyeliner, we’re – just totally nailing – a normal-ass sleepover–”
KJ starts snickering too, harder and harder, and before long she sinks to the ground, rocking back and forth there as she lets out giggles that sound like hiccups. Mac levers herself off the bathroom counter and joins KJ there in solidarity, leaning against the toilet. The floor is so bizarrely clean, though there’s drops of moisture on it now from where the cologne-mist settled. The scents of orange and sandalwood are still in the air; they smell even better together.
“Jesus, it’s only nine-thirty,” KJ says, looking at her watch as she wipes her eyes. “What else should we do? For this very normal sleepover? Um, truth or dare, paint our nails–”
“That could be fun,” Mac says.
KJ’s brow crinkles. “Mac, I don’t think I even own nail polish.”
“Not that, dingus. Truth or dare.” It’s totally Sweet Valley High, and maybe not even lame if you play it well. Why not, right?
“Just ‘cause Tiff and Erin aren’t here doesn’t mean I’m lifting your truth or dare ban,” KJ says firmly.
Oh, that’s why not. Mac had forgotten. “Just because you pussies can’t handle a decent dare-”
“Screw you,” KJ says, bumping Mac’s shoulder with hers. “Your dares weren’t fun. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t take them. Well, not that I couldn’t take them, anyway.”
“That’s true,” Mac has to admit. “You smoked that cig like a champ.”
KJ laughs a little. “Uh-huh. Right up until I threw up.”
“You what?” Mac reaches for that night in her head and oh yeah, huh, KJ had gone to the bathroom for a while after that. “You never said!”
“Didn’t want you to think I was a pussy.”
A little queasiness coils in Mac’s stomach. “So…why’d you tell me now?”
“I dunno.” KJ shrugs. “Guess I’m not as worried anymore about you thinking I’m lame.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you were lame,” Mac says, elbowing her. “I mean, I might have said it. But I wouldn’t have meant it.”
“I know that now,” KJ says. “Thanks, though. I’d never think you were lame either.”
“Well, obviously not,” Mac says, scoffing. “Also – look, what if we just did truths? No dares. Would that break the ban?”
KJ’s mouth screws up in thought. “I guess not?”
“Sick!” Mac’s not sure why she feels so laser-focused on this, but picking a weird idea and committing to it 110% has worked out pretty good so far, right? And truth or dare really is a normal sleepover thing, the kind of thing they can tell Tiff and Erin about later, as long as they explain that it wasn’t breaking the ban. “Your turn first.”
“Why me?” KJ protests. “I already told you about the cigarette thing. You go first.”
“That wasn’t part of the game!” Mac argues. “If I don’t get to use my genius dare skills, I should at least get to–”
“Fine!” KJ huffs. “I pick truth. Obviously.”
“Tell me…” Fuck, Mac should have made sure she had a good question before she started, huh. “...a secret?”
KJ laughs in disbelief. “Seriously? Secrets are, like, the entire point of this game, Mac, you can’t just say tell me literally any secret-”
“Okay, okay, you want more rules, fine,” Mac says. “Tell me…something that’ll surprise me. Knock my fucking socks off. And if it’s not good, you have to keep going.”
“What happens if I don’t?” KJ protests. “Anyway, you could just – lie, and say nah, I totally would have guessed that, tell me something else, and just make me keep going all night, that wouldn’t be fair–”
Mac rolls her eyes. “Fine, then fucking honor code. You try your best to come up with something good, and then even if it sucks, I won’t make you keep trying.” She’s pretty sure KJ has something in mind already. Her protests have taken on the nervous tone she gets when she’s thinking hard about something but trying not to, like when Erin sprained her wrist and KJ kept saying you’ll be fine, I’m sure you’ll be fine, there’s no way you won’t be fine.
“Fine. But for the record, you’re already almost as annoying about truths as you are about dares.”
Mac flips her off. “Less talking, more truthing.”
“Um.” KJ’s eyes dart around the room like she’s searching for an escape. “...Does it have to be my secret?”
“On one hand, I feel like it should,” Mac says. “But also, now I’m really curious about what poor sucker you’re planning to sell out.” Also, maybe this will give KJ an out if she needs one, because Mac doesn’t want to, like, actually make her feel bad. “So sure. Spill.”
KJ bites her bottom lip. “You can’t tell them I told you, okay?”
“Ooh, them? I’m getting two for the price of one?” KJ looks genuinely guilty, and maybe Mac should take the moral high ground and refuse to hear this entirely, but now she’s really curious. And a them is probably Erin and Tiff, and it’s not fair if KJ knows whatever secret they’re keeping and Mac’s the only one out left out. “I’ll keep my trap shut. Come on.”
KJ says in a rush, “Erin and Tiff kissed last week, and Erin said she thought it was a one-time thing, for practice, but then they left early tonight and I kind of think maybe that’s what they left to do? Not that it’s any of my business, but–”
“Slow the fuck down, Kaje,” Mac says. “Actually, just start over. What did Tiff and Erin do?” She misheard, probably.
KJ looks down at her hands. “Kissed? For practice? Because apparently Erin likes some boy at her school and she thinks he might like her too but she’s nervous to try and do anything about it since she doesn’t have any – experience, and Tiff said that since she’d kissed some boy at computer camp–”
“Like a computer geek would know shit about how to kiss,” Mac says, sort of on autopilot. Seems her joke skills are a little stronger than the slow, sticky, cough-syrup feeling that’s filling up her brain and drowning most of her thoughts before they can form. She’s felt this before. It started fucking with her vocabulary back in fall ‘88 – she’d open her mouth to call some dipshit a pansy or assmuncher or whatever, and then her head would start to feel weird and if she wasn’t careful she’d fall off her bike. Eventually she started throwing rocks instead and hasn’t really had the same issue since. But this feels like that same shit, only way stronger, and instead of the little whisper in her head going wrong, this is wrong, it feels more like it’s going right, this is right. Which doesn’t make sense, but it feels like it should, but it doesn’t–
“Well, Tiff said she knew how, and the easiest way to show Erin was to, y’know, show her,” KJ continues, apparently too wrapped up in her own brain to see how Mac’s is short-circuiting. “And then Erin called me the day after and asked if doing that really was normal, if – if liking it was normal.”
“What’d you say?” If Mac can’t manage to have thoughts of her own, KJ’s are the next best thing.
“I said I thought it was?” KJ says, her voice spiking high on the last word. “I mean, practice, that’s – supposed to be normal. One of my mom’s friends said once that it was, that like, pretty much all the girls our age did it when she was younger.”
Mac doesn’t remember that in Sweet Valley High. But then again, none of the books at the library showed those girls drinking or smoking, so they definitely cut some real-life shit out.
“And when you think about it, mouths probably can’t – be all that different, right?” KJ chatters on. “Especially if you’re imagining a boy, which Erin said she was doing for Tiff, so–”
“That seems hard,” Mac says. Her tongue feels thick and slow in her mouth. “Tiff doesn’t look like a boy.”
“Erin’s got a good imagination,” KJ argues. “And I mean, I don’t know, maybe if you gave her a hat or–”
The fabric against Mac’s skin feels like it has a heartbeat of its own. “Or a suit?”
KJ’s face goes fucking white. “Jesus, Mac, that’s not why – I wasn’t trying to make you look like – you don’t even, you just look like you! I mean, I wasn’t thinking about any of that when we started, I promise. I wouldn’t have – I know we couldn’t–”
Yeah. Yeah, they couldn’t, huh. The kind of girls who get to practice, they’re probably the kinds of girls who can see themselves in eyeliner – regular eyeliner – without wanting to melt their faces off. The kind of girls who are guaranteed to eventually get those boyfriends they practice for, and then get a husband and a house and a brood of kids, and decades of suburban life straight out of that sitcom Erin loves. Girls who, if they tried on suits, would probably giggle at their reflections and then put their skirts back on like their whole fucking worlds hadn’t been rearranged.
But Mac isn’t some sitcom or Sweet Valley High girl. She doesn’t have a guarantee of fucking decades in the suburbs. She’s never had anything guaranteed. And if her world gets rearranged, or she gets a glimpse of something really fucking amazing, she doesn’t want to just keep going afterwards like it never happened.
There’s not that much that’s good in life, at the end of the day. So it’s only logical, and practical, to grab onto the shit that is with both hands.
“Mac, Mac, please,” KJ is saying, almost chanting. Has she been talking the whole time? She’s kneeling in front of Mac now, hands fluttering anxiously at her sides. Even when she’s scared, she’s so shiny. “Mac, I’m sorry, please say something, you’re scaring me – come on, we can play something else, we can take the suits off, whatever you want, we can do it, just don’t be mad at Tiff or Erin or–”
Mac reaches out for KJ with both hands. One lands on her cheek, the other on the knot of her tie. The fabric is too thick there to let her feel KJ’s heartbeat, but she still knows that it’s speeding up. She knows KJ pretty well, when she actually lets herself think about her.
“We can do whatever I want, huh,” Mac says. She wants it to sound suave. It sounds gravelly, which is cool, but wobbly, which is not.
“Mac,” KJ says in a whisper. “Please.”
“Please what?”
KJ’s breath shudders over Mac’s hand. “Please don’t fuck with me. ‘Cause if you do, I’ll kick your ass.”
“I think I kinda wanted you to beat me up,” Mac says. “Or maybe that’s not what it was. Huh.”
“Mac, you’re not really making sense.”
The skin of her face is so warm. “You know what I want, Kaje?”
KJ’s laugh sounds desperate and half-strangled. “I wish I did.”
“I don’t want to practice,” Mac says firmly, and pulls KJ’s face down to hers.
KJ’s lips are a little greasy with chapstick, and not really that soft despite all the chapstick she uses, and they feel better than a shaved head or a good smoke or the growliest part of a Joan Jett song. Oh my god, I missed this, I missed this so much, some part of Mac’s brain babbles, even though she’s never done this before, let alone with KJ. Fuck her stupid shitty lungs, because she runs out of breath way too soon. When she pulls away, KJ’s face is smudged with pale brown.
“You got my beard on your face,” Mac observes, rubbing at it with her thumb, which just smears it more.
“You got my face on your beard,” KJ retorts, like a dork. She grabs Mac’s hand like she’s going to pull it away, but then she just holds onto it instead. “Mac, when you said – said you don’t want to practice, what did you–?”
“I mean I don’t want to get a fucking boyfriend,” Mac says. “Not unless, like, he's you.” Fuck, why’d she say that last part? What does it even mean?
“Oh,” KJ says softly. Maybe she knows what it means, somehow. “I think – I think I don’t want a boyfriend who isn’t you either.”
“Okay,” Mac says, feeling hysterical, feeling like she wants to stick-and-poke the word BOYFRIEND across her ribs, where she’d really feel it. “So are we cool? I mean, what do we do now?”
“Um...” KJ’s face turns pink. Mac's never seen pink look better. “Well, you said no practice, but isn’t practice just doing stuff to get good at it? Or stay good at it? Because I have field hockey practice three times a week, and–”
“And you’re really fucking good at hockey,” Mac says hoarsely.
She pulls KJ back down. They’ve got a lot of time to fill before sunrise, and after it, too. Better make it all count.