Chapter 13

I'm in the dark hallway with Mother. Mother's gloved hands are on my shoulders. Her face hovering over mine is like a pretty, pretty cloud. She's telling me that she has to go out now. She won't be long. But don't wait up. All right, Belle?

"All right, Mother."

"And don't go snooping around in my room while I'm gone. Especially you know where."

I nod. I know where.

"I won't." I'm lying, of course.

"Promise?"

"Promise. Where are you going?" I ask even though I know. I know by her clothes and her hair and her perfume that smells of violets and smoke. She's wearing the white suit by Yves Saint Laurent today. Her hair's done into an old-timey wave like the women in the black-and-white movies Mother likes to watch at night, and sometimes she lets me watch with her. It's Nicholas, her hairdresser, who Mother calls a genius, who did this wave for Mother so that her hair is like a soft cloud of S. He tells her every time she sits in his salon chair that she's his very own Elizabeth Taylor. He told her this today when we went to get Mother's hair done for tonight. And Mother smiled at herself in the mirror. She loves when he says that. I watched the smile creep across her face from where I sat in the waiting area, flipping through a magazine called Sky. Tom Cruise was on the cover, and I knew there'd be more pictures of him inside. Who's Elizabeth Taylor? I asked her. Someone beautiful, Mother said, out of the corner of her red mouth, as if that were all I needed to know. Someone beautiful, I repeated to Tom Cruise, his smile white and blinding. There were more pictures of him inside. Quietly, I tore out the one I liked best.

After mother got her hair done, she let Nicholas give me a trim—just a half an inch, just the bangs, she said—and I hated when Mother said this. It was like she was sentencing me to myself, which is not a place I want or asked to be. I wanted Nicholas to defy Mother. To give me the S he gave her. In my dreams, he does just this and then we run away together, hand in hand. But today, Nicholas just gave me the trim Mother said to give me, talking to Mother the whole time about something called "the single life," making Mother howl with laughter while she smoked her Matinée 100 in the next chair. He didn't tell Mother to put her cigarette out. He didn't tell me I was his anything. Nicholas smells like shampoo and his eyes sparkle and his hair is very crisp. For a while, I had what Mother called a crush. Though I told her nothing, she knew. She knew by my face alone, which Mother says she can read like a book. Every page. And she said, Nick doesn't go that way, Sunshine, sorry. I pretended not to know what Mother was talking about. And Mother read that page too.

"Mother," I ask her again now. "Where are you going?"

"Twenty questions," Mother says, which is a warning. And then she says, "I'm meeting someone."

A man, of course. Always a man. Which one? Mother is seeing two men these days. Will she be meeting Chip or the Troll? I hate them both, but the white suit and the violet perfume probably mean Chip. She wears another dress, another perfume that looks like a poison apple and is actually called Poison, for the Troll. It smells like spiced secrets. The lipstick she has on (that I love) is the one she wears for them all: Russet Moon by Chanel, a deep red that makes Mother's mouth look like it's bleeding. The shiny red shoes on her feet are for all of them too. Not my favorites. My favorites are still in her bedroom closet, second shoe shelf from the bottom, third pair from the left. But these are pretty too. I look at Mother's strappy feet, her made-up face with the Russet Moon mouth, her hair done by Nicholas, for whom she is someone beautiful.

"Can I come?"

"Not today, Sunshine."

"Why not?" There's a whine in my voice. A whine I can't control. A whine Mother hates. I watch her wince at the sound of me. Touch her white hand to her white temple like I'm too much. I've followed her into her bedroom, where she's pulled a hat from the closet and set it on the bed by her purse. The broad-brimmed white hat with the beautiful black ribbon to protect her face from the sun. Because the sun is our mortal enemy, sweetie, Mother always says.

Why?

Because it makes us age and it makes us tan. And we don't want that. We certainly don't want to age. As for tanning, it's wonderful when we have it naturally like you, of course, she always says to me, cupping my face in her hands. You're one of the lucky ones, Sunshine. But when we're ghosts like your poor Mother, we need to be exceedingly careful. I always thought the sun was nice. In school, whenever I drew the sun in pictures, I made a smiling face inside the yellow circle in the sky. Made it smile over the flowers below, also smiling, and the spiky green grass. But ever since I learned the truth from Mother, I put a frown in the sun. I give him angry eyes. Mean eyebrows, like hairy, upside-down vees. He shoots death rays down onto the beautiful maiden's hat, who is sitting below on the grass.

Why do you make the sun so cruel-looking, dear?Ms. Said asked me, looking over my shoulder at my drawing on the desk. Ms. Said is Egyptian like me. But fully, not half. Which is lovely, Mother said.

Because the sun makes us dark, I told Ms. Said. And Ms. Said was concerned. She was already very concerned that most of my drawings featured girls who looked nothing like me. They were either blond and green-eyed like my secret best friend, Stacey, or they were red-haired and blue-eyed like Mother, and they kept looking at themselves in the mirror. There was always a mirror in my pictures, even when they were outside.

It's called imagination, Mother told Ms. Said when Ms. Said brought her into the school to talk about the pictures. She'd laid them all out on the desk, to my great shame. All my angry red suns and my beautiful maidens and my shining mirrors.

Is that what it's called?Ms. Said asked, and Mother didn't answer, just stared at my pictures. Her sunglasses were on, so I couldn't see her eyes. Ms. Said is the one who told me my last name, Nour, means "divine light," did I know that? I thought Nour meant something dark like the French word for black. Noir, Nour, a lot of French people get it confused, including Grand-Maman. Nour, Ms. Said said. Looks like "night" but means "light," remember that. Mother's name means "of the gardens." No one looks at Mother's name with narrowed eyes or says it like a question. Noelle Des Jardins, they say, and I know they see a beautiful snowy garden like I do. Her face offers a picture. The red of her lips and blue of her eyes like flowers poking out of the white.

"Belle," Mother says now, "please just stay here and be good for Grand-Maman, okay?"

"But I don't want to be good for Grand-Maman!" Now I'm shouting. Grand-Maman's evil, I want to tell Mother. I want to tell her about Grand-Maman's eyes. How they can go from light brown to shining black in an instant. How the blackness seems to fill her whole eye, even the white. This happens whenever she tells me about the end of the world, how it's coming soon. She'll start the minute Mother leaves. Belle, she'll hiss from her white island of couch. Viens ici. But there is never time to tell Mother because she's always going somewhere.

"Mom, please let me come with—"

"No, Belle." And the words are like a slap. My face stings with it. For a minute, Mother looks cruel. It feels like her beauty was only a disguise. This thin, hard mouth, these flashing eyes, this jaw of stone—this is the truth of her face.

"Stay. Here. Stay here and be good and don't go in my room."

"I don't!" I shriek. I'm a terrible liar. I feel my face go red. I look at the floor, where I see my foot's jittering. I can feel her staring at me, not like she's mad, but like she's sorry for me. She reaches into her purse. Lights one of her long cigarettes. Look what I've done. I've made her smoke. She's been trying to give it up, she really has, but she never will with me around. Whining. She exhales a plume of smoke into my face.

"Play with your dolls or something, all right? I guess you're a little old for those now. Read one of your fairy-tale books, how about that?" She makes it sound like such a fun time. Like I haven't read these books a thousand times before.

"All right," I say.

"Chin up, Sunshine. No more long face. Or else what? What do we say?"

"It'll freeze that way," I finish.

"That's right. And we don't want that, trust me." And she does an impression of me pouting. Makes her eyes storm cloudy and sticks her lower lip out really far. I don't want to laugh, but I do. And Mother smiles. Pats my head. "Much better." Kisses the air near my face three times. I catch a whiff of her violets and smoke, the waxy animal smell of her lipstick.

"Bring me back something?" I call after her. Pathetic. I don't know the meaning of the word yet, but the minute I heard Mother use it about someone, I knew that's the word I was. She's already going out the door, but she hears me.

"Like what?" she calls over her shoulder.

You, I think, after she's gone.

From the living room window, I watch her go. A man is waiting outside our apartment in a fancy red convertible. Chip. The one who Mother says looks a little like Montgomery Clift. Monty, Mother calls him and sort of sighs, like she's actually met Montgomery Clift, like he's not at all a dead stranger. When Mother calls Chip Monty, he gets angry. I'm not a queer, Chip says, and then he winks at me. I don't wink back. I hate Chip. He looks nothing like the beautiful man I see on Mother's black-and-white screen at night, who Mother calls by his first name only, like they're friends. I think there's something very wrong with Mother's eyes if she sees Monty in Chip. Apparently, Chip is Connected to the Industry, Mother says—whatever that means, Grand-Maman always adds—and if he could get Mother a role in his next film project, wouldn't that be so wonderful for Mother? Then Mother wouldn't have to slave her days away in Ladies Apparel at the Bay, dealing with those god-awful ladies. So difficult the ladies are, Belle, Mother says, closing her eyes as if she can still see them in her mind. But difficult's one thing, she whispers. Mother can handle difficult. Mother can handle anything, she's a survivor, after all. What's trying for Mother about the ladies who shop in Ladies Apparel is that they have No Style. All they want are the saddest slacks. Sweaters to fucking drown in, even when Mother is very happy to show them other options. They always choose Death by Polyester. Mother sometimes wants to ask them why not just go down to Hardware and buy a garbage bag and wade into the Saint Lawrence River and have done with it? It's the lack of style, the lack of dreaming, that gives Mother a migraine every night when she comes home. So that she has to sit in the dark for a very long time watching old movies to do what she calls cleanse. And if I'm quieter than quiet, if I let Mother sit and smoke on the couch, watching the TV screen like it's a window to the most magical world, mouthing the words she knows by heart, I can sit with her. And Mother might even pat my hand, point at the screen with her cigarette, at Elizabeth Taylor or Gene Tierney or Catherine Deneuve, and say, See? Now that's style. I see, I say, but I'm still looking at Mother's face fixed on the screen, dreaming herself into this other world. Her face looks like it never does. Soft. Open. Like she could cry any second, but she won't. The Bay and its ladies have left her mind. Or it's Mother who left, the screen took her away. Opened a door and Mother walked through it. Movies do that to Mother, open something usually closed. I guess they do that to me, too, sometimes. Certain ones, anyway. If Chip or the Troll or whoever got Mother a good role, just one, Mother could leave the Bay and its ladies forever. She'd torch it on her way out the door. Set all the slacks and sweaters on fire, she wouldn't be sorry. They'd burn up quick, she says, made as they mostly are from cheap materials.

Now Chip grins when he sees Mother walking toward him in her white suit, which she bought with her Bay discount—what Mother calls the one saving grace. When I look at Chip grinning, I think of wolves dressed as sheep. Fangs hidden in the woolly white. She gets in the car, which opens funny, sort of like the doors of the car in Back to the Future. She doesn't see me watching her from the window. Fogging up the glass. Telling her don't go.

"Get away from the window, Belle," Grand-Maman says. Sitting behind me in her nightgown of pink lace, eating religieuse and watching All My Children in her dark corner. Even in the bright June afternoon, Grand-Maman somehow makes wherever she sits a dark corner. Her jeweled fingers are sticky with syrup. She's taken her teeth out so she can taste. I become aware of the smell of her. Old bread and throw up and Shalimar. Jewels clinking softly. Stones of all shades shimmering from her neck, her wrists, her fingers. Some given to her by her dead husband, my grand-père, and by my father back when he was courting Mother. Other men too. Apparently, everyone used to give Grand-Maman gold like she was royalty. Now she drips with it. She was a great beauty once, Mother says. When she says that, I think of Grand-Maman's drooping mouth and her tiny eyes in her bloodless face. Her gray-white hair sticking up like an electrocuted puffball. What happened? I asked Mother. And for a second I thought she was going to smack me. But she just shrugged. She threw it away. She gave it up.

If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up.

Now that Mother has driven away with Chip, I brace myself for Grand-Maman to tell me about the end of the world. The horse-filled dark. Her eyes going black. Mother doesn't tell me about it enough, Grand-Maman says. Mother's forgotten herself since she moved down to Montreal from the north. Speaking English to her unbaptized daughter. Not even going to mass most Sundays. If it weren't for Grand-Maman, Grand-Maman says, my soul might be lost entirely to Darkness. But today Grand-Maman says nothing. Just stares at All My Children like she's not even seeing it. She tells me to go to my room and play.

"Okay," I say. And on this day, I walk down the hall like I'm going there. But I'm not going there. I keep going down the hall. To the very end of it. To the blue-and-white room I love that smells like dreams. I'm careful to turn the knob of the door a certain way so that Grand-Maman doesn't hear the sound. When I open the door, I sigh. Blue walls the color of the sky. Blue velvet curtains that filter out the light. There's the great white wicker bed with the clean blue-and-white sheets. There's her closet on the left. There's her white wicker vanity on the right with her tray of perfume bottles in so many glass shapes. Tears and stars and strange flowers, gifted by Mother's friends at the beauty counters. I have to be so careful in Mother's bedroom. Because of the wicker, everything hisses when I sit on it, when I touch it, even.

The closet door is white and tall, very closed. I see Mother saying, Don't open this door. Promise me. When I open the gliding door, I'm very slow. I've done this before. I know how to glide it very quietly.

Dark in here. Can't seem to find the light switch. But I feel Mother's clothes hanging on either side of me. I smell their violets and smoke. Mother sorts them by color, but mostly there's just the three colors she loves best: white and black and red. She loves red most. Because of her hair and her eyes, she says. Also her skin—what she calls her coloring. Everybody has a season based on their coloring, Belle. Mother read this in Vogue magazine. Mother is a Winter, she says. What am I? I asked her. Probably a Fall, she said, because of my coloring. It's all coloring, Sunshine.

What colors am I if I'm a Fall?

Olive, Mother said. Earth. Rust. Mustard. Don't those sound nice?

No.Those all sounded like nightmare colors to me. What if I don't want to be a Fall?

Well, Glum Drop, I don't make the rules, do I? And Mother pointed to her magazine. See? It was Vogue that made the rules, not Mother.

Still can't find the light in the closet, but I can sort of see in the dark now. Anyway, I know what I'm looking for. I sense them there. Second shelf from the bottom, third pair from the left. Glowing like a wish. Red satin with pointed, feathery toes. Spiked high heels. They show off Mother's white feet in a red strappy web. Like lingerie for the feet, Mother said when she bought them. And I said, What's lingerie? And she said, Never mind.

Carefully, I reach out my hand and pick them up. Slip them on while sitting on the floor. How come you never wear these outside? I asked Mother once.

Because they're not for outside.

There are shoes for only inside?

There are shoes for everything.

What are these for, then?

Never mind, Belle.

But I knew. These shoes were for sex. Knowing that made me as red as the shoes. Thinking of Mother having sex. Mother and Chip. Mother and the Troll. I heard sounds sometimes through the bedroom wall at night, and I wondered if what I was hearing was sex. I didn't know what sex was, not exactly. Apart from what Mother had shown me in a children's book called What's the Big Secret? It starred two ugly old people, a cartoon man and a cartoon woman, who were always naked and smiling and holding hands. I hated that book. My secret best friend, Stacey, who is two years older than me because I skipped a year and she was held back a year, says sex is nothing like that dumb book at all.

What's it like, then?

I can't say, Stacey says like she has secrets. Stacey's like that with me. I'm only her secret best friend, after all. Stacey wears Black Honey on her lips just like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, and she walks in a cloud of Love's Baby Soft because innocence is sexier thanyou think. If anyone knew that we actually hung out, that would be very bad for Stacey, Stacey says. Socially. In terms of boys, Stacey's had what she calls experiences. The only experience I've ever had was in a dream of Stacey's. She once told me she dreamed that I slow danced with Gabriel Gardner to the song "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House, and then he Frenched me right on the dance floor full of fog. "Frenched" means he kissed you with tongue, she said. I almost died from happiness when Stacey told me this. I've since asked her to tell me this dream again and again—what was I wearing, what was Gabriel Gardner wearing, how did he look just before he Frenched me, in what part of the song did we French?—but Stacey always says she doesn't feel like it right now. The last time I asked her was when she slept over, and Stacey said she was too tired, then closed her eyes. I looked at her closed eyes through her feathery blond bangs. All I could think was that dream of me was in there somewhere. Floating around inside her skull like one of those jellyfish I once saw at the aquarium. Slippery. Fragile. Mine.

Mother's heels are very high, so when I try to stand up, I nearly fall down. But I grip the closet doorknob just in time. It makes a groaning noise.

"?a va?" Grand-Maman calls.

"Oui." Quickly I teeter to Mother's vanity. Spritz the violets-and-smoke perfume from the bottle shaped like a jagged star. Does Mother have another red lipstick? She took the best red with her, but there's a lesser red right here in her drawer. In a blue-and-gold scratched-up case shaped like a hexagon. Rouge, it's called. By someone named Dior. I coat my lips without looking, I don't want to look until I'm done.

In Mother's vanity mirror, I can see only the top half of myself, and I can't see the shoes. She used to have a full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, but she took it down. The door still has the shape of the mirror though. I can see the holes where Mother nailed it there. I always thought that mirror must be magic because Mother couldn't stop staring into it. I'd call her name again and again, Mother, Mother,Mom!, and she'd keep looking in the glass like she was in a fairy-tale trance, like it was telling her something.

Where is that mirror now? I look all around her bedroom. Nowhere.

"Belle? Are you sure you're okay?" Grand-Maman asks from the living room.

"Fine."

I teeter back into the closet, ready to take off the shoes. And then I see the mirror. Leaning against the closet's back wall. Turned to the wall like it's mad at Mother. Or maybe Mother turned it away because she was mad at the mirror, like when she makes me stand in a corner. I turn it around, quiet as I can. Heavy. There's a crack right down the middle. Mother must have broken it once. It's dusty and smeared, too. But at least I'll be able see all of myself in it. As I wipe the mirror with my hand, I suddenly fill with hope. Maybe with her red shoes, and her lipstick, maybe in Mother's mirror, I'll see something else. Someone else. Not this face or this body. Not this skin I wish I could slip out of like a suit. Someone who makes me not want to look away. Who? I wonder.

But when I look in the mirror, what I see is what I always see. My bulbous body. My monster face. Beautiful, Mother says, but I know by now she's lying. I can read Mother, too. Every page. My gold Egyptian bracelet—a gift from your father—glows on my hairy wrist. There's an eye in it that's always staring. The Eye of Horus, Mother explained when she gave it to me. An Egyptian god from mythology. You love mythology, Mother insisted.

What's mythology?

Old stories. Like your fairy tales.

I looked at the strange, painted eye. It looked nothing at all like fairy tales to me.

Think of it as Father's eye, Mother said. Watching over you. She never lets me take it off. I slide it off my wrist now. Let it clatter to the ground. Right away, I feel lighter. I close my eyes. A land far away. A castle by the sea. That's the story Mother tells me each night. About the beautiful maiden. I smile because I can see her. When I close my eyes like this, I am her. Wandering the castle with my glowing skin and my hair like an S.

I open my eyes. What I see in Mother's mirror isn't me anymore. The crack down the middle is gone. The glass is shining. And there's a shape. A dark shape shimmering in the mirror. Waving like smoke. Suddenly, I'm excited. Frozen as I watch the smoke gather into something.

Not something.

Someone.

A man.

An actual man in the mirror. He's blurred around the edges, like a pond rippling after you throw a pebble in. But I see him there. He's beautiful. Dark, waving hair. Eyes of bright blue-green. He looks like he's from the movies. He looks like a fairy-tale prince.

"Are you a prince?" I whisper.

He smiles with his red lips. "Am I a prince?" he whispers back. Looking at me from the other side of the rippling glass. Intensely. So intensely, I shiver. His voice is playful, though. You know me, his voice says. Don't you?

I nod. Yes. His voice, his face. I know them.

"The movies," I whisper. "You're from the movies."

And just like that, he's not blurry anymore. He comes into vivid focus. His smile shows teeth. Long and white, slightly crooked. Yes. That's exactly right.

My heart hammers. The movie. Seeing it in the theater with Mother, then again secretly with Stacey. He's not wearing aviator glasses or a pilot's uniform, but otherwise it looks just like him. It is him. I know it like I know my own hammering heart; it hammered just like this in the dark theater. My breath catches.

"Oh my god," I whisper into the glass, "is it really you?"

"It's really me," Tom Cruise whispers. Tom Cruise. Standing in Mother's mirror. Tom Cruise, in the flesh. Right there on the other side of the glass, his smile white and blinding. Looking just like the movie except for his clothes, which are all black. Like the picture I tore from Sky magazine while Mother was getting her hair done into an S. I don't know why I did that, just looked into his sky-colored eyes and ripped. Quietly, carefully, so Mother wouldn't hear or see. Folded it three times, then tucked it deep into my dress pocket where it is still. Tom's smiling at me. His lips are a little redder than I remember. But he sounds just like Tom Cruise sounds. Smiles just like Tom Cruise smiles. Suddenly, I feel very hot in the face.

"What are you doing here? What are you doing in Mother's mirror?"

Tom keeps smiling with his long white teeth. One is longer than all the others, like a fang on one side. His eyes say some things are secrets, right? Best kept that way. Something inside of me catches fire. My skin goose bumps right down to my feet. I know why he's here. I know before he even says the words: "I'm here to see you, Belle."

Me. Tom Cruise is here to see me. Of course he is, though part of me thinks, It can't be. I notice he's holding a red rose pointy with thorns.

"Aren't you supposed to be in Hollywood?"

When I say Hollywood, I think of Mother, even though she's the last person I want in my head right now. Hollywood's where she wants to go eventually. Because how is she ever going to be the star she's meant to be in Montreal, for fuck's sake? Doing theater? A commercial here, a film there? She's tired of being a big fish in a small pond, making peanuts in Ladies Apparel. Someday we'll get there, Sunshine, she whispers to me at night, gripping my hand in the dark like it's my dream, not hers.

Tom Cruise shakes his head. He's still smiling at me. "I had to see you," he says.

"You did?"

"Definitely."

The rose glows in his hands. The rose, I know, is for me. My heart flutters, brightens. We're swaying to this music that's suddenly playing. That song I love from the movie, the one about breaths being taken away. Tom takes a step closer to the glass that separates us. He looks serious now. His jaw tightens, just like it does in the movie when he feels the need for speed.

"Can I come in?" he whispers. Tom is asking like the mirror is a door I can open. Will I open the door for him?

"Yes," I hear myself say. "Please."

And then? Tom Cruise walks through Mother's mirror. The mirror is like jelly. As Tom walks through, it makes a sucking sound that reminds me of squids. And then he's here. In Mother's closet with me. Standing on the same floor I'm standing on in Mother's very high-heeled red shoes. So high that Tom's eyes are only a little above my eyes. His face is inches from my face. And everything seems to happen in slow motion then. Like a movie. A movie I'm inside of. He smells like the ocean, like the sky over the ocean, the breeze the water brings. My body is swimmy. I can't breathe because Tom's taking my breath away. He's smiling at me just like he smiles at that blond woman in the movie, like Chip smiled at Mother just now. I'm fire. I know no words but his name. There are no eyes but Tom Cruise's eyes, which aren't blue-green anymore. They're red. Red and shining like the shoes on my feet, like the rose in his hands.

What's wrong with your eyes?I want to ask Tom. But I don't want to be rude. And maybe very close-up like this, Tom's eyes were always red and I just didn't notice before. But wouldn't I have noticed before?

"Here," Tom says, handing me the rose. "For you."

"Thank you." No one's ever given me anything like this. I can't wait to tell Stacey—

"Don't tell anyone," Tom says, knowing my thoughts. Knowing my heart. He looks very intense.

"I won't," I whisper. And though I'm sad about Stacey, I love that Tom doesn't want me to tell. That it's a secret.

"Our secret," Tom says. "From Mother, too."

"Mother, too?"

He nods. Takes a step closer to me. He cups his hands around my face. Tom Cruise does. His hands feel slightly sticking and cold. I shiver at his touch. "You know about secrets, don't you, Belle?"

"Yes," I tell Tom.

He smiles. "Good." Even with his red eyes, he's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. More beautiful than any of my dumb dolls. More beautiful than any prince or Snow White. Way more beautiful than Gabriel Gardner or even Val Kilmer, the actor from the movie where I first saw Tom Cruise. Iceman, Stacey sighed in the theater, and now her bedroom wall's plastered with his cold, smirking face. I thought, How is it possible to see Iceman when there's Maverick? I didn't say anything though. Iceman, I agreed, but I thought no, never in a million years. Tom's skin gleams like glass. He has red lips like he's wearing Mother's Russet Moon lipstick or like he's been eating cherries. He wants to dance with me. With you, Belle. Like Mother, he calls me Belle too. He bows a little, like he's from a fairy-tale world. He holds out his glossy hand and I take it. It feels just like a hand would feel except lighter, colder. More jellylike.

"Take My Breath Away" is playing all around us in Mother's dark closet. Tom and I are dancing. I've never slow danced with a boy before, apart from once in Stacey's dream. I watched Stacey do it with Gabriel Gardner at our grade six dance, while I waltzed with Ms. Said. They put their hands on each other's shoulders and rocked like they were on a boat. Their arms were so straight, like zombies. Later, Stacey said it was so hot.

Slow dancing with Tom Cruise is nothing like that. It is incredible. His cold, sticking hands on my shoulders, only a little lower than his thanks to Mother's shoes. His red eyes locked with my eyes. His smile making my skin shiver and burn like it's freezing and on fire at the same time. He's lighting me up on the inside. Like I'm a candle in Grand-Maman's dark church. He tells me he has a castle by the sea. In a land far away. He doesn't tell me this in words so much. We speak in another language. A language of eyes. Tom's eyes. And his smile full of white teeth, sharp and long.

"I like your shoes," Tom says, just like Tom would. He's very serious about it. "Wow," he whispers, shaking his head at my feet. "They're so pretty."

"Thank you," I whisper. I don't tell him that they're Mother's.

"So pretty," Tom repeats. Not looking at my feet anymore. Looking into my eyes, the color of mud. "Like you."

And when he says this, tears fall. I lower my head so Tom can't see.

"I'm not," I say, shaking my head. I shouldn't be telling him the truth about how I feel. "Mother's the one who's beautiful," I say to the red shoes. "Not me." The words just fall from my mouth like leaves from a tree. There's a game the girls at school play called Honestly. We sit in a circle and take turns closing our eyes. When you close them, you ask the circle, Am I beautiful? and people raise their hands if they think Yes and don't raise them if they think, No, sorry. And someone counts the hands for you, and that's how you know honestly. The last time we played, every girl, when she closed her eyes, sang, No one is raising their hand, no one is raising their hand, and we all laughed, though mostly we raised our hands. When it was my turn, I closed my eyes and sang, No one is raising their hand, no one is raising their hand, and no one laughed. How many hands? I asked when I opened my eyes. One, said Valerie, who was our Counter, who Mother said looked like a gopher. She'd had three hands. Well at least now you know honestly, Ashley said. She'd had five. I nodded. Now I knew honestly. Ashley looked at me like sorry, like maybe she was the one who'd raised her hand. But I knew who it was because I'd peeked. Stacey. She'd even glared at everyone like seriously? Later, I told Mother about this game and she looked at me for a long time. I don't want you playing that fucking game ever again, she said.

Why?

Because it's stupid, that's why. She lit a cigarette. On the TV screen, Grace Kelly was about to change from a beautiful evening dress into an even more beautiful nightgown while Jimmy Stewart sat in his pajamas and watched from his wheelchair. Go, Mother said to me, eyes on the screen.

I thought we were watching right now.

I don't want you watching right now.

Where do I go?

She shook her head at the screen. I don't know. Run. Climb a tree or something, okay? Climb a rock. Be a kid.

So I went outside and sat on a rock until it was dark. Until I heard Mother's voice calling me. Sounding soft now. She looked beautiful in the doorway watching me walk toward her. If she closed her eyes in any circle, I know everyone in the circle would raise their hands.

Now Tom lifts my chin so my eyes look right into his eyes, blue-green again. Tom's face is inches from mine. Still serious, a little angry, maybe. Glowing like he's lit by his own personal sun. So beautiful, I can't breathe. "Forget about Mother," he hisses.

"Forget about Mother?"

"Her Beauty's a lie, a trick. Not like yours." And he smiles like I'm sweet. When Tom says the word Beauty, it sounds like he's uttering its name.

"Mother is the moon to your sun," he says.

And then in Tom's eyes, I see the sky and the sea all at once. Creatures gliding in deep, dark water. Above the waves, the bluest sky going up and up into black space. Eclipsed suns and a Milky Way of stars. I'm shivering and shivering from his touch.

"The moon is pretty," I whisper, lost in the universe of Tom's eyes.

"The moon is nothing," Tom snaps. For a moment he looks angry. The universe goes red. Then he smiles again. "Without the sun, what's the moon? Just a rock in the outer dark. Its illumination just a trick. Just a trick from the sun's light, which it steals. And that's what Beauty is too."

"It is?"

"Definitely," Tom says. He seems so sure. A smoke surrounds us like fog, like it does sometimes in movie scenes when people dance.

"Beauty," Tom says through the smoke, "is a mystery, Belle. A spell. Some have it for real like the sun." He smiles at me. "Or like this rose right here." He takes the rose and tucks it behind my ear. "And you can have it for a while. You can bloom and bloom. But Beauty also disappears. Just like that. Here one day, then poof. Gone. Smoke and mirrors."

"Where does it go when it goes?"

"Where we all go in the end."

"Where's that?" I ask, afraid. Thinking of my father. I remember almost nothing about him. Just a lullaby he sang to me once about a goose and a duck. Mother says he's in heaven now, he's all the stars I see, and if I look up, I'll see him there in the twinkling lights, looking down on me. Waving. Now I feel bad about taking off the bracelet with Father's eye.

Tom just smiles at me like I'm sweet again. Where we go isn't up there with the stars, his face says. Trust me. I don't want to know where we go.

"When Beauty goes, it fucks with people, Belle."

"Fucks with them," I say, mesmerized by Tom saying the word fuck. My own mouth saying a word Mother once smacked out of it.

Tom nods slowly. He leans into me close. "They'll do anything to get it back. Even stealing Beauty that doesn't belong to them."

"Really?" I whisper. "They do that?" I think of Mother's mean face.

"Oh yes. It happens all the time," he says softly. He fingers the rose in my hair.

I flush. Lower my eyes to Mother's shoes. "That's so bad."

"It's the worst," Tom says, sighing like he knows. His breath like a breeze on my neck. I'm sure he knows all about this. People must try to steal Tom Cruise's Beauty all the time.

"But you know what you have to do, of course," he says. "When they steal it."

"Take it back," we say at the same time. And then I smile.

"How?"

And now Tom smiles too. Tom's smile. My body is jelly. Cold hands on my face making me shiver even as I burn. The smell of him like oceans and sky and something else, something that makes me think of creatures gliding in deep water. "Magic."

Suddenly, his expression darkens. Like the sun on his face went behind a cloud. His smile disappears. "I have to go."

"No! Wait. Take me back with you, Tom Cruise," I whisper. "Please."

There's a flash of anger in his eyes. Then he sighs. Strokes the side of my face with his cold, sticking hand. Not like Mother does. Not like I'm some pet. Like I'm his lover. I don't know what a lover is exactly, but somehow I know that's what I am to Tom Cruise.

"My name's not Tom," he says. "It's Seth."

"Seth?" But you're Tom Cruise, I know you are. He looks exactly like the Tom I saw in the movie except for the red in his eyes sometimes. But Tom's face says he's just told me his name. And that it's a secret. Like the rose. Like this dance. Like the fact that I'm his lover. And I can keep secrets, right?

Don't fucking tell anyone, Stacey said when we first started hanging out. Just after the Honestly game. I went up to her in the schoolyard the next day while she was with the grade seven girls. You raised your hand for me, I said, and all the girls smiled sideways and Stacey told me to fuck off. Later, though, she came up to me. Hey, she whispered. They're just being little cunts, the girls in your grade. That's what she called them, the girls in your grade, though technically it was her grade too. Come over sometime, she said. Maybe we can rate each other or something. Okay, I whispered. I had no idea what she was talking about. And that's how it started. After school we'd go to her house, which it turned out was only a block from my apartment. It felt like a different world with its huge rose garden and its many floors. She'd lead me through the bright red flower beds spiky with thorns, and then through the back door, down to her basement. There she'd change into a black bodysuit and lower the lights. Tell me to sit on the plaid couch covered in the hairs of her many golden dogs. Then she'd turn on Flashdance and dance it for me until she collapsed. My job was to rate her ability to be Jennifer Beals on a scale from 1 to 10. At first I gave her all 10s, but then I learned to give her an 8.7 or a 9.2 sometimes so she'd trust me. So she'd know I was really honestly watching each time. Don't fucking tell anyone we do this, Stacey said. It's secret.

Like being best friends,I said. I said it like a question. Stacey didn't answer. Closed her eyes like she was tired and it was time for me to go home.

I look at Tom smiling at me with his red lips. Tom who just told me his name is Seth.

"Yes," I whisper. "Yes, yes, just take me with you, Seth, please. Away from here," I say. I'm shaking my head. I'm in tears.

He brushes them away tenderly with his cold, cold hand. "I'll take you, Belle," he whispers. "I will. Definitely."

When he says this, I shiver. Fresh goose bumps on my skin. He feels them under his fingers and laughs. Cups my cheeks in his hands. I look at his face shining like glass. I can see a shimmer of myself in his red eyes. Not at all like the girl I am. Beautiful. My true face in his eyes like universes, like mirrors.

"When?" I whisper back. "When will you?"

"When the time is right. You'll know. I'll give you a sign, how's that?"

"What's the sign?"

But he's already slipping away from me. Smoke all around us now.

"Belle?" calls a voice. I hear footsteps in the distance.

"What's the sign?" I shout to Tom/Seth, slipping away into the smoke.

The door bursts open. I lose my balance in the shoes and fall to Mother's floor. I smell violets and smoke. And there's Mother in the closet doorway.

"Belle!" she hisses. Lips a tight line. Eyes flashing with anger. She's looking at me sitting in a heap on the floor. Her red sex shoes slipping off my feet.

"What the hell are you doing in here?"

"Nothing."

She raises an eyebrow. "What did I say about coming in here?"

I'm silent.

"What. Did I just fucking say about coming in here?"

I stare at the floor. My whole body ringing with the anger in Mother's voice.

"Tell me what I SAID!"

"Not to," I whisper to the floor. I see the gold bracelet lying there. Father's lidless eye staring up.

"And did you listen?"

I shake my head. Tears fall. Drip, drip onto her blue carpet. The bracelet is a glowing, blurry circle by my feet.

"Who were you talking to in here?"

"No one."

"I heard you talking to someone."

"I was playing."

"Why is this mirror turned around?"

"I just wanted to see myself."

She looks at the mirror, then at me. She reaches down and picks up the gold bracelet. Your father's bracelet. On the floor.

"It fell off," I whisper.

Mother's shaking her head. "You're not to come in here again, do you understand me? Ever." I hear a rustle and look up. Chip now behind her in the doorway, grinning at me over her pale shoulder. He loves this. That I'm finally getting what's coming to me. Feeling Chip behind her, Mother's face softens, remembers itself. Puddles back into its usual Beauty. She pats her S hair, disarrayed by her shouting, into place. "Well?"

Her Beauty is a lie. A trick.I nod.

"Good. I'm glad we understand each other."

She turns away from me and grabs her white hat from the bed. That's why she's back. Can't forget the hat that keeps out the sun. That will keep her from ever being tan like me. That will keep her Beauty a lie. From the doorway she looks at me, her hat in her hand.

"Go wash your face and then go to your room and stay there. Until I come back."

She looks at Chip, shaking her head—what is she going to do with me?—and slams the door. I hear the sound of laughter in the hall. The click of their footsteps fading. And I'm alone in Mother's blue bedroom. Staring at the floor-length mirror in the closet. No more crack. No more dust. The crack's sealed up and the glass gleams. Empty now. Tom's not in it anymore, though the ocean animal smell is still all around. Just my reflection. Same old face slashed with Mother's lesser red. Except I look a little flushed, like I've been running or something. My heart's pounding in my chest. My heart is full. With what?

A new secret. Our secret, Tom said.

Seth.

I close my eyes, the better to savor it.