Keeping the Moon(30)
Author: Sarah Dessen

I picked it up, peering down into the green contents.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never done this before,” she said.

“Well,” I said.

“Oh, God.” She crouched down in front of me. “Give it to me.”

Morgan was still in the kitchen, washing her hands. I could see her green face reflected in the window over the sink.

Isabel scooped out a handful of mask and leaned close to me, spreading big gobs of it across my skin. It was cool and smelled like leaves.

“All natural,” she explained, her finger brushing my lip ring as some slipped into my mouth. It tasted terrible. “Deep-cleans your pores and tightens the skin. What kind of person has never done a beauty mask before? When I was fifteen I was obsessed with this stuff.”

“Colie’s not like we were,” Morgan said, coming back to sit beside me. She’d pulled her hair back in a clip on top of her head and looked like a big asparagus. “She doesn’t sit home and read Seventeen every Saturday night. She has a life.”

Isabel kept spreading the mask. I waited for her to say something about Caroline Dawes and what she’d heard, but she didn’t. Instead, she just sat back and looked at my face, studying her work. “Oh, right,” she said. “A life.”

Morgan reached over and picked up the phone. “Hello?” she said.

I was confused for a second until I realized it must have rung. Morgan, obviously, had doglike super hearing.

“Turn that down,” she hissed, pointing at the CD player.

“Who is it?” Isabel said, getting up.

“Just turn it down.”

“Oh,” Isabel said, slowing down considerably. “It’s Mark.” She cocked her head to the side, hard, to punctuate the name.

“Turn it down, Is.”

Isabel turned it down and the noise was sucked out, gone, just like that. Then she came back over, plopped down on the floor, and opened another beer.

“I wasn’t mad,” Morgan was saying, her mask cracking as she did so. She wrapped the phone cord around her fingers. “I just really wanted to have a chance to talk about our future. . . .”

“Oh, God,” Isabel said loudly, and Morgan turned her back.

“I know. I know how busy you are.” Morgan examined her nails, one by one. “I just always forget how little time you have to spend with me.”

Isabel made a gagging noise. Morgan stood, picked up the phone, and started dragging it toward the bedroom, still talking.

“Ask him why he’ll never give you a number where you can reach him,” Isabel called out as the cord slid along the floor. “Ask him why he only calls you once a week.”

Morgan waved her off angrily, trying to get the door shut.

“And ask him about that girl in Wilson, Morgan. Get a spine and ask him for once about that.”

The door slammed. Isabel threw up her hands.

“That girl,” she said, in the same loud voice, “wants to be hurt. And I am so sick of standing by and watching her do it.” Her green mask was splitting open across her cheeks. “Let me tell you something about men, Colie.”

I waited. My skin felt strange, tight, and I was concentrating on not moving any part of my face.

“Men,” Isabel said, after pausing to suck down some beer, “are wired, by nature, to take everything they can from you. It is their basic instinct to screw you over.”

“Really.”

“Yes,” she said solidly. Then she leaned closer. “If you think that girl from the restaurant yesterday can hurt you, you just wait. All the bitchy girls in the world are just a training ground for what men can do to you.”

The bedroom door opened and Morgan stood there, phone under her arm. Even with her green face I could tell she was mad.

“What is your problem?” she snapped, dropping the phone onto the couch. “He heard what you were saying, Isabel. He heard you.”

“Good.”

“I don’t understand,” Morgan huffed, “why you have to bad-mouth him to anyone who will listen.”

“I’m not the one coming to work and sobbing over him, Morgan,” Isabel shot back. “I’m not the one bringing in deviled eggs.”

“This isn’t about deviled eggs,” Morgan said.

“No, it isn’t.” Isabel picked up her pack of cigarettes, turning it over and over in her hand. “This is about how Mark does not respect you. About how he uses you.”

“Shut up,” Morgan said in a tired voice, walking into the kitchen.

“Why doesn’t he ever ask you to come to the games? And why can you never get a number or place where he’s at or going to be since you surprised him in Wilson?”

“He’s never sure where exactly he’ll—”

“Bullshit!” Isabel yelled. “You can go down to the drugstore and buy a poster for ninety-nine cents with their entire schedule on it. They’re a baseball team, Morgan. They have a season. They don’t just travel around playing random teams when they feel like it.”

Morgan put her hands on her hips. “It’s more complicated than that. You don’t know—”

“I know this,” Isabel said, standing up. “I know he comes into town, sleeps with you, and books out of here the next day before breakfast. I know when you went to surprise him on your anniversary you found that stripper in his hotel room.” She was ticking things off on her fingers, one by one. “And,” she went on, “I know that since he gave you that ‘ring’ ”—as she said it she made quote marks with her fingers—“he has not said one word about your wedding or your future. Not one word.”

Morgan absorbed this, blinking. She’d put one hand over her ring, protectively, when Isabel mentioned it.

My face was so tight my eyes were starting to hurt. But getting up to wash the mask off meant stepping between them, and I wasn’t about to do that.

“Can’t you see, Morgan?” Isabel lowered her voice and took a few steps closer; with their green faces, they looked like aliens meeting on a foreign planet. “There’s something wrong here.”

Morgan blinked again. I wondered if she was going to cry.

Then she straightened up to her full height and took a deep breath. “Jealous!” she shouted, pointing a long bony finger at Isabel, who just rolled her eyes. “You always have been! Since the very beginning!”

“Oh, please,” Isabel said indignantly.