Page 11 of The False Flat

“In fact,” I told him, “I have plans Friday night.”

CHAPTER 5

LIFE REALIZATION #3: MUSTACHES ARE RIDICULOUS

On Friday night, my hand shook as my finger was poised over Deanna’s Ring doorbell. I’d written and erased so many texts backing out of tonight that my thumbs had calluses, but I needed a distraction from the haunting conversation with Chad. I also needed to try to get over my fear of social events. So I’d decided to come, a box of Cap’n Crunch stuffed in a purple gift bag with lavender tissue paper that complemented my dress. I pushed the button, hearing the tones announcing my arrival from somewhere behind the opaque oval pane of glass.

When Deanna opened the heavy mahogany door, she waved me inside. “You look amazing! Purple is your color.”

My favorite color was purple, the color of royalty, power, and ambition. The color of my dress silently whispered my first impression before I ever uttered a word. The real reason was because of the royal purple Princess Diana Beanie Baby my brother gave me, the last gift I ever received from him.

I handed her the bag. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t need to bring anything.” She peeked inside and squealed. “This is perfect.”

Deanna sparkled. From afar, everything about her was medium—her hair color, her skin tone, her height, her weight—but as soon as she opened her mouth, it was like she transformed into a princess who charmed wildlife and conversed with common household items. Just like the other night at the grocery, she was the number two, a swan floating on a glittering pond.

I didn’t look half as good as she did, because she had something I didn’t: real confidence. I spotted it because I knew what trying looked like.

“Come back to the kitchen with me.” Her eyes were alive with excitement behind her black plastic frames. “Dinner’s almost ready!” She slapped her forehead. “I’m not thinking. You need to meet William and Grant. They’re in the living room, discussing some ‘hot article’ in Popular Mechanics.”

I nodded politely, like I knew what she was talking about, but I think my face gave me away.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I heard the words ‘tiny nuclear reactors’ and got the hell out of there.”

She grabbed my arm and pulled me to the living room like we were old friends.

What did this woman see in me? Now that I was here, standing in her warm house with brightly colored paint on the walls and monochromatic photographs scattered around like a professional gallery—a far cry from my own place—I wasn’t sure why I’d ever agreed to come.

Oh yeah, Chad. And his wife. And I liked Deanna. She had a way of making me feel comfortable, even though I knew tonight was about distraction, not about lasting bonds.

Two men turned as we entered the room.

The taller, with skin the rich color only biracial people have, came forward first, his hand extended. “It’s nice to meet you . . . Pen, right?” His eyes—I couldn’t tell if they were green or blue—hid behind glasses that matched his wife’s. I tried not to imagine him on a billboard in an underwear ad, but he’d be perfect for it. I instantly liked him, and as he smiled at me, I relaxed a fraction.

Why do humans act this way? I didn’t know William at all, but the fact he was a mix of Black and White, like me, made me feel less alone, like this hadn’t been a gigantic mistake. And maybe he knew, just a little, how it felt not to belong, to be caught between two groups and not really identify as either one. Maybe I’d met Deanna in the grocery store for a reason.

I focused and turned off the sappy voice inside my head. William, in his orange T-shirt and dark-wash straight-leg jeans, was a nine, the shape of a helium balloon at the circus. No, not the circus—I hated the circus—but maybe a fair, with colorful lights and cotton candy. Yeah, William, with his vivid eyes, was a number nine at the fair.

As the other man moved forward, Deanna said, “And this is my brother, Grant, and his mustache.”

Grant extended his hand to me. The polite smile that was affixed to the bottom half of my face faltered as our eyes met. If William was a balloon, Grant was the fork that popped him. All my hopeful positivity was skewered by this Grant, the number four, and turned upside down, hence the balloon-popping thing.

His devastatingly blue gaze shot through me, like he saw past my perfectly positioned facade, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t possible, at least I didn’t think so, for him to be able to read as much as his eyes seemed to suggest he could, but I swallowed and struggled not to rip my hand out of his.

“Grant,” he said, pointing to his dark-blue-button-down-covered chest. “And this is Henry,” he continued, gesturing now to the perfectly groomed line of facial hair under his nose. A faint, amused smile bloomed under Henry.

“Grant,” Deanna sighed. “You named your mustache?”

“Of course not. You’re the one who made it awkward if I didn’t provide a formal introduction.”

I forced myself to smile. I hated mustaches. They reminded me of overconfident, sleazy Sal, who had referred to his facial hair as “Stache.” I’d spent the first fifteen minutes of our one and only date learning about Stache and Sal’s morning routine: special stache shampoo and conditioner, followed by application of either stache oil, stache balm, or, if he was feeling frisky, stache wax, all either applied with or activated by a set of stache-grooming tools.

There was nothing more pretentious than a man with a mustache.

Grant, with his solicitous stare and hideous lip fur, was already starting from behind. Though he did look, ironically, like Henry Cavill, during his mustache days of course.

“How do you know your mustache isn’t female?” I asked, hoping I’d covered my scrunched-nose disgust.