Volume Ten: Love Doesn't Need to Be Perfect
Chapter 10
Aphrodite came to me for the last time on the night before graduation, and for once she didn't bother with the mirror at all. I woke to find her simply sitting in the chair by my window, Delia's gray uniform gone, the sunset-colored robes settled around her like she'd finally stopped needing to hide what she was.
"There is one test left," she said, without preamble, the way she always started the conversations that mattered most. "Not a kindness. A truth. The curse ends only if you can choose honesty even when it might cost you the very thing you want most to keep."
"Noah," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Noah," she agreed. "You have not yet told him everything, Sienna. You have told him the parts that make you brave. You have not told him the part that makes you human." She rose, robes shifting like something poured rather than worn. "Tell him tomorrow. Before the ceremony, not after, when it would be easier and less honest to wait until the day was already won."
She was gone before I could ask how she knew exactly which fear I'd been avoiding.
* * *
I found Noah in the quad an hour before graduation, both of us already dressed in the ridiculous, wonderful black gowns the university makes you wear, his cap slightly crooked in a way I resisted the urge to fix, because I needed my hands to stay still for what came next.
"I need to tell you something," I said, "and I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say anything, because if you say something kind in the middle I might lose my nerve."
He went very still, the way he does when he's bracing for something. "Okay."
"When I first started spending time with you — really at the beginning, before any of this was real to me — it wasn't because I liked you. It was because you were the only person who understood the curse, and I needed you to help me get rid of it. I used you. Not maliciously. But I did." I made myself keep going, even though every old instinct in me wanted to soften it, dress it up, make it easier to hear. "And even after that stopped being true — even after I actually started loving you — there's a part of me that still gets terrified you'll wake up one day and realize you could have anyone, and wonder why you settled for someone who spent three years being cruel to you before she ever said a kind word. I get jealous over nothing. I still sometimes want to be the only thing you look at in a room, not because I trust that you will, but because some old, ugly part of me still isn't sure I deserve to be looked at unless I'm the only option."
The quad was quiet except for distant, cheerful chaos — someone's family taking photos, a group of seniors laughing too loud, the ordinary noise of a happy day happening all around the two of us standing very still in the middle of it.
"Is that everything?" Noah asked, when I finally ran out of words.
"That's everything."
He was quiet for a long moment, and I made myself stand there and let the silence exist instead of filling it with something to manage his reaction, which felt like its own small, hard-won miracle.
"It doesn't surprise me," he said finally. "Any of it. I think I knew most of that already, in the parts of you I could see even before you said it out loud." He reached out and took my hand, unhurried. "What actually would have hurt me, Sienna — what would still hurt me — isn't that you started this using me. It's if you still believed, after everything, that you have to be flawless to be worth loving. That's the only part of what you just said that I can't just accept and move past. Everything else is just you being a person. That part is you still not believing you're allowed to be one."
"I don't know if I believe it yet," I admitted. "That I'm allowed to be a person. Some days I still catch myself performing for an audience that isn't even there anymore."
"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to be finished. I'm asking you to keep letting me watch you work on it. That's different from asking you to already be perfect at it."
I kissed him then, gown and cap and all, right there in the crowded quad with someone's grandmother probably capturing the whole thing accidentally in the background of a photo, and it didn't feel like relief exactly. It felt like something sturdier than relief — like a foundation finally finished settling into ground that could actually hold weight.
* * *
Blair found me by the fountain twenty minutes before the ceremony started, and for a second I thought she'd come to say something cutting, some final parting shot before we scattered into our separate futures. Instead she stood there, twisting her gown's tassel between her fingers, looking younger than I'd ever seen her.
"I'm not going to make some big speech," she said. "I know that's not owed to me right now. I just — I posted that video because I watched you and Noah get closer every week and some part of me panicked that I was about to become replaceable. Which is an insane thing to do to someone over. I know that. I've known it since about ten seconds after I hit post, honestly, and I still didn't take it down, because taking it down would have meant admitting I did something I couldn't undo."
"I'm not going to pretend that didn't wreck a few weeks of my life," I said. "But I'm also not going to spend graduation day hating you for it. I don't have room left for that. I used it up on myself a long time before you ever used it on me."
Blair's eyes went bright and she blinked hard, refusing to let it become anything more dramatic than that. "I don't expect us to go back to how we were."
"We're not going back to how we were," I agreed. "I don't think either of us should want that, honestly. But I don't need to hate you to walk away from you either. I think I'm just done, Blair. Not angry-done. Just done. I hope whatever you build next isn't built on being scared of being replaced."
She nodded, once, and turned to go, and neither of us hugged, and that felt right too — not every ending needs to be wrapped in forgiveness to still be a kind of peace.
* * *
The ceremony happened the way ceremonies do — long, hot under the gowns, half the speeches forgettable, the school band slightly out of tune on the processional. When it was my turn at the podium, representing the graduating class the way the committee had decided I should, months after crossing my name off every honor they could think to withhold, I set aside the notes I'd prepared and told them the truth instead, the short version this time, the version that had earned its brevity through everything it had cost to learn.
I talked about a corridor, and a cleaning cart, and a woman I hadn't recognized as anything but beneath me. I talked about a boy in an ugly sweater who saw more of me than I wanted anyone to see, and loved what he saw anyway, long before I'd earned it. I talked about what it costs to be kind only when someone's watching, and what it's worth to be kind when no one is.
I didn't check for cameras once, the whole time I spoke. It didn't occur to me to look for any.
When I finally sat back down, Noah's hand found mine before I'd even fully settled into my seat, and I realized, with a small internal jolt, that I hadn't thought about my own face — about marks, about mirrors, about whether anything on my skin was giving away some secret truth about my character — in longer than I could remember. Not because I was hiding it. Because it had simply, finally, stopped being the thing I measured myself by.
* * *
Delia found me one last time that evening, in the gold hour after the ceremony when the whole campus had gone soft and honey-lit, students scattered across the lawns in their gowns like a field that had briefly sprouted wildflowers. I was alone for exactly the length of time it took to find her waiting by the same fountain where so much of this year had happened, looking, for the first time since I'd met her, entirely at peace.
"You never told me why you chose me," I said. "Out of everyone at this school who's ever been cruel to somebody weaker than them. Why me."
"Because you were the loudest example of it," she said simply. "And because, underneath all that noise, you were also the most afraid. Cruelty born from fear is not the same as cruelty born from emptiness. The empty ones cannot be reached. The frightened ones — " she tilted her head, something almost fond in it — "the frightened ones can, if someone is patient enough, and if they are honest enough with themselves to let the patience work."
"Am I done? Is it actually over?"
"It was over the moment you chose Lily over an interview with no one there to see it," she said. "Everything since has simply been you learning to trust that it was real. The curse did not need you to become perfect, Sienna. It needed you to become someone capable of choosing kindness even when imperfection was the only reward you'd ever get for it." Her expression softened into something almost maternal. "You are still going to be selfish sometimes. Still going to be afraid, and petty, and human, in all the ordinary ways humans are. That was never the thing being asked of you. Only this: that you keep choosing, on the days it's hard, to be someone worth choosing."
She reached out and, for the first time in the entire strange story of us, touched my cheek — not a curse, not a warning, just a hand, warm and steady and entirely without judgment.
"Go find your boy," she said. "I believe he's been waiting for you by the oak tree for nearly ten minutes, and I also believe you already know that."
* * *
Noah and I built something together in the two years after graduation, the way people do when they've survived something that taught them exactly what they wanted to spend their lives fixing. We started small — a peer support line, run out of a borrowed office above a bookstore, for students dealing with bullying and body-image struggles the way I once had, except with none of the magic and all of the same ordinary human wreckage. Noah built the technology behind it, quietly brilliant the way he'd always been, the way I'd spent three years failing to notice. I did the parts that used to be my only skill and had slowly become something worth more — standing in front of people and telling the truth, plainly, without performing it.
We got married in a small ceremony in New York four years later, nothing like the wedding my mother had once sketched out for me in magazine clippings when I was twelve — no six hundred guests, no portrait in a hallway, just the people who'd actually shaped the person standing at the altar. Blair came, older and softer around the edges than the girl who once mimicked Noah's glasses in a library. Lily came, her gallery show flyers tucked proudly into half the guests' welcome bags. Dana came, and cried more than anyone, which none of us let her live down for the rest of the night.
And near the end of the reception, when the tables had mostly emptied and the string lights had taken over from the sun, an elderly woman I didn't recognize approached our table, silver hair loose around her shoulders, and set something down in front of me without a word.
An old mirror. Small, unremarkable, its frame worn soft with age.
I looked up to say something, and found her already smiling at me in a way I knew, bone-deep, better than I knew almost anything else in the world.
I picked up the mirror and looked into it — not searching this time, not counting, not cataloguing every flaw the way I once would have. Just looking. My own face looked back, lines starting at the corners of my eyes from four years of laughing more than I ever used to, a small scar near my hairline from a bicycle accident the year before that I'd never bothered covering.
"This time," I said, "I'm not afraid to see my flaws anymore."
"Then you're ready to be loved," Aphrodite said, and there was something almost like pride in it, the particular pride of someone who has watched a very long, very difficult thing finally, quietly, complete itself.
She was gone by the time I looked up to introduce her to Noah. I never did explain the mirror to him fully — some things, I'd learned a long time ago, you only need to understand once to know exactly what they mean, and some things are better kept as your own small, private proof that the whole strange story had actually happened, that a woman with wings had once decided a cruel girl in a hallway was worth the trouble of saving from herself.
Noah found my hand under the table, the way he always did, unhurried, certain, like it was the easiest yes he'd ever given anyone.
"You okay?" he asked.
"I'm perfect," I said, and then laughed, because I'd meant it as a joke, the old reflex of a girl who used to think that word was the only currency worth having — and then realized, somewhere in the honeyed light of that evening, surrounded by every person who had actually seen me become someone worth marrying, that for possibly the first time in my entire life, I hadn't meant it as a lie either.
I wasn't perfect. I never would be. I had simply, finally, stopped needing to be, in order to believe I was worth loving exactly as I was.
That, it turned out, had been the whole lesson from the very beginning.