“What the hell?” he asks. I turn around. It’s Dylan. “Why are you making so much noise?” he asks with his eyes still closed.
“Why are you sleeping out here?” I ask, ignoring his question.
He doesn’t respond. I look at the door. And there, on the handle, I see a Do Not Disturb sign. But not just any sign. I’m well familiar with that one. That’s the Do Not Disturb sign that Tristan stole from the hotel room in Mammoth, California where we spent the weekend skiing and making love. That’s our Do Not Disturb sign.
Suddenly, the door opens. And Kathryn comes out. She’s wearing the dress she wore last night and holding her heels in her right hand. Her hair is disheveled and out of control. She’s wearing barely any makeup and the eyeliner that she has on looks like it was applied last night, but she still looks as beautiful as ever.
“Hey,” she says quietly.
“Hey,” I say, taking a deep breath.
I wait for her to run off and leave, but she doesn’t. She simply stands in the middle of the room waiting for something. But for what? She keeps eyeing the coffee pot. And then it occurs to me.
“Would you like some coffee?” I ask reluctantly.
“Oh, yes, please!” she says. A huge smile forms on her face. “I simply can’t function without it. I don’t think I would even be able to find my way home.”
I nod and pour her a cup of coffee.
“Hey, listen, I’m so sorry about last night.” Kathryn walks up to me. She puts her hand on my arm. Shivers run up my spine. I want to shrug her off, but I don’t want to be rude.
“What do you mean?” I manage to utter.
“You know, about Tristan making that whole scene. If I knew that he was planning on doing that…I would’ve never agreed to come.”
“Oh, that, yes. I understand,” I say with a nod.
“Can you two please take your chatter somewhere else? My head is killing me,” Dylan moans from the couch. He doesn’t bother to lift his head off the pillow and his words are muffled and barely comprehensible.
I’m about to reply, but then there’s a knock on the door.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
Loud knocks, each one less patient than the last.
“Who could that be?” I ask rhetorically. I open the door. A man in an expensive suit and coat storms past me.
“Dylan! Dylan Worthington!” he yells at the top of his lungs.
Dylan opens his eyes and jumps back into the couch. There’s a sheer terror in his eyes. I look at the man before him. He’s fuming. It looks like smoke is about to come out of his ears, but his suit and tie and coat remain perfectly coiffed and put together. His newly shone shoes shine in the sunlight even though the streets are full of slush and sleet.
“What the hell are you thinking, Dylan?” the man yells, reaching for something in his front pocket.
“Dad—” Dylan says.
Ah, that’s who it is. Kathryn and I exchange looks.
“What is this?” Mr. Worthington waves a large piece of paper in Dylan’s face.
“What is it?” Dylan asks.
“This, my darling son,” Mr. Worthington says quietly, his voice saturated with sarcasm, “this is a bill from Tiffany’s.”
“Oh,” Dylan mumbles under his breath.
“So, imagine my surprise.” Mr. Worthington turns to Kathryn and I. I get the sense that this man is used to speaking to large groups of people and he relishes the sound of his voice, “when I walk into Tiffany’s this morning to buy a diamond ring for my future fiancée and discover that my son, Mr. Worthington, already has an account with them.”
“Shit,” Dylan says.
“Yes, that’s right. ‘Is something wrong with the other ring you purchased? Or would you like to exchange it?’ the nice woman at the counter asks me. I, of course, have no idea what she’s talking about. I haven’t been to Tiffany’s in years, not since Dylan’s mom and I divorced. So I have no idea what she’s talking about. So I ask her to educate me.”
“I’m sorry,” Dylan whispers.
“And you know what I find out?” Mr. Worthington asks. He’s speaking to everyone in the room, but he’s focused on me. “Do you?” he asks when I don’t respond.
“No,” I say, shaking my head.
“What I find out is that apparently I already bought a 2 carat diamond ring from them. Apparently, I had spent $40,000 there two weeks ago!”
“I can explain,” Dylan says with a whimper. But his dad doesn’t let him.
“A $40,000 ring? Are you insane, Dylan? An engagement ring should be two months of your salary. And the last thing I remember is that your salary last year was zero. A big fat zero. So what does that mean, Dylan? That means that the only ring that you could’ve gotten your Peyton is a ring pop. Because that’s all you can afford.”
“Not Peyton,” Juliet says. I don’t know how long she’s been standing there, but she’s never one to avoid drama.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Worthington asks.
“Dylan didn’t marry Peyton,” Juliet says, shaking her head. “He married Alice.”
“What?” Mr. Worthington yells. His face gets flushed and the pupils of his eyes dilate so much it looks like his eyes fill with blackness.
“Wait a second,” Dylan says. “Why did you go to Tiffany’s?”
What the hell is Dylan talking about? His dad is about to murder us all and he’s questioning him? I start to inch my way to the back of the room. If Mr. Worthington explodes, I want to be as far away from him as possible.
“I’m going to ask Cynthia to marry me,” Mr. Worthington announces.
“What?” Dylan asks.
Just at that moment, the door to his room opens and Tristan comes out. Perfect timing. As usual.
“Cynthia? You’re going to ask Cynthia to marry you? Are you insane?” Dylan asks. He’s no longer a scared little boy afraid to make his father mad. He’s now standing right in front of his dad, challenging him. He’s indignant and his mouth is full of anger and venom.
“Yes, Cynthia.” Mr. Worthington shrugs. He looks as surprised by Dylan’s temperament as we all are.
“Cynthia is four years older than I am,” Dylan turns to me and explains. “She’s 23 years old. And my dad apparently doesn’t think that there’s anything inappropriate in that.”
“Age is just a number,” Mr. Worthington says.
“Yeah right,” Dylan says.
“But hey, why are you questioning me anyway? I wasn’t the one who secretly got married to a stranger and got her a…” Mr. Worthington looks down at the piece of paper in his hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that a picture of my ring at the top. “The 2 carat Tiffany Embrace diamond ring,” he reads from the print out. “It’s bead-set diamonds exquisitely accentuate a round brilliant center stone in a setting that evokes glamour and romance. All for a price of $44,100! And you two were engaged for how long? An hour?”
“You got her a 44 thousand dollar ring?” Juliet whispers. Her eyes light up and I think she’s going to faint.
Honestly, the ring looked nice, but I had no idea it was so much money.
“And you know what the best thing is? He put it on his father’s credit card. How perfect is that?” Mr. Worthington says sarcastically.
“He got you an engagement ring?” Tristan asks quietly. His voice is barely audible, but everyone turns to look at him.
“I’m not going to keep it,” I say. It’s the only thing I can say.
“You got her an engagement ring?” he asks Dylan.
“So what?” Dylan asks. He’s taken aback, I can tell, but I get the feeling that he’s not apologizing as long as his dad’s here.
“So what?” Mr. Worthington yells. “I was going to get my actual fiancée a $30,000 ring, but my son went out and splurged on 44-grand of my money on some stranger!”
“She’s not a stranger,” Dylan says. “Alice this is my dad, Mr. Worthington. Dad, this is Alice Summers. My roommate and wife.”
�
��Oh please,” Mr. Worthington rolls his eyes.
“What? You think this marriage is a joke? Well, it’s not,” Dylan says with a shrug.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I whisper.
“Look, Dylan, even your wife knows it’s a joke.” Mr. Worthington laughs.
“Well, it’s not. I wanted to marry her and I did. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I shake my head. No, no, no. What is he talking about? Suddenly, my whole body starts to shake uncontrollably. I turn to Tristan. He can’t actually believe this. Why is Dylan doing this? But Tristan just grabs his jacket and walks out. I follow him. I can’t stay in that room any longer.
“Tristan! Tristan!” I run after him catching him by the elevator. “Please, wait,” I say. The button pointing down is lit up and I know we don’t have much time.
“He gave you a ring?” he asks. There is sadness on his face. And disappointment. It looks like he’s going to cry at any moment. He takes a deep breath, trying to hold back tears.
“He got me a ring. But I’ve already given it back to him. We’re getting a divorce. This all has been a terrible mistake,” I say. I’m speaking fast, a little fast, but I want to be able to get everything out before the elevator comes.
“He got you a ring, Alice,” Tristan says with a shrug. As if that means something. As if it signifies something important. “And a really expensive ring,” he adds.
“So what? That’s Dylan. If he gets something then he goes all out. But it doesn’t mean a thing. I don’t care about that ring.”
“It’s a 2-carat ring, Alice. It cost almost 50 thousand dollars.”
“It was just a splurge. A mistake from a night full of mistakes,” I say. “Why does it matter what kind of ring it is?”
The elevator doors open.
“I don’t know,” Tristan says, stepping inside. “But it does.”
The elevator doors close and he disappears, leaving me alone. I’ve never felt so alone before. This is over. Really over. My legs crumple underneath me. I drop to the floor. Tears rush down my face. I can’t stop them even if I want to. I just let them wash over me. Maybe they can wash away my mistakes. Probably not.
22
Day turns into night and into day again. I lose track of time. I cry for so long that my eyes feel like someone’s slicing them with razor blades and my chest starts to physically hurt from the pain. Eventually, the tears dry up. There are no more. The pain remains, but it’s as if it’s happening to someone else. I’m detached from it. Separated somehow. Now, there’s just a dark cloud that descends around me. One that I can’t shake no matter what I do.
The next two weeks are consumed by melancholy. Hours blend into days and days into nights. I become something of a zombie. I don’t cry much anymore, I just wander around lost. Detached from the world. Unreachable. I avoid everyone. I stay on campus for as long as I can, wandering the busy stacks of the library. And when I do come home, I avoid everyone except Juliet, whom I can’t really avoid even if I had tried. Luckily, she has the good sense to pretty much leave me to my own devices. She doesn’t pester me with questions and she doesn’t ask me how I’m feeling. Mainly, she just leaves me be, which is exactly what I want. As for Tristan and Dylan, I don’t see them at all. I can’t. I don’t think I have the strength to deal with my feelings if I were to see Tristan again. And I’m too mad at Dylan. I can’t believe that he went out of his way to say those things to his father. Those things that hurt me to the bottom of my core. He doesn’t want to be married to me. He doesn’t want to be engaged to me. I, of all people, know how much he had regretted marrying me instead of Peyton. At least with Peyton, there’s a history. They love each other. And they have for a long time. And even if they were to marry by accident and then get divorced….well, that seems just like something out of their story.
So, if that’s true, why did he have to go and tell everyone that he wanted to marry me? Why did he have to get such a big ring? And why did he have to throw it in his father’s face? There are some things that I will probably never understand. But I will talk about it with him, one of these days. Just not now. Not yet.
Despite all of my melancholy and lonesomeness, I did manage to come to a decision. A pretty important one, too. I’m going to transfer to University of Southern California next year. It’s something that I had been thinking about ever since this whole mess with Tristan happened. And now I think that getting out of town and going to a completely different school will be the answer to my problems. I know it looks like I’m running away. It sort of feels like that too. But I honestly don’t think I can solve my problems by staying here. They are too complicated and convoluted. No amount of talking will make Tristan understand what happened. Or forgive me for what I’ve done. No amount of talking will allow me to forgive him for sleeping with Kathryn or for starting this whole thing in the first place. At this point, it feels like all we can hope for is space. Distance. Space, distance, and time will allow both of us to move on and perhaps, one day, be in that nice space again where we can talk to each other without wanting to kill each other.
USC will be my opportunity to start over. It’s a good school in a warm climate near my home. I know LA. LA is my home. Nothing bad, nothing this bad, has ever happened to me there. And it sounds like the best thing. I’m only in my freshman year and I can barely see myself making it through this winter in tact.
It is with this attitude of cautious optimism and hopefulness that I walk into my public speaking class that Friday and raise my hand to make my first real speech. I have not had anything to drink, and I’m under no mind-altering substances, not even caffeine. Surprisingly, the jitters and the fear that plagued my other speeches didn’t accompany this one. No. It’s like I’m a completely different person now. I clear my throat and look down at my notecards. The assignment is to give a public speech in a professional situation and I’ve prepared a lecture on Jane Austen. I did my midterm paper on Jane Austen for my Victorian Literature class and I give a cautious, but thorough speech on her life and work. Yes, I rely on the notecards a little too much. Yes, I avoid eye contact with almost all students in the class and instead choose to look out into space, somewhere beyond their sight lines. But overall? Overall, the speech goes incredibly well. I speak clearly and my voice only shakes a little bit when I forget to breathe. I take a few sips of water as my mouth runs dry, but I don’t rush through them and I don’t worry about tipping over the water bottle and everyone laughing at me.
“I don’t know what it is, but something about me feels different now,” I tell Dr. Greyson at our next meeting. I’m going on and on about the success of my speech and how in awe I am over the whole experience.
“What do you think it is?” she asks, taking off her reading glasses and letting them dangle around her neck on the ornate leather rope.
“I’m not sure,” I shrug and really think about it. “But I sort of think it has something to do with everything that has happened. In the beginning of the semester, I was so focused on Tristan and our relationship and how he wasn’t helping me prepare for the speeches that I was paralyzed by them. And now, now that everything happened as it happened…I don’t know, it feels like I’ve been through too much to almost care what those people think.”
“Very good,” Dr. Greyson says, nodding approvingly. “I’m very proud of you with making so much progress, Alice.”
“What progress did I make?” I ask.
“You’re giving yourself a voice. When you first came here, you were lost in your own mind. You didn’t care what you thought and felt. You only seemed to care about what other people thought and felt about you. It’s almost like you, the inside you, didn’t exist. And now…here she is. You’re embracing your flaws and mistakes. You’re owning them. But you’re not letting them dominate your life. You’re no longer silencing yourself.”
I think about that for a second. She’s right. Of course she’s right. I have been silencing myself for w
ay too long. I’ve been living trapped in my own fears and insecurities instead of simply embracing myself for who I am. The ironic thing is that the more I seem to embrace myself and my insecurities, the less insecurities I seem to have. It’s as if I have only been manifesting them as a way to protect myself. When in reality, they’ve been hurting me more than they have been helping me.
23
Spring break couldn’t come soon enough. I am going back home to California. I am going to spend the week watching beautiful sunsets over the green valley below my parents’ house, swinging in the hammock on our wraparound deck and eating oranges straight from my mom’s carefully maintained orange tree.
By the time my mom picks me up from the airport and we finish eating dinner in front of their new wall of windows looking out onto the valley spotted with wildflowers, I forget all about my life in New York. It’s as if absolutely no time has passed. I feel like I had never left at all.
“So, tell us everything that has been going on,” my mom announces.
We talk everyday and I keep her up to date on my everyday life, but she still demands an update as if we haven’t seen each other in ages.
“Nothing.” I shrug. “Just school stuff. Lots of papers. Midterms. Didn’t do very well on my Victorian Literature midterm, unfortunately.”
“Like an A-?” my dad jokes.
“No.” I shake my head. “Like a C.”
“Oh wow,” my mom says. “Well, that’s good.”
“What?” I gasp.
“It’ll build character. I don’t think you’ve ever gotten a C before and this is good for you. To know that you are capable of making mistakes. That you’re not such a know-it-all.”
She’s joking of course. Trying to make me feel better. I appreciate it. My mom can always be counted on that. She doesn’t take things too seriously. At least, not anything that shouldn’t be taken seriously. In fact, she always has a way of putting life in perspective. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is pretty much her motto.
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