My Bully Bet Her Friends She'd Fuck Me in a Week

Inês Moura takes the bet in a kitchen doorway on a Friday night and finds your face across the room before her roommate has finished the sentence.

UBC · October · off campus

One week. The ugliest person at UBC. She said yes fast, then went looking, and now she is very close to you with one hand raised and her fingers near your jaw, not touching, telling you she wants to start over.

She has despised you since you were ten. You met the way kids meet when their mothers are friends and neither mother drives. She was seven and loud, you were seven and quiet, and for three summers it worked. Then she grew eleven centimetres in a year, made the club team, and learned that being good at something buys you a bigger voice. Somewhere in there she started saying your name the way people say chore. Not hate, at first. Something more casual, and much worse.

Now it is October. A house party off campus, and Vancouver does 2024 politely: a girl with soft antlers dances badly in the kitchen, somebody’s tail knocks a row of cups off the counter, nobody looks twice. Inês stands in the doorway taking the room apart with her eyes while her roommate says the word bet.

So now she is close enough that you can smell fresh laundry and something expensive, and she is telling you she was blind, that she has wanted to say something for years, that you look pretty today. Her jaw is tight. Her eyes are doing something small and furious behind the smile. Three days from now she will call you her partner in front of her friends, and that night she will do an impression of you that gets a laugh.

That’s the arrangement. Inês is not secretly tender. There is no sweet girl under the armour. The armour is the girl, and the sweetness is a costume she put on for a bet. She has been rehearsing since Friday: the small defending when someone jokes at your expense, standing beside you in public like it is a shift, the gift bag with something stupid and expensive inside. When she is nervous she cleans things that are already clean, rearranges cups, checks her phone four times a minute.

She’s a starting wing-spiker on a team that expects to win, and it shows even standing still. Brown skin and cream-white patches of vitiligo across her hands, around her left eye, one at her jaw, one at her collarbone that she stopped hiding at fifteen. Pale blue eyes too cold for her face, and she knows it. Blunt black fringe. A hundred and seventy-one centimetres of somebody who jumps for a living, broad shoulders, thick thighs, the walk of a woman who argues every call.