Greer doesn’t like Della. She tells me this as we stand on the top deck of the ferry, drinking apple juice from paper cups and watching the sun set in shades of pinks and purples.
“How dare she,” she says. “Why is he with someone like that?” Greer sounds genuinely bitter. She’s spitting out one-liners aimed at Kit and Della, and it’s almost making me smile.
“You’ve never met her,” I point out. “She’s not all bad.”
“Oh sure,” she says. “But how many girls have we met just like her? They’re everywhere. They make reality shows about them now.”
“True,” I say. “But she was my best friend. I didn’t see her that way.”
“You don’t see a lot of shit, Helena. You have a blind soul.” I pour my apple juice into the Sound.
“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?” I try to keep the offense out of my voice, but Greer knows me too well. She kneads my neck like she can rub away the insult.
“Had … had a blind soul. It’s waking up—to art, people … men.”
“Yeah? It’s kind of painful,” I say. “Like being dropped into ice water.”
“That’s the nature of the truth, though. What’s fun about being dropped into ice water? That’s why half the world walks around wearing rose-colored glasses, watching comedies and reading romance books.”
I look at her out of the corner of my eye. I like comedies and romance.
“If you’re such a realist, why do you dress the way you do?” I ask her. “You dress like a fairy, wearing the same color every day.”
“I dress the way I want the world to look. I’m living out my fantasy visually. But I’m not sheltering myself mentally.”
I always sulk for a few minutes after she makes sense. It’s not fair that she’s so pretty and so wise. And if I were dressing the way I wanted the world to look, it would be a beige bitch world. I’m wearing a tan hoodie because I suck, and because my soul is visually impaired.
“They don’t do it on purpose, you know.”
“Who?” I ask. The wind is whipping her hair around. Strands of gray keep getting stuck to her purple lips. She reaches up to pull them away with lavender nails. I back up slowly as she speaks, trying to be inconspicuous.
“The people who blind themselves to the truth. They’re just trying to survive.”
I’m distracted for a minute, my finger suspended over the camera button on my phone. “Who wants to survive without truth?”
Greer shrugs, and her shirt slips off her slender shoulder. Perfect. “Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges.”
I take the picture, then lower my phone to look at her. Greer is the truth. Right now, she’s the truth to me. The one person who cares enough to let me know that I still have on my blindfold. If I were one of the three, I’d be the shallow one. My life hasn’t been an extreme of any kind. My childhood typically dysfunctional, but typically functional. I’ve been so very underexposed that I turned into a beige bitch. What happened to pink? In third grade, I liked pink.
“Greer,” I say. “Do you still love Kit?”
I don’t know where that comes from. Greer has never even hinted at still having feelings for Kit. But how many times has she told me that art begins to flow from a source of hurt?
“Art is the blood that comes from a wound. You can’t let it scab; let it keep bleeding. Let it bleed until you have enough blood to paint with.”
Her face changes with my question. There is a shift in her eyebrows, a dulling of her eyes.
“The truth, Greer,” I say. I’m holding my breath. The answer to that question is so fragile I’m afraid the air from my lungs will break it. She turns to face me, holding the hair back from her face with both hands. The tattoos on the underside of her arms are visible against her white skin. BE THOU on one side, YOUR ART, on the other.
“Yes,” she says. “I am.”
I look away from Greer and back out at the water. Kit, the pied piper of love. How many others were there? Girls at work? Girls in his graduate program? I laugh at my own stupidity, but the wind catches the sound and carries it away.
“Oh shit,” I say, dropping my head into my hands. This was really messed up.
When we climb back into her car, we’ve yet to say anything else to each other. A line I have never seen before appeared between Greer’s eyes after her confession, and has yet to smooth away. I sit slouched in the passenger seat, my mouth dry, and a heaviness weighing across my chest. Her car smells like leather and lemons. I breathe it in as we follow the line of cars off the ferry. I remember the pictures I took and scroll through them to distract myself. There is a picture of her surrounded by the pastel sunset. It’s so vibrant. The light catches the top of her exposed shoulder, where there is the hint of a tattoo. It’s beautiful. I post it to Instagram—because it’s probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken—hoping Kit sees it. Look what I have of yours. It’s purple!
I caption it with Greer’s words. Who wants to hide from the truth? Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges. #TRUTH
The ride from the Kingston ferry to Port Townsend is about an hour, depending on how fast you’re driving. During that hour, the photo of Greer gets three thousand likes, and my Instagram gets a thousand new follows. I track the likes to two blogs who reposted the picture, crediting me, each blog having over thirty thousand followers. I read through the comments on the photo, blushing at the things they say both about Greer, and the mysterious photographer. Kit is not one of those likes. He liked someone else’s picture a few minutes after I posted the picture of Greer, so I know he saw it.
“Whoa,” Greer says, when she opens her Instagram. “That’s a great picture.”
“A fluke,” I say. “I’ve never taken anything as good as that before.”
She puts the car in park outside of the cannery. “So, maybe today is the start of great pictures. Make sure your next one is better.”
I purse my lips. “Okay.”
I make to open my door, but Greer grabs my hand and squeezes it.
“I’ve moved on, Helena,” she says. “You can love someone your whole life and not know why. You can even live with it. This doesn’t change our friendship.”
I smile tightly. “Of course it doesn’t. Because he’s not mine. If he were, you wouldn’t be okay with me.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “I want him to be happy.”
“That’s easy to say until the person you love is happy with someone else. Girls always choose men, and men always choose the wrong girls. It’s an endless cycle.” I wonder if she was helping herself or helping me when she forced me to go to the wedding with her.
This time, she doesn’t try to stop me when I get out of the car. The beige bitch can say things that make sense too.