three

Spring. Attic. Bright afternoon.

In the room there are girls. Blood fills their cheeks in dusting patterns. Vaguely they all look the same; they are the same time of thing. Their eyes are pale or honey brown. Their lips are smirking and clever. They are young. They sit in a circle. And there is me.

I have lost track of what they are saying. I have ceased to comprehend their rituals, stopped hearing their lowered voices. The sound that I hear is cumulative, like the low chatter of birds at the very start of the morning. I watch the doorway. I stare at the hardwood of the floors, the dashes of light across it through the half-shut blinds. This is all very secretive. Their postures tell me this. Their faces tell me this and their lips tell me this. Secrets make me curious but it's their eyes that drive me away.

It is Sunday. They all wear dresses and tights and bows in their hair. I do not know if they are beautiful or ugly. Later, when I understand, I will remember them as harpies. It is fitting.

"Watch the door," Cordelia said when they led me here.

(Cordelia is beautiful. Sometimes she meets me at the corner after school. Sometimes she is very sweet sometimes I am filled with hope in her presence sometimes...)

Her gray eyes, the color of ice over a deep blue pond or strange wallpaper, changed from laughter to something else which I didn't know. I moved my eyes from her face to her blue checked dress. Without consent the words slipped from my mouth, "But I thought we were playing a game."

"We are playing a game. You're watching the door," she said. "You were mistaken. You aren't playing," she un-said.

Now I don't know what kind of game it is they're playing. Something with only words, words muttered and whispered and streaming from their mouths as black ribbons would. Maybe it's because they're older than me. Or maybe there isn't any reason. Or maybe I was wrong.

I turn. "No one's coming," I say. "I don't need to watch the door anymore, so I can play," I un-say. It starts with strength in my throat but chokes. They don't hear, or don't respond. So I repeat, "No one's coming." The unspoken remains.

They'd been laughing. They stop, mid-laugh. I meet Cordelia's eyes. Anger is what I register but it is muddled by something else, undefinable. "Keep watching," she says.

"No one's coming. I can play."

Anger, increasing. Annoyance. "But no one wants you to play."

I can't meet her eyes anymore. My chest is constricted ever so slightly and all of a sudden the air is so heavy that my mouth droops and my eyes fall back to the floor. I notice the veins of brown in the wood, and the spots that appear as solid watching eyes. How old are the eyes, I wonder. What have they seen?

Cordelia turns from me to the other girls and the laughter materializes again on her face. I turn back to the door.

Looking back into the hall, I meet a pair of smoldering dark eyes, lit by color and emotion and depth that is the whole universe. I begin to breathe easily. The other girls don't notice him and I say nothing. I never need to. He smiles.

"They really don't need you here," he tells me and I know that this is true when I look back at their heads bowed together.

"You have your jacks?" he asks. They don't hear. They can't over the sound of their secrets. I nod. And we walk away.