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Charlie can’t remember a time after he came to Welton when he liked the way he looked in the mirror.
There’s something about his jawline, the curve of his eyebrows, that doesn’t sit right with him. Something about his body is just inherently wrong. He wonders if changing the shape of it will make him right and throws up after every meal for a week. By Saturday, he looks at his eyebags and weighted limbs and throws up in the sink. On Sunday, he manages to keep down half his plate of spaghetti.
Charlie looks at Neil, looks at his golden smile and beautiful eyes, and wonders what the hell is wrong with himself.
He pinches the sides of his waist and presses his thumbs into the tops of his thighs and picks at the skin around his nails until it bleeds, and even then the red doesn’t shock him out of it. He bangs his head against the walls and then, in an effort to stop doing that, starts picking at his scalp until red lines his fingernails. He feels sick when he looks at them, so he asks to borrow nail polish from Ginny, but she has only red.
"Sure," says Charlie, feeling nauseous. He can hear his own breathing. Ginny frowns at him.
"Charlie, are you okay?"
"Could you maybe paint my nails for me?"
She blinks, lets a moment pass by, lets the subject drop between them.
"Sure thing. Do you want ABBA or Bowie on?"
"ABBA, please," says Charlie, thinking he might throw up if he has to hear Bowie sing "my stomach feels small / There's a taste in my mouth / And it's no taste at all."
He spends the afternoon at Ginny’s, and when she sees him glancing at her eyeliner and glittery eyeshadow, she asks him if he wants to try her makeup, too. He pauses for a moment.
"Isn’t it a bad idea to share makeup?"
"When have you ever let a bad idea stop you?" Then, seeing his hesitation, she hurriedly adds: "If you don’t want to, that’s fine too, I just thought I’d offer if you were wondering—"
"Sure," he blurts out, and lets Ginny’s smile wash over him.
When he looks in the mirror, he can’t stop staring.
"What do you think?" says Ginny. "I tried not to go too heavy on the eyeliner, but if you want more, I can do that too."
"Winged eyeliner?"
"Absolutely."
When he comes back to Welton, he thinks this is the first time he’s ever seen Neil lose his words.
"Hey Neil," he says, somewhat softly, and Neil doesn’t respond. His mouth is slightly parted and his eyes are—god, his eyes are gorgeous. "Neil?" He wonders if he’s made a mistake.
"You look," says Neil. He swallows. "You look—Ginny’s makeup?"
"Yeah. What do you think?"
"I’m thinking you should’ve done theater with me so I could see you like this earlier. Goddamn, Charlie, you look great." Neil blows out a breath, then makes an aborted gesture towards Charlie’s face. "Sorry. I just. Makeup is a good look on you, Dalton."
Charlie softens, smiles, winks. "You know it, Perry."
He swears he sees the tops of Neil’s cheeks pinken.
After that, he hangs around Ginny more, wheedling her for the liquid eyeliner she keeps in her pocket most days. She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, and usually she gives it to him.
———————————————————————
Charlie has always hated his birthday. His parents have always fussed over him on his birthday, but never in a good way—never in a way that makes Charlie feel treasured. (He feels like that most of the time when he’s hanging out with Neil.) He wakes up day of feeling nauseous, only to be tackled by a smiling (eyes crinkling, cheeks pinkened, beautiful as all hell) Neil.
"Birthday boy!" Neil cheers, and twists the sheets away from him. A little piece of Charlie’s heart softens and breaks away. He smiles regardless.
"Look who’s excited. Is it your birthday too?"
"Nope, it’s my best friend’s birthday! Come on, I have a present for you!" He tugs at Charlie’s shoulders, bony knees digging into Charlie’s side. He laughs.
"Okay, okay, give me a minute! And—god, you really didn’t have to do that."
Neil has hopped off the bed and turned to his desk, so Charlie can only make out his dark green, fuzzy shoulders. He sounds uncharacteristically quiet as he says, "Yes I did." And then, brighter, "I hope you like it." It sounds a little forced.
"Of course I do," says Charlie, yawning, even though he doesn’t know what it is Neil’s gotten him. He’s sure it’ll be good. (He loves Neil regardless.) He swings his legs off the bed and walks over to Neil, drapes his arms over Neil’s warm shoulders and slots his head next to Neil’s.
"You don’t even know what it is yet," laughs Neil quietly. Charlie thinks he sounds nervous. (Charlie is the only one who can really read him and vice versa. The way it’s always been.) "I just—I really appreciate you, in all your you-ness, a-and I wanted to get you something that commemorated that."
"Big word there," Charlie teases, dropping his arms and reaching around Neil’s sides to take the wrapped gift from his hands. He unties the ribbon and tears the paper (Neil always does it carefully, slots a fingernail to pry up the edges of the tape and unfolds the paper like birthing a baby bird or something, but Charlie has always been impatient), and now Neil has turned around, and he looks into Neil’s eyes, which are—warm, and lovely, and nearly golden in this light, and so so anxious. Charlie feels his heart stop for a few gentle moments. "Neil," he breathes. "You didn’t have to get me this."
"Yes I did," says Neil again, and his voice is so light and thin Charlie thinks he could soar away on it. "Put it on?"
Lipstick. In the shade True Red. Charlie swallows and says, "Now?"
"When else?"
"Well, we have to move to the bathroom so I can use the mirror to put it on."
Neil exhales. "We can do tha—"
"Unless you’d like to put it on me?"
Neither of them are breathing. There is a beating heart in the space between them. There is nothing Charlie hates more than a stopped moment, but somehow, with Neil, it feels okay. Right, even. (He doesn’t feel that way several months later. He is angry at Neil for breaking his rules and then breaking him and breaking them again. Life shouldn’t be this way. Charlie shouldn’t be this way. Neil should still be.)
He watches Neil swallow and reach for the lipstick. When he takes the cap off, the popping noise makes them both flinch. Nevertheless, Neil raises the tube to Charlie’s lips and glides the lipstick on with trembling hands. His other hand comes up to rest on Charlie’s cheekbone and Charlie thinks he might die, right here, right now, but Neil is still applying that goddamn lipstick and Charlie is not breathing and he thinks damn your pretty eyes, Neil, because they are focused so intently on Charlie’s lips and Charlie finds that all he wants is to look straight into them again, maybe smudge Neil’s cheekbone while he’s at it. And then Neil is done and lowering his hands slowly away from Charlie’s face and Charlie finds he doesn’t want that to happen, so he seizes them, and Neil makes this—noise, and something in Charlie’s brain shuts down and he’s leaning forward, kissing Neil, keeping one hand enfolded in Neil’s as he tangles the other in Neil’s hair and Neil is kissing back and there is suddenly nothing else that matters until the bell rings.
"We’re going to be late for class," says Neil. His eyes are shut and he is slightly short of breath and Charlie finds that there is nothing more he wants to do than kiss Neil again.
"We shouldn’t get detention," says Charlie. Neil hums in agreement. He opens his eyes.
"Okay. We’re going to take off the lipstick and get ready for class and tonight I am going to kiss you again. If you’re okay with that."
"I am so okay with that," says Charlie, and presses a short kiss to Neil’s cheekbone. He can’t help it. Some hand of fate reached down and pushed his head forward. Or something like that.
"Okay," says Neil, and that is that.
———————————————————————
Charlie tells Neil before he does his bit about "getting red," and he swears he sees Neil’s eyes flash. He doesn’t know why he does it. As he zigzags the paint down his chest, he wishes that his chest would crack down the middle, between his ribs, just like that, and out of his body would emerge a wonderful soul-y sort of thing, nothing to do with his body. He wants to float and never touch anything but Neil and maybe the cool tip of liquid eyeliner. He wants to never exist again.
It’s not Charlie whose body ceases to live that night.
———————————————————————
One night in the haze that follows, he thinks about the deep red of the banner proclaiming "Excellence," the one Neil carried every year he was there. He thinks about the blood staining his sheets sometimes, he thinks about the berries on Neil’s crown when he was Puck, he thinks about the lipstick, and he wants to throw up.
He does throw up. It happens again and again and again and Charlie is left sobbing on the bathroom floor. He wants something to make it stop, but he has nothing but his useless body, so he bangs his head against the toilet again and again. He wonders how he was ever good enough for Neil. Before he exits the bathroom, he makes himself look into the mirror as punishment. His eyes are bloodshot, but he can’t sleep, and he doesn’t really want to anyway. Red becomes more than a once-off occurrence on his skin after that.