“He is kind of hot,” Alexa says thoughtfully, mulling it over. She holds up one long strand of hair to the light, inspecting it for split ends, but it’s predictably perfect. “In an old-dude, Eurotrash kind of way.” Her expression becomes distant, and I wonder what she’s thinking.
“Wait a minute . . .” Alexa leans forward excitedly, as if someone’s just turned on a heating coil under her ass. “Don’t you have something going with that weird kid who looks like one of the Lost Boys? What’s his name . . .” Alexa snaps her fingers in rapid succession. “Jesse? Jamie? Or is he gay?”
“Julian,” I say, swallowing hard. His name in this cluttered room sounds like a prayer, something you whisper to yourself late at night. “And he’s definitely not gay.”
At that admission, my face turns red, and I can’t help but stare, openmouthed, not sure what to say next. Circles of pink color Alexa’s cheeks, making her appear fragile, almost doll-like. Like the sun, she is so beautiful that it almost hurts to look at her for more than a few moments without turning away.
“Fuuuuuuck,” Alexa says softly, drawing out the word. “So basically, you’re a total mess?”
“Pretty much.”
Alexa smiles, her grin growing incrementally wider with every second, and we burst into laughter. It’s one of those moments that wouldn’t be funny at all to anyone not sitting right here with us at this very second, but at the same time it’s inexplicably hilarious, and I’m holding my sides, doubled over. Alexa is laughing so hard that she’s wiping under her eyes, checking for tears or smeared mascara, and as my voice rings out into the room, only one thought is racing through my head: this is the only time I’ve ever admitted how screwed up I feel without wanting to cry. Alexa’s hot-pink travesty of a bedroom is some kind of bizarre refuge, a panacea from the usual fear and sadness that follow me throughout the day. Somehow, the fact that she’s laughing at my insane life doesn’t make me want to kill myself immediately.
“So what happened with Ethan?” I ask again as soon as we’ve managed to compose ourselves. Now that we’ve just lost our minds together, it feels OK somehow to ask again. So I do.
“What do you think happened?” she asks cryptically, her eyes glowing in her face like green embers. She’s in love, and it’s all over her. I can smell it—the sulfur that lingers in the air after striking a match, the blackness after the flame. Some kind of smoldering left in its wake.
“You slept with him.”
Alexa leans her elbows on her thighs, cradling her head between her palms. She doesn’t answer me, but then again, it wasn’t really a question.
“What do you know about him?” Her eyes meet mine, and I see the naked hunger reflected there, the desire. This is what love reduces you to, that tiny voice inside me whispers as I take in the flush in her cheeks. Remember that.
“Not much,” I say, and it’s the truth. I’ve spoken to Ethan only a handful of times, and I can barely remember what we even talked about. “I know that he lives somewhere near Gramercy Park, that he has about seven roommates crammed into a two-bedroom apartment. One of them—this guy with a Mohawk—came into the club once for one of Sebastian’s parties, drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s and had to be carried out.”
“How punk rock,” Alexa deadpans, looking decidedly unimpressed.
“I think he used to have a girlfriend—I’d see her sitting at the bar sometimes, waiting for him to get off work.”
“Who?” Alexa asks impatiently. “Ethan or the roommate?”
“Ethan,” I say quickly, before she gets the wrong idea.
“What did she look like?”
I close my eyes briefly, trying to remember. Small, dark hair and reed thin. Always in a washed-out black dress that bordered on gray. But what I remember most is the look of sadness on her face, the melancholy she carried around with her, a veil blanketing the bland prettiness of her features.
“It doesn’t matter,” I answer, watching as the tension stiffens Alexa’s angular limbs. “I haven’t seen her in months.”
With that admission, Alexa sighs in relief, and I realize that while I’ve been speaking, she’s been holding her breath, and her eyes beneath her smooth forehead are subdued and uncharacteristically serious. Whatever is going on is clearly weighty enough to force her out of her usual sarcastic demeanor and into quiet contemplation.
“I brought him back here.”
There is a pause, the words hanging in the air between us.
“What did your mom have to say about that?”
I cannot even remotely imagine Alexa introducing Ethan to her parents. Something in the universe would probably shift, then immediately implode.
“Oh, please,” Alexa snorts. “Once she’s taken her sleeping pills, not even an earthquake could wake her up. And my dad was out of town on business, as usual. I’ve been sneaking people in since I was fifteen anyway. It’s not really all that difficult—even when they are home and conscious.”
My eyes widen a bit. I’m kind of impressed, not that I would give her the satisfaction of admitting it.
“But this was different.” Her eyes glaze over, lost in memory. “It was . . . intense. But he hasn’t called and . . . oh, I don’t know.” She throws her hands up in exasperation, clearly frazzled. “I mean, there have been other guys. Obviously.”
I nod, thinking of Alexa back at Dalton, making out with her teacher. Her defiant face in the headmistress’s office as she stood up, throwing her mane of blond hair over one shoulder and striding out the door. I’m not sure at all why she’s telling this to me. Despite the fact that she came out the other night, despite the fact that I’m sitting here in the inner sanctum, Alexa Forte and I are still not friends. Of course there have been other guys—the boys practically snap to attention when she saunters down the hall, leaving a honeysuckle sweetness in her wake. Maybe it’s just that I am the only one she can be this vulnerable around, this exposed. No one would believe it. The legend that is Alexa Forte waiting by the phone like any other lovesick girl, her defenses battered and broken down, her heart flayed open.
“He hasn’t called,” she repeats miserably, reaching up and pulling the headband from her head, releasing a cascade of hair. “Maybe it didn’t . . . mean anything to him, you know?”
She forces the words from her throat like she’s trying to get rid of them. Tears well up in her eyes and she blinks them away, looking off to the side. Despite the armor she’s built up around herself, this is the soft candy core of Alexa Forte. I picture her hunched over the toilet in the girls’ bathroom, her finger down her throat, the taste of fried dough and disgust lingering on her tongue.
“I’ve messed around with tons of guys, OK?” She raises one hand and swipes at the moisture collecting in her lower lashes, darkening them. “But this was the first time I . . .” Her voice trails off into innuendo. “Well,” she says, looking up at me, her expression tentative, almost shy. “You know.”
“Did he know?” I ask gently, knowing that we’re in dangerous territory, that I could say the wrong thing and she might explode in righteous anger or melt down into a puddle of jelly. “Did you tell him?”
“Not in so many words.”
“In any words?”
“No, but I’m sure he could figure it out,” she adds sarcastically, the old Alexa rising to the surface like bubbles in Perrier. “I mean, really. Hello, Captain Obvious!”
I giggle a bit. She looks so incredulous that it’s actually kind of funny, her eyes so wide they’re practically bulging out of her head.
“But you’re going to see him on Saturday, right?” I ask once I’ve stopped laughing. “I mean, that’s something at least.”
“He asked me to come watch him lug ice and empty bottles,” she deadpans. “He probably asks every girl he bangs the same exact thing. I’m sure I’m so special.”
Sarcasm is clearly Alexa’s default mode, a guise she slips into to protect herself from whatever emotional messiness she’s feeling, and t
o this I can relate. Underneath that practiced exterior she’s vulnerable as a flower in the August heat. The big difference between Alexa and me—well, not the only difference but a major one—is that I learned long ago just how unremarkable I really am. It’s hard to believe you are exceptional in any way when your father abandons you for a girl half his age, calling you only to sign a lease that serves no other purpose than to take you away from him permanently. And your mother . . .
I blink rapidly to clear the thoughts from my mind, erasing them like a damp rag moving efficiently across a blackboard.
“So, why him? Ethan, I mean. You’ve held on to it this long—why now, with him?”
“Everyone else I know lost it at thirteen,” she blurts out. “By the way”—her eyes narrow as she peruses my face—“if you talk about this with anyone, I’ll fucking kill you.” Alexa pushes her hair back with one hand until the entire mass of it falls sleekly over one shoulder.
“They all look up to me,” she spits out as if the words themselves are rotten, and though I don’t question her further, I assume she’s talking about the salad girls, how they follow her around, worshipful as petitioners at a church service. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she says, taking a deep breath, gulping the air as if she’s trying to overdose on oxygen. “The benefits, the dinners—always having to be so goddamn perfect. At my debutante debut last year, I had to bite my tongue the entire night to keep from screaming, I was so fucking bored. Plus, my dress was kind of hideous. Well, you know,” she says, sighing loudly. “You were there.”
“For about a millisecond,” I say, laughing.
My mother forced me to go to Alexa’s debut, and I retaliated by showing up in a black dress and pink combat boots. The only reason I was even invited is that I suspect Alexa’s mother forced her to ask me, since our mothers are friends in the loosest definition of the word.
“Sometimes I think I’m going to start screaming and never stop.” Alexa looks down at the carpet, running a palm over the plush strands as if it’s a grassy lawn. “Sometimes I wish I could just run away to Paris or Switzerland and never come back.”
“The land of chocolate and cuckoo clocks?” I raise an eyebrow.
Alexa grabs a pillow off the foot of the bed, lobbing it expertly in my direction. It hits me squarely in the face, the soft cotton muffling my laughter. I hold the pillow in my lap, cradling it in my arms.
“So I’m supposed to feel sorry for you. Is that it? Everyone worships the ground you walk on, you can get any guy you want, but you’ve got it so tough?”
I can’t believe that I’m talking to Alexa Forte like this, but somehow I am.
“It’s not as easy as you think,” she says after a long pause, her eyes squarely locked on my face. The hair on my arms rises as she stares at me, unblinking. “In fact, it’s not easy at all.”
“Nothing ever is. And neither is being a freak. Even if it’s your own choice.”
“Trust me, I’d rather be a freak than what I am right now.”
Her voice is an urgent whisper, and I can tell that she thinks she means what she’s saying, means it desperately.
“You just say that because you think it’s easier, and in some ways, it is.” Even as the words leave my lips, I can’t help wondering if they’re really true. “But it’s also hell. I don’t think you’d like it one bit,” I tell her, my voice a low murmur. “Instead of people looking up to you, envying you every time you walk by, they’ll either avoid or fear you—sometimes both. Neither is any kind of fun.”
I think of all the lunches I’ve eaten alone since transferring to Manhattan Prep, all the times I’ve watched Alexa and her group saunter by, their perfume floating along the breeze like an anesthetic, and my eyes grow damp at the corners.
Alexa walks over to her bed, flopping down on her stomach, her face buried in the softness of her pillow. “Maybe you’re right,” she says after a long moment, her voice muffled.
Alexa rolls over on her back and stares up at the ceiling, strands of blond hair she doesn’t push away strewn across her face. I sit there on the floor listening to the sound of the silence that descends, the rush of air animating the room as night closes in, deepening the sky outside Alexa’s bedroom windows like the coming of some kind of judgment, rushing toward the dawn.
TWENTY-THREE
THE WEEK HURTLES ITSELF toward the weekend, the question of whether or not I’ll actually meet my mother looming over my head like a raven, talons bared and ready to strike. Each time I close my eyes and picture walking through the front doors of the restaurant, toward the corner table she favors by a large bank of windows overlooking the park, my mind goes utterly blank. And don’t even get me started on the whole Christoph situation. I don’t know what I think about more—my impending date with Christoph or meeting my mother. Neither option offers any kind of solution. I used to think that when I moved out of my mother’s apartment things would somehow magically be OK, a wand waved, gold glitter falling from the tip, erasing everything. Now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all been an illusion, if my life has somehow shifted from bad to worse in just a few short months . . .
On Thursday afternoon, Sara and I sit on my rumpled bed, rubbing polish remover over our toenails. It’s less than a week before Thanksgiving, the stores full of chocolate turkeys, cloves, cinnamon, the tang of apple cider hanging over the streets. The harsh, acrid smell of acetone fills my mouth as I take a deep breath, releasing my words like a series of cannonballs.
“My mother called. She wants me to meet her for lunch at Tavern on the Green.”
Sara’s hand halts mid-swipe, poised over her foot. Her eyes widen in shock, her mouth falling open slightly before her lips snap rigidly shut.
“Ha,” she says with a clipped, mirthless laugh. “That’s funny. Oh, by the way, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you you’re not going.”
Sara holds my eyes with hers for a long moment before bending back over her foot and removing the last bit of red polish from her toe. It’s clear from the way her back muscles suddenly bunch up beneath her thin gray T-shirt that she means business. The guilt rises up in my chest, threatening to drown me. I imagine my mother sitting at a table set with white china and neat rows of silverware, her hair like onyx shot with bronze in the afternoon sunlight. A vase of pink roses sits before her on the white linen tablecloth, the petals the color of an open heart. She checks the gold watch on her wrist impatiently, ordering a third glass of Chardonnay while her eyes search the door of the restaurant, expectant and somehow sure, despite all that has come between us, that I will arrive on time.
I swallow hard, feeling as if there’s a Nerf ball stuck in my throat. It’s amazing that someone who hates the very sight of me can make me feel so completely guilty for refusing to cooperate. How can I feel so torn about something I should be able to resist without even trying? It is, as Sara would say, a no-brainer.
“I might,” I say, clearing my throat and picking up a bottle of blue polish Sara brought with her, turning it over to look at the name stamped on the bottom, Blue Bayou. I picture mossy swamps, the banks of a river running with mud, sucking at my toes as I approach the water’s edge, smelling the rich mineral scent of the earth. “I might go.” I turn the cap, pulling the brush from the bottle, and bend over my toes, dabbing at them unevenly, my hand shaking with the effort.
“Are you serious?” Sara’s head snaps up, her expression fierce, predatory. “You’re going to meet her after everything she’s put you through?”
“It’s only lunch,” I say in a whisper so faint that even I don’t quite believe it.
I close my eyes and my mother smiles as she reaches out to hand me a stuffed tiger, striped golden and black, her eyes crinkling at the corners. A day at the zoo, the smell of roasting peanuts and sun-warmed hay drifting through the air, the promise of something rich and intoxicating, my future hanging like layered gauze in the distance, still mostly unspoiled. I am four.
Children sh
ould love their mothers, Caitlin.
“Bullshit, Cat!”
Sara throws the bottle she’s holding across the room, red polish streaking the white wall, recasting it as a butcher shop, a crime scene. She grabs my arm, her fingers squeezing my flesh tightly, trying to shock me back into the present. I flinch at the sudden touch, the implicit violence in it, and for a brief moment I see my mother’s face staring back at me.
“How many times are you going to let her hurt you?”
Her voice is pleading now, but she is yelling, still yelling, and something inside me begins to shut down and hide, the way it always does when I am confronted violently or with aggression. I see the hurt and fear in her eyes, and I know exactly what she is thinking. It is bad enough that my mother hits me, slaps me in the face until my vision is blurred, the sharp jewels in her rings opening up the tender skin at the corners of my eyes or the rough, chapped fabric of my lips, but the fact that I am willing to go back for more is unforgivable. It makes me what I have never wanted to be, what Sara has never wanted to see me as—a victim.
“Cat, you have to listen to me.” She releases my arm and shakes her hands in front of her for emphasis or to shrug off the tension between us, I’m not sure which. “I’m sorry,” she says, quietly now, pulling her hair back with one hand and twisting it into a white rope. “I don’t want to hurt you. You know I’d never do that. Not to you. Not ever.” We stare at each other, unblinking, her eyes glistening with regret. “But she is never going to change and you know it.”
“It’s not about that,” I say, trying so hard to keep my voice calm and measured when it is taking every fiber of self-control I possess not to bolt into the streets, away from everything I don’t want to hear and feel. I wish I could push all the rage, fear and pain back inside me where it belongs, safe and locked in the velvet dark of my body, but those feelings have somehow sprung to the surface like an evil jack-in-the-box popping up to surprise me, grinning maniacally at their liberation. See? they seem to say with no small degree of elation. We were here all along!
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