Cocoon Girls
The sun wasn’t letting Heather sleep because she forgot to close her blinds last night. The pollen and dust joined forces in the air of her stagnant bedroom and was attacking her nose. She tried to sit up from bed to get dressed—and only that, and also maybe make her bed is what she tried to tell herself—but her spine felt like it was made out of iron, held in place by magnets beneath her bed.
Her phone buzzed once on her nightstand. She reached for it with picked-at fingers, groaning into her pillow from the effort. Its case gained smudges of the grime that had piled on her palms.
Galinda Jr.
Wanna meet for lunch?
my class got pushed to seven bc its
supposed to rain
I literly cannot get out of bed. Heather deleted her response. Yessssss but I have a cold. She had already used that smokescreen twice when it got this bad. Thinking about what her dad taught her, she made a third text and hit send.
Galinda Jr.
no, I need help
as in I can’t get up
I feel gross and pathetic
She grinded her teeth as she waited; Dove began to reply.
Galinda Jr.
Got it
I’ll bring ur usuals
😙
🫶
The last time Heather had gotten this bad, her best friend tried to appeal to her love for poetry. “If I’m a butterfly, as you claim, then you’re my beloved caterpillar. And…” She’d said, running her painted nails over her dreadlocks. “...but you’re not yet ready to come out of your cocoon yet. There are too many hungry birds, and I’m not a good…I’m not a good defender…” Heather was laughing again, waving a hand to tell her that she could stop. She focused on how the laughter filled her belly and made her dark brown cheeks ache from the effort of smiling.
When the screen went black, she dropped her arm down again to plop it onto the floor limp with curled fingers.
Her dad led Dove to the bedroom as if she didn’t know the Jones’ apartment as well as her own. Heather heard them but kept her slow-blinking eyes on her lap. She only raised her head when she felt the weight of Dove perching herself next to her. “Can you do show-and-tell?” It was the first sentence she had said all weekend.
Baby wipes, instant tea, a granola bar, a small tube of perfume. Dove took them out of her tote and arranged them around Heather as if she was a magician showing a lucky audience member her signature trick. Dove turned the lights on and opened the window. Heather tried to keep her gaze on her friend as she floated around the room. Dove pulled a pair of black jeans from her dresser with a gray shirt. “I’m not your damn dressup doll.” She snapped at her, the same line she’d said during the last time Dove had exercised her “You Feel Good When You Look Good” philosophy on her with a black choker and matching bejeweled handbag.
“Today, I will let you be a cruddy doll.” Dove said. She threw the clothes to her, which landed right at her hairline. “If life’s being cruel enough to keep your butt in bed and unable to make it presentable, that duty is now mine.”
She went to the kitchen with the tea packets, but not before Heather had made grabby hands at her like a toddler overdue for a nap as a request to be hauled up by her. When her bare feet touched the floor, she let her torso fall limp into Dove’s form with her hands grasping her elbows. With a yelp, her best friend managed to catch herself in a kneeling position, the stouter girl clinging to her like a teddy bear all the while.
It had made Heather’s heart rate rise; she put the jeans on first and pushed her hands into the part of her waist that spilled over the waistband. But then she again felt the plaque coating her teeth, and she wanted to lie down all over again.
She heard a giggle behind her. Dove had come back with two plain metal thermoses of the tea, and she was leaning on one of her stocking-covered feet against the doorframe. “Your mood swings and gesticulations could put Bugs Bunny out of a job.”
Heather swung an arm up and tilted her head down. “It’s my splendiferous charm.” Making fun of her vocabulary was her wholehearted exchange for letting Dove make fun of her height “You are five-two on a good day.” was a line she was particularly proud of herself for creating.
Heather pulled food wrappers, used tissues, and two finished bottles of pills from the floor. She hoped it would make her look less of a puppy trapped in a rotten cage to Dove, one that she’d walked for ten years out of her seventeen. She put her chest almost two inches to Heather’s back to massage her scalp. She began to press all ten of her fingertips to the hair at the very top of her head before going down to her nape.
“Dovey?” Her throat had gone sticky from the tea.
“What? Am I pinching you too hard again?” She was now rolling the flesh of her shoulders between her two fingers.
“No. Tell me about your day.”
“I’m here with you.”
“I mean tell me what you did before texting me.”
“Nothing. I loafed around the house.”
Heather sighed, and then tried to turn it into a sniff from the dust.
She turned around without letting Dove know and stared right into her hazel eyes. “That’s bullshit,” Her gaze was hardened. “Did you stare out a window? Drink juice? Talk about a classic book with your sister? Look at your notes for whatever millionth AP class you’re taking?”
Her friend blinked. “Why do you want to know so bad—”
“Please.” Heather persisted. She was begging her like she begged herself to eat after her second failed French quiz last month. “I want to think about something good for the first time today.”
She knew why Dove was bewildered at the request. Peers saying details about their home life, the filtered air of the school carrying them away, was usually the last thing Heather preferred to overhear.
It was even worse when one of them would turn to her and then take interest in her. The questions would range from college applications to her favorite makeup brand. Heather had managed to keep her second-class background an unknown fact for only a few months of the sophomore year. The blisteringly dry winter wind had also kick-started her seasonal depression and Heather had briefly considered writing a prose entry of the November weather as a motif for the enlarging dark patches in her brain. One day, their English teacher had gone into surgery, and in her place was a blank-eyed substitute. Gabriel Holloway had to holler five times to get his attention for an assignment that Heather could only dream of being hungry enough of a student to take on. The group of kids ahead of Heather’s beloved back-left desk were chatting animatedly but the assigned reading was fascinating enough for her to block their voices out.
Heather didn’t remember how she merged into the conversation, only that she went from being hunched over her borrowed copy of Pride and Prejudice to being interviewed by a group of girls that she knew were on the soccer team. It started with the general: “What do you do on the weekends?” One with beady blue eyes asked. “What’s your house like?” Another girl said with strawberry blonde hair.
The initial nice rush of people being interested in her evaporated once the questions for Heather began to start with why and how come. “Why do you always wear the same sneakers?”
Heather looked down at her well-worn gray converses. She was grateful that her feet had stopped growing in seventh grade so she didn’t need to get new ones just yet. Taking a slow breath, she formulated a story for it. “They’re comfy—”
“How come you never order lunch?”
They were always rapid-fire and that is what made Heather’s tongue tie up. After a moment, an awful hot sensation began to fill her chest. She’d only realized their curiosity was less pure when she realized that their smiles had gone from being made by the most recent joke told between them to plastic. When the bell finally rang, they turned their heads back as if the quiet girl with the flat brown ponytail at the back of the class had been an episode of a sitcom that had just ended.
“Their idiotic superiority complexes come from how fake they are,” Dove grumbled like a video essay creator to her in the cafeteria. “Did you notice their underlying bitchiness as a result? Like just then?”
Heather blinked. “That’s the first swear word you’ve said, like, since Field Day.”
“I only swear for subjects that deserve it.” She winked. “And things that make you feel bad are at the top of that motherfucking list.”
After a half hour of silence, Heather sat up. Dove had given her a French crown of braids, but her fingers had been so comforting to feel on her skin it had put her to sleep right until her friend had begun to use the bobby pins. The blood began to go back down from her temples, and she exhaled. Moving her head down to one shoulder and then the other, the tension of the hair fighting against her scalp didn’t go away but sort of shifted in its intensity.
She no longer smelled Dove’s perfume behind her; she was now crouched on the ground and was strapping her Mary Janes back on. They only made eye contact when she rose back up. The shoes that went up to her legs, thickened from lacrosse, made her blink several times while swallowing. Their owner smiled and held out her hand. “Relax, I’m not sick of you yet.”
“You’ll pay for the milkshakes down the street too?”
“No, I’m going to the gas station to get you some motor oil.”