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They’d been sleeping in a foreclosure in Michigan, in some glossed-over suburban neighborhood far by the wayside of wherever Dad was hunting. Snow was stacked so high off the ground that the back door wouldn’t open, but Dad had left them with one of those propane tent heaters, and the house itself had great insulation and was pretty much spotless, so all-in-all, it was one of the nicer places they’d stayed.
There was a woman who lived down the block who knew about them. She didn’t say anything about the eleven- and seven-year-old boys squatting the cold empty house in the middle of winter, not to the police or to the bank. Dean still couldn’t decide, in retrospect, if that made her a good person or a bad one.
One morning, Dean opened the front door to find a stack of blankets, a box of non-perishables, and some women’s-fit jackets.
“What’s that?” Sam asked, when Dean had dragged their presents into the living room. “Did Dad give you those?”
“Yeah,” Dean said, even though he’d just watched the woman scuffle back down the street.
“I wanna see him, too!”
“I didn’t see him, dork, just the car.”
At night, he wrapped him and Sam up in those jackets, built a fort out of the blankets and their sleeping bags, and did one last check on the salt lines before laying himself down.
When he turned to check the bathroom window, something clacked against the doorframe, like a mini-thunderclap in the still, vacant house. Dean dug the culprit out of his borrowed pocket and stared: one of those lipstick tubes, with the clear caps, used down a little so that the top was rounded.
Huh. He hadn’t actually held one of these things, ever since—
He climbed up on the sink, flashlight carefully balanced, and angled so as not to catch the mirror.
He was careful to run the tube along the curvature of his lips. It came away sticky red, clotting up the sides of his mouth. Almost like The Joker. It tasted nothing like cherries.
In the other room, Sam made a soft, sleepy noise.
Dean hit the floor with a startled smack, his shoulder twisting awkwardly where it took the brunt of his fall. The beginnings of a bruise bloomed across his shoulder blade and hipbone, and pressed painfully into the bathroom tile as he felt around for the flashlight.
It took a few tries to click it back on, fingers lousy with adrenaline.
“Dean?” Sam called, somewhere behind him, and Dean could’ve kicked himself over that note of fear in his voice.
“I tripped, Sammy. Go back to sleep.”
“What’s wrong with your face?”
“Just—bed, Sam. Now.”
Dean tried his best to scrub it off without water, but his lips just ended up redder and rawer than before.
Dean didn’t like sleepovers. For one, most parents did not respond well to children who stowed guns and knives under their pillows. For two, he never slept well without Sam in his line of sight.
Not that he had a choice, tonight.
They’d been parked in the neighborhood for about a month, now, while Dad put together the case. It was delicate, he said; the shifter had taken up residence as someone unassuming. A family man. A PTA kind of guy, with blond, brace-faced children and food pantry volunteer hours. In a small town like this, everyone's nose in everyone else's business, it had proven impossible to catch the monster with its guard down. Dad, with his gun oil stink and hunter’s gait, was too easy to spot; cue Dean, newly thirteen and newly new, the up-and-coming most popular kid at Normalsdale, Ohio's only junior high.
Dean had always been good at making friends. Other kids ate out of the palm of cool and worldly, and Dean… well, he was pretty damn cool. His dad let him wear a leather jacket. Plus he knew how to cheat old guys at poker and steal Playboys, the combination of which basically rendered him a middle school god.
He played Super Nintendo in the dark with some boy named Kenny, whose chief concern in life was a middling baseball card collection. He had a little sister, and he never let her play, you'll just fuck it up, Jackie. Dean honestly felt bad about it, but he didn't want to be the weird kid who played with little girls, so he kept silent, occasionally glancing at her as she pouted from the end of the hall.
On Dean’s twentieth Mario Kart loss—his vain attempt at avoiding the wrath of a sore loser—Kenny decided that letting his sister give Dean a girly makeover was the proper retribution for sucking so much.
By the time Kenny’s parents came home, Dean had endured five flavors of lip gloss and a suffocating amount of blush. He had so many Lisa Frank tattoos caked on his arm that he looked like some kind of gay biker. At least it made Jackie smile. He made eye contact with the thing pretending to be Kenny’s father, and it laughed at him, good-naturedly, and ruffled his hair. Dean itched for the trigger of a gun that had been too risky to bring in.
Dean gave the signal out the kitchen window. Dad called, right on time.
“Oh, you need him home right away?” it said. “I’m so sorry, I was just out grocery shopping—no, you’re right, I apologize, I really shouldn’t have left them unsupervised like that—of course, I’ll drive him up there right now.”
Dean thought of Sam, sitting in the motel room, back against the wall and clutching a silver-loaded handgun, on the chance things went very, very south tonight. Dean was just grateful that he was the bait, not Sammy. Dad hated using them as bait. He knew Dad wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t the only way.
In the car, Dean pretended to get sick, making the thing pull over so he could puke. Dad capped it while his guard was down. One drive-by shot off the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Dean’s ears rang; the monster's insides mixed with the lip gloss and blush on his face. He puked for real, then, and then laughed, wiping stomach acid off his mouth, because that thing had no idea Dad had even been coming. It had been so easy and they did it and that psycho fucking baby-eater never even had a clue.
On the way back to the motel, he got vomit and lip gloss and blush and shifter guts smeared against the Impala door, curled up the way some kids curl up in a parent’s arms.
The thing was, Dean had some rude words for the kinds of men who tried to look like women. He knew he wasn’t raised to be that way. Dad wasn’t exactly a liberal, but there were too many monsters in the world to be making them out of your average human weirdo. And, well—they got false positives, sometimes. Things they thought were monsters but were actually just your run-of-the-mill sick fuck, fucked-in-the-brain little girl killers and cult leaders and perverts with bunkers in the woods. Dean could do the math. The dudes-who-dressed-like-chicks were basically always on the victim side, not the killer side. He knew that the stereotypes were grossly unfair. He had the numbers to prove it.
Dean couldn’t really help the kneejerk reaction, though, with the kinds of places they went and the kinds of things he heard. Fourteen/fifteen/sixteen saw him in enough seedy bars with enough backroad bigots to turn even the most open-minded roadie off the gay life. And he wasn't one—a faggot, that is. He liked girls. He fucked girls (okay, well—one girl, so far, and it was more like a handy at a party that he definitely would not have gotten invited to if he hadn't pretended to be eighteen, but it was awesome and he would very much like to do it again). He liked girls' smells and their curves and the way they left sticky spots of lipgloss on his neck when they gave him hickies. He was a man and he liked being a man. So why bother thinking about it?
Why couldn't he stop thinking about it?
He wouldn't have thought about it, except that Sam, now twelve (he didn't want to say "they grow up so fast," but god, it was a cliché for a reason), had apparently made friends in the Gay-Straight Alliance. All of a sudden he was being a PC little bitch about the entire thing.
"You can't just say shit like that, Dean."
"Like what? Like 'faggot'?"
"Exactly!"
"If you're gonna keep acting like a princess, I'm gonna keep giving you shit for it."
"It's not about me!"
"Who's it about, then, huh, Sam?"
"It's not like swearing, okay? It's worse. It's like—come on, man, you know there's shit you can't say. It's a slur. There's some shit we don't say 'cause we know it's racist—"
"'Cause we ain't no fucking racists, Sammy. Dad raised us better than that."
"But being a homophobe is totally okay?"
"That's not the same."
"How is that not the same, Dean?"
"You don't get to choose what skin color you're born with."
"And you, what, get to choose whether or not you're gay?"
Dean thought, yeah, kind of. He didn't feel like explaining. Sam's incredulous stare was starting to make him squirm.
The next time Dean wore makeup, it was years later—long after Sammy chose pre-law over family, long after Dad gave him the Impala and let him start hunting on his own—and it was during sex, which underpinned some kind of irony, he guessed, though he chose not to think too hard about it. It made sense to him, anyway. There were four modes in Dean's life: fucking, hunting, eating, and watching out for Sam. Now he was three-for-four. Put some mascara on a Big Mac and he'd have the whole set.
She was this chick in Indiana. He met her in some flyover dive, eating all alone and working on her homework: a community college nursing degree, her pop was in a wheelchair and her baby brother was in special ed and she was gonna take care of them and she was gonna go places. She seemed wetter for the damn car than she was for Dean, but he could appreciate the principle of that. Baby was, after all, a fine piece of ass.
They were in the back seat when he told her about the thing with Rhonda and the lingerie. Miss Indiana yanked him upright and practically demanded they take things back to her place.
She painted his face with stains and glosses and lipliners, making this cute little lip-bitey expression as she concentrated. It fet cold and probably cheap and it irritated his skin a little, but she was so into it that he found himself grinning. She cooed pretty boy, pretty boy, pretty boy and God, how he hated it when people called him that, but somehow it felt different coming from her, this sweet little country girl with her big brunette perm and her deep-set dimples and her wide, sincere eyes.
Dad was missing and Sam was a tall, thick warp of tension at his shoulder and Jessica was dead.
Dean did what any normal brother would have done under the circumstances: he found some of Jess's pictures on MySpace and printed them out at the local library and looked at them whenever Sam wasn't in the room. It wasn't weird. Sam loved her. Maybe even enough to marry her one day. Dean just wanted to understand that. It wasn't fair that he hadn't gotten the chance to know her.
He studied the bow of her smile and the twinkle in her red, flash-photography eyes under a gum-stalactited diner table. On his third free refill of sweet iced tea the waitress leaned over Dean's shoulder and asked, "That your sister?"
"Nah. Brother's girlfriend," Dean said automatically. Then, considering the potential creep-factor of that answer, he amended, "Brother's dead girlfriend," as if that made it any better.
"She's got your lips," the waitress said.
"Does she, now?"
"Yeah, she does. Same cheekbones, too—and the same crinkle right around her eyes."
Dean thought there was something hilariously Oedipal about that but he chose not to burden Sam with the discovery. He gave the lady 40% on the tip and ordered a lemon merengue to-go. When he got back to the motel room it was empty and Sam's duffel was wide open. There was a little bag on top of his clothes with a white-and-red hibiscus print, and Dean would have gone immediately for the gay jokes if he didn't know that it was Jessica's.
He took the bag to the bathroom and locked the door behind him. His palms clammed like he was a kid lifting his first pack of cigarettes. He unzipped it and spread it open with a finger on either side and eyed all the little treasures within. Wet 'n Wild concealer for the conscientious collegiate budget, a brow pencil, a neutral shadow palette, a matte lipstick and a glitter gloss both the same shade as her blush.
He uncapped the gloss and pursed his lips. He remembered how Miss Indiana did it and did it just like that but backwards; he'd always been good with spatial reasoning and it went on clean and smooth. He smacked his lips a few times and felt them stick and pop. In his mind's eye he was clinging to a slim pair of Wranglers and his head barely crested the countertop. He ignored everything but the shape of his mouth and mimed the words, "Not right now, Dean, sweetie. Mommy's going to be late for work."
"Have you been going through my stuff?"
Sam slammed the door on his way in and immediately started on his best impression of an angry swarm of wasps. He tore newspaper clippings off the wall and pinned up new ones. This week's vic was another blonde girl with a tinkling laugh. No fires involved, fortunately, or Sam would be a basket case. It wasn't a vengeful spirit, though, whatever it was—which meant that it was a full-blooded creature, which meant Sam and Dean had to keep on their toes.
Dean affected leisure. He slid toward the remote and clicked off Looney Tunes. He was a little annoyed about it. It was one of Dean's favorites, where Bugs does viking drag and Elmer Fudd gets a hard-on for his stupid disguise.
"You left your shit in the middle of the room, dumbass. S'not my fault if I accidentally kicked it around."
"Don't go through my stuff."
"I just said I didn't go through your stuff! Jesus."
Sam wasn't listening, though, and Dean got the impression that he didn't even believe his own accusation. Dean's shoulders dropped incrementally. He watched Sam work his jaw over nothing, glaring at this collection of small town obits like he could intimidate them into submission.
"Take a shower. You think better in the shower," Dean suggested. Sam rolled his eyes. He went, though, grabbing a towel and a fresh pair of boxers from his bag. He paused at the bathroom sink and stared.
Dean didn't know what Sam was looking at, at first, but then his eyes adjusted: there was a small, drying glob of glitter gloss at the edge of the laminate.
Dean laughed and rubbed the back of his head. "Man, I bet they don't even clean these rooms before renting 'em out to the next guy."
Sam nodded absently and closed the bathroom door.
Dean got up. He stood in the middle of the room for a minute or two without thinking about much of anything. Suddenly he thought about the stain on Baby's passenger door and about the blackish lacquer of shifter guts under the full moon.
He grabbed the keys from the bedside table and left a post-it next to his things. Need to clear my head, it said. Just going for a drive.