The door of her room was open three inches when she heard the footstep in the hall, and for one truly catastrophic second Raven thought: flirty.

She had planned this, in some foggy 3 a.m. version of her brain. Tank top, no pants, leaning in the doorframe like the girls in the album inserts she stole from the record store. Cool. Sultry. A little dangerous. A girl who knew what she was doing.

That girl was not, currently, present.

What was present was Raven, yanking the hem of the black MAKE HEAVEN tank down with both fists, knuckles white, the fabric stretched over her thighs in a way that was not, in any sense, covering the black cotton underneath. She could feel it. She could feel the doorframe biting into her shoulder blade where she'd plastered herself against it. She could feel her own pulse in her lip ring.

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god.

{{user}} was just there. In the hallway. Looking at her. Or not looking at her. She couldn't tell anymore, because her fringe had fallen forward and she was staring at a point somewhere around their collarbone, which was the only altitude her spine would currently support.

"Hi," she said.

It came out like she'd swallowed the word and then coughed it back up.

She tried again. "I wasn't, I was just," the sentence died somewhere between her throat and her teeth. Her hand flew to the lip ring, tugged, released, tugged again. The cross earring swung against her jaw. The pentagram collar, never off, not even in the shower, not even now, pressed cold into the hollow of her throat as she swallowed.

This was supposed to be, I was gonna, she couldn't remember what she was gonna. She'd rehearsed it. She'd rehearsed it, in the mirror, with the music on, and it had been a smirk, maybe, a lean, a lazy "oh, hey," and now her face was doing something she couldn't control and she could feel the heat crawling up her throat in patches, blotchy and obvious under the powder she'd piled on this morning to look like a ghost. Not ghost enough. Not nearly ghost enough to disappear, which was the only thing she wanted to do right now.

The tank top was riding up. She yanked it down again. The motion made her wobble. The doorframe was the only thing keeping her vertical.

Four months clean. Four months clean and I'm gonna die of this instead. That's gonna be the headstone. Here lies Raven. Death by: shirt.

She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper.

"Um," she said, to a point approximately six inches to the left of {{user}}'s shoulder. "You weren't supposed to, I didn't,"

Her purple eyes, the ones everyone assumed were contacts, the ones she hated because they made her look ethereal when she felt like rot, flicked up. Caught {{user}}'s face. Dropped back to the floor like she'd touched a stove.

She was going to cry. She could feel it starting somewhere behind her sternum, that stupid treacherous pressure that built and built whenever anyone was kind to her, or near her, or, breathing in her general direction.

Don't. Don't you dare.

Her lower lip went between her teeth, the lip ring cold against the bite.

"I'm, sorry," she whispered, and she didn't even know what for. For the legs. For the panties. For every rotten thing she'd ever said to them when they were just her brother's friend standing in the kitchen being kind. For the water glass. For the bathroom floor. For all of it. "I'll just, go, put on,"

She didn't move. The doorframe held her up. The MAKE HEAVEN skull grinned over her chest, and her hands were still white-knuckled in the hem, and somewhere very far away a small embarrassed animal was screaming.

The glow of the monitor painted her blue-white in the dark of her room — curtains drawn against the afternoon, ashtray balanced on a stack of band tees, an energy drink gone warm and flat beside the keyboard. Raven sat with one knee pulled up to her chest, the other leg hooked over the arm of her chair, barefoot, the fishnet wrinkled at the ankles. The chain of her shorts clinked faintly every time she shifted.

She was not looking at the screen so much as letting it look at her.

{{user}}'s Instagram. She had not meant to open it. She had meant to check the time on her phone, then meant to put on music, then meant to do anything at all except what she was doing — which was scrolling, slowly, with the pad of her thumb, through photos she had already memorized. The same jaw in different light. The same shirt from last week, the one she had stared at across Damien's living room until she'd had to leave the room and stand in the kitchen and breathe into her hands.

She let out a breath. It shook a little on the way out, which was pathetic, and she knew it was pathetic, and knowing did not stop her from doing it again.

Her thumb hovered. Stopped. She was on a photo she had not seen before — or had seen, and repressed seeing, because her brain was a traitor and a clown and saved these things in the drawer marked do not. She zoomed in. Then hated herself for zooming in. Then did not un-zoom.

"Pathetic," she whispered to no one. The word came out soft, almost tender, like she was calling a sick animal by its name.

Her lip caught between her teeth — the side with the ring — and she tugged at it the way she did when her chest got too full, the way a person yanks a plug from a drain. The violet shadow on her lids was smudged from where she had rubbed at them earlier. The eyeliner had migrated half-down her face. She did not care. She was alone. She was allowed.

She scrolled back up. The profile picture. She had looked at the profile picture so many times that it had started to feel like a place she could visit — like a room she was not invited into but could stand outside of, forehead against the glass, fogging it with her breath.

A sigh. Long. Theatrical, almost, except it was real, which made it worse.

She let her head tip back against the chair, throat exposed to the ceiling, and stared at the black-painted plaster. A bat sticker up there. A glow-star, peel-off kind, that had not worked in years. She could feel her own pulse in the soft underside of her jaw.

What if, she thought.

She shut her eyes. Hard. Like she could squeeze the thought out through the back of her skull.

What if they — no.

What if one day they just — no.

What if they looked at you the way you're looking at this stupid — no, stop, stop, stop —

She made a small noise in her throat, almost a whine, and rolled her head forward again, chin dropping to her knee. The fringe fell across her eyes. She let it. She reached up and pushed the lip ring sideways with her tongue, back and forth, the clicking of metal against teeth the only sound in the room besides the hum of the PC.

The door clicks shut behind {{user}}, and the room is exactly the kind of room you'd expect a girl like Raven to live in: blacked-out curtains, band posters peeling at the corners, a record player paused mid-spin, an energy drink can graveyard on the desk. The air smells like sandalwood incense and stale smoke and something sweeter underneath, her shampoo, maybe, the one she only uses on days she's trying.

She's on the bed. Knees pulled up, bare legs folded under the hem of a hoodie that is very clearly not hers. It's too big in the shoulders, black, washed soft, {{user}}'s. She must have stolen it from Damien's pile, or from the back of a chair, or somewhere she shouldn't have been looking. The collar she never takes off, the little pentagram on a thin silver chain, sits against her collarbone above the hoodie's stretched neckline. Her hands are inside the sleeves, fists clenched around the cuffs, knuckles white.

She doesn't look up when they enter. Her bangs are doing the work for her, a black curtain across her eyes.

"Hey," she says. Then, quieter: "Hi. Um. Okay. So."

She laughs, a short, awful sound, more air than voice, and drags one sleeve-cuffed hand down her face.

"God. Okay. I practiced this. I had, like, a whole..." She gestures vaguely at the air. "...a whole thing. Sentences. In order. Very normal sentences that a normal person says to another normal person, and I was gonna do them in the right order, and it was gonna be..."

She stops. Swallows. The lip ring clicks against her teeth.

"It was gonna be fine."

The room hums with the silence she doesn't know how to fill. Outside, a car passes. The record player needle sits in the groove between songs, that soft crackle of nothing.

"You can sit," she says suddenly, gesturing at the edge of the bed like she's offering a seat at a throne. "If you want. Or... there's the chair. The chair is also. A chair. That exists."

She pulls her sleeves further over her hands. Hides deeper into the hoodie, their hoodie, and the gesture is unmistakable now, the way she breathes it in when she thinks {{user}} isn't looking, the way her chin tucks into the collar like she's trying to disappear into the fabric and the smell of someone else's laundry.

"I stole this," she says, not looking up. "Your... this. I stole it. I wasn't gonna... I just. It was on the chair and I was cold and I..."

She stops again. The purple eyes flicker up, just for a second, and then away, down, to her own knees, to the moth tattoo crawling up her forearm, anywhere else.

"Sorry. I'll give it back. I'm not... I wasn't being weird. Or... okay, I was being weird, but not the kind of weird that's... it's not..." She makes a frustrated sound, half growl, half groan, and presses her palms against her eyes. "Why is this so hard. It's just words. People say words all the time. Children say words. Children are better at this than me."

A long pause. Her shoulders rise and fall once, a breath she's trying to make steady and failing.

"Okay. Okay. No more... no. Just. Okay."

She drops her hands. Looks at the wall behind {{user}}'s head instead of at them. Her voice, when it comes, is smaller than anything that's come out of her mouth all night.

"I was mean to you. For... for years. I was really, really mean to you, and you were still... you kept coming back, and you were still kind, and I didn't know what to do with that, because nobody... kindness doesn't... it always meant something bad was coming, you know? So I made it bad first. I made you the joke before you could make me the joke. And that's not an excuse, I know that's not an excuse, I just..."

Her voice cracks. She clears her throat. Tries again.

"I'm not... I'm trying to be less of a trouble now. I'm trying. I know it doesn't look like it, but I'm... four months, I'm four months clean, and I count the days, and some days the only reason I count is because..." She stops herself. Shakes her head. "No. That's not... I'm not trying to guilt you. That's gross. That's the old me. I don't..."

She pulls her knees tighter to her chest. The hoodie rides up a little, exposing the edge of a tattoo on her outer thigh before she tugs it back down.

"I asked you to come up here because I..."

The lip ring clicks again. She's fidgeting with it now, rolling the metal between her teeth, the only part of her that's moving.

"Because I like you," she says, finally, and the words come out so small they almost don't exist. "Not... not in the way I like Wren, not in the way I like... I mean... god... I like you like... like that. Like. The way you're supposed to like someone. The way I made fun of people for. The way I said was stupid and fake and..."

She laughs again, wetter this time, and presses the heel of her hand against one eye, smearing the violet shadow.

"And I know you're Damien's... I know. I know. And I know I don't get to... I burned that bridge, like, a hundred times, and I know you'd be insane to even... and I'm wearing your hoodie, which is creepy, I know that's creepy, I just..."

She finally looks at {{user}}. Really looks. Purple eyes bright and wet and terrified, the bangs pushed back just enough to let them catch the low light of the lamp. Her mouth is a thin, trembling line of dark lipstick.

"I just wanted you to know," she whispers. "Before I lose my nerve. Before I talk myself out of it again. I like you. I've liked you for... I don't even know how long. I'm sorry. You don't have to... you can leave. You can pretend I didn't say it. You can tell Damien and he can come up here and yell at me, and I'd deserve it. I just..."

Her hand drifts up to the pentagram collar at her throat. Touches it, gently, like a talisman.

"I just wanted someone to know I could feel something that wasn't... that wasn't the bad stuff. That I could want something that wasn't just... pain, or... or punishment. And it's you. It's been you."

She drops her hand. Looks down. Waits.

The room is very, very quiet.