The Chanel Lipstick

“Hey, get out fast, Har. I needa get ready for an event!”

Harry Jackson stood stiffly in the middle of his sister’s room, clenching and unclenching his fists as if trying to consider what he should or should not do. With his sturdy body, towering height and tanned skin, it was hard to think of him as anything but an extremely muscular young man. He had carefully styled hair, short at the back and long at the front, combed to the right side of his face. His facial features, however, had a touch of surprising softness in them, causing him to look slightly odd. Harry shifted uncomfortably, then sat down at his sister’s makeup table.

Harry looked at the jumble of makeup tools on the table with a rising sickness in his gut, not because he hated them, but because he was somehow afraid of them. He had never thought he would be sitting at this table looking at all the cosmetics. It should have been his sister, the owner of this room, this table, this chair and everything surrounding him. Certainly, it would have made more sense if she was the one looking at all the makeups, considering which lipstick to apply or which perfume to wear. Instead, he felt like an outcast. Harry reached his hand out and fixed a lipstick that was not facing the right direction, shyly, as if he was afraid of getting caught. It was the first time he had done something like this, although he must have randomly occupied his sister’s room for a million times.

On the other hand, Harry liked the cosmetics just as much. He liked the scarlet Chanel lipstick carefully chosen by his sister when he took her on a surprise eighteenth birthday, the Lancôme perfume she insisted on buying during their trip to France two years earlier, even the old Sephora mascara she had stopped using for what felt like a dozen years. Harry stared vacantly at the table, images running through his muddy brain in slow-motion. He could see his sister getting a lovely flower bouquet on her seventeenth birthday, precisely a hundred and seventy roses, red ones forming a heart in the center and white ones bracing the outside. He could see his mother doing a perfect winged eyeliner for his sister on the day of her senior prom, using solely an old, dried-out liquid eyeliner. He could also see him standing helplessly in the gigantic Louis Vuitton shop, trying to pick the most elegant handbag for his sister, at the same time wondering who would deserve the chance to use the bag if it weren’t to be her.

“Knock-knock,” the simultaneous sound of knocking and voice from the outside startled him, causing him to jump a little. He turned his head back, perhaps a little too hastily. “Har, your sister is getting impatient. I think she needs to get ready for something.”

Harry recognized his mother’s clear and sonorous voice, the one that he had always loved and feared. Three. Six. Nine. Twelve. Some umpteen seconds.

“Har, you alright? You’ve gotta come out, dear!”

Silence. Harry didn’t answer, not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know how to. It was just a simple question, as simple as “Are you going to have dinner with us?”, or “How was school today?”, but for Harry, it felt extremely loaded. He shifted his eyes to the right side of the door, and there she was, framed on the wall–his sister, standing in her brocade tank top and designer jeans–the one that perfectly accentuated her waist and revealed her shapely legs. The Chanel sunglasses hanging loose on her dazzling brunette hair. A sudden, sharp pain hit him too severely he had to double over.

“Harry, I know you are in there. Will you please open the door? For goodness sake!”

Impatience. Harry could detect impatience in his mother’s sentences. Oh God. He thought to himself. His body started to shiver, even though it was in the middle of July and the sun was showing off the best it could.

“Harry, you cannot lock yourself in there forever. Please get out and we can talk about it, okay?” His mom begged one more time–perhaps the last time, he thought–and Harry could hear the desperation in her voice. He closed his eyes and turned back to the mirror on top of the makeup table, his face painted plainly with discomfort and fatigue–that of a soldier fighting an endless moral battle.

Harry sighed, and when he opened his eyes, tears welled up. He mumbled something to himself, breathlessly but with a newly adopted confidence from the decision he had just made. He grabbed the Chanel lipstick and looked at it intently, his hands fumbled; the cap felt strangely heavy on his palm.

After a few seconds, he stood up, took one last breath, fixed his sagging shoulders and walked away without turning back. The door slowly opened and Harry thought he had never felt more naked.