Surfaces

“Shush, or I’ll smash it,” Julio says.  "And then we'll see sparkles, girl."

The fairy girl floats in and talks to Julio.  She seems as if she’s at least a full foot off the ground, though I don’t see any wings and I’m not afraid.  And she looks at the seahorses too and I wonder what she’ll do.   Those creatures are being ridiculous, all of them, they laugh and slap each other silly with their shiny tails.

“They’re just being wild,” I say.  “You don’t have to go.”  But Julio has already left.  And then she turns into someone I know and she says a ton of things that sound like:

Who are you Kimmie?
What do you have?
What do you want?

It is Bev, her voice sounds like one big whirring noise, almost the way the fairies talk (you get the ideas in your head) but it can’t be that the fairy girl is Bev!  But I get that she knew those stupid seahorses had been giggling at me; I had been the big joke.

“You look like this girl I know,” I say  “She’s muscular too.  Her whole body is streamlined for splits and cartwheels.”

She speaks to me in a high-pitched voice like she sucked helium in through a straw and she tells me she knows who I mean.

“You have the most natural blond hair I have ever seen.  It’s like true fairy girl hair,” I say.

And it is the stuff of tales.  Fine, long, and sparkling, and under the white light it reminds me of my Aunt Kelley’s.  She complained about having to sit in the salon every six weeks for two whole hours to maintain that kind of hair (Aunt Kelley is a brunette). 

“You don’t have any mousy roots,” I say.  “What’s your secret?”

But the fairy girl never answers my question.  And then she offers me some of her peppermints and talks about mad shoes and clothes and says, “Can’t you see how messed up this is?”  It all feels like the stuff she says drags me down to a giant dumpster at Gitt’s where I imagine all of the party garbage magically disappears.  The seahorses start up again too.  And I call Bev or the fairy girl or whoever she is the worst kind of names.

"Make them stop," I say.  She stands over me in the middle of Gitt’s palatial bathroom and protects me from hundreds of small, spitting sea animals.  "Shush," she says.  And her bravery makes me listen to her story about the queen of this castle and answer any questions about what I was doing with Adrianna’s boyfriend.

“Are you even a fairy at all?” I ask.  “And why are you doing that?”
I point to her cell phone that hovers above me.  My dress fans out all over the tiles, all over the queen of Denman high’s floor.

“Even junior fairy girls get cool cell phones and this one’s got a great camera.”

Before I can say another word, she’s gone.  The seahorses have stopped their laughing and tapping as if they have all followed her out, the bathroom is as silent as I imagine it must be on Mars.