Luckily, Sylvia hadn’t seemed to notice I’d been looking at my phone. And now that she’d sat down, she was focused on using her electric blue nails to organize the little cheese-covered squares she still had them cutting her slices into like she was a three-year-old. I looked past Sylvia through the flowers painted on Roma’s front windows to the Yogo Monster and the liquor store on the other side of Seventh Avenue. I expected to see Zadie over there, watching me. But there was just a big pack of moms with strollers and little kids.
“So I know that Ian saying he wants to hang out isn’t the same as him saying he wants to be, like, my boyfriend or whatever,” Sylvia said, picking up on her Ian monologue pretty much exactly where she’d left off when she’d gotten up to get our slices. She popped another square of pizza into her mouth, then checked her own phone for texts. From the disappointed look on her face, she didn’t seem to have any. “But he did say once that he never hooks up more than once with girls who go to his school. So him hooking up with me a bunch of times has to mean something, right?”
I snapped my eyes down from the window when I felt her looking at me.
“Um, yeah,” I said. From the way Sylvia’s face balled up I knew it hadn’t been enthusiastic enough. And Ian Greene did seem totally into Sylvia. Of course, that wildness of hers that all the boys loved hadn’t yet taken its turn into full-on wacko. “I mean, yes, totally. Absolutely.”
Her face relaxed a little. “You really think so?”
“Definitely. Nobody hooks up more than once with somebody they go to school with unless they think it could be a real thing,” I said, as though all my information on this kind of thing didn’t actually come from gRaCeFULLY. “It’s too messy. Especially for somebody like Ian. Why would he bother? He could totally meet girls anywhere.”
Sylvia nodded, but she looked kind of worried. My phone vibrated then with another text. I tried to be subtle about checking, but Sylvia was looking right at me.
DON’T BE LATE, it said.
“Who’s that? Your BFF Ben?” Sylvia asked, rolling her eyes. “I’m telling you, that kid has way too much free time to be texting you. Can you say loser?”
“I have time to text him back,” I said. “Am I a loser, too?”
Sylvia shrugged. “If the shoe fits,” she said. I scowled at her. “Listen, don’t blame me. You’re the one who’s settling for cybersex.”
I wanted so badly to shove my phone in her face. I wanted to tell her that it was she who was the loser, not me. Because I’d been tapped by the Maggies, and the Maggies didn’t tap losers. Except, of course, I couldn’t tell Sylvia anything about the Maggies. I felt bad about that. I even felt bad for bragging about the Maggies in my head. And Sylvia was Sylvia, too. When she felt bad about herself, she picked on me. It was just the way she was, which reminded me of those stupid texts about my dad that I was almost 100 percent sure she’d sent as some kind of joke.
“By the way, what’s up with the texts about my dad?” I asked. I felt more pissed off once I’d brought it up. It was a seriously messed-up joke. “Why would you ever think that was funny?”
“What are you talking about?” She was trying to play all innocent, and she was doing a pretty good job.
“Sylvia, come on. I know it was you.”
“Let me see it.” She held out her hand for my phone. “Because I so did not send you any text about your dad.”
Right away, I dropped my phone back into my bag, then played like it was too much of a pain to dig for it. There was no possible way I could let her get her hands on my phone. What if another text from Zadie came through?
“I’m not making it up,” I said.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“The last one said, ‘Your dad isn’t who you think he is.’ ”
“And it was from my number?”
“No, it was blocked.”
“But you still thought I sent it to you?” Sylvia looked all offended. “Thanks.”
“I guess I was hoping it was you.” Which was more true than I’d realized.
But it definitely wasn’t Sylvia. That was for sure. Because she was a terrible liar. If she hadn’t been telling the truth, I’d have totally known it. It could have been from Zadie or someone else in the Maggies. It wasn’t a secret that I didn’t live with my dad, but the fact that I’d never even met him kind of was. Sylvia was pretty much the only person who knew that.
“What did your mom say?”
“About what?”
“Um, the text?” Sylvia asked, looking at me like I had to be playing dumb on purpose.
“I didn’t tell her,” I said, feeling a little guilty.
“Why not?”
I’d thought about it, obviously, but I wanted to figure out who they were from first. If the messages had come from Sylvia, my mom probably would have wanted to have some humiliating sit-down with her mom. And if they hadn’t come from Sylvia, my mom would have called the school to tell them someone was stalking me. It wouldn’t be long before she ended up talking to Woodhouse, and he would tell her all about the Maggies.
“I didn’t tell my mom because I thought it was from you.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. Nice.”
“Anyway, that last text was from my coach,” I said. “I left my cleats back at the field. I have to go get them.”
Sylvia looked a little wounded. “You’re coming back, though, right?”
I looked down at the time on my phone. “I’ve got a bio test tomorrow. Probably not.”
“Oh, okay, I guess,” Sylvia said. “But before you go, can you at least—just bottom line, you don’t think I should call Ian again, do you? I mean, I should wait for him to text me back?”
Dylan lived up on Second Street near the park, in a brownstone that looked a lot like ours except it was white stone instead of red, and there was a kind-of-cool, kind-of-creepy sculpture out in front of a small tree with hands at the end of the branches instead of leaves. I was standing at the bottom of the steps staring at it when the door flew open. At the top was Dylan, barefoot in a loose dress and a bunch of necklaces. She had a cigarette in her hand, which she looked weird holding. Like it was a stage prop.
“Come on, come on,” she said, waving me up. “You’re one of the guests of honor.”
When I got to the top of the steps, she crushed the cigarette out on the stoop, linked her arm through mine, and guided me inside. Her living room was packed with furniture and tchotchkes and bodies—boys and girls piled on couches and stretched across the floor. It was filled with smoke, too. Pot, cigarettes; most people had a beer in their hand. I must have stopped walking because Dylan tugged me gently forward, toward the kitchen.
“You look like you’ve never seen a party before,” she laughed as she headed to the refrigerator and pulled out a Brooklyn Lager.
I had been to parties before—slumber parties, movie parties, birthday parties, even some boy-girl parties. Never a party like this.
Dylan snapped off the cap and handed me the beer like she was handing me a stick of gum. I took it. Or I must have, because there the bottle was, in my hand. It felt cold and slimy and heavier than I would have expected. I gripped it tight so I wouldn’t accidentally drop it. I’d had wine at Christmas, and Sylvia and I had once done a shot of her father’s disgusting whiskey. But I’d never had a beer before, definitely not one of my own at a party full of cool kids. I was staring down at the bottle when Zadie came pounding into the kitchen. She seemed drunk already, or maybe just more angry than usual.
“Ugh,” she said when she saw me, shielding her eyes like I was hard to look at. “If it isn’t Crazy Eyes. Delightful.”
“Be nice, Zadie,” Dylan said, without bothering to look at her. “You said that you would be.”
Zadie grabbed two beers from the refrigerator and slammed it shut with her hip. Dylan tensed at the noise but didn’t turn around.
“Nice?” Zadie growled, still glaring at me.
I took a long swallow of bee
r and tried not to gag.
“Yes, nice,” Dylan said. “You promised.”
“We never said ‘nice,’ we said ‘not mean.’ ” Zadie came around to stand next to Dylan. She leaned over to whisper in her ear, but Dylan kept pulling her head away. “And considering what I really think about Crazy Eyes here, I think I’m being charming as all fuck.”
Crazy Eyes? Zadie seriously hated me, but why? We didn’t even know each other. But with each meeting of the Magpies, how much she despised me became way more obvious. It was only when Dylan started being extra nice to make up for it that I had decided to stay. She even said I reminded her of herself when she was a sophomore. It might have just been a thing to say, but it still felt good thinking Dylan saw what we had in common.
I took another gulp of beer, holding my breath so I wouldn’t have to taste it.
“I don’t exactly love your badass ballerina, you know,” Dylan mumbled, crossing her arms. She looked upset now. “But I’m not taking it out on her.”
Your badass ballerina. Did that mean I was her Crazy Eyes? Because I had been wondering who could have possibly picked me to be in the Maggies in the first place.
Zadie was still hanging near Dylan. She reached out slowly, pushing a few strands of Dylan’s hair gently behind her ear.
“Don’t touch me,” Dylan snapped, knocking Zadie’s hand away.
“Temper, temper,” Zadie said, with a mean smile. Then she held up her hands—a beer in each one—before sashaying toward the door. “Be careful, Crazy Eyes, that one bites.”
Carter appeared in the doorway to the kitchen then, looking disoriented and nervous. It was a relief to see a friendly face, but he didn’t even look in my direction before Zadie charged at him.
“There you are!” she said, pressing her hips against him, then her mouth hard over his. Carter looked woozy when Zadie came up for air. She grabbed his hand and jerked him toward the living room, smiling back at us over her shoulder. “Catch you later, ladies.”
“She’s not as bad as she seems,” Dylan said when she was gone. But she didn’t sound convinced. “You have to really know her. She’s my best friend. A lot of the time, it’s felt like she was my only friend.”
“What do you mean?” I laughed a little, even though it definitely didn’t seem like she was making a joke. “You have a million friends.”
“Not ones who know the real me,” Dylan said, her eyes turning glassy. “Not like Zadie knows me.”
“I’d like to know the real you,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush, but I was glad I’d said it all the same.
“Come on,” Dylan said, smiling as she linked her arm through mine. “I want to show you something upstairs.”
I followed her back through the smoky, antique-filled living room toward the creaky, dark staircase. Her house, laid out so much like mine, couldn’t have looked more different. Stuffy and overstuffed, but not in a totally bad way. Like a set for a Jane Austen movie. I looked over my shoulder as I started up the stairs. That’s when I caught a glimpse of Ian Greene sitting on the couch. But who was that sitting with him? It had been a girl, definitely. And I could have sworn it was Zadie. I thought I recognized her pointy boots and her little plaid skirt. Was that Ian’s hand on Zadie’s leg? But she’d just been with Carter in the kitchen. She couldn’t have traded up that quickly. It was too late, though, to go back and check as Dylan pulled me up the steps and out of sight.
“Come on,” Dylan said, half playfully, half losing patience. “Hurry up.”
When I looked back, Ian was gone, disappeared along with the rest of the living room.
“Are all the guys here in Wolf’s Gate?” I asked when we were at the top of the steps. I tried to sound nonchalant.
“Yeah. Most of them are okay. Some of them are assholes.” She sounded bored as she pointed to a doorway halfway down the hall. “We’re going in there.”
We turned inside a small office, with a big mahogany desk and a formal leather chair. The walls were lined with books, the old, leather kind with fancy gold trim and thin crinkly pages. And not just new books made to look old either. These were old, old books.
“Wow,” I said, stepping closer. The classics were all there—Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Dante’s Inferno. “This is amazing.”
“Nobody reads them,” Dylan said, like she didn’t want me getting the wrong idea. “My dad just collects them. Original ones, too.” She pulled one book down, which was displayed alone on a little shelf. “Like this one.”
I took the book reluctantly, afraid I’d spill what was left of my beer on top of it. It was a first edition of The Sun Also Rises.
“Wow,” I said again. I could hear myself sounding totally stupid, but I couldn’t help it. The book was pretty amazing.
“Anyway, I thought maybe they’d be your kind of thing,” Dylan said, grabbing The Sun Also Rises from me and shoving it back on the shelf. She’d cooled suddenly, that warm smile that had guided me up the stairs had vanished. I’d offended her somehow, but I had no idea when. “Actually, I’ve gotta go,” Dylan said, turning fast for the door. “You can stay and look around if you want, but I’ve gotta go do something. I’ll see you back downstairs in a couple of minutes.”
Then she was gone. And there I stood, alone in Dylan’s library, a nearly empty beer in one hand and a bunch of questions in my head. I had no idea what had just happened, much less how to fix it. It wasn’t easy when I didn’t really understand what was going on between Dylan and me in the first place.
I texted Ben as soon as I got home:
AMELIA
I went to the first coed party today
BEN
Was it debauch?
AMELIA
Pretty much
BEN
Sex, drugs
AMELIA
Pretty much
BEN
But I’m guessing not for you
AMELIA
Not really; Dylan was really nice to me though
BEN
That’s good
AMELIA
Then she turned off all of a sudden
BEN
Not good. Why?
AMELIA
IDK, I’m asking you
BEN
What do I know about girls? I think you’re all crazy. That’s why I stick with boys
AMELIA
U r useless
BEN
:)
I dropped my phone, rolled over in bed, and picked up To the Lighthouse. It wasn’t like I needed to read it again to write my English paper. I practically knew the whole thing by heart. Virginia Woolf was kind of my hero. Not because she walked into a river with rocks in her pockets—though as far as ways to kill yourself went, that did have a certain style—but because she was crazy talented and had been who she’d wanted to be, despite the world telling her to be someone different.
How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul’s side! He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure; she, moored to the shore . . .
I put the book down and looked at the clock. It was close to ten. I’d gotten a text from my mom at a little past eight telling me that she was on her way home soon, but that I should go ahead and eat. I’d ordered enough sushi for her. If I didn’t order her dinner, she’d go to bed without eating at all.
With Leelah not around anymore, I ate alone a lot, usually three or four times a week—Japanese, Chinese, Thai. Never Indian. It would have made me miss Leelah’s cooking too much. Most of the time, it wasn’t so bad. The takeout people knew my address by heart and said things like “For you, anything.”
I didn’t blame my mom for having to work. She had a job, and she had to do it well. Most of the time I was proud of her for that. It was still lonely sometimes, though. But that didn’t mean I was “looking for something” like Woodhouse had said. I was fine just the way I was.
Besides, we had our Friday night dinner dates, which neither of us was allowed to cancel, ever. And we tried for brunch
together on Saturdays, and we’d always curl up on a couch together for a movie on Sunday nights. We did other things on weekends, too, depending on my homework and field hockey schedule and how much work my mom had to do. And now my Maggie meetings. We went to museums or got our nails done together. Once we went on a cupcake walking tour in Manhattan. In summer, we always spent a week somewhere at the beach together—Fire Island, Block Island, Nantucket. And I knew my mom would have spent even more time with me if she could have.
I heard the front door open downstairs a few minutes later. Then my mom was on the stairs, creeping up, probably afraid she might wake me. When she finally pushed open my bedroom door and poked her head inside, her dark blond hair was pulled back in a low ponytail and she was wearing her tortoiseshell glasses, the ones that I thought were cool in a mom kind of way. She looked beat, with big dark shadows under her blue eyes. But still pretty. My mom was always pretty. Not in a MILF sort of way, that would have been humiliating. My mom was just a regular mom, but a pretty one.
I waved a hand back and forth, my head still down on the pillow, so she’d know I was awake.
“Oh hi.” She smiled, looking pleasantly surprised. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Nah.” I pushed myself up in bed and put my book down on the nightstand. “I was just reading.”
“Haven’t you already read To the Lighthouse a bunch of times?”
And that was my mom. She could have been around a lot more and noticed a lot less. Maybe we weren’t all Leave It to Beaver or whatever, but what we had worked for us.
“Yeah, like ten times. But we’re supposed to write a paper on it for English. I was just looking at it again to decide what I was going to do it on.”
“Should you be in a different English class?” my mom asked. “I know we thought that another honors class would be too much. But being bored isn’t good either.” She looked concerned. “We pay a lot of money for that school. They should be able to accommodate your needs.”
“Mom, the class is fine, seriously. Liv’s, like, my favorite teacher.” I shrugged. My mom got like this—all intense about stuff that wasn’t that important. It was because she felt guilty for not being around. She was always itching to go to bat for me, on everything. Even things I didn’t need help with. “Besides, I’ve got some ideas about how I can make the paper more interesting.”
Reconstructing Amelia Page 11
