The weather that greets me when I step outside my dorm is the kind that poets write overwrought sonnets about: crisp but not too cold, breezy enough to ruffle your hair but not ruin it, charged with something unplaceable that makes every moment feel like an establishing shot in a movie. It’s the kind of night that people want to go out and do things in. Even people like me, who aren’t poets at all.
And since I’m not a poet — maybe an amateur songwriter at best — the only thought I have about the weather as I head across campus is, “I should’ve worn a bigger coat.” Because that’s the thing poets never mention about crisp breezes full of romantic potential: how sometimes they can slip up your jacket sleeves and between your shirt buttons, and spawn goosebumps up and down your back just as well as a blizzard could.
Which is really just redundant, honestly, because those goosebumps were already there to begin with. They’ve been there pretty much all day, and gotten bumpier and goosier every time I’ve thought about how this stupid poetic evening will start with what might be my first capital-D Date in my entire life.
“It’s not a date,” I mutter to myself as I walk, for probably the hundredth time since Sweetie Belle left me with a million answerless questions this morning. “It’s a performance. She wants her friends to see her perform.”
And yeah, sure, that would make the most sense out of every other possibility I’ve thought of today. A capital-D Date would be something like two seats next to each other in a movie theater or a dinner by candlelight, not her being up on a stage and me being a blurry face in the crowd below her.
But then again, a Date could also be a long conversation over coffee, followed by a test to see exactly how far I’ll go to impress her the way rushing KNZ apparently hasn’t. I’ve thought about that specific possibility more than most of the others, and gotten nowhere close to figuring out whether it’s the one closest to being real.
So, as I pass the older campus dining hall and see the coffee shop rise into view at the top of the hill flanking the larger building, I decide to just not think about it — again, for the hundredth time today. Maybe attempt one-hundred-and-one will be the one that finally sticks.
With only a few minutes left until showtime, there’s still a pretty sizable crowd milling around in front of the shop, and though I can’t see through the plush velvet curtains pulled over the windows, it sounds like the inside is packed. Guess Open Mic Night’s a pretty big deal around here. For a moment, I wonder whether it’ll be too packed for me to even get in, but nobody gives me a second glance as I thread my way into the throng outside and, eventually, through the place’s front door.
In the few hours since this morning, the coffee shop has gone through a impressively thorough transition from daytime hang spot to intimate evening entertainment venue. The interior still has tables set up about where I remember them being earlier, but someone’s added tablecloths and flickering electric candles to each one, and lined up some extra chairs along the windows and walls as mostly-full overflow seating. The back left corner, though, is empty save for a raised dais with a mic stand and a wooden stool on it — and to the right of the stage, seated at a table a few feet from the hallway back to the bathrooms and kitchen, is the girl I’m supposed to meet here tonight.
Forget what I said earlier. Right now I’m really wishing that I was a poet, because just describing what Sweetie Belle looks like — hair piled over her shoulders and framing the ridges of her breasts, snow-white legs crossed so the hem of her glittering cherry-red dress wrinkles a bit between her thighs, knuckles propped under her chin and lips glistening the same color as her outfit — feels like drawing the Mona Lisa in crayon. If the show had started already, she’d look good enough to stop it, just like she’s stopped me so dead in my tracks that a couple trying to find a table almost crashes into me from behind.
And by the time it occurs to me — in my too-big button-down and unironed slacks draped over a body that’s more bone than muscle — that I can’t possibly share the same table or restaurant or universe with her, she’s already spotted me and sat up straight and beckoned me over with a indelicate, almost urgent wave. I swallow my heart back down into my chest, adjust the front of my pants a little, and make my way towards her.
“Wow,” I gush once I reach the table. “You look amazing.”
“Thanks,” she sighs, only briefly glancing up at me as I sit down before turning her gaze back to the stage. Her phone buzzes, facedown on the table in front of her, and she ignores it. When it buzzes a second time, her jaw tightens.
“Glad one of us got here early,” I say after a moment, over the drumming of her fingers against the tablecloth. “Pretty big crowd.”
“Mm-hmm,” Sweetie Belle hums. She’s still staring at the stage. I bite my lip and ball my fist so my fingers don’t start tapping along with hers. I definitely should’ve dressed up more, or maybe not come at all. She sure doesn’t look too excited to see me. Actually, she looks kind of like she did a few nights ago — right before she sprinted into the bathroom and started throwing up.
“So… what time do you go on?” I force myself to ask. “Actually, how does this work? Is it random order, or –”
In a blur of motion, Sweetie Belle drops her hand from under her chin, wraps it in a vice-grip around my wrist, and yanks me out of my chair as she surges to her feet. Silent every step of the way, she leads me away from our table and towards the back hallway.
And despite everything, I can’t help but stare at the back of her dress — or just her back, really, since I can see it through a gap in the fabric that stretches from halfway up her spine all the way to the twin dimples above her tailbone. I guess it’ll make for a nice memory later, after she’s dragged me out the back door and ordered me away with my own proverbial tail between my legs.
But instead of doing that, she stops outside the bathrooms and drops my arm with a heavy sigh. And then she sighs again as she presses her back to the wall, and again as she bends forward and braces her hands on her knees, and finally I realize that those aren’t sighs so much as ragged gulps of air that feel like the prelude to a scream.
“Fuck, this was a bad idea,” she groans down towards the floor. “Oh fuck. Fuck meeee.”
Well, thank God that’s not going to repeat in my head all night like a corrupted MP3 file. In the meantime, body, wanna get on board with my brain and live in the moment for a bit?
“Is it the crowd?” I ask. “Because –”
“Yes, it’s the fucking crowd!” Sweetie Belle growls through her clenched teeth. “I didn’t think anyone would show up! I thought it would just be a casual thing, like a…”
She straightens up against the wall and lifts her hands to the back of her neck, threading her fingers through her hair as she sucks in air through her nose. I risk a glance back up the hallway. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s noticed us back here.
“I mean, you’ve sung in front of people before, right?” I say, fumbling for a handhold I can use to pull Sweetie Belle back off this ledge. “You can –”
“Nope,” she squeaks. “No. I’ve done choir, fucking school plays. This is… can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
And she means that — she’s shaking from head to three-inch heels, arms crossed tightly in front of her torso now like she wants to squeeze herself into a ball small enough to hide from the whole world. For the second time today, I look at Sweetie Belle and see a mirror.
The buzzing sound of mic feedback echoes down the hallway, followed by a voice that sounds like a wish someone made to turn a sweater vest into a real boy. “All right, ladies and germs, let’s get this show rolling!” the emcee announces. “First up, all the way from the other side of campus, the lovely and talented Miss Soprano Silk!”
“Oh God,” Sweetie Belle whimpers as the crowd starts to applaud, “I’m up next. Let’s just go, let’s just… I don’t care where we go. I’m sorry, I…”
She trails off and blinks — not fast enough to keep her eyes from shining with tears. I know exactly what she’s feeling right now. If I say we should leave, she’ll come with me — and she’ll never come back here again, and never stop thinking about what she should’ve done differently.
Somewhere inside my head, an imaginary mirror cracks right down the middle.
“You can do this,” I tell her — first as a murmur, and then again with all the force I’m capable of putting into words. “Hey, look at me. You can do this.”
She does look up, eyes wide and chest heaving, and she tries to argue before I cut her off. “You’re going to do this,” I tell her, “and you’re gonna do great at it, because it’s what you do.”
Her eyes narrow a bit, going from dinner plates to something more like sauce dishes. “No,” she snaps. “Fuck you. Do not fucking Rarity me right now.”
“Well, Rarity’s not here right now, and I am.”
“Button, I’m not kidding –”
“Neither am I.”
Sweetie Belle glares at me, half-snorting with every angry breath. I stare back. Now I know for sure what this all is, and it isn’t a date — it’s me making sure my friend doesn’t make the same mistake I’ve made a million times before.
“You think I don’t know what this feels like?” I tell her. “Wanting to give up before you fuck up? Because I do. I’ve lived for years like every day was a thousand opportunities all lined up in a row to mess something up and look like an idiot, and you know what happened? I looked like an idiot anyway, because I never tried looking like anything else.”
Sweetie Belle bites her lips and cringes — maybe from what I said, maybe from the high note the singer on stage just hit.
“Look, I can’t make you do anything,” I go on, “and I’m not gonna try. But whatever you think might happen out there, any awful embarrassing thing you can imagine… giving up is worse. Trust me.”
Sweetie Belle doesn’t say anything, and even if she had, the applause for the end of the evening’s first song would’ve drowned her out. But as the singer thanks the crowd and transitions into her next piece, I see something solidify in her expression — an instinct crystallizing into a decision. She sighs, and nods, and looks up at me with her jaw set and her gorgeous green eyes shining.
“If I puke up there, I’m aiming for you,” she says — and she means it too. But I grin back at her anyway, because there isn’t a word she could gruffly snarl at me right now that would overshadow what they all mean put together: “I’m not giving up.”
The table we were at before is occupied by the time we emerge from the back hallway, so with one last friendly “You got this” smile from me and a “I still kind of want to kill you” glare back from her, I head for a spare seat along the wall as she lingers by the stage until it’s her turn to take it. When the first singer finishes her last song and the emcee — who, go figure, literally is wearing a sweater vest — joins her by the mic, I can see the twitch in Sweetie Belle’s shoulders as she thinks about running away again.
And then she looks at me, and sets her jaw again, and waits to be announced.
“One more time for Miss Silk, everybody!” the emcee says, drawing another smattering of applause for the opening act as she departs. “And I don’t know if we’ve got any soldiers in the audience tonight, but I hope you’ve still got some soul for our next performer, a dynamite laser beam of a teenage dream: Sweetieeeeee Belle!”
Corny as they are, Sweetie Belle seems to take the emcee’s words to heart as she strides up to the mic, serenaded by polite applause and a few wolf whistles. Once the noise from the crowd dies down, she clears her throat and squares her shoulders, throwing one last glance my way as she does.
“Um… hi,” she says, her amplified voice vibrating in my chest. She looked great at the table and even in the dim back hallway in the middle of a panic attack, but under the spotlights ringing the stage and refracting in the sequins lining her dress, she looks like a twenty-megaton bombshell. “This is my first time performing solo, and my friend talked me into doing it, so… this is his fault.”
Polite laughter rumbles through the crowd for a moment, then the place goes silent again as Sweetie Belle nods to the emcee. He hits a key on a laptop just off stage, and from the speakers flanking the stage on either side, quivering violin strings lead Sweetie Belle into her first song.
“Birds flying high… you know how I feel…”
There’s a hitch in her voice on the first word, a little quiver in the second, but by the time she reaches the end of the lyric, her voice is full and clear with just a hint of smoky seduction trailing each syllable. She gets a couple whoops from the back of the crowd, and a smile flickers through her lips as she puts a bit more weight into the next line.
“Sun in the sky… you know how I feel…”
More whoops and whistles, and — for me at least — tingling goosebumps down my arms and back. She’s not just good and not just beautiful. She’s more than both. She’s hypnotizing. And by the way she gently shuts her eyes and steers the mic closer to her tilted head, she thinks and feels and knows it.
“Breeze driftin’ on by… you know how I feel…”
But when she opens her eyes and scans the blurry faces in the crowd, the only one her gaze lingers on is mine. It’s not just a guess, not just vain hope — she meets my eyes and flutters her lashes and croons the next line like she’s murmuring it to me across an empty room, little flourishes of strings garnishing each phrase. And looking up at her, completely alone in a packed house, I realize something.
“It’s a new dawn… it’s a new day…”
I don’t have a crush on Sweetie Belle. Crushes are what teenagers have on people they don’t talk to, what hopeless nerds feel when they wish they were popular without understanding why anyone else is. Crushes distract you in classes and keep you awake at night, but they don’t paralyze you even though you’re already sitting still, flow through you like electricity on an endless circuit getting stronger and brighter by the timeless second.
“It’s a new life… for me…”
I did have a crush on her. I had shallow fantasies, childish wishes, a wall-poster image of her in my mind that pales in comparison to a fraction of the real thing. She’s so much more than that. I’m so far beyond that.
“And I’m feeling…”
I’m in love with her. And maybe she knows it. And maybe right now she’s thinking…
“... good.”
She throws her head back in perfect time with a titanic burst of horns and drums, and the crowd cheers right along with it. They’re all enraptured by her, blown away by her sultry voice and her swaying hips and her fingers running over her head as she belts the line again.
“Aaa-aaaaah'm feelin’ good!”
But she could be up on stage in sweatpants with stringy fresh-from-the-shower hair, and she’d still be blowing the roof off this place. This is all of her, body and soul, bared for the whole world to see — the very best version of the very best person I’ve ever known, grinning and thriving and living exactly like she deserves.
And as the track softens again and the second verse begins, she throws one more half-lidded glance my way, and I know this is where I’m really meant to be: by her side, on her side, doing anything and everything I can to make her this happy every single day. It feels incredible. It feels real.
And I feel like I know exactly what I need to do next.
===
When Sweetie finally cedes the stage to a long-haired guy with an acoustic guitar, half of the people in attendance get to their feet to applaud, and half of those people — including the singer who went on before her — meet her on her way down to pat her shoulders and shake her hand and gush about how good she sounded. Even if I wanted to interrupt, there’s no way I could squeeze my way through the horde around her, so I hang back and let it clear enough for her wandering eyes to find mine.
She doesn’t say anything once she excuses herself and joins me, just motions with her head towards the exit. She still doesn’t talk once we’re outside again, and the fur-lined coat she collected from the rack at the door doesn’t do much to stop her from shivering. But it also doesn’t stop her from walking with a spring with her high-heeled step, or from swinging her arms in long arcs by her sides, or eventually from bouncing up and down as she lets out an exhilarated squeal.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that!” she says, hugging herself either to keep the breeze out or to stop herself from cartwheeling. “That was insane, that was…”
Finally, she sees the look on my face, and her giddy expression morphs into a put-upon scowl. “Okay, yes, fine,” she grumbles. “You told me so. Don’t be annoying about it.”
“I’m gonna be so annoying about it,” I assure her.
She tries to roll her eyes and glare, but she can’t finish the motion before a goofy grin erupts past it. She looks really cute when she pretends to be mad, and beneath that, she looks as happy as I’ve ever seen her — and the fact that it has almost nothing to do with me somehow makes it even better.
“God, though, I haven’t panicked like that in years,” she says — still smiling, but a bit somber now as well. “I was absolutely gonna quit.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t,” I remind her. “That took guts.”
“You’re one to talk. I was seriously ready to strangle you.”
“Yeah, but… you didn’t. So it worked out.”
The look she gives me isn’t happy or fake-mad. It’s a mix of amusement and… something else. Something that bubbles in my chest and sends heartstopping heat tingling through my fingers and toes.
“Yeah, it did,” she says. “It worked out great.”
Sweetie Belle stops walking. We’re in front of a little pond down the hill from the coffee shop. Our dorm’s just around the corner.
“Button…” she murmurs.
I stop too, turn around to face her — and suddenly her body’s pressed into mine and her arms are wrapped around me, and she’s hugging me so hard I almost stumble over backwards from the contact, her flowery perfume filling my nose and wiping every thought from my head.
“Thank you,” she whispers, cheek pressed to mine and chin poking my shoulder as her lips move next to my ear. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”
I should hug her back. I want to hug her back — and so I do, gently and then firmly, one hand and then the other squeezed around the small of her back right where her coat swells out over her hips. She doesn’t stop me. She presses herself closer and squeezes me tighter.
“I’m glad you did it,” I tell her. “And I’m glad I could help.”
She pulls back a little, her hands sliding down my back and settling at my waist. Her face is inches away from mine. She’s smiling, sighing, staring into my eyes.
I could kiss her. I want to kiss her, more than I’d ever wanted anything — and so…
… what if she doesn’t want me to?
No. Shut up, brain. She does want me to. This is the perfect moment for it.
And if it’s not, I could perfectly ruin things with her forever. I could lean forward, and she could lean back, and her face could twist with awkward confusion as she asks what I’m doing and then explains that we’re just friends.
But we’re already hugging! Gazing into each other’s eyes! This is the most romantic that a moment could possibly fucking get!
And hugs can be platonic. Even super-long, gazing, romantic ones.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you, br–
“You in there, Button?”
I blink back to reality — back to Sweetie Belle’s eyes and lips millimeters away from mine, both curling together into a smirk.
“Y-Yeah!” I stammer. “Yep. I’m… sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” she giggles.
“Nothing! Or… um…”
She laughs again. Her hands shift behind me, and the fingers on one of her hands scratch against my back just lightly enough to almost drop me to my knees. “You’re adorable,” she says. “And you have somewhere to be, don’t you?”
For the first time in hours, I remember that I actually do. It’s at least nine-thirty right now, probably closer to ten. If I want to have any shot at a KNZ bid, I gotta get going.
And leave Sweetie Belle behind. Give up on this moment for good, and just hope there might be another one someday. There might not be. There might never have been.
“Y-Yeah, I…” I mumble. “I guess I…”
Sweetie Belle smiles, and squeezes me one last time, and then gently pushes me forward as she takes a step back. “Go,” she says. “Go have fun with the boys.”
I nod, swallowing hard until I can talk past my bone-dry throat. “I’ll… text you later?”
She cocks an eyebrow. “You better,” she pointedly replies — then she smiles again. “Good night, Button.”
“N-Night,” I manage to say back. And then she brushes past me, leaving the barest hint of perfume in her wake, and the moment — whatever moment that really was — is gone.
I should have kissed her. I so obviously should have, and I missed my chance, and she barely stopped herself from laughing about it. But if I got one chance, I’ll get another. I have to. I’ll just text her later, tell her I’m an awkward idiot, and ask her if she wants to get lunch tomorrow or see a movie or do something that counts as a real, actual date. And then she’ll say yes, and everything will be fine.
Or not. Or I’m still misreading this, because I’m in love with her and desperate to believe that any friendly gesture from her is proof she loves me back, just like every clueless guy who gets made fun of online for being impossible to have normal, platonic friendships with.
Fuck this. My face is red, and my hands are cold, and I have half a mile to walk to the KNZ house so I can find out what “consequences” for being late to a rush event look like. Maybe I’ll figure out where I stand with Sweetie Belle on the way. Or, most likely, I won’t.
Either way, I better get moving — and so, hands stuffed in my pockets and teeth grinding hard enough for my head to ache, I do.