by Anna Birch
I don’t let myself cry until I’m washing my face.
It’s a habit as old as life, to wait until my face is hidden and already wet to pour my heart down the sink. Nobody is here now to see it, but it doesn’t matter. The grapefruit scent of my prescription face wash is a source of comfort, and the water is warm on my cheeks.
My bones galvanize as I dry my face and smooth on moisturizer.
The tears are out of my system. The ache is still there, that feeling that my lungs are full of concrete and my sinuses are on fire, but I can finally look at myself in the mirror and see that old hardness staring back.
Every time I close my eyes, I see an image clear as day: the Intergalactic Underland’s hangar bay, the setting for one of the first panels I ever designed with Cheshire over the summer.
Alice sneaking through a spaceship filled with escape pods was the idea—and the conversation—that started it all. What if Alice were set in space? What if she were hiding in a hangar bay instead of the Red Queen’s croquet grounds?
What if the hangar bay is where it all ends, too?
With no one here, the island in the kitchen is the perfect place to draw. The surface is wide, with pendant lights hanging low enough for me to bump with my head if I could get close enough.
It comes over me so fast I don’t have time to think about it. My oversize sketchbook and pencils are easy enough to grab, but I have to improvise with the rest: A cereal box is a right angle one minute and a straightedge the next. My mom’s giant Tennessee-shaped novelty hard eraser is actually getting put to use. I outline with a ballpoint pen from the bottom of the junk drawer.
In a matter of minutes, I have three panoramic panels on the paper in front of me. This was a deliberate choice—I love the drama of it.
I love the warmth spreading through my chest, the ecstasy of seeing the thing in my mind’s eye sprawled out on paper in front of me.
The wide, sweeping shots give a sense of size and space that smaller panels don’t. I want this panel to be the goodbye I won’t ever give Cheshire—not just relationship closure, but an ending to this thing we’ve spent the past six months toiling over together.
Time is subjective: I don’t know if I’ve been sitting here for minutes or hours.
My hand moves, graphite scratches against paper, and slowly each panel becomes a window into another world.
God knows how much time has gone by when the hair on the back of my neck stands on end. It’s a weird feeling, to sense that you’re no longer the only human in the room. The condo is quiet, though—there are no other steps on the polished concrete floors. The room hums with silence, only cut on occasion by the sound of sirens.
“Why aren’t you wearing pants?” Griffin’s voice is a jolt of electricity down my spine.
A shudder ripples through my torso and out through my limbs; a sound leaves my body somewhere between a shriek and a sob. Even if a part of my brain knows it’s just Griffin, Anxiety Brain screams DANGER!
My pencil goes flying.
I think the eraser hits Griffin in the face, but I don’t see it happen because one minute it’s in my other hand, and the next it’s on the other side of the room and Griffin is holding his eye.
“You look … uh, terrible,” Griffin says, frowning.
“I’m not wearing pants because I thought I was here alone.”
We frown at each other. I tug the hem of my T-shirt down around my hips to cover my underwear.
“God, attitude much? What happened?”
I’m not answering that. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“Meeting with Bob and June at the country club.” His tone is thick with significance: Bob and June Baker. The forefather and foremother of the Ocoee Arts Festival. He stares at me carefully. “I’m serious, you look horrible.”
“She didn’t show, okay?”
“I had a feeling something like that would happen,” he says.
Griffin glances past me, and his eyes fall on my sketchbook. I throw myself across the paper, but it’s too late. He swipes it from under me and holds it close to his nose.
“Whoa, this is—wow. What was all this crap about not being able to draw?!” He runs his finger down to the third panel, where the Red Queen and Alice are talking one last time. There are only empty speech bubbles on either side of them—I don’t fill the speech bubbles with text until I’ve scanned the panels into my design software. “What are they going to say?”
“I—” I swallow. Griffin’s never seen my comics. He barely knows how much Alice in Wonderland means to me.
“I think the Red Queen”—I point to the Red Queen, a smaller, curvier silhouette than Alice’s tall frame—“is asking Alice if Alice thinks she can just … leave. And Alice”—I point to Alice—“is telling the Red Queen that Alice can’t be … part of her world anymore.”
My throat is a vice around those last words.
My eyes sting, and my lungs begin to burn again.
“Oh, so it’s sort of like Through the Looking-Glass—”
I nod. Griffin is consciously Not Looking At Me, which is good because I’m definitely crying again. I cough away the frog in my throat before I speak again. “It’s, uh, fan art. A web comic—alternate universe fan fiction, basically. Alice in Wonderland, set in a different place.”
“This says number fifty at the top. There are forty-nine others?”
I nod.
This is how I end up telling Griffin everything about tonight, how she never showed and now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with six months of daily conversations and sometimes biweekly comic updates and a story that lives and breathes because of the two of us. The worst part about this is that there’s no part of my life I can retreat to and hide from how I feel—Cheshire’s handprints are everywhere.
“What I don’t understand,” Griffin says, “is why you aren’t turning something like this in for your scholarship award. Don’t you see it—you’re evolving, Rhodes. ‘Breathy nudes, lighter than air,’ isn’t you anymore.”
“I did what you told me to do,” I say. My voice shakes. “I phoned it in and pitched what I know will work.”
“You can’t blame this on me!” He throws his hands up. “I had no idea this was going on. Just turn in a few of these—the Jabberwock ones are SO GOOD. I can guarantee they’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have to submit what I pitch.” I pick up my sketchbook off the counter and tuck it under my arm. God only knows how late it is, and Mom and Dad should be home any minute. “I pitched breathy nudes, so they’re getting breathy nudes.”
“Why don’t you just call June—?”
“NO. I’ve already called in enough favors. I have to do this like everybody else.”
We both dart our eyes to the doorknob jiggling in the front door’s frame. Griffin rakes his fingers through his hair.
“Well, we won’t be nude, but if you insist on trying to make the nude drawing thing happen, you can always come to mine and Sierra’s rehearsal on Monday night. I’m helping her with her recital solo. You can sketch.”
It’s not a bad idea.
Different is fun. Different is good.
Maybe Griffin is right: The Same Old Thing is the problem, not me.
“I can probably wiggle a little bit on the nude thing.” I could do some quick sketches and focus the pieces on sense of movement…” It’s hard for me to see right now, but in an academic sort of way I understand that this is the next logical step: to focus attention away from the figure, and to point the viewer’s eye to the model in medias res.
It won’t take technical skill in a literal sense, just clever compositional choices.
Yes. I can do this.
I have to do this.
“I’ll bring dinner,” I say. “Is Sylvia’s okay?”
Mom’s and Dad’s voices filter low through the cracks in the frame, moments before a key rattles in the lock. Griffin and I make eye contact one more time. We gather up my mess and bolt to
our bedrooms.
He doesn’t want to deal with our parents, either.
I flick off the lights in my room a fraction of a second before I hear the door open. And I’m in bed with my blankets over my head before the door to my room opens and somebody—Mom?—peeks inside. With my blankets over my head, I stare at my direct messages with Cheshire on my phone screen for what feels like forever. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but it only feels natural to be here, waiting to tell her good night.
I lapse out of consciousness like this, in that weird place between sleep and the waking world where my dreams feel like real life and the reality of my relationship with Cheshire being over could simply be fabricated by my imagination.
When my phone lights up again, it’s a phone call, and Sarah’s name is spelled out across the screen. I send it to voice mail and fall back asleep.
6 comments // 45 kudos // 67 reading now
USER COMMENT
Curious-in-Cheshire
I can’t believe you’d submit something without letting me see it first
—
USER COMMENT
I-Kissed-Alice
are you effing serious right now
What, I have to get your permission now? Hearts & Spades is mine. It’s yours. It’s also *ours* together. I don’t have to ask your ~permission~ on anything
—
USER COMMENT
Hearts-n-Spades-Fan-01
omg our moms are fighting, guys
—
USER COMMENT
Curious-in-Cheshire
Whoa. Settle down killer, I just thought we always ran things by each other first
—
USER COMMENT
Stay_curiouser1
Popcorn emoji x 10000000
—
USER COMMENT
I-Kissed-Alice
Don’t tell me to settle down, Cheshire. Ever.
CHAPTER 19
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Online now
Rhodes’s—Alice’s—last Hearts & Spades update sits open on my laptop screen, staring back at me. I’m at home, and in bed, and everyone else in the house is asleep.
I got home from Nashville yesterday.
Which means it’s been two days since Alice—Rhodes—and I were supposed to meet, and we haven’t spoken since—either online or in real life.
Until now, I never missed living on campus—I’ve always understood that finances would never allow it, and at the end of the day, I needed the space. But I would give anything to be physically close to where Rhodes is right now.
I want to know what she’s doing, and if she’s okay.
I want to know if Sarah and Rhodes are talking, and if Sarah is Team Iliana or Team Rhodes right now, and if she’s going to spill the beans to Rhodes about who I am before I get the chance to do it myself.
In a cerebral sort of way, I know it’s my fault, but I can’t feel guilty about it. Months of drama between Rhodes and me has tossed around my mind ever since, searching (and ultimately connecting) with events I remember hearing about when I was Cheshire and Rhodes was Alice.
The “School Bitch” Alice always complained about is me.
I talked about Rhodes to Alice more than I talked about anyone else—not just about our fighting, but about the myriad character deficiencies I have always perceived in Rhodes. Character deficiencies I never saw in Alice.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night: Perception is 75 percent of reality, and now I have no idea how much of Rhodes is some kind of monster I’ve created in my mind because of the way she ruined my life, and how much of the things I believed about her actually exist in reality.
That night at Sylvia’s won’t leave me alone, standing with Sarah by the dishwashers.
You can’t blame Rhodes for your problems forever, she’d said. Her parents paid the school off for you. Are they supposed to pay for your college, too?
What was Rhodes supposed to do?
There’s no way Rhodes can really make this right.
It’s been so long since that night. It’s hard to remember much aside from sitting in the head of school’s office at one o’clock in the morning, higher than a kite and terrified. I never told Alice what happened that night—I was too embarrassed—but Alice told me everything.
I open my DMs with Alice—Rhodes, I’ll never get used to calling her by her real name—and scroll back as far as I can go. The time stamps read November, then October, then September, then August.
July.
June.
It feels like it was an entire lifetime ago.
I-Kissed-Alice 6:51p: One day I’m going to write a book called “The Seven People You Meet in Rehab.”
Curious-in-Cheshire 6:51p: lol
I-Kissed-Alice 6:52p: It’s family weekend. This lady brought her baby, and they’ve been feeding it Dr Pepper and Moon Pies since they got here four hours ago.
I-Kissed-Alice 6:52p: these people are why stereotypes about the South exist
I keep scrolling. My heart bottoms out.
I-Kissed-Alice 10:09a: what do you do when you know you hurt somebody, and they were just, like, collateral damage?
I-Kissed-Alice 10:10a: this entire thing is a frigging mess, and I found out today that I probably ruined somebody’s life
I-Kissed-Alice 10:10a: I don’t know how to live with myself anymore
I remember this conversation now.
I was convinced she was being DramatiqueTM at the time—how can a teenager ruin somebody’s life in any real, tangible way? Particularly someone as kind and noble-hearted and wonderful as Alice? It’s so easy to say third-period French, or your curfew, or even the bitch in Drawing III who doesn’t know how to leave you alone is “ruining your life.” Never in a million years did I believe that Alice ruined someone’s life in a literal sense.
But Alice is Rhodes, and now I know differently.
Alice—Rhodes—was talking about me.
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:10a: you didn’t ruin somebody’s life
I-Kissed-Alice 10:10a: no, I really did
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:11a: well, I mean. You just have to do your best to make it right.
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:11a: And give them space—don’t hurt them and then ask them how to fix it.
The time stamp is June 23. On June 26, my brother called home to tell me that Rhodes’s parents had paid off the school to handle things in-house rather than press charges. Nicky spoke up on my behalf with the school, and rather than being expelled, I spent the summer cuddling with kittens and scooping dog poop from stalls at the Greater Birmingham Humane Society.
The only thing I would never get back was my Savannah College of Art and Design scholarship. She did the very thing I’d told her to do, and irony of ironies, that very thing is the one reason I’ve always hated her.
I honestly believed that she was too spoiled to face any real consequences on her own—which, to be realistic, her money and social status does give her a level of power I’ll never have—when at the end of the day, she had done exactly what someone in her position should do: She used her privilege in a way that ensured we were all treated by the school equally.
It wouldn’t have happened that way if her parents had only looked out for her and Griffin—neither my family nor Sarah’s could afford the palm-greasing necessary to make drug use on campus go away.
And now, after that night, we’re all still suffering.
Neither Rhodes nor myself know what our futures look like anymore—me, because of the scholarship I lost, and Rhodes, because of the way the past several months have affected her ability to create art—and yet all we’ve done is continue to fight each other.
I can’t help but recognize that so much of what Rhodes is experiencing might actually be my fault. She’s suffering now because of my behavior as Cheshire.
Things could have been so different right now if I’d just told her who I was the night we were
supposed to meet.
I close my laptop.
The house is quiet. I slip my arms into my sister-in-law Whitney’s old housecoat and pad out of my room, down the carpeted stairs, and into the hall. Mom is already sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window and smoking a cigarette.
I jump at the sight of her, and she jolts at the sight of me.
We stare at each other for a moment, clutching at our chests, mirror images: wild frizz scraped into half-assed piles on top of our heads that still manage to somehow hang over our ears. Big dark eyes (hers flanked with heavy crow’s-feet, mine still edged with the liquid liner I didn’t wash off before bed) and dramatically dark brows. Overly large mouths, and left incisors that tilt slightly toward the right.
Finally, I walk past her and open the fridge for the jug of milk.
“It’s out on the counter, baby.” Mom taps ashes from her cigarette out the open window.
I grab a clean bowl from the dishwasher and pour a bowl of cereal, then cross the room to drop into the chair on Mom’s left.
“Why are you awake?” I ask.
The only light sources in the room are the glowing embers on the end of mom’s cigarette and the streetlamps shining through the window. I fumble to get a spoonful of cereal into my mouth and dribble milk onto the front of my T-shirt.
“I’d ask you the same.” Her tone is warm. “When you get old, you stop sleepin’.”
She’s been getting up for first shift at the pipe factory as long as I’ve been alive. Four thirty a.m. alarms every day eventually rewire your brain.
“You’re not old, Mom,” I say, laughing.
“Sixty-two and counting,” she says. “Feels more like eighty-two most days, honestly. Why you up?”
“I—” I sigh. I don’t even know where to start.
“Got somethin’ to do with that hang in your shoulders?” I don’t have to actually see Mom to know the way her own face is twisted into an amused smirk. “When you gonna tell me what happened?”
“Rhodes and I got into a really bad fight,” I say. “I know Sarah’s dad probably told you.”
