[P] aloha from hell

[Hagar]

HAGAR IESHAN

please don't lean on me
cuz i don't want your heart between my teeth

B

efore I go downstairs, I glance at myself in the mirror, stretch one slender leg after another to admire the lines that they make. Dressing, I felt like I was strapping on armor: something light enough to dance in, something chic enough to stun, carefully avoiding the thin line between what Pilate would excess and enough luxury to feel like a god in my own body.

In the end, there is something to be said for dressing down. Without the necklaces, the curve of my neck and the sharp lines of my shoulder are drawn into focus. Without the chain looping from my ears to the plate on my nose to the piercing inside it, my face looks dark, sultry, dangerous.

Pilate would be proud, I think. I look in the mirror for just one second longer and don't look like the same person. I braid my own hair on the way down the stairs.

---

It is some time into the party before I bore myself, surprisingly few drinks in considering I seem to be the only creative mind in the whole of Solterra when it comes to truth or dare. 

"Truth or dare isn't a game you win," says a man dressed in red, freckled enough that they shine in the winking lights strung across the courtyard from post to post.

I smile. "Isn't it?"

"How does one win truth or dare, then?"

"Well," I say, coyly, batting my lashes with a practiced sort of charm. "Truth or dare?"

His turn to grin now. "Dare," he says.

"I dare you to lose." The few others around us, two other Solterran girls and the man's friend, Frederick I think he said, erupt into uproarious laughter as the man searches the dark courtyard, my face, then Frederick's face for something to say. I pause for just long enough to see him start to panic, or grow agitated, then touch his shoulder with my nose and say, "Kidding, though I must take a break."

The second I turn to walk across the courtyard my face falls into what might be a scowl if it were not dripping with aristocratic patience. If it is a scowl it is the way mothers disapprove of children when their backs are turned: a slight narrowing of the eyes, mouth pulled into a tight straight line, and then gone like it had never been there at all. It is as I'm pulling myself back together, scouring the place for a drink tray, that I hear her.

Wardatī, she says. Miriam. I cannot remember the last time I saw Miriam, let alone spoke to her. When I turn and see the alternating gray and white of her face, the fierce red of her hair knotted back in braids, and one of the artists dobbing paint on the face of her ribs, I almost don't know what to say.

--but, she asks me to come, so I come. It is automatic.

"Miriam?" I say, "How's this going?"
I appraise the art made of her body for a moment. It is still blocky colors in undefined shapes. They seem to be making her a proper painting, or something close to it. "Looks great."

@Miriam