A Good Girl With Blood on Her Lip Gloss

The first time I saw Avyaan Rathore’s face after he died, it was not in the morgue. It was in the mirror. And he was standing right behind me. Devigarh is not the kind of town where people expect their dead to come back. It is a town of cracked sandstone walls and women who carry secrets in the folds of their saris. People here believe in curses and in God, in the sound of anklets at night, but not in the return of the dead. Yet there he was. It was the night after the police took me in for questioning. I hadn’t slept in twenty-six hours. My lip gloss — the exact shade my friends called Kesar Blood — was still in the little pouch in my purse. I hadn’t touched it since… since that night. Since the blood. People think lip gloss smudges easily. They don’t know the right brands. They don’t know that the one I wear stays on through monsoon rains, greasy street food, even through— Well. Even through the kind of night that stains you forever. When I got home from the police station, my mother was waiting for me on the veranda. She didn’t ask how I was. She asked if I had eaten. I told her I wasn’t hungry. She told me not to talk to anyone. That is how mothers love you in Devigarh — with fear. In my bedroom, the mirror above my dresser is old and slightly warped, the kind that makes you look thinner on one side and fatter on the other. I was standing in front of it, removing the kajal that had smeared during the interrogation, when I saw him. Avyaan. Behind me. In the mirror. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t even angry. His expression was the same as it had been the last time I saw him alive — searching, like he was trying to read me. And then he spoke. “I told you not to wear that lip gloss,” he said. I spun around. There was no one there. The murder had happened two nights ago, on the terrace of the Rathore haveli. They were celebrating Raghav Rathore’s birthday — Avyaan’s older brother — with too much whisky and not enough civility. I wasn’t supposed to be there. My family wasn’t rich enough for those kinds of parties, but Devanshi, my cousin, had begged me to come. She said there would be live music and lanterns. She didn’t mention Avyaan would be there. She didn’t know what he meant to me. Or maybe she did. People will tell you they saw me go upstairs with him around 11 p.m. That is true. They will also tell you they saw me come down alone at 11:30, my lip gloss still perfectly in place. That is also true. What they don’t know is that there were two of us on that terrace… and then there weren’t. The police asked me the usual questions. How did you know the victim? Were you in a romantic relationship? When was the last time you saw him alive? I lied only once. When they asked me if I had touched him after he died, I said no. The truth? I touched his face. I pressed my fingers to his lips. They were still warm. And when I pulled my hand away, there was blood on my lip gloss. Inspector Meher Singh is not like the Devigarh policemen I grew up seeing — the kind who would rather drink tea than solve a case. She is sharp, with eyes that move like scalpels. She watched me the way a snake watches a mouse, not to strike immediately, but to learn my exact shape. “You seem very calm for someone who was one of the last to see him alive,” she said during the interrogation. I shrugged. “I process things slowly.” She smiled, but it wasn’t kind. “Or you processed them before they happened.” The strange thing about murder in a small town is not that everyone talks about it — it’s that they talk about it in layers. The men talk about money. The women talk about shame. The old talk about fate. And the children… they just listen. By the second day, the whole of Devigarh knew that I was “the girl with the lip gloss.” Some said it was because the police found my makeup pouch on the terrace, next to the blood. Others said it was because the stains on the glass railing didn’t smudge, even when the officers tried to wipe them away. They don’t understand. Lip gloss doesn’t leave stains like that. Blood does. That night, after I saw Avyaan in the mirror, I did something stupid. I took out the lip gloss from my purse and uncapped it. The smell hit me first — sweet, faintly of vanilla, but with an undercurrent of something metallic. Blood smells like metal, did you know that? It clings to you in ways water never will. I applied it, slowly, to my lips. I looked at myself in the mirror. And I whispered, “You’re not supposed to be here.” The next morning, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, a small boy stood there, barefoot, holding something wrapped in newspaper. “For you,” he said. Inside the paper was a single red kite string, frayed and stained dark at one end. The boy didn’t wait for thanks. He dropped the bundle into my hands and ran back down the lane, his bare feet kicking up dust. I closed the door and unwrapped it carefully. The kite string was sticky. Not with sap or sugar, but with something darker, heavier. My fingers itched after touching it. My mind flashed to the Rathore terrace, the way the cold wind had whipped around us, the way Avyaan’s fingers had curled around the edge of my scarf as if he needed something to hold on to. The frayed end of the string looked like it had been snapped in a fight. By afternoon, Devigarh was already full of whispers about the kite string. Not because they knew it had been given to me — no one saw that — but because Inspector Meher had been seen walking through the market, holding something long and thin wrapped in cloth. She had the kind of stride that makes people move out of the way without thinking. Devanshi came over that evening, pretending she was here to return my dupatta. She always pretends. Her real reason for visiting is to feed her hunger for information. “They’re saying he was strangled,” she said, her eyes wide. “That’s ridiculous,” I replied, too quickly. She tilted her head. “Why? Did you see how he died?” The funeral was the next day. Avyaan’s body was brought out in the late morning, carried through the courtyard of the haveli by men in white. The smell of sandalwood incense clung to the air, mixing with the sharper scent of marigolds. Women sobbed loudly, their bangles clinking together in a kind of accidental music. I stood at the edge of the crowd, wearing white like everyone else, my hair braided, my lips bare. I could feel eyes on me — not just from people I knew, but from people who had only heard about me. The girl with the blood on her lip gloss. And then I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t mockery. It was… something else. The kind of laugh that escapes when you remember something that doesn’t belong to this moment — like a joke someone told you years ago, in a place that no longer exists. But to everyone watching, it was proof. Proof that I was wrong in the head. Proof that maybe I had done it. That night, my mother slapped me for the first time in years. “You will not shame this family,” she hissed. “I didn’t kill him,” I said. She didn’t reply. She didn’t have to. In Devigarh, sometimes silence is an accusation louder than words. The real nightmare began three days later, when I received the note. It was slipped under my door, folded neatly into a small square. Written in red ink, in handwriting I would recognize anywhere. “You wore it that night. You should have listened to me.” The signature was a single letter: A. But Avyaan was dead.