by Anna Birch
“I don’t think Alice wants to meet in Nashville, though, remember? She said she didn’t know if it was a good idea.”
“That’s because she’s nervous,” Sarah says. “Everyone does that when they’re nervous.”
Like clockwork, a zippy, expensive car with a Conservatory rider tag pulls into the parking lot. After a moment of shuffling, Kiersten Keller appears out of the passenger side with a bright pink overnight bag tossed over her shoulder and curiosity in her eyes.
I’ve stayed so caught up in the world of the visual arts track at the Conservatory, I forgot that as someone in the theater track, Kiersten doesn’t really know us, either.
“I’m going to go get Dad from the rental office, and then we can hit the road,” Sarah says.
She flashes her eyes at me, and a second later, Kiersten and I are alone.
A second later, and I’ve forgotten that Alice could have been anyone other than Kiersten: Her hair is nearly black at the roots, graduating to periwinkle at the ends, and today she’s wearing it in a long braid that hangs messy over one shoulder. Her pink bomber jacket has studs at the neck and pockets that look like lace, her eye makeup is smudgy and dark, and she’s sewed patterned patches behind frayed holes in her jeans.
“Hi,” she says finally.
I didn’t realize I was staring at her.
She’s just so pretty. I have lost all ability to brain.
“Are … you on … um. Drugs? Still?” She pops her gum.
My face burns hot enough to ache. Oh my God, this is a God-forsaken disaster.
I giggle involuntarily for way too long—WHO THE HELL AM I?—before it occurs to me that I can hide it in a series of fake coughs in the inside of my elbow, vampire cough–style.
A half a beat later, it hits me that she thinks I’m on drugs.
“Still?” I ask. Where the hell is Sarah? This is terrible. Everything is terrible.
“Didn’t you, like, get caught high on campus last year?” Kiersten pops her gum again. “You’re the only Iliana at the school—”
“I wasn’t on drugs!”—WHERE THE HELL IS SARAH? OH MY GOD!—“It was just pot. It’s not, like, uh, a regular thing—or even, like, a sometimes thing.”
Pot’s too expensive for anything remotely resembling even occasional use.
I don’t really care for how it makes me feel, anyway.
Finally—fucking finally—Sarah and her dad emerge from the rental office. He has a genuine smile for all of us—and not much else by way of conversation—and rounds the side of the van to start the engine. Sarah isn’t far behind, eyeing my and Kiersten’s faces with a level of curiosity that completely mortifies me.
Kiersten’s interest moves from Sarah to myself, then to the phone in her hands.
“What the hell happened?!” Sarah tries the locked front passenger-side door, then bangs on the glass.
The locks pop, and she hops inside.
“More like, what the hell took so long?” I sling open the side door and clamber to the back. Kiersten claims the middle row.
Sarah and I blink out an entire conversation at each other in a Morse code of waggling eyebrows and shrugging shoulders:
Sarah: Dad’s gotta be Dad. I dunno. He always takes forever.
Me: I completely bombed that. She thinks I’m weird and that I use drugs.
Me: SHE THINKS I’M WEIRD NOW. Does she even like girls?
Sarah: Well, you’re weird.
Me: But does she like girls?
Sarah: I have no idea if she likes girls, Iliana.
Me: SHE THINKS I’M ON DRUGS. HELP.
Sarah doesn’t help. Instead, she puts headphones on and turns to the book in her lap.
It occurs to me that maybe we were having two different conversations.
We have enough room in the back of the passenger van that Kiersten and I have rows to ourselves. I’ve turned to rest my chin on the back of my seat, and Kiersten rests against the window with her legs stretched out in front of her. Alice has told me before that she’s tall, but Kiersten is small like Sarah and me: Her feet—clad in gorgeous, one-of-a-kind floral Doc Martens, because of course she has amazing, one-of-a-kind floral Docs—don’t even make it to the end of the row.
She’s a theater-track kid, I’ve learned, but her passion isn’t acting.
She loves costume design.
“It’s DIY,” Kiersten says, fingering the studded details around the neck of her jacket. “I found my mom’s old BeDazzler in our attic and just … figured it out myself. Ordered the studs and stuff off the internet and googled the user’s manual.”
From the front seat, Sarah and I make eye contact in the rearview window.
The internet! She’s on the internet!
Of course she is on the internet. Everybody is on the internet.
Still, it feels like a clue of some kind.
“So you’re studying costume design,” I say, eyeing the sketchbook in her lap. If I could get a glimpse, I’d recognize Alice’s unique drawing style immediately. “But you’re an artist, too.”
Instead of showing her work, Kiersten pulls the spiral-bound book closer to her chest. “Costume design is art.”
“Fair,” I say. “But costumes won’t win the Capstone Award. What are you pitching?”
I gesture to the sketchbook. Kiersten doesn’t hand it over, though—she pulls her phone from her pocket and flips through a photo album.
I’ve never seen anything like what’s on the screen: fabric collages—silks and cottons and brocades, dyed spectacularly and hand-sewn together, topped with intricate embroidery. Some of her pieces have poetry sewn into them; one is a self-portrait.
“At some point the world decided embroidery—sewing—was women’s work,” she says. “So it doesn’t have value as art. I want to reclaim it.”
“This is incredible.” I hand her phone back. Her fingernails are painted periwinkle, too.
“You should tell her about your project, Iliana,” Sarah says from the front seat.
Kiersten waits, smiling. I don’t have a sketchbook on me to show her, or pictures on my phone. All I can do is tell her about it, but if she’s Alice, that’s all it will take. She’ll know me immediately.
“It’s—” I take a breath. I didn’t even know Kiersten five minutes ago, but I want her to be Alice so much. For better or for worse, I’m not sure I’m ready to find out what the outcome will be. “It’s a paper-cut project. Alice in Wonderland–themed tarot cards, mounted between sheets of glass.”
I can feel Sarah watching from the front seat.
My eyes are only for Kiersten.
“I don’t think I can picture it,” she finally says, smiling. “I don’t know much about tarot. It sounds very interesting, though.”
I don’t know if I’m relieved or disheartened.
It had been so easy to believe it was Kiersten.
I need to guard my heart this weekend.
I turn to Sarah. “Tell us about yours!”
“Oh.” Sarah waves her hand. “I’m still marinating on it. You’ll find out with everyone else.”
Sarah and her dad share a look across the center console.
“Don’t look at me like that. I know what I’m do—”
One moment, everything’s fine. The next—BANG. BANGBANGBANGBANG POW.
The entire passenger van seizes.
Two hours until we’re supposed to check in for the Capstone project proposal, and we’ve blown a tire. Crap.
Sarah’s dad curses as he swerves hard to the right, and all of us are screaming as we lurch to the kind of stop that tests the functioning of our seat belts. He slings himself out of the car, grumbling about the rental company and the tires and AAA.
Sarah, Kiersten, and I smooth each other’s hair and collect each other’s strewn cell phones and water bottles from all over the inside of the van.
“We’re still, like, two hours away,” Kiersten says, frowning out the window.
“I’ll text Rhod
es.” Sarah doesn’t wait for us to object before her thumbs fly over her phone’s screen. “They left town after we did, so maybe they’re close.”
It isn’t even fifteen minutes later that a lipstick-red SUV pulls onto the shoulder behind us.
In the blink of an eye, everything has gone to hell.
CHAPTER 12
RHODES
Username: I-Kissed-Alice
Online now
“So … you want me to wait with Dad,” Griffin eyes our dad and Mr. Wade—Sarah’s dad—as if they belong to another species.
Truthfully, our dad and Mr. Wade are a different species from boys like Griffin. They’ll probably love the whole rigamarole of waiting for AAA, having the tire changed by a professional, and then driving up out of earshot from my mother’s never-ending string of biting criticism.
“There isn’t enough room in the SUV for all of you,” Mom says, frowning.
Kiersten Keller shifts from one foot to the other, visibly uncomfortable.
Sarah’s used to the rude way my parents talk in front of people as if they aren’t standing right there, and Iliana glowers into the distance with such force I half expect the mountains on the other side of the interstate to move.
Mom’s comments from when we pulled over to pick them up echo in the back of my mind as I take in each of them:
“Why does the purple-haired one look like an extra in a Cyndi Lauper video? What is it with you girls and your Kool-Aid hair? Ugh with the nose rings, already—”
“Do Sarah’s parents just give her their old clothes? Why does she always look like she crawled out of a donation bin at the thrift store? You should take her shopping, honey.”
“Iliana would be so much prettier if she smiled. Does she smile, ever? No? Well. She’ll spend the rest of her life—and all her husband’s money—trying to make those frown lines disappear.”
A year ago, I would have been whispering the same things back to my mom, judging girls like Iliana and Kiersten for how they dress. But there are things about Iliana I know now that give me pause—even if I can’t stand her: that she’s stern-looking because she’s driven to the degree that she spends her life consumed by her work.
That she probably won’t ever take a husband—she won’t want or need a man at all.
That if she ever settles down at all, it will be with a woman who wants her exactly as she is. As much as I hate Iliana Vrionides, I know she’s the kind of bitch that never settles for anything.
Sarah’s never talked about what she wants, and she’s never been clear on who she is. I don’t know Kiersten at all, but knowing Sarah and Iliana the way I do now has completely shifted the way I think over the past year.
It’s shifted what I want for myself, too.
It feels like some kind of divine mystery, the way people learn to love themselves like Iliana and Kiersten have. Or, for that matter, to know themselves like that.
Coming out was hard enough two years ago. Admitting to myself—and anyone else—how I might have changed over the past year is still harder than I could have ever imagined.
“I can, um”—Kiersten glances at her phone—“call an Uber, I guess—”
“No, you’re not,” I say. “Mom, you stay with Dad. We’ll take the SUV.”
“No adult?” Mom’s Botox-frozen eyebrows don’t move, but her face does this weird thing where I know they’d hike up into her forehead if they actually worked like they were supposed to. “Five teenagers and no adult?”
I shrug, and gesture for the keys.
This has nothing to do with concern for our safety and everything to do with spending the next two hours in solitary confinement with Dad.
“I’m not leaving Griff to listen to Dad grunt and fart at the Triple A guy.”
“Language—”
“I said fart. Give me a break.”
Mom and I glare at each other for a solid minute.
“Mom,” I finally say. “We only have two hours until we have to be there.”
Mom sighs and whirls on Griff. “Put everybody’s luggage in the back of their rental van, and there will be room for all five of you in the SUV.” She turns back to me. “Dad can wait with Mr. Wade for Triple A. I’m still driving. You need an adult.”
* * *
Behind where Griffin and I sit in the middle row, Sarah, Kiersten, and Iliana are purposely not talking—not in a we-just-fought sort of way but …
The energy is odd.
“Something happened in the van,” I whisper to Griff. “Don’t you think?”
The way Iliana isn’t looking at Kiersten speaks so much louder than anything either girl could say to each other. Iliana’s earbuds are in, and she hasn’t taken her eyes off her phone since we got back on the road. Kiersten is doing the same, sketching with giant candy-colored headphones covering her ears.
I start to ask Sarah what happened, but my phone vibrates in my lap instead.
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:21p: I know you think knowing each other—and doing this irl—will muddy everything up with the competition but like
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:22p: we go so much deeper than this
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:22p: we both know we deserve the award, we can be supportive of each other. Right?
I wish I could believe she’s right.
I steal a glance at Iliana, whose mere presence is a testament to how toxic competition really is.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:22p: I just don’t want to mess this up
I-Kissed-Alice 1:23p: you’re the realest thing I’ve got going for me right now
The truth of the words blooms somewhere deep. It honestly hurts, telling her no like this. I want so much for the circumstances to be different, for us to have just decided on our own to do this thing like we’ve talked about a thousand times before. The only difference? We’d choose to find each other.
The fact that life is just throwing us together should feel like fate, but instead all I have is an impending sense of doom.
I take a screenshot and text it to Griffin. His phone lights up, then he cuts his eyes to me.
What would you do? I text him.
I didn’t know y’all were so serious, he types. Rather than hit send, he just shows me his phone. I cut him a look.
He types: Do you think knowing who she is will change anything? Like if you find out now or later, you’re still going to find out eventually.
I type: What if we fall head-over-heels in love and have all this head-over-heels sex and don’t care about the scholarship anymore?
Sex. A real-life possibility I had not considered until I typed it out. We’ve sexted so many times—would Cheshire expect it when we finally meet face-to-face?
I don’t even know her first name yet.
It wouldn’t be my first time, but I can count the number of times I’ve had sex with anyone on one hand. I’d need maybe two or three fingers. Max.
Would she wait until I was ready?
Griffin scrunches his face.
1) ew
2) spare the sex stuff I am a pure, impressionable child
3) then you can go flip burgers I guess
“Oh, give me a break.” I say this out loud. “You’ve been with more girls than I have.”
Griffin puts a finger to his lips and points to our mom in the front seat. She’s oblivious, gratefully, absorbed in an audiobook she has faded to the front speakers. Behind us, Iliana has her headphones on and her eyes closed, but I don’t think she’s sleeping. Sarah is asleep and snoring slightly. Only Kiersten seems to be listening with interest, and I don’t care what she does or doesn’t know.
If you’re so worried about it, tell her you’ll meet her after the project proposal. I think it *will* distract you if you wait until after the winner is announced …
That’s a good idea, I type. I’ll do that. Why are you so smart?
I’m not, he types. You’re just exceptionally clueless.
Oh, eff off.
I swipe back over to my Slash/Spot
direct messages.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47p: let’s do it after the proposal
“DO IT?!” Griffin whispers over my shoulder.
“That’s not what I meant!” I elbow him in the stomach, but the damage is done. My face throbs with embarrassment.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47p: MEET I MEAN. LET’S MEET AFTER THE PROPOSAL OMG
Smooth, Griffin texts me.
I turn to give him an earful, but he’s already leaned against the far window with his eyes closed, feigning sleep. I punch him in the arm, and he spreads his knee past the seam between our two seats—an old-as-time breach of territory lines. I kick him in the shin, and he pinches me in the ribs, and I poke him in the ear, back and forth until Mom threatens to pull over the car like we’re six and eight again.
It isn’t enough to distract me from the fact that Cheshire still hasn’t messaged me back.
* * *
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:41a: okay
I-Kissed-Alice 1:45a: okay what
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:45a: let’s meet. After the proposal
I-Kissed-Alice 1:45a: okay
I-Kissed-Alice 1:46a: where
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:46a: I don’t know anything about Nashville
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47a: There’s a coffee shop around the corner from Frist. It’s called Glace. They have ice cream too. And glaces … like both.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47a: Ice cream and coffee together
I-Kissed-Alice 1:48a: well I mean not coffee. Espresso. If you like espresso.
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:48a: so we’ll meet at 8, then?
I-Kissed-Alice 1:48a: 8 is good
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:48a: we’re really doing this
I-Kissed-Alice 1:48a: we’re really doing this
* * *
CHAPTER 13
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 20m ago
On paper, the Frist Art Museum didn’t sound like a big deal at all. I should have known when Rhodes gave one of her bored shrug-slash-sighs and said Frist was “just, you know, fine.”
