I find out that Vivian’s boyfriend is hitting her on a Tuesday night. 

​

We’re sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room when she pulls off her sweater and guides my hand to the purple bruise beneath her breast. It fans out across her abdomen like rippling water, like something alive and greedy. I make my hand into a fist and fit my knuckles against her damaged skin. They don’t fit quite right, marbled skin leaking out from beneath my fingers, and it’s sweet, selfish relief that courses through my veins before anything else I know to feel. 

​

“It’s hideous, I know,” Vivian says like she’s talking about an inflamed zit or a bad haircut. “I don’t think I’ll be able to wear a bikini for the rest of the month.” I trace my fingers around the edge of the bruise, where purple fades into blue fades into pale skin. It’s a sprawling galaxy condensed into a stomach-sized mark, Vivian’s very own Andromeda. 

​

I tell her, “I’m going to kill him.” 

​

“Oh, don’t do that.” Vivian laughs, and her stomach flutters delicately beneath my hand. I press down a little because I’m curious and because I can. She grimaces. Says, “It’s so ugly. What am I going to do?” 

​

“It’s not,” I say. “Ugly, I mean. It kind of looks like a butterfly.” 

​

We both stare at it for a while. 

​

“Hm,” Vivian says finally. “It does, doesn’t it?” 

​

Then, she cries.

 

*** 

​

Vivian is the type of beautiful that makes heads snap up and down like a light switch instead of turn because everyone is too intimidated to stare. You look at her for that one fleeting second, and you know deep inside that she is the prettiest girl you will ever see. 

​

It feels wrong to see someone so beautiful cry like this. Perhaps it just feels wrong to see someone cry like this and still be so beautiful. 

​

Vivian’s bigger than me, but I shift and nudge and crowd until she’s cocooned in my body, folded tight and neat and tucked between skin and bone. Until her heartbeat is my own. In the morning, when she climbs out of my body and her wings unfurl, she’ll take flight and shatter the sky like a falling star. 

​

Or maybe, she’ll plummet. 

​

*** 

​

Immediately after emerging from the chrysalis, butterflies cannot fly. Their wings are wet at first, soft and wrinkled like wet paper towels. Unusable, worthless. 

​

I tell myself that this is why Vivian hasn’t left him yet. Because she’s still suspended upside down somewhere, waiting for her wings to harden. Waiting for the day she can soar. 

​

***

 

“Do you love him?” I ask one night, and Vivian laughs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. 

​

Her long fingers curl around my thin shoulders and urge me down until my head is pillowed on her thigh and grass is prickling against the back of my legs. Her hands brush through the tangles in my hair, careful even though I have a hard head and I’ve told her that she can tug as hard as she wants. 

​

“Look at the stars,” Vivian tells me, cupping my chin and lifting my face to the sky. “Aren’t they beautiful?” 

​

It’s a clear night, stars scattered across black velvet like pearls, but space has always been Vivian’s thing, not mine. I gifted her a telescope for her birthday last year, one of those cheap plastic ones that’s always propped up and on display in Walmarts, but Vivian didn’t seem to mind that the poles could not extend far enough to reach her face. She’d crouched on the ground and pulled me down next to her, and even though I was wearing my favorite pair of jeans, the grass stains didn’t seem so bad next to her smile. 

​

Then and now, my thing has always been Vivian. 

​

“There’s Corvus.” She lifts an arm and draws lines in the air, coaxing the mess of dots into the semblance of something real. “A pure white raven, sent by Apollo to watch his lover. When Apollo found out that she was cheating on him, he turned all of Corvus’ feathers black.” 

​

I nod even though I don’t understand. I never understand – why Vivian is so gentle with my hair, why she doesn’t leave, why there’s a new bruise on her arm so dark that it stains my fingertips when I touch it, why she doesn’t leave, why she stays, why she doesn’t leave. 

​

***

​

The butterfly effect, according to Merriam-Webster: by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future. The small changes: the healing bruise on her stomach, the lip gloss she stops using, the concealer she starts using. 

​

The large-scale and unpredictable variation: me, falling in love with her. 

​

*** 

​

Vivian wears her bruises like jewelry. A ribbon around her throat, a braided chain circling her wrist. 

​

“This isn’t safe for you,” I tell her. 

​

“I know,” she says. 

​

There's an ice pack on her wrist and one on her ribs, and I’m wrapping ice cubes in paper towels now because we’re all out of ice packs. Vivian presses an antiseptic wipe to the cut on her cheek, hissing through her teeth. I can feel the burn in my own skin, the staggering sting of phantom pain. 

​

“I fought back this time.” Vivian smiles, but her lip is split, and there’s the Milky Way on her cheek. “You know what they say: float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” But I’ve been stung enough times in my life to know that a bee doesn’t sting unless it absolutely has to. Because when it does, its stinger remains hooked in the skin so that when the bee tries to fly away, its organs are ripped clean out of its body. I look at Vivian now, with her hollow voice and hollow eyes, and wonder if she already knows this.

​

I say, “You should leave him.” 

​

Vivian shrugs with her good shoulder, the one we didn’t just pop back into its socket. I remove the ice pack from her hand and weave her fingers through mine. Her skin is cold, but I don’t let go, not until my warmth has drained into her. Not until her cold has consumed me completely. 

​

*** 

​

I don’t see Vivian for another week, and then she appears at my door all at once. Her eyes are glimmering with tears, and her body is trembling so hard that her teeth are beginning to chatter. I help her climb into my bed, and then I slip in next to her and hold her until her breathing eases. I stroke her hair, and I know now why she was always so gentle. It feels cruel to be rough with something so fragile. 

​

“You know I love you, right?” There’s enough finality in her voice that I understand what she’s too afraid to voice. 

​

I say, “You’re not going to leave him, are you?” because saying you’re going to leave me, aren’t you? is too difficult. 

​

When she kisses my cheek, her tears mingle with mine. It’s enough of an answer.