|Tori|
When my eyes flutter open, the first thing I see is a skull from some sort of small animal staring back at me with hollow eyes. It does me well with shocking the fatigue out of my system, but I don't panic or scream. With consciousness comes recollection, and with that comes driving to Jade's house at midnight, laughing on her bed, wrapping her finger with a bandaid, and – I lift my head and turn it. Jade is still on her side, her usually tense face lax with sleep, her hand beneath mine. I smile goofily, running my pinky over one of her fingers before I carefully move out of her bed.
Tip-toeing toward my bag, I pull out clean clothes and move back into her bathroom. It's a nice bathroom – everything in Jade's house is nice – but it's got Jade's particular sense of interior design to make it unique. The handles on the sink are molded like serpents. The mirror is framed with a string of lights shaped like spiders, and the shower curtain has fake blood smeared over it. I smile, peeling away my pajamas and turning her shower on.
The water feels marvelous. I lather my hair with her shampoo, the scent that I so strongly associate with her filling the room. I breathe it in along with the steam, releasing a slight sigh.
While I rinse my hair, I think of Jade – no surprise there, really – the way she was last night, the way she looked this morning. I smile, feeling the shampoo slide down my back. I've always known Jade was pretty, but when I really look at her, it's startling how really gorgeous she is. Her eyes remind me of grass just before spring comes; dark, heavy, flecked with golden brown. The silver stud in her eyebrow that rides along every expression she has, her lips, a soft pink, and the curves of her sides and hips, legs, hands and stomach and breasts and –
I don't realize I'm doing it until my hand yanks back so quickly, I almost slap myself in the face. My cheeks start to sizzle and it's not from the temperature of the water. I hurry up then, slamming the water off as soon as the soap stops streaming down my body. I step out, rummaging beneath her sink for a clean towel and patting myself down. I'm still throbbing something awful and hot between my legs, so I carefully avoid that area with the towel, focusing instead on drying my arms and legs and hair. I pull on my clothes and take a minute to breathe, hands braced on the sink, staring at my fogged reflection in the mirror.
When I feel more composed and less embarrassed about what I almost did in Jade's shower – Jade's shower of all places! – I emerge. Jade is awake, sitting in front her computer. She spins to face me, and her smiling, sleepy expression sends my heart into a frantic dance. I feel on fire again. I smile, reminding myself that I'm an actress and concealing emotions are supposed to be my talent, but it almost feels like lying to her, and I can't do that. I grab my brush from my bag and glide it through my hair.
"Last Sunday, I took you to Jolly Days." I smirk at her, feeling a little more comfortable now that I'm not naked and slick wet. "How are you going to top that?"
Jade is smiling, too. She stands, swaying over toward me, and I swear she's swinging her hips like that on purpose. Stopping just before she runs into me, she taps the tip of my nose with her bandaged finger. "Hollywood is a big place with lots of strange things to offer."
Her tone sets me on edge. "Jade, if you're taking me to a morgue or something –"
She laughs, but doesn't correct me. Spinning on her heel, she disappears into her shower, still chuckling.
I take the time she's away to examine her room more closely. There's a collection of skeletons and fossils, as well as the more odd things, like the mouse fetus floating in the jar, the fatty lump I remember her asking for at the hospital when Robbie got sick. There's snakeskin and an ant farm, bird feathers, a 3-D model of a set of teeth that I've seen in dentists' offices before. The paintings – which I'm not sure belong to her or not – depict images of men turning into beasts, demons spewing from a crater in the earth, a little girl holding a doll with no head. But among the strangeness are more normal things – picture frames. Tucked behind a glass skull with a candle coming from the top is a picture of a younger Jade with her parents on either side of her. A couple others show her standing with stage crews, her standing beside TV stars and famous singers. One makes me stop and pick it up to see it closer; it's from a dance we had last year. I recognize Jade's lavender dress. Beck's arm is wound around her waist. They're both smiling. I wonder who took the picture only to blink when the memory comes swimming back – I took this picture. I remember Beck pushing the camera into my hands, laughing, the music nearly drowning out his requests to take the photo. I was anxious to get back on the dance floor, snapping the picture quickly and taking off. Now that I focus, though, I can recall hearing Jade laugh freely and openly, her hand on Beck's chest, and I realize that that was one of the few times I ever saw her truly happy.
