the ring was twenty-odd karats. beautiful. big enough to see from space, which is another way to say visible on the front pages of the newspaper stand across the way. it was so heavy, it took birdie about two weeks to figure out how to lift her hand properly. for over a fortnight after she got engaged, she found her arm would sink downward at every opportunity, falling until it hit the screen of her phone. it stayed like that for hours at a time, her one thumb repetitively typing out an email to the family pilot, or the phone number of the federal correction institute of atlanta, or a text to a number already disconnected. her wrist, more often than not, took to hurting. and most often, never not, that pain radiated up and over the medial line of the body, landing somewhere more central. even so, sometimes god gives you a rock ( emerald cut ) you just can't put down.
cain knows this.
so does birdie.
he's not wrong. elizabeth is tricky. and she damn sure did have to try. each and every day.
she settles far enough away that the smoke won't nestle in the folds of hair or dress, a precise distance that birdie has had mapped out since age fifteen. back then, being near kit wasn't the part she considered dangerous— only the things that stayed behind once he left: hickeys, smoke, scattered branches under her bedroom window. loitering tattle-tales. now birdie's grown-up, like all wendy-birds will be one day, and she's been forced to accept the reality of it all: it's not the ghosts, or the lingering cologne of one, that will hurt you. the truth is that there's none of that without a body to begin with, and that's where the damage comes from. and kit turner, all six-something of him, got just about the largest one around.
her arms tuck behind her back. NOW THAT THEY'RE OUTSIDE OF THE ATRIUM AND IN THE OPEN AIR, it's a wonder she doesn't light up translucent like one of the decorative, currently defunct hanging lanterns— because in kit looking at her, birdie's skin proves to be as thin as tracing paper and just as functional. she can feel a hard line of heat flaring in the track of his gaze. "mh." birdie holds his gaze, the familiar undertow of it. after a lingering beat it lifts demonstratively upward; up, up, into the arrangement woven in her hair, before it comes down again with pollen in her lashes. "not quite the right flowers."
then she rounds her pillar the way a child does— slow, one palm flat on the curve, weight all slanted out. birdie can't read kit's mind, but she knows that boy well enough. she knows he's thinking of this privacy as a blind spot, as a way to hide from his mama and ( secondarily ) everybody else's mama. and birdie, arguably the better student, is thinking of it in similar terms. well. the same term, applied differently:
BLINDSPOT. 𝙽𝙾𝚄𝙽. A SUBJECT ABOUT WHICH YOU ARE IGNORANT OR PREJUDICED AND FAIL TO EXERCISE GOOD JUDGMENT.
so she turns. away. comes around the mountain the way the girl in the song does, going and going and never getting anywhere. it's only at the far side of the pillar, when there's a whole white marble world between them, that she pauses and leans back. the column is hard and sun-warm, almost comforting; like resting the back of her head against somebody else's. birdie lifts her gaze up— onto the speckled ceiling, the clear sky.
"y'look like you're too big for your jacket."
she smiles, if only a little. the view is far too obstructed to look at kit from this position, which is half- or whole- of the-point, but her head still turns over her shoulder as though she might. could. on the ground next to her his shadow stretches as long as he does, creeping past the castle rampart. one arm curls backward where she can't see, her hand extending into open air before spreading the palm open, a five-fingered blink of morse code.