“Yes?”
"I don’t think so."
His face fell, and my heart soared. "I'm not saying I don't love you," I said. "And if you asked anyone else, I would deny it outright, but...you know. I do. I love you, and now we both suck at timing."
His face split open into a wide, silly grin. I hated to admit that I missed that.
"You love me," he said, and we both started spluttering at that, with loud and boisterous laugher. I knew neither of us could quite believe that this was happening. I mean, of all people, Benedick Padua was in love with me, and I was in love with him? Crazy!
Something inside me lifted, like a weight I never realized I was carrying around. Ben leaned his forehead against mine like he used to, and it made my insides flutter, causing all the dust in my tin heart to disappear. But as my heart came alive again, I remembered Hiro and Claudia. I slapped Ben's arm as he wrapped it around me.
"I can't believe you just distracted me with…with…feelings!" I exclaimed, shaking my head and pushing him away. “Hiro crushed Claudia. I can't just sit here and... and..."
"And what?" Ben asked innocently, his lips curling up into a mischievous smile. I shook my head and slapped him away again. Thankfully he seemed to get my point. "Bea, what are we supposed to do?"
I felt something bloom inside me. It felt hot and painful, but it had stewed so well that I relished the feeling. I was angry. Rightfully and properly angry for my friend who was humiliated in front of people who respected and loved her. I looked at Ben full of my anger, and he gave no reaction.
"I want to hurt him," I announced. "I want him to understand what he did to Claudia."
"Who, Hiro?" Ben asked. "He barely understood what he did himself!"
I felt myself scramble immediately away from his grasp. "Don't defend him," I warned, pointing a finger at him. "Don't even defend him."
He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. "But Bea, you can't--"
"I can," I said, standing up and looking down at him. "I can do what I want, Ben. The question is, what are you going to do about it?"
His face became still and stoic, and for a second, I didn't recognize him at all. That was the scariest part of all of this, wasn't it? I could defend my best friend and lose Ben in the same breath. I watched him make his choice, and my heart was hammering in my chest. It had never done that before, and it was such a weird feeling.
"I won't stop you," he said, taking my hand, and in a really weird gesture, kissed the tops of my knuckles. It was a kiss that was so full of affection, and seemed to last forever. I wasn't used to seeing him so serious. Don Franco had nothing on Ben’s quiet affection. "But please, think about it a little more."
Then he squeezed my hand tightly, almost like he didn't want to let go, before walking away. Then I was standing alone, looking out into the water and feeling utterly lost.
* * *
I sat inside the Library of Congress, watching the tourists come in and out and weave through me as they navigated what I believed to be the most beautiful building in the world. I sat on the cool marble floor and leaned my head against the Roman columns, staring up at the intricate murals in gold and white as they danced across the ceiling. I came here as a seven-year-old kid, running away from my parents when they were fighting. Now I still came here to hide, hiding in books and research into a field that I found myself unable to fall in love with. I bit my lip and sighed.
Claudia was having the mean reds. Just like Holly Golightly had said, she was suddenly afraid of something she didn’t know. She told me earlier that day that she’d been diagnosed with ‘mild’ clinical depression. Mild seemed an odd word to use for what Claudia had, because when she had the mean reds, she had them bad. She lashed out, she locked herself in her room, or worse.
After her father died, she couldn’t handle it. Leo just called me after their fathers’ funeral and said Claudia would drop out of school for a while, for therapy and to spend some time with him while he studied in Paris. She promised to stay in touch, but that was just a platitude you said to everyone, wasn't it?
I rest my chin on the tops of my hands. Someone came up the stairs, looking sweaty, frantic and pretty determined to find someone. It was really easy to lose your kid in here.
"Bea!" He exclaimed frantically, his voice making the walls of the library quake. His sneakers skid against the marble floor as he slipped over them. "Bea!!"
What was he doing??? I grabbed Ben's arm as he stood in front of me and had him sit down with me on the floor. The librarian gave us a look of warning before leaving us alone. I glared at Ben.
"What the hell is your problem?" I whispered to him. "We're in a library!"
He was wheezing so hard I worried he would have an asthma attack right then and there. But a few breaths later, he managed to speak.
"You...got..." he said, his voice wheezing as he tried to say words. I told him to slow down and speak again. He nodded and managed to speak. "You...got in. You got the scholarship. They announced it today in the Fine Arts Office."
I jumped up and started screaming and laughing with Ben, completely forgetting that we were in a Library. We got kicked out pretty quickly after that, but nothing could ruin my good mood. We both started walking across the street to the Capitol without really knowing why.
We hadn't told anyone, but Ben and I applied for a two-year program in Paris for Fine Arts. It was something we both did for fun and on a whim, and I never thought that either of us could even get in. But...but...
"This is going to be so cool and you are going to have such a great time," Ben whispered into my ears as he wrapped his arms around me. His pride warmed me and filled me, and suddenly Paris felt a million miles away. I wrapped my arms around him, not caring that the tourists around us were getting annoyed that we were standing in the middle of the massive path. The Library behind us, the Capitol in front of us. It was a scary moment.
"I don't want to go," I suddenly said. "We were supposed to do this together."
He pulled out of the hug, looking at me like I had sprouted a third eye. "Hey, hey. You should totally go," he said, murmuring into my hair before he kissed my forehead. "It's Paris, Bea! I don't have to tell you why you should do it. Plus, Claudia’s going to be there!"
"But what about..."
"I'll be here," he promised, giving me such a sincere smile I wanted to believe him. "I'll email you, and teach you how to figure out Facebook so we can talk."
We both giggled, and the weight of my emotional day was settling heavily on me. I held him tighter.
"Nothing has to change, Bea," he promised. "Nothing."
* * *
My heart was in a panic, worried about what Claudia might do. I hurried to the only place I could think Claudia would be. But instead of finding my best friend, I found Hiro and Don standing in front of the studio, holding Hiro's laptops and website notes and totally surprised to see me. The store had just opened for the morning, and a few customers seemed confused at the scene unfolding in front of the store. Claudia would have wanted us to move aside and act like nothing was happening, but I was too angry to care. Why did Ursula even let them get their things?
"What are you doing?" I asked as a car pulled up behind me. I didn't even see who it was, but Hiro's big black eye glanced at the figure behind me in recognition.
"We've decided that the deal is off," Don said, stepping in for his friend. "We can't make this website while there are conflicts, and the introduction to Liberty will have to be cancelled as well."
My insides flared up again. What an asshole! My hands clenched into fists, and I was so ready to punch him in the face. Someone had to, and I was determined that it was going to be me. I was just about to open my mouth to say something when the person behind me spoke first. It took me a second to realize that it was Leo, burning with anger more powerful than mine. He stepped forward, his large frame nearly rivaling Hiro's. I noticed the hand he used to punch Hiro with was wrapped with a bandage.
> "You've already humiliated her," he said to them. "The least you cowards could have done was to leave the girls their meeting."
"A coward?" Hiro asked, stepping forward. "Claudia was the one…”
"Claudia wasn’t with us on that day because she was having her dark day," Leo snapped, countering Hiro by standing in front of me. "Just like the ones you have. You could have asked her in private, and I think she would have told you, since she did love you. But you had to bring her, and all of us there, and forced her hand. How does that not make you a coward? And now, you and your little buddy are running off while nobody is looking. It takes a special kind of bastard to be able to do that."
Leo took my wrist and gently led me backwards. "Come on, Bea," he said to me in a low murmur. "We have to look for Claudia."
"What do you mean we have to look for her?" Hiro suddenly asked, and Leo shot him a look that could have killed Medusa stone dead. Even I shivered a little.
"My sister is missing," he said simply, before placing a hand around me (!!) and walking me over to the car. I took that moment to look briefly at Hiro. His face had turned pale, his eyes off-focus. He looked like a man who had been shaken to his core way too many times in the last few days. I almost felt sorry for him.
We got into Leo’s car, and drove off from the store without a word, leaving Hiro and Don in the dust.
Benedick
I found them in our office on the ritzy side of DC, near DuPont Circle and where the embassies were. I have no idea how Don managed to secure us an office in that area at the rent we were paying them (let’s just say that Hiro and I paid more for our takeout than we did for our office rental), but at least Messina Designs had a home. I schooled my face straight as I walked in, finding them sitting in their desks and chatting idly like nothing had happened. Hiro’s laptops were on his desk, and my website notes and designs were on mine. They did it. They took everything back and left Bea and Claudia without anything!
Why was I friends with these guys again?
"Ah look who it is," Don asked, raising a beer can to me like he was about to offer a toast. It wasn’t even lunch yet. "Finally, we've been looking for you everywhere, my friend. There's beer in the fridge, but you already knew that."
"Why were you looking for me?" I asked, still standing by the door. I knew if I took one step further I might end up strangling Hiro or finally becoming the guy to punch Don across the face. So I didn’t move.
"Well, Hiro here needs a bit of cheering up after what happened," Don said, patting the top of Hiro's head while Hiro didn’t’t register the action. "So naturally I looked for you. Based on the flush in your cheeks, I'd say you were with Bea," he continued, as he sniggered into his beer can. "But I could be wrong, of course."
Then I found my opening. I had been waiting for it, calm and composed as I never thought I could be, and I looked up at Don with a defiant chin.
"Oh suddenly, you can be wrong?" I asked, letting them know that I wasn't in the mood to dick around with them. Don especially. "After all this time where we looked to you, and trusted you because we thought you were right that you knew…but you don’t know anything, do you Don? You know nothing about real life, about how Hiro and I feel, but that’s not the point.
Hiro knows that Claudia has…her days. You know that, Hiro. Maybe you don’t understand her as well as you think you do, and she didn’t like that you forced it out of her in public.
Did you ever consider that maybe she left because it was something incredibly personal, Don? Everyone is out there looking for Claudia, and you're sitting there, drinking beer and laughing like nothing's happening. What the hell is wrong with you?"
"We heard that she was missing," Don said, shaking his head. "But we know it was for the best that Hiro did what he did."
This was the first time anyone had even mentioned Claudia’s dark days, and yet Don looked totally nonplussed, still putting Hiro in the right. If I was a suspicious guy, I would think he had something to do with it.
But that was crazy talk, right?
I wanted to say so much more, and I could feel the words rising up in my throat, ready to vomit right out of me. But I held my ground, and turned to the person I was really after.
"Dude," I turned to my best friend, the one guy I had always trusted. "You do realize that you've become his fucking beard."
"What?" Don asked, his perfect smug bastard face curdling into confusion. Hiro shot me a similarly confused look as well. Finally I managed to get to him.
"You're exactly where you and I promised we would never be!" I said, raising my voice to reach him. "We said, one year tops, remember that? One year with Don and then we would have to do it on our own. It's been three years, Hiro, and we're still mooching off of him, letting him make deal after deal whether we want to do it or not. The company we wanted isn't based on X-deals for jobs and using connections to get what we want."
"I thought this was about Claudia," Don said, finally putting down his beer can. Hiro was still looking at me like he had no idea who I was. But I needed to get to him.
"He told you to do this," I said, pointing a finger right at Don. "Because he knows that you and I will wake up one day and realize that we don't need him. That contrary to popular belief, we can’t trust him, because he doesn’t know. He did the same thing to me when Bea left for Paris, and I am so sorry that I just watched him do the same to you."
I pulled something out of my back pocket and slammed it on the table in front of them. Don picked up the letter and quickly scanned the contents.
"You're resigning," he said in a deadpan voice. "Effective immediately."
"I appreciate everything you've done for me, Don," I said. "But I can't do this anymore. I'm going out to find Claudia, Hiro. Either join me outside in ten minutes, or consider us done."
Then I walked out of Messina Designs for the very last time.
* * *
I was not able to teach Bea the fine points of Facebook, and to be fair, she really tried, at least for a while.
But when she finally found a place to buy stamps in Paris, she began sending me letters and post cards. Some of the cards were drawings that she'd sketched, with a few platitudes about where she had been when she was doodling.
Sometimes she wrote on ready-made postcards of her favorite art pieces from the Musee d’ Orsay, enthusing about her discovery of Tolouse-Laturec, and shared tidbits of information about the Impressionists (her best friends, she called them) --Renoir, Degas, Pissaro, Manet, and Monet that I never would have learned in Washington. She told me about her discovery of the Saint Chapelle, how the stained glass walls brought tears to her eyes. She breathed their air and learned their strokes, she dined in cafes like a true art student and best of all, she missed me like crazy.
I did my best to reply to all of her letters. I told her to steer clear of Manet, because he was clearly a cad and that none of them would appreciate her art like I could. I reminded her of other artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock and even my buddy Van Gogh, who were all waiting for her with me back in the US. But it was hard to match the beauty of Paris with your average, everyday American Wal-Mart and IKEA. I have to admit that I struggled.
Don, who we had been hanging out with lately (he and Hiro became classmates in some complicated computer class, and I'd pitched in a couple of times to help their projects get good grades), asked me why I was bothering to reply to all her post cards and letters when we weren't even in a relationship. I was supposed to be helping him with some animation on Flash, but I was two letters behind, and already told a good IKEA story in the last one. I'm just a real sucker for their Swedish meatballs.
"It's basic economies of scale," Don said, still talking to us as the bar was closing in the wee hours of the morning. Yeah, we'd decided that I would help him during my work hours. He didn't like that very much. "As production volume goes up, the cost of producing the goods go down."
That sounded like absolute gibberish to
me. "What?"
"The less effort you put into your damn letters, the more she will appreciate it when you do write back," he said, rolling his eyes. "And you get to spend a little more time helping me out."
I raised an eyebrow skeptically at him, wondering how much I should trust the drunk guy in front of me. But Don patted my arm and smiled with the wisdom of a drunken master.
"Trust me, I know." he said, and the sickly sweet, heady smell of alcohol filled my nose like a sweet poison. "I've had more experience with women. Don't write. She'll love you for it."
So I didn't. On the advice of someone I believed to be a sage expert, I wrote to Beatrice only when I found the time. Sometimes I found the time and still decided not to write to her. Bea's letters turned into post cards, cards turned into the occasional holiday card, until finally, one day, I got a text from a foreign number.
Paris is lovely, even without you.
After that, I never heard from Beatrice Noble again, until I saw her looking at me from the window of Noble Crowne.
Beatrice
I sat in my usual spot at the Library of Congress, texting Claudia over and over, asking her where she was. Leo and I ran out of places to look two hours ago, and now we were coming up on the sixth hour of Claudia's disappearance. I had one hour of Library left to clear my head, and I needed it to find a way to look for her. I looked up at the massive windows. It was nearing three pm, and the light was still warm, sunny and bright. It filled the library’s grand halls and made everything look like it was glowing. Something about it felt peaceful, in spite of everything that was happening.
"Bea!" A voice boomed across the hallway. I turned my head and was surprised to find Benedick there, smiling like he'd just won the lottery. He was given a warning by one of the library staff and sheepishly made his way towards me, slipping on to the marble floor like he'd been there the whole time. When did he become so smooth?
We Go Together Page 7
