It’s makeup remover.
“Calliope uses the same kind,” he explains. “She’s been known to need this after particularly brutal performances. For the, uh,”—he gestures in a general way toward my face—“same reason.”
“Oh God.” I blink at the mirror. “It looks like I’ve been vomited on by an inkwell.”
He grins. “A little bit. Come on, the water is warm.”
We scoot around awkwardly until I’m positioned in front of the sink, and then he drapes a towel over the front of my dress. I—very difficultly—lean over. His fingers slide through my hair and hold it back while I scrub. His physical presence against me is soothing. The face powder, mascara, false eyelashes, and blush disappear. I dry my face, and my eyes find his in the mirror. My skin is bare and pink.
He stares back with unguarded desire.
Nathan clears his throat from the doorway, and we startle. “So what are we going to do about your hair?” he asks.
My heart falls. “I guess I’ll wear a different wig. Something simple.”
“Maybe . . . maybe I can help,” Cricket says. “I do have some experience. With hair.”
I frown. “Cricket. You’ve had that same hair your entire life. Don’t tell me you style it that way yourself.”
“No, but . . .” He rubs the back of his neck. “Sometimes I help Cal with hers before competitions.”
My eyebrows raise.
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said it was a seriously embarrassing skill for a straight guy.”
“You’re the best,” I say.
“Only you would think that.” But he looks pleased.
It’s in this moment that I finally register what he’s wearing. It’s a handsome skinny black suit with a shiny sheen. The pants are too short—on purpose, of course—exposing his usual pointy shoes and a pair of pale blue socks that match my dress exactly.
And I totally want to jump him.
“Tick tock,” Nathan says.
I scooch past Cricket, back into my bedroom. He gestures to my desk chair, so I lift my skirts up and around the back, and I find a way to sit down. And then he finger-combs my hair. His hands are gentle and quick, the movements smooth and assured. I close my eyes. The room is silent as his fingertips untangle the strands from roots to tips and run loose throughout my hair. I lean back into him. It feels like my entire body is blossoming.
He leans over and whispers in my ear, “They’ve gone.”
I look up, and, sure enough, my parents have left the door ajar. But they’re gone. We smile. Cricket resumes his work, and I nestle into his hands. My eyes close again. After a few minutes, he clears his throat. “I, um, have something to tell you.”
My eyes remain shut, but my eyebrows lift in curiosity. “What kind of something?”
“A story,” he says.
His words become dreamlike, almost hypnotic, as if he’s told this to himself a hundred times before. “Once upon a time, there was a girl who talked to the moon. And she was mysterious and she was perfect, in that way that girls who talk to moons are. In the house next door, there lived a boy. And the boy watched the girl grow more and more perfect, more and more beautiful with each passing year. He watched her watch the moon. And he began to wonder if the moon would help him unravel the mystery of the beautiful girl. So the boy looked into the sky.
“But he couldn’t concentrate on the moon. He was too distracted by the stars.”
I hear Cricket remove a rubber band from his wrist, which he uses to hold a twist of my hair.
“Go on,” I say.
I hear the smile in his voice. “And it didn’t matter how many songs or poems had already been written about them, because whenever he thought about the girl, the stars shone brighter. As if she were the one keeping them illuminated.
“One day, the boy had to move away. He couldn’t bring the girl with him, so he brought the stars. When he’d look out his window at night, he would start with one. One star. And the boy would make a wish on it, and the wish would be her name.
“At the sound of her name, a second star would appear. And then he’d wish her name again, and the stars would double into four. And four became eight, and eight became sixteen, and so on, in the greatest mathematical equation the universe had ever seen. And by the time an hour had passed, the sky would be filled with so many stars that it would wake his neighbors. People wondered who’d turned on the floodlights.
“The boy did. By thinking about the girl.”
My eyes open, and my heart is in my throat. “Cricket . . . I’m not that.”
He stops pinning my hair. “What do you mean?”