As she turned back around, Avery saw a flash of pink on the flesh of Atlas’s inner arm, and gasped.
“What?” he demanded.
“What happened?” Without thinking, Avery reached out to trace the scar, an angry red half-moon near Atlas’s elbow. He held very still as her fingers brushed over the mark.
She knew his body so perfectly, even after all this time. She had long ago memorized him—every last one of his scars and freckles, on every last inch of his skin. But she didn’t recognize this one.
“I burned myself,” Atlas said quietly.
Suddenly Avery realized what she was doing, touching Atlas in this intimate way. She caught herself and retreated. Her gown was still hanging open at the back; she crossed her arms over her chest. “They don’t have derma-repair in Dubai?”
“Maybe I wanted to leave it. Maybe I think it looks badass,” Atlas said lightly.
Avery rustled into her closet to take off the offending gown, slipping into a robe and sweatpants before returning to the bedroom. Atlas was still there.
“Are you okay, Aves?”
Hearing the familiar nickname made her oddly sad. She swallowed. “Do you remember those forts we used to build when we were little?”
She and Atlas used to construct elaborate forts in the living room, pushing the furniture together, topping it with piles of pillows and sheets. If their mom caught them, she would invariably freak out—Do you know how expensive these silk pillows are? Now they will all need to be dry cleaned!—while Avery and Atlas looked at each other and giggled. When they disappeared into those forts, it felt as if they were able to escape from anything.
“What made you think of that?”
“I just wish that I could go hide in one of our forts right now, to get away from all this.” Avery cast out her arms, indicating the rows of couture dresses, which were all designed specifically for her body and yet felt unbearably suffocating.
Atlas met her gaze in the mirror. “I don’t think I realized how much you hated that Dad is the new mayor.”
Avery struggled to find the right words. “It’s too much attention. I feel like I’m caught in limbo, like I have a constant pit in my stomach. No one sees the real me anymore, not even our parents,” she said helplessly. “Sometimes I think I’m going to snap in two.”
“You know you’re much stronger than that,” Atlas said quietly.
“It’s just that sometimes I think of the version of me that Mom and Dad do see, sparkling and perfect, and I wish I could be that girl. Instead of the flawed person that I really am.”
“Your so-called imperfections are the best part of you.”
Avery didn’t know how to answer that, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“Our parents never saw me for me either, you know,” Atlas went on after a moment. “Through the years, they’ve looked at me and seen a lot of things—a PR stunt, a way to keep you happy, maybe even an asset to the business—but not me, the way that I really am. Trust me when I say that I know how it feels to want to live up to the version of you that Mom and Dad built in their heads. I might even want it more than you,” he added, and the angles of his face changed, became sharper, “because this wasn’t always my life.”
Avery was startled into silence. Atlas so rarely talked about how it had been for him, before he was adopted.
“When Mom and Dad brought me home, I thought I was the luckiest kid in the entire world. I kept worrying that they might wake up one day and decide that they didn’t want me after all, and return me like a pair of shoes.”
“They would never do that.” Avery ached at the thought of Atlas, young and uncertain, afraid of such a thing.
“I know. But unlike you, I remember a time before I had their love. Which is why I hate disappointing them. They expect so much, but they have also given me everything.” He sighed. “That was part of the reason I stayed away so long last year—just to see how it felt, being myself without being a Fuller.”
“And how was it?” Avery couldn’t quite imagine who she would be if she weren’t Avery Fuller. If she could just walk through the world unremarked upon, like any other unremarkable person.
“It felt like a haze had lifted. Like everything was much clearer,” Atlas told her and smiled. “Aves, promise me that you won’t worry about Mom and Dad. That you’ll do whatever is right for you. I mean, for you and Max,” he added awkwardly; and the moment between them was abruptly broken.
“Sorry, I should get going.” Atlas reached up to run a hand through his hair, making it stick up at funny angles. “I’m not any help with this. Besides, you know that it doesn’t matter what you wear. You could show up to that party in a plastifoam box and you would still look perfect.”
Before she could find some way to answer, he was gone. The ripples of his presence seemed to lap through the room like waves, crashing over her.
Why did Avery have to struggle to make herself understood to everyone else in her life, yet Atlas always seemed to get her on an instinctive and elemental level? Why couldn’t she make the rest of the world see her the way that Atlas did?
She collapsed onto her four-poster bed and stared blankly up at the ceiling, which was decorated with a hologram of her favorite Italian mural. Its pixels constantly shifted, so slowly as to be imperceptible, brushstroke by brushstroke; as if an invisible artist was suspended up there, always repainting it into a new arrangement.