For a prompt: Brittana first kiss and algebra lessons
"But San, how can something be minus and plus at the same time?"
I love B, I really do and I never minded helping her with homework but high school work seemed to be so much harder for her than middle school had been and I was getting a headache from the amount of times we had gone through the quadratic equation.
"No B, that's positive and negative. It just means that there are two answers at the end because that can be either." She stares at me blankly and I know none of this is getting through. "Okay so let's make this number pink," I say, writing the number in the pink gel pen Brittany had been twirling around her fingers. "And this one blue and the last one green."
The numbers were big and sprawled across the page in my messy writing. "Now let's call the pink number a, the blue number b and the green number c. When you write the equation, the letters match up to the colours of the numbers, and you just have to put the numbers in."
I am so proud of my logic, she has to be able to piece together what I was saying now, and colours had always been her favourite thing to play with. I look up but my mood falls as soon as I see her; head down, drawing swirls across the back of her hand. What she has drawn is beautiful, there's no denying tit but I had been trying to teach her the quadratic equation all week in class and the teacher was starting to get annoyed at her.
My eyes get caught up in the colours though, watching as blue washes across into green, as pink swirls bloom off the tendrils. The whole thing shimmers wetly from the glitter in the pens and as the light from my open blinds hit it, it seems to move on its own. I imagine the swirls wrapping themselves around her wrist, travelling up her arm and covering her, making her more magical than she already is. I imagine the green moving across her eyelids, making the blue stand out when she blinks them open again; I imagine the blue as a line from the bottom of her lip, joining pink swirls that wrap around her neck. The image makes her seem so much more alive than anyone else and I feel cold and dead in comparison. I feel like the piece of a wood a butterfly would perch on.
My eyes finally flicker back to hers; the blue seeming more intense, like someone had upped the saturation on a picture. I get lost in them, just for a second, imagining the green lines running down to her cheeks.
Her hand is cool, pressing against my cheek and my eyes close without meaning to. I let out a sigh but her face is that close to mine that the sound ends up dying in between us. I have barely a moment of cool air on my face until her hand is turned around, pressing the soft skin of the back of it against me. I can feel the colours, still not dry, sinking into my skin and even though I know it's only ink, I feel like it's a part of her that's sinking in; that if I open my eyes, shimmering green, pink and blue lines will be curling around the air to join us together.
Her hand moves away, leaving me cold but her lips fall onto mine a second later. A part of me thinks that it should feel weird, that Brittany is a girl and my best friend and Brittany but I feel the ghost colours as they run across her face, I feel them between our lips and I feel myself coming alive with them. I don't feel dead anymore, I am thrumming with energy and my lips press against hers, moving softly and the light dips and fades through the curtains.
