Her small fingers are pale as they tap against the steel edge of the table. You had bought her orange juice, her favorite, and she accepted it with a soft smile, cupping it in her hands, but she still sets it down gently on the corner of the table and leaves it untouched.
You talk and laugh with her, ignoring the odd looks you get from other coffee shop customers, smiling at the easy banter that falls off of your tongues, as light and friendly as it had always been (nothing at all had changed, nothing at all) You were glad for the thousandth time that she was here, safe with you.
She looks very small, and very pale, and very cold even though it’s late in April, and already springtime warm. You realize that she always seems cold lately, and that makes you kind of sad. You decide to buy her a nice scarf, or a pair of mittens to wear as you pay the bill and walk out of the shop. She flits out of the door behind you like a wisp, glancing forlornly behind her at the orange juice left on the table. The bell jingles on your way out.
* * *
When the two of you arrive at your house, you brush past your father and hurry to your bedroom. You try to ignore the stains on your father’s unkempt shirt the strained, worried heaviness in his eyes and they follow the two of you up the stairs.
You pull out the gaming console she bought you for your tenth birthday what feels like centuries ago and slide in MarioKart. She grabs a controller and slips in next to you at the edge of your bed, settling into the crook of your shoulder like a puzzle piece. You let her be Yoshi, both of your favorite character, and even though you swear you aren’t going easy she wins ever single round.
She is still so cold and fragile as she giggles at the video game, and you wish she could just warm up again.
* * *
Later while she sleeps, in the low hanging dimness, you hesitantly open your phone and check you messages, afraid and resigned to what you might find. The frigid blue-white glow of the phone highlights her peaceful face from across the bed and makes her look young and soft.
You stomach sinks as you glance at the screen. You have enough voice-mails and texts to make you want to scream. You open a few texts, unsurprised at the message's content and weary of the close, hawkish attention people had been heaping onto you lately.
"We're very worried." "Please text back!" "We know you're still upset-" "-it's not helping to dwell on it-"
You snap your phone shut tight and flop onto the bed where she's wrapped in a cocoon of quilts, and fall asleep staring at the familiar hazy profile of her face, relaxed into a quietly sad expression, listening to the muffled baseball announcer your father your father is watching on the television downstairs.
In the morning, she is gone again.
* * *
The next time she comes, you ask her to stay. She smiles widely and nods her head and your heart feels full for the first time in a while, heavy with emotion and still alike it's about to fly away. She so rarely looked happy anymore, so you decided it was a cause for celebration. You hug her briefly and run downstairs to the kitchen for refreshments, even though your father is there and you prefer not to interact with him. He is reading the newspaper at the table, playing with an unlit cigar between his thin chapped lips, and you give him the biggest smile you can as you dash to the freezer. He risks a tentative smile back at you as you grab some bowls and the Cookies and Cream out of the ice-box, but the bewildered curve of his mouth slips down into a crease of concern as he sees you filling two bowls and taking two ginger ales. "Are you... alright, son?” He looks at you oddly, talking around the chewed up cigar.
"Of course! Never been better." And you really mean it, too, paying his worried expression no mind as you head back up the stairs, balancing the ice cream on your forearm and grasping the sodas in either hand. Despite the heaviness flickering in the back of your brain, you feel happy, happy, happy, and nothing was bringing you down/.
When you entered your room, she is cozy on the carpet in front of your T.V and clutching her favorite DVD in her hands. It makes your heart swell with the knowledge that this could be normal, this could be permanent, it was possible. Maybe she would never have to leave you alone again.
You slide the DVD, The Princess Bride, into the player and wriggle under the blanket with her. As the movie begins, she looks up at you through her pale, pale eyelashes, smiling.
"Thank you." It sounds normal, it could be thanks for the ice cream or the movie or the ginger ale, but she's looking at you in such a special way that you almost want to cry. You smile back hard enough to make your eyes squeeze up at the ends.
"It’s my pleasure.” You murmur into her hair and plunk the ice cream down in her lap, shoving a bite of Ben and Jerry's into your mouth and turning your eyes towards the movie, her feathery shape molding to the bend in your side. You had plenty of time to make her warm now, and you think back to the nice mittens you saw at that fancy clothing store the other day. You just might have enough savings to buy them for her.
By the time your ice cream is gone and hers is melted into liquid, she is asleep against your side, so so so completely still and silent, unmoving and ethereal like a doll with her face relaxed into a slightly melancholy expression. As the big fairytale kiss scene shines on the screen, you press your lips for just a second to hers, breathing what little life you can into her mouth. It’s nowhere near a fairytale kiss, with your noses knocking and your teeth catching on her lip, but it makes a quiet sort of happiness float lazily down your spine. You pick her up easily (she's so very small and stiff), and set her gently on the bed. She is totally and completely still, but if you concentrate hard enough you don’t notice that.
When you wake up in a tangle of limbs, she is still there beside you, twisted in the sheets and covered in buttery morning light, and you know that the night has passed and she's not gone yet.
* * *
Her eyes are moist as she speaks to you. "I can't stay for much longer." Her voice shakes delicately and she presses her lips together before she continues. "I wish I could. I really, honestly do. But. I can't." Her voice cracks at the end of her sentence, and even though you barely see a change in her face, a tear tracks it’s way down her left cheek.
Even when she decided to stay two weeks ago and you were foolish with happiness, you knew it was too good to be true. Even now, your father was getting suspicious because you were spending even more time in your room, and you had stopped answering your texts, causing more and more to pile up in your cell phone’s inbox. But you're not as upset as you feel like you should be. You have a plan that you haven't told her about, mainly because she would never let you go through with it, a plan that you had formed for the time when she would have to fade away, and the certainty of it all keeps down the flourish of emotion that’s threatening to rise in your chest.
The next time she leaves, you are following her. You can't leave her to let her sadness run rampant in her tired mind when you know that you could be there, that you could listen to whatever she needs to have heard and make her warm. She would never let you. But you need to, so you are.
After she has frozen still, not even breathing, her face dark and slack, you untangle her arms from yours and pad down the hall to the bathroom on feet freezing against the tiled floor. The sickly fluorescent light bounces over the bright polished white that covers the bathroom. It seems too sad and clean. Your heart calmly beats out ten more seconds, then eleven, then a minute.
You glance back down the hallway, leading to the door in front of your father's room, his wheezing snores coming from lungs ruined by decades of tobacco, the door to your room slightly ajar and darkness seeping out into the white-dim hallway.
You smile and shut the bathroom door with a clack, and you can't decide whether it sounds like an end or a beginning.
* * *
He had likely known it was coming for a while, and you knew that he knew, so you honestly didn't expect him to be so upset. It doesn't show in his actions, but his nails are bitten bloody and ragged and the lines on his face seem deeper than they had before, as if etched into stubbly stone, even though he’s sitting at the same oak kitchen table, smoking the same pipe and reading the newspaper like he had for as long as you could remember, as if nothing had changed. You watch him for a little while before his face suddenly crumbles like paper and he throws the newspaper down on the table. As he rises stiffly and strides out of the room on rigid legs, his back trembling, you catch the headline of the article he was reading. The words "Teen Suicide" and "Death of Girlfriend" stand out to you, and even though you are sure you’re happy where you are, your heart aches for him, your father who used to be so, so proud of you, and suddenly you need to get away, leaving him to his empty house.
That night you hold her in a black quiet place, and even though you could attribute it to the fact that you are her temperature now, she feels very warm.