prompt: fingernail painting
fandom: scary stories to tell in the dark
characters: ruth steinberg, esau bellows
Esau had gone upstairs just to see what Ruth was up to, while Sarah’s downstairs with Chuck and Auggie telling jokes (he hears his sister laugh, and it warms his heart). Now Esau finds himself mesmerized by Ruth’s activity. He’s pulled up an extra chair from the corner of her room and dragged it up beside her makeup table (that’s what she called it, right? Right.). He watches with his arms propped on the back of the chair, chin on his arms, as Ruth swipes a tiny brush, laden with colorful liquid, over her nail. The brush leaves a thin streak on her nail. Esau watches, entranced, as Ruth repeats the process of dipping the brush into the bottle and running it over her nail until she’s satisfied with the results.
It’s a lot like watching Sarah write.
“What are you doing?” He tilts his head as Ruth goes back to the bottle a third time.
He expects Ruth to jump, but she doesn’t. She puts the little brush—attached to the lid—back into the bottle and looks up at Esau. “Painting my nails,” she says, and shows him her newly painted nail, now with a layer of bright pink. Esau blinks in wonder at the color. He’s never seen anyone paint their nails. Delanie never painted hers, at least that he noticed, and Gertrude certainly never did. Sarah didn’t, either, but she didn’t have access to any…nail paint? Is that what’s it’s called? Sure.
He likes the way it shines in the light, so clean and bright and shiny enough that he can almost see his reflection if he looks hard enough. And it gives him an idea. He perks up, grinning at Ruth. “Can you do mine?”
Ruth blinks at him, surprised, and sputters, flounders for an answer, all while Esau watches her hopefully. “I-well-um…” She pauses and shrugs. “Boys don’t usually paint their nails,” she says softly.
“Oh.” Esau frowns, slightly deflated, but he doesn’t understand why this is a problem. Why shouldn’t he—or any boy for that matter—not be able to paint their nails? He gives Ruth a smile. “Come on and paint mine, Ruthie,” he says. “I could use a little color, right?”
This time Ruth smiles. “Oh, alright. Since you insist.” She reaches into the top left drawer and pulls out a small basket full of more bottles of the same size as the first but with slightly different shapes, each one filled with a different color, or different shades of the same color. Esau can’t count right off the bat how many Ruth has, but it’s definitely more than he would have thought.
How many different colors does a girl need?
He’d ask Sarah, but she knows as much about this as he does.
Ruth pulls out all the bottles—all the bottles—and makes a few neat lines of them for Esau to get a good look at his options. Blues, reds, greens—no, not green, Mother wore green all the time and he’d rather not be reminded of that hideous shade of pear-green with the black trim. He scoops all of them up and puts them back in the basket. Ruth doesn’t ask why.
He puts the two black bottles away, too. His brothers and father and grandmother all wore black, all the time, and it’s just too dark a color for his liking. He’s not even really sure why Ruth has it, unless she uses it for decoration; it’s just too dark a color for a full coat for someone like Ruth. Pink is much more fitting for her.
For him, not so much. He puts that one away too, and keeps narrowing down his options until he’s left himself with two: blue and yellow. He frowns.
“What do you think, Ruth?”
Ruth picks up the bottles and looks each other them over. “Well,” she says, “I think blue is a good match for you, but I think you could use something a little brighter.” And she sets the yellow down in front of him. “Yellow?”
Esau grins. “Yellow it is!” So he settles himself in, and on Ruth’s instruction, he holds out his hand to her, flattening it on the surface of the table. He curls his free arm over the back of the chair, tucks his chin into the crook of his elbow, and watches Ruth repeat the process for his nails that she did with her own: dip, wipe off the excess, and swipe. He watches until he gets lost in the easy pattern, and then until he finds himself zoning out to to where he thinks he might reach the verge of falling asleep. Instead, he tries to focus on the other colors in Ruth’s basket, still sitting on the table, and wonders what color Sarah would pick. He tilts his head.
“What color do you think would look good on my sister?”
Ruth’s rhythm falters a moment at the question. She blinks, swipes the brush over Esau’s nail again. “I was thinking pink…” Two spots of faint red rise in her cheeks. Esau smiles.
“You like her, don’t you?”
The red on Ruth’s face darkens. She sputters for a response. “I-I-well-I—”
“It’s okay,” he says, smiling. “Sarah deserves someone who loves her for who she is.”
Ruth pauses mid-swipe to look up at him. “So do you.”
Esau raises his head. So do you. He’s never had someone be that honest with him before. All his life, he’s always looked after Sarah, always put her first, the one who seemed to catch the brunt of the Bellows’ ire. He’s never had someone tell him what he’s always told Sarah, that she deserves someone outside the family who loves her the way she deserves to be loved. He’s not even sure he ever expected to hear those same words.
And he does deserve it, doesn’t he? After all he had to hear from his family, about him and his sister, all the nasty words that still ring in his ears when he thinks they’ve gone, or when he thinks Sarah doesn’t know he can still hear them—and he wonders if she still hears them, too—he knows he does.
“You love me, don’t you?” The words are out before Esau realizes he’s said them.
Ruth finishes the last swipe of yellow paint across Esau’s thumb and puts the brush away. “Of course I do, Esau.” She lays her hand on his arm. “We all love you. There’s nothing in the world we would trade you for.”
The new pink on Ruth’s nails blurs as Esau looks at it. He blinks the blur away, wipes his eyes on the back of his unpainted hand. “Thank you…” I can’t tell you how much that means. His old family would have traded everything in the world for him. And Sarah.
He doesn’t realize Ruth’s gotten up from her chair until her arms are around him and her head is on his, and damn it she feels so safe, his friends are the safest people on the planet, all of them. He gently closes his hand around her arm.
“I promise,” she whispers into his hair, “we will never let anything happen to you or Sarah.”
Esau turns his head into her shoulder. “Thank you.” He’s been protecting Sarah so long it never occurred to him that maybe he needed some protection, too.
“You’re welcome.”
He and Ruth stay like that for a while; Esau makes no move to push her away. From somewhere downstairs, he hears Chuck’s muffled voice, laced with a smile, and Sarah’s laugh among the others. He can’t hear what she says after, but her voice sounds bright. That’s all he could ask for.
And then he hears the tone of their voices change, wondering where he and Ruth are, “They’ve been up there for almost an hour,” he hears Chuck say. There’s a muffled thud, then Stella’s voice, low and scolding, no doubt warding Chuck of making a joke that would make both of them feel uncomfortable.
Honestly, he expects nothing less.
(Even if he doesn’t understand all of them.)
“I think my hand is dry now,” Esau says with a smile. He’s comfortably warm and relaxed like this, in Ruth’s hug, and really he has no intention of unraveling himself from Ruth’s arms (unless she wants him to, of course), but the rest of the group sound like they’re ready to come looking for them in the next few minutes if they don’t come down soon. “Wanna do my other hand?” He twists his head up to give her a smile.
“Course I do,” Ruth says, and gives him a squeeze. “I can’t let you go out with only one hand painted, what kind of girl would I be?” She grins at him. Esau sees what Sarah likes about her so much. She’s gentle, kind, and her eyes shine when she smiles. “And then you can go show off to your sister,” she adds, sitting down, readying the brush again. Esau watches her go through the familiar motions, dip dip swipe swipe make sure nothing still runs from the bristles, and she holds it up, ready for him.
“Let’s bring the pink bottle,” he says, holding out his unpainted hand to Ruth. “I think Sarah’s going to want her nails painted, too.”
