Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  “You probably need a drink or something.” Aaron dipped low and squeezed my arm, tenderly. I made sure he felt me stiffen in his grasp. He drew away.

  Aaron reminded me of an ambulance chaser I dated in college. This emo fucking break dancer who’d ask me about the tendons in Peyton’s neck and the slow drop of the curtain on his blue eyes—had the sparkle gone out slowly or had he known? Accepted? I thought this was love, too, once, this vested interest in all that was gory in my life. Now the pendulum had swung the other way.

  Aaron cleared his throat. “So, get yourself a drink!” He laughed stiffly. “But remember, seven A.M. call time in your hotel room tomorrow.” That was for the hair and makeup people. Then they’d pack up their round brushes and eyelash curlers and we’d all drive over to Bradley for the “location shots.”

  “Got it.” I rose and brushed myself off. I’d almost made it to the door when Aaron stopped me.

  “Argh, okay,” he said. “I’ve been debating asking you this all afternoon.”

  I glared at him so he wouldn’t.

  But then he leaned forward and told me something I hadn’t expected at all. Something that put that familiar acid taste on my tongue. When he finished with his proposition, he held up his hands—Don’t shoot!—and said, “Only if you’re comfortable, of course.”

  I let him squirm in my silence for a moment. “Is this a trick?” I folded my arms across my chest. “To get your money shot or something?”

  Aaron appeared startled. Hurt, even. “Ani, oh my gosh, of course not.” His voice dipped low. “You know I’m on your side, right? We are all”—he gestured around the room—“on your side. I can understand why you wouldn’t think so, after what you’ve been through. Heck, I’d be suspicious of everyone too.” The word “heck” felt warm on my ears, like something a granddad would say. “But I hope you come to trust me. This is not a trick. I would never trick you.” He backed away and gave me a little bow. “Why don’t you think about it? We have all weekend.”

  I pressed my lips together and studied his wedding ring again. Recast Aaron as kind, rather than leering. Wondered if that had been the reality all along, and, if it was, what else I’d read wrong.

  I opened the studio door and stepped into the cool belly of September. I was so glad summer was over. I hated it, always had. It may seem odd, given the memories that are tied to fall for me, but whenever I catch the first edge in the air, notice the leaves flushing, I shiver with joy. Fall will forever be an opportunity to reinvent myself.

  I waved good-bye to some of the crew heaving cameras and equipment into the back of a primitive black van. For a moment I considered taking a picture of it, texting it to Nell with the caption “Rapiest rape van ever?” But I remembered the way she’d stared me down at dinner, the combination of disappointment and disgust ruining her perfect face, and decided against it. I plugged the Radnor Hotel into the Jeep’s GPS. I hadn’t come this way much in high school, and I’d been “home” so infrequently since then that the roads I used to frequently travel now gave me a vague sense of déjà vu. I’ve been here before, but when? This confusion swelled in me as pride. It meant this was no longer home. New York was. You didn’t reject me, I rejected you.

  I backed out of the parking lot slowly. I was a tentative driver now that I didn’t do it often. Clutching the wheel like some blue-haired old lady, I maneuvered onto Monroe Street. I heard my phone buzz in my bag, but I wouldn’t check it until I could pull over. A few years ago, LoLo made us all sign a pledge, some partnership with Oprah, that we wouldn’t text and drive. It wasn’t my word that kept me from reaching for my phone but the stat I’d looped my name beneath: Texting and driving increases your risk of a fatal car crash by 2,000 percent. “That can’t be right,” I’d demanded of Martin, one of our fact-checkers. Martin is so strict we once got into a fight over a line I wrote, “You need this lip gloss in your life.”

  “Maybe we should put this another way?” he suggested. “It’s not food or water, so technically you don’t ‘need’ it in your life.”

  “You’re kidding me, right? It’s facetious.”

  “Well, at least remove the emphasis on the word ‘need.’”

  But when I’d questioned the accuracy of that 2,000 percent stat, he’d only nodded solemnly. “It’s right.”

  There was a crack, and I started so intensely the car swerved. I swept my hand over the back of my head, a quick check for injury. Over the violent pulse of my heart, I realized it was only the construction workers on my left, slowly assembling what would be a sprawling McMansion. Sometimes, when I’m waiting for the subway, or crossing the street, a phantom pain will appear in my head, or shoulder, and I’ll touch my hand to it, pull it away expecting to see blood. The last person to realize he’s been shot is always the person who’s just been shot.

  A Wawa loomed to my right. I wrenched the wheel, confusing the GPS woman as I pulled into the parking lot. “Continue to your left, continue to your left,” she berated me. I stabbed at the buttons until she went silent.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out my phone. No texts from Luke. I opened my e-mail. Found the one from Mr. Larson—Andrew—about our lunch on Sunday. “Today was harder than I expected,” I wrote. “Any chance you could meet for a quick.” I paused. Knew I was pushing it, so I wrote, “slice at Peace A Pizza?” I would eat carbs for Andrew.

  Peace A Pizza was the residential hangout when we were in high school. Headmaster Mah was such a fan he was always the customer of the month, giving the camera an embarrassing thumbs-up in the picture that hung next to the fountain soda machine. Dean once wrote, “Me love pizza long time” across Mr. Mah’s face. Of course he didn’t get into trouble for it, even though everyone knew he was the one who did it.

  I hit send and waited five minutes, even though I doubted I’d get a response anytime soon. I decided to go back to my hotel. Maybe by the time I got there he would call.

  The Radnor Hotel is one of those places that advertises itself as a boutiquey beauty in the heart of the Main Line—a wedding destination—when really it’s just an overworked Marriott with sprawling parking lots and the roar of the highway not far behind it.

  Whoever had stayed in the room before me had smoked, and hadn’t been discreet about it. Our beauty director had wrung her hands over thirdhand smoke on the Today show—that’s the kind that’s embedded in ugly couch fabric and apparently does the most damage to your skin. Normally, I would call downstairs to the front desk and request to move like a demanding little bitch, but there was something about the room’s stale breath that I found soothing. I pictured a girl, an outlier like me, curled up in the floral armchair by the window, narrowing her eyes as she pulled on her cigarette, the tip blazing in response. She was back in town for a funeral, I decided. She didn’t get along with her parents either, and that’s why she was staying here instead of at home. I felt a delicious camaraderie with her that made me feel less alone. Which was exactly what I was, at six o’clock on a Friday evening, the last act of Never Been Kissed playing out on TBS. I held a coffee mug full of warm vodka between my hands, trying to ignore the M&M’s in the minibar beckoning me like a prostitute in the part of Philadelphia where Hilary once got a butterfly tattoo on her lower back.

  It had been an hour since I’d written Andrew, and the only e-mails I’d received were from Groupon, alerting me to deals for liposuction, keratin, Swedish massage, fractional skin resurfacing, dating. There was another from Saks, which had selected a pair of snakeskin Jimmy Choo booties for $1,195 just for me. I wasn’t that flush.

  I checked the call sheet for tomorrow, trying to calculate if I had enough time to go for a run before the hair and makeup people arrived. I never expected to sleep, but I certainly didn’t expect to here of all places. A thought suddenly dawned on me, and I set my coffee mug down. I dug around in the nightstand table, and—aha—there it was, a phone book, yellow and ancient in my hands.

  Larsons, Larsons, Larsons, I thought, flippi
ng to the L section, tracing an oxblood fingernail over the names once I got to “Lar.”

  There were three Larsons, but only one lived on Grays Lane in Haverford. Andrew had once pointed out his folks’ house on a run, used that word, “folks,” which was such a sweet Andrew word, so I knew that was it.

  I eyed the phone in its receiver. If I called from this number, I could just hang up if anyone but Andrew answered. Whitney might be there, his parents certainly would be. But, Christ, what were those systems where the caller ID shows up on the TV screen they have now? I’d told Andrew I was staying here. What if I called and the Radnor Hotel blinked in plain sight, interrupting whatever PBS program the family was probably watching? He’d know it was me who hung up on his mother, if she got to the phone before he did. I knew nothing about Andrew’s parents, but I pictured them as former academics, both with soft white tufts of hair, glasses of red wine in their hands as they discussed the energy crisis through the lens of the Obama administration in low, respectful tones. These kind intellectuals responsible for turning out a person like Andrew Larson, with all his emotional intelligence that drew me to him, desperate as a groupie.

  The vodka opened up some clear channel of memory, because in an instant I recalled a trick from middle school sleepovers. *67 before the number and it blocks the caller’s identity. I decided to test it out with my cell phone first, punching in the secret code followed by my 917 area code. I worshiped my 917 area code. Not a PA girl anymore. A New Yorker.

  My screen read “Unknown number” and I gasped a laugh. I couldn’t believe it actually worked.

  I gathered a little more courage from my coffee cup. You know, maybe I didn’t even have to hang up if his parents answered. This was a perfectly innocent request. Production had changed my call time on Sunday and I couldn’t do lunch anymore, and I just wanted to try to catch him while we were both here. It wasn’t a lie yet. My call time would change, if I agreed to do what Aaron had asked me to do.

  I punched in *67 first. There was a pause, and then the gentle purr of the dial tone in my ear, the shrill ring in the Larson household, several miles away.

  “Larson residence.” The voice that answered could have cracked your skull in half.

  “Hi.” I stood and began to pace. But I’d forgotten about the cord, how short it was, and the receiver crashed to the floor behind me, wrenching the phone out of my hand. “Shit!” I hissed, dropping to the ground to grab it.

  “Hello?” the voice demanded from the floor. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” I said again, “sorry. Is Mr. Larson there?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Sorry, Andrew Larson.”

  “This is he. To whom am I speaking?”

  I wanted to hang up. It would have been easier if I had. But muscle memory took over and my knuckles went white on the phone. “This is Ani FaNelli. I’m trying to get ahold of your son.” Adding, so this request didn’t seem indecent, “I was one of his students.”

  There were a few surly blasts of Mr. Larson Senior’s breath. Then, “My God, girl, I thought you were one of those crank callers.” The connection crackled with his laugh. “Just a second.”

  He put the phone down. There were muffled voices in the background. Agonizing moments of silence before Andrew Larson Jr. was saying, “TifAni?”

  I forgot all about the posturing and the excuses. I just told him the truth. Today was hard, and I was alone.

  Andrew hadn’t brought Whitney with him for the weekend. When I heard that, I caught my breath, hoping he would suggest we grab a drink instead of meeting at Peace A Pizza, my idea, but he just said, “Peace A Pizza. I haven’t been there in years. Forty minutes?”

  I placed the phone in its receiver with an accusing click. Pizza. At a time so early the sun still taunted me in the sky. There wasn’t anything indecent about this. Relief and disappointment went to battle. I felt the gritty determination of both.

  I’d washed off the camera makeup the moment I entered the hotel room, averting my eyes from the places the fluorescent lights pointed out, the powder and foundation gathered in creases around my eyes and mouth. Twenty-eight, and, thanks to my slick olive skin, I was often mistaken for just out of college, but it was impossible to tell how much longer that would last. I’d seen aging overcome people like a fast-growing cancer. Not enough antioxidants in the world to ward it off.

  I went to work again—tinted moisturizer, concealer, bronzer, mascara, lip stain. Luke is always amazed at the weight of my makeup bag. “Do you actually use all of this crap?” he asked me once. It was a compliment because yes, I did.

  It was 6:50 when I climbed into Luke’s Jeep. Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took to drive just two miles into Bryn Mawr. That terrified crawl—it wasn’t just so I could be the right amount of late. I was genuinely afraid that I’d pushed my luck too far now. That the universe had no choice but to intervene, point its finger at a mean-eyed luxury-make SUV and drag it into my lane, pinning me between its polished body and the median, the steering wheel cracking my sternum into bony splinters, one of which would puncture a heart or a lung. Proving what a falsehood it was that I got out of that cafeteria because great things were ahead for me, things the five were never meant to accomplish anyway. Which is what I sometimes tell myself when I fall into a depressed slump, when all I can see is the open nut of Ansilee’s head in my mind’s eye, and the day doesn’t seem like it will ever turn tonight.

  I didn’t know what kind of car Andrew drove, so there was no way for me to scan for it in the packed parking lot before I entered. That one drink on an empty stomach had induced a brave haze, but anxiety was still stronger. The place was teeming with teenage limbs, gangly legs too long and restless to squash underneath the table, and, like Nell’s, they sprawled into the open aisles, a series of overturned pogo sticks. No Andrew. I backed into a corner and waited.

  I had that feeling like I didn’t know what to do with my arms—fold them, hold one elbow with one hand?—when the doors opened and a whoosh of crisp air ushered Andrew in. He was wearing a fine knit sweater and good jeans, jeans picked out by a magnificently thin stylist at Barneys.

  I gave him a little wave, and he made his way over to me.

  Andrew whistled. “This place is packed.” I agreed, hoping again he would suggest we go somewhere else, but then he said, “I guess we should get in line.”

  When I was in high school, novelty pizzas were still high concept. Macaroni and cheese pizza, bacon cheeseburger pizza, penne alla vodka pizza—it had been so wild to me. Now all I think is carbs on top of carbs. No wonder I was such a porker.

  I said as much to Andrew, and he laughed. “You were never a porker.” He patted his brawny middle. “This guy on the other hand.” It was true. There had been a playful, frat boy roundness to him back then. I still can’t believe Andrew was twenty-four years old when he was my teacher. Twenty-four that night in his bedroom, when he woke me up from my bad dream and I begged him to stay. There had been so much sadness in his face before he agreed. For a long time I thought it was because he felt sorry for me, but now I wonder if it was something else. If maybe he was mourning the great divide between us, what could have been if our age difference was just five years less.

  Through the glass partition, the pies gleamed high with toppings that, on their own, were more than I was eating at my meals these days. My stomach yawned.

  I ordered a slice of margarita. A safe choice, I reasoned, because no flair meant no flair caught in my teeth. Andrew ordered a slice of the Mediterranean salad.

  There were no open tables, only open chairs, and if this was all the time I had with Andrew, I wasn’t about to waste it next to a pair of rawboned gigglers, napkins over their laps in the event of an untimely erection. I nodded at the door. “Want to sit outside?”

  There were two benches in the front, but those were occupied, so Andrew and I went around the side and sat on the curb, paper plates balanced gingerly on our thighs, the gravel pocking our sk
in through our jeans.

  I took a bite. “Oh my God,” I moaned.

  “Not better than New York,” Andrew said.

  “Better than anything.” I held up my finger. “Wedding diet.”

  Andrew nodded. “Whitney went crazy with that too.” A portly artichoke rolled off his slice and hit the ground with a wet thud. I thought about Ansilee’s head and had to place the paper plate on my lap. Like that, the tomato sauce had taken on the consistency of blood. This happens to me occasionally with ketchup too, usually when I go through a bout of thinking about Peyton. There are times I see the mangled destruction on his face all day and no red food is safe. Neither is meat. Just the thought. I held a napkin to my mouth and forced myself to swallow the last bite I’d taken.

  “So today wasn’t easy, huh?”

  Andrew was sitting close to me but not so close that there could be an innocuous brush of our thighs. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his scruff was golden over the summer tan that clung on. He was heartbreaking to look at.

  “Not because I had to talk about it,” I said. “That I don’t care about. I care about people believing me.” I leaned back on my hands, something I never would have done on a New York City street corner. “I looked around at the crew after we were done, and I just wondered, Do they really believe me? I don’t know what to do to make people believe me.” I watched the cars pass each other on the road. “I’ll do anything.” I took a deep breath, that old desperation flaming in me like a pull on a cigarette. It makes me capable of things I don’t want to be capable of, and if I don’t watch myself with militant supervision, my blade could very easily slip, cut Luke too deep, sever me from the life I’ve worked so hard to assemble. But when I stand next to Andrew and see how my head just barely reaches the place where his shoulder starts to pitch, when I think how big he is and how hard it must be to control himself, I wonder if he would be the one thing that’s worth my exile from the tartan tribe.