And We're Off

by Dana Schwartz

  An Imprint of Penguin Random House

  Penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 Penguin Random House LLC

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780448493831

  Design: Eric Ford

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mom, who is only a tiny bit like Alice Parker.

  I love you.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”

  —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

  1

  STOP IT, NORA. You have more self-control than this.

  My fingers twitch on the keyboard, but my eyes don’t move from the screen. It’s not even that Nick’s Facebook profile is that interesting. It’s just . . . he changed his profile picture. Now, instead of the soccer team photo, he’s posted a picture of him at a party, mid-laugh, looking away from the camera. His hair is wavy, almost wet-looking. In the corner of the picture is an arm that I know has to be Lena’s because—

  Stop it. I slam my laptop shut, like I’m actually closing my mind to all things Nick DiBasilio, and I make the responsible, adult decision to turn my attention to something slightly less sexy than the second alternate goalie on the boys’ varsity soccer team: the drawing I’m working on of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy making out. The sneer in Draco’s upper lip isn’t quite right. I need to make it clear from their body language alone: This isn’t a truth-or-dare peck between Drarry—this is a full-blown kiss that’s going to turn into some full-contact wand play in the Gryffindor common room later.

  The gay erotic fandom community on Tumblr has turned out to be surprisingly profitable. Last month, I made enough money from customers—people requesting the most specific scenes they could think of—that I was able to go to Six Flags with Lena. For twenty dollars, I’ll draw a cartoon of any two characters of your choosing. For thirty, I’ll include a more elaborate background. And for fifty, I’ll add you into the mix.

  Today’s to-do list includes the aforementioned gay Harry and Draco kiss (“No background, with Harry also wearing Slytherin robes too, please?”) and one illustration of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes sharing a bathtub.

  How long am I spending on the drawing? It could be ten minutes or ten years. My mind is so focused on perfecting that curl in Draco’s lip, the slight . . . bulge . . . in his Hogwarts robe, making Harry’s hair just messy enough, that by the time I finish the sun has gone down completely behind the white roof of the 7-Eleven outside my bedroom window.

  I blow on the page, careful not to smudge any of the still-wet black ink, and set it carefully beside the letter that I’ve kept in the place of honor at the corner of my desk for two months.

  The letter is written on gorgeous paper, cream-colored with a dark, pressed logo at the top of the page: a minimalist lighthouse. This is the type of letterhead Pinterest was born for, the kind of stationery porn that could launch a thousand BuzzFeed listicles.

  And then my eyes sneak down the page, and it gets even better from there:

  Congratulations! We are pleased to offer you a spot as one of eight fellows at the Donegal Colony for Young Artists in the summer of 2017.

  I could recite the entire acceptance letter from memory, along with the rest of the welcome packet, which is filled with details about lodging and meals and travel tips. All of the shiny-haired, clear-skinned students featured in its glossy photographs look like they were caught in the middle of the most hilarious inside joke. The group of them—so casually diverse that they have to be staged—all have their heads tossed back in big Julia Roberts laughs. I practice opening and shutting my jaw, but I don’t think I can even get my mouth that wide.

  And then, a creak from the hallway tears me from my multiethnic reverie. I don’t even need to look to know that my mother is standing in the doorway. I instinctually flip the packet shut and place it innocently atop my Drarry drawing (the ink must be dry by now, right?) before picking up another one of the commissioned pieces I recently finished—Hermione Granger reading in bed as a ten-year-old—and staring at it like I’m scanning for Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  “You shouldn’t be keeping this stuff,” my mother says, walking into my room without being invited (there goes my theory that she’s actually a vampire) and pawing through the pile of old sketchbooks and pages that have turned my desk into something of a paper Jenga game. I keep eyeing the drawing of Draco and Harry, worried that it might fly out from under the welcome packet of its own volition and show my mother exactly how intimate my knowledge of the cartoon male anatomy has become. “I swear,” she says, “this room becomes messier every time I pass it. Are you breeding papers?”

  “No, I’m pro-shelter.”

  She ignores my hilarious joke and continues surveying my room, her fingers playing with the chunky turquoise necklace that sits above her abomination of a coral-colored sweater. She was probably going for “Capable Mom Back in the Workforce!” but the effect is more “Middle-Aged Little Mermaid Cosplayer.”

  Her eyes settle on the green streak in my hair, which has been a topic in every single conversation we’ve had since I bleached and dyed it two weeks ago.

  “It’s like you’ve been using your hair as a Kleenex,” she says, chuckling to herself with a clucking laugh like it’s the funniest joke she ever heard.

  “Do you mind?” I say. “I’m trying to work.”

  With a single stride, she crosses the room and snatches the Hermione drawing from my hand and brings it close to her face. “These aren’t your applications,” she says. “You’re drawing cartoons, Nora. I mean, look at this.” She lets the ripped, crumpled drawing fall to the floor. “You promised me you’d at least have a rough draft of your personal statement before you left.”

  I slide to the carpet to rescue the drawing, but the damage is done. Even after smoothing it out it, the wrinkles in the page mean I won’t be able to upload the image. At least not without a spiderweb of shadow lines across it. A small tear threatens to separate Hermione’s left leg from her torso.

  “You ripped it!” I wave the ruined drawing in her face.

  “Don’t be so dra
matic,” she says.

  “I’m not being dramatic!” I slam the drawing on top of the quivering tower of papers on my desk, and, with a sound like a cartoon splat effect, the entire stack comes tumbling down. Papers soar through the air and land all over my carpet.

  Jenga.

  “Ugh!” My mom jumps back from the swelling flood of papers as if she’s trying to keep the hem of her pants dry. “Your room is a pigsty,” she says, her gaze sweeping with disgust past the fallen pile of papers and toward the T-shirts and sweatpants that have settled into a nest on my bedroom floor. “When you leave, this is all going in the trash.”

  “This isn’t trash! These are my drawings.” I pull out a piece of scrap paper on which I doodled a giant man-eating pineapple with dripping fangs. “I mean, most of it isn’t trash.”

  “I don’t want to have to look at this.”

  “So don’t. Just close my door and don’t look. It’s fine.”

  She clears her throat and repeats herself. “If I have to look at your messy room—”

  “—which you don’t.”

  “—which I do because it is in my home,” she continues, straightening her already perfect-posture spine, “this is all going to be recycled.”

  “That’s not fair. One, I need to pack. Also, don’t forget Dad’s wedding is tomorrow, and that means I won’t have time to—”

  My mother stiffens. I’m surprised she doesn’t hiss like a vampire smelling garlic. She’s mentioned Dad a grand total of three times since the divorce: once when he started dating Ms. Wright, once when she found his old navy-blue golf shirt in the wash (I was using it as a smock), and once when the wedding invitation arrived.

  I didn’t think it was biologically possible, but somehow, my mother’s spine gets even straighter. “Clean your room, or I will deal with this when you’re gone,” she says and then leaves.

  Since she’s gone back to work, my mother has been stressed, but the past few weeks she’s been criticizing my summer trip—three weeks at one of the most prestigious art programs for high school students in the world—as if it’s a personal inconvenience. “I assume you’ll be taking the money for airfare out of your Bat Mitzvah savings,” she had said immediately after hearing I’d been accepted.

  Grandpa understands, though. He knows what this opportunity means. He knows that listing the DCYA on my college applications is basically a golden ticket to the Rhode Island School of Design. He knows how long I spent agonizing over my application. Should I include a landscape or an abstract portrait? (I went with both in the end.) What’s the best way to ask my art teacher, Mr. Kall, for a recommendation? Will they even want an American there when, according to my research/stalking, they let in three Americans last year and their website says they want “diversity of nations among the admitted students”?

  I assume Grandpa pleaded my case to my mom, because two days later, despite continuing to mutter about “wasting time” and “focusing on a precollege program,” she took me to get a passport. And when Grandpa broke the news that he was going to pay for me to travel around Europe before and after the weeks I would spend studying at the Donegal Colony in Ireland, she barely protested.

  I begin cleaning up the papers from the floor: not just pineapple doodles, it turns out, but old English reports (“Red Light, Green Light: The Great Gatsby and American Industrialism”); several failed self-portraits created after spending hours studying my face in the mirror only to end up with a drawing that looked like Jar Jar Binks; a worksheet covered in calculus notes that don’t look even a little bit familiar; and sketchbooks that I can’t bring myself to throw away. Attempting to clean up now is akin to asking someone to drain the ocean with an eyedropper and be done by noon the next day: a futile effort. I let the pages fall from my arms back onto the floor and return to my desk to get a final look at the Drarry cartoon before I scan it to Tumblr. Let my mother yell about my messy room all she wants. I’ll be across the Atlantic Ocean.

  2

  THE BARTENDER ISN’T paying any attention to me—that’s the second problem with my night. I’ve fished out the fluorescent orange cherry from the bottom of my glass, and I’ve been swirling the stem back and forth between my cheeks, trying to tie it into a knot. I read somewhere that this is sexy, but even if I succeed, I still don’t think it’ll capture the bartender’s attention. He’s too busy wiping down wine glasses with a dust-gray rag to notice the not-completely-unattractive seventeen-year-old almost showing him how good she’d be at making out.

  The first problem with my night is, obviously, that I’m leaving for Europe in two days and still haven’t packed. And in an act of teenage anarchy that I’m not regretting in the slightest, I left my room covered in paper when I left for the wedding. Sure, it’ll mean I’m facing a dual packing-and-scavenger-hunting endeavor when I return. But, you know: worth it.

  And while I could be worrying about important things, like how I’m going to find my raincoat from underneath three semesters of essays (I still have a raincoat somewhere, right?) or my debilitating procrastination problem (will I be forced to tour Paris in a hotel towel because I forgot to bring enough underwear?), it’s much more fun to focus exclusively on how I’m going to get the bartender to flirt with me.

  He’s cute in a brunette Ryan Gosling kind of way—if Ryan Gosling had a less-good-looking little brother who worked as a bartender and resented when strangers told him he kind of looks like that guy from The Notebook.

  I probably shouldn’t have ordered a Shirley Temple. If I had sidled up to the bar with confidence and a world-weary look in my eye that said, “Make it a double, pal,” I bet he wouldn’t have checked to see if I was twenty-one. Do they even card people at weddings? Probably not. Especially not if you’re the groom’s daughter. Especially not if you’re the groom’s daughter and the bride is your former math teacher. Sure, they didn’t start dating until I was out of her class, but still, it’s objectively weird. I had to deal with snide “PTA meeting” jokes for six months after Nick DiBasilio wrote something about it in the group text we had for homecoming plans that year. If the bartender knew about all of that, he’d definitely pour me a real drink.

  I twist the green strand of hair around my finger. I was going for a chick-bassist look, the kind of casual just-woke-up-looking-this cool that you see on street style blogs where people look amazing in long T-shirts and hats that would make me look like a crazy lady at the beach. It seems like the purpose of street style blogs is to point out how incredibly attractive people still look incredibly attractive in strange clothes.

  But here, in the yellow lighting of the Chicago Radisson ballroom, with a swelling red pimple on my nose threatening to overthrow the feeble ranks of Maybelline concealer, the green in my hair makes me look sickly. The ends of my hair are cracked and dry. I might have left the bleach on too long.

  It’s also worth noting that my dress—a taffeta nightmare that I’ve had sitting in the back of my closet since Bar and Bat Mitzvah season in seventh grade—is too tight. Even though I haven’t gotten any taller since the last time I wore it, I still look totally wrong. I feel like an undercover policewoman dressing like a kid to bust a suburban high school drug ring.

  “It’s fine,” my mother had told me when I came downstairs into the living room wearing it a few nights ago, trying to convince her to let me buy something new. Her fingers were absentmindedly circling a few kernels of popcorn at the bottom of her bowl, and she didn’t even bother to look up from the latest episode of Property Brothers to see the way the fabric squeezed across my chest and stomach like a shiny sausage casing, outlining the shadow of my belly button. My mother also didn’t notice the way I rolled my eyes and headed back upstairs, slamming my bedroom door behind me just to make good on the annoyed-teenager routine.

  For whatever reason, the ponytailed wedding DJ (do all wedding DJs have ponytails?) thinks that people in the year 2017 still want to hear
“The Chicken Dance.” The song is quacking along when the DJ’s voice comes through the speakers: “Let’s welcome to the dance floor Mr. and Mrs. Holmes!”

  My dad, Walter Holmes, who used to pick me up from soccer and tuck my stuffed elephant, Bobba, in bed next to me when I was little, is suddenly in the center of the dance floor flapping his arms and shaking his butt . . . clap clap clap clap.

  I can’t watch. I need the semi-cute bartender to save me, but he’s still checking his cell phone and ignoring me. I abandon the cherry-stem plan (spitting it out as gracefully as I can into a monogrammed cocktail napkin), and I pick up a cardboard coaster from the artistically fanned stack in front of me. I place it, balanced, on the edge of the bar. With a quick flick of my wrist, I send the coaster into the air and catch it, one smooth motion before it even finishes its ascent.

  It’s a trick Grandpa taught me whenever I went with him to his country club. He’d walk into the clubhouse after a round of golf, and I’d already be waiting at the bar, swinging my legs on a stool, drinking a club soda through a straw, and plucking the cashews out of the plastic bowls of salted nuts. As we waited for our lunch to arrive, he’d flip one of the coasters and snatch it faster than I thought he was capable of moving. “Always impresses the ladies,” he said, winking at the waitress in the clubhouse, the glint of his gold tooth deep in his mouth barely visible.

  Just by looking at him, you’d have no idea that my grandpa is Great Living American Artist Robert Parker. With his taste for wrinkled khakis, sweater vests, and suspenders, he looks more like a retired middle school vice principal than the man who once sold a painting to George and Amal Clooney.

  But even if people don’t always recognize him by his appearance, they definitely recognize the look of his paintings, the style he’s famous for—moments of tension, usually family scenes, frozen in time against a placid background.

  The clubhouse had one of Grandpa’s landscapes—not an especially famous one—hanging in a gold frame with a little light above it meant to illuminate the scene of the hill and the water mill. But that’s not the painting that’d be an answer to a Daily Double on Jeopardy! or a question on the SAT: