"What colour dress?"
Spencer is quiet. She's always quiet. She's quiet when she paints and she's quiet when she takes off her panties. She's quiet when she smokes her cigarettes by her bathroom window, which is open because she has to hide the smell from her landlord, and she's quiet when she finds me bleeding outside the corner shop after having climbed out of that same window.
But now she's a different kind of quiet. Now she's even more blue then Kieran's lovely eyes and Paul's boxers. Now she's silent.
"Spencer?" I ask. I'm back in the hospital reception, but this time Natalie isn't here. I don't care about the colour of my dress when I call her name - I just want her to be quiet again. She's silent and I'm cold and I ache a bit without Liam's affection. Not affection.
Spencer turns and she's pursing her lips.
She's worried, I think. I worry her.
"The dress is white," she replies, before she sighs. She always sighs. "You're going home, now, Isla."
There's the faint yet bitter taste of vomit clinging to the back of my throat as I swallow, and it reminds me of last December.
I reach for her hand. She takes it.
"Are you going to be there?" I whisper.
"Yeah." She squeezes it. Something is wrong, but this time it's not Liam. "Yeah."
I don't know if I believe her, but that's okay.
"I don't love you," I say, as we pass the low hums coming from room after room, "do I?"
"No," Spencer confirms softly. "No, you don't."
Spencer confirms things for me.
"Okay."
She's right. The dress that I see laid out on the bed in my room is white, embroidered with little flowers that are blue like Kieran's eyes. I know this dress. I wore it to one of Spencer's art classes during the summer and I was wearing it when Lola brought the jug of my mother's homemade lemonade into the garden.
She was smiling then. It must've been before her fifteenth birthday.
"I like this dress," I tell Spencer, reaching out to touch the fabric. Spencer smiles, faintly, but she doesn't say anything. She's silent.
The world seems dark all of a sudden. It seems dark because Spencer's silent and Natalie can't have kids and Liam isn't my protector anymore. The cars and buses keep going by and by and Kieran's crying on the doorstep and the paramedic is praying with me.
The world seems so dark.
That's why I kiss her.
Spencer's lips harden in surprise, but only momentarily. They're soft and they're cold and they remind me of every time I've ever gone to her shitty apartment with the broken tap and blue bathroom walls to kiss her and smoke weed with her and miscarry on her couch, all because she's easier to fuck.
That's why I kiss her.
I think I knocked my dress onto the floor, because Spencer goes over to pick it up once I stop. I don't know how but I think I did. It must've landed with such a soft thud that I didn't hear it. Spencer lays it back on the bed and wraps her dry green woollen coat around herself like she did outside.
