by Anna Birch
I knew Iliana liked Alice in Wonderland, but this?
This is the magnum opus of someone who knows the story like she knows herself. I think about her hands, always covered in bandages, the tiny cuts all over her fingers and palms, scabbing over and healing in fresh air. It always seemed crass to me, for her to spend so much time bandaged and bloody, but each of these little cards whisper truth to me that speaks the opposite: What I believed harsh at best and disturbing at worst was actually a testament of Iliana’s dedication to her craft.
I look up and find Griffin studying my face, frowning.
Something is off.
Iliana and Griffin have watched me the entire night as if I’d blow away with a puff of air.
I’d thought it was concern for me being here, at first. Maybe they were afraid of how I’d cope with facing my loss head-on, or maybe they wondered if it would be shameful to appear at all after basically being sent off in disgrace less than two weeks before the final art show.
“You look like you could use this, babe.” Kiersten appears on my right with two flutes of—surely it’s not champagne—and thrusts one into my hands. I lift the flute to my face, and my nose confirms my worst suspicions. “You look like you’re about to throw up.”
“Uh.” I glance at Griffin, and he shrugs in agreement. “Thanks?”
“I just had to come talk to you.” Her red lipstick leaves little crescent moon imprints on the edge of her glass between sips. “You’re really, just, amazing.”
Iliana’s eyes grow wider from where she stands between her parents, watching us. Her mother pokes her, and she turns to the camera and smiles.
“You’re kind,” I say. It doesn’t feel kind.
Kiersten places her hand on my arm. Red fingernails, red lips. Sharp teeth.
“We figured you’d go into hiding after your, uh—” Kiersten takes another sip and cuts her eyes to someone standing behind me. A reflection of a bedazzled jacket in Kiersten’s champagne flute confirms the only logical candidate: Sarah. “Unfortunate, um, removal from the scholarship award. We were really worried about you.”
“It’s been a blessing in disguise,” I say. I turn to widen our circle and include Sarah in the conversation. There’s something about her behind me that sets my teeth on edge. “Sometimes it takes losing something to realize you didn’t want it to begin with.”
I don’t know who I’m supposed to trust anymore.
Sarah’s hair has gone from bleached peroxide-blond to cotton-candy pink. It hangs around her face in sheets, and Kiersten’s red lipstick is too harsh on Sarah’s fair features. Sarah averts her eyes and takes a too-big swallow of champagne, then cringes.
“Aw, that’s nice.” Kiersten smiles. “It’s really seemed to bring you and Iliana together, too.”
“She’s representing the Conservatory’s visual arts track tonight.” I pump my fist in the air, but my face burns. “Go Bobcats.”
From across the room, Iliana looks like she’s going to vomit.
She’s an oasis in the sea of what I now think of as my old life: old ladies in fur coats and gentlemen clutching half-smoked cigars like flotation devices.
Bootsie Prudhomme is one such lady, lush in white ermine with opera gloves the color of cranberry. She pushes her way to the center of the tent, where tables have been scooted here and there to make room for a small platform.
A man in all black quietly tests a microphone, and the quiet confidence in Kiersten’s face begins to crack.
“You know,” Kiersten says, hurried, “after everything’s come to the surface, it really says a lot about you as a person that you’ve come to stand by her anyway.”
Griffin blanches on my right.
The night around me is a giant, blinking arrow: The red roses on the tables. The squat, toad-like wealthy men in their waistcoats, and Iliana’s Capstone Award entry displaying an almost obsessive love for something I only thought I shared with one other person.
Cheshire.
Iliana and I meet eyes again, from a hundred feet away, and her expression tells me everything.
She knows. I know.
She knows I know.
Raindrops plod against the tent surface here, then there, before the sky opens up into a steady spatter that covers the entire expanse over our heads. It shakes in the trees and echoes off the pavement, but it doesn’t matter.
Griffin grabs for my arm, but I slither away and dart backward toward the crowd.
“Rhodes, don’t do anything you’re going to regret later—”
Kiersten is barely suppressing a grin behind her champagne flute, and Sarah looks as if the weight of the world rests on her small, round shoulders.
Sarah knows. Kiersten knows.
Griffin knows.
Somehow, everyone in this whole fucking world knew that Iliana was Cheshire but me, when—GOD. I can’t even think anymore. The room is pressing in on me, all roses and froggy men in their livery, and suddenly I’m Alice.
Drink me, whispers the champagne flute in my hand.
I open my throat and down the entire thing in one long, painful gulp. Little birds and silly men in top hats float around my head, and I’m shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. I’d be small enough to disappear through a tiny door in the baseboards, if this tent had baseboards. But I start to cry, and if I were very, very big, I could flood the place with teardrops the size of dinner plates.
I push past women in their minks and men sipping their scotch, grab my coat from the rack, and disappear out into the rain.
I’d meant to be alone, out here.
I thought the rain would be enough to keep anyone sensible inside, especially if the person I want to be far from most has a real, honest-to-God chance of leaving tonight as the newest recipient of the Capstone Award.
It isn’t, though.
Iliana’s voice echoes out into the night behind me.
My heart eases into the sound of my name on her lips, like a hot bath. I scald myself and retreat farther away. Her footsteps ring out behind me, louder and louder until I know she’s close by the warmth of her hand clasping mine.
She catches me and turns me around to face her, thrusting a wide, black umbrella over my head. She stares up at me with matching streaks of mascara down her cheeks, and her hair has grown three times in size from the moisture in the air.
This is Cheshire.
I knew it when I looked up that night standing in front of Frist and saw her staring at me from across the street. She was looking at me like I was a ghost, all wide-eyed and hollowed out. That night I chose not to see the fear, the disappointment, or anything else other than her anger, but it showed up in my dreams.
It’s nagged at the base of my brain ever since: When we were talking. When we were working together in the gallery. When she was kissing me, every time she gazed at me—so full of hope and warmth and lovesickness and eight thousand other emotions without a name.
I didn’t know, I chose not to believe, but I knew.
“You had so many chances to say something,” I hiss. “You told everyone else, but you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t tell everyone else,” Iliana cries. “Sarah was with me that night, remember? She knew what I was doing before I knew you were you. She told Kiersten, because of course she did.”
“Griffin?”
I wish so much to be brave. I envisioned this conversation with Cheshire eight thousand times, and in each little dream I was strong, and had courage in my convictions, and I didn’t cry.
“Griffin figured it out somehow. He’s really smart.”
“Yeah, he is.” I palm at my cheeks, and my fingers come away black with makeup. “You—Cheshire, I mean—were my best friend. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Speaking it out loud settles like lead in my bones.
You, Iliana, were my best friend.
Iliana Vrionides was the dream girl who once only lived inside my computer.
“Because we were horrible to each other,�
�� Iliana says. “I was horrible to you. I was so angry with you about last summer, and it was so unfair. But I knew Alice’s heart, and I knew from my relationship with Alice that she—you—did everything in her—your—power to make things right. When I realized that you and Alice were the same person, I wanted time to prove that I’m worth loving, too.”
“Oh, Iliana—” I can only shake my head.
What an ugly, ugly mess.
“Tell me,” she says, punctuated with a sob, “if I’d shown up that night and told you who I was, would you have given me a chance in hell?”
I don’t have to answer that, because she’s right.
Iliana reaches up to touch my cheek. Our eyes meet, and all I want is to melt into her.
But it’s all so much to reconcile. Even if I see the way Cheshire and Iliana puzzle together, my mind flip-flops in protest and I can’t get my thoughts all the way around it.
“I—I don’t know—”
“Iliana!” Iliana’s mother’s voice is a throatier version of her own. I’d know it anywhere. “Baby, come on! They’re calling for you.”
Iliana’s eyes grow wide like saucepans, the color of honey.
“It’s you, baby,” her mother calls out to us—no, to Iliana. This isn’t meant for me. “You won! What’s wrong, sweetheart? Ah, come inside—”
I burst into tears. Again.
Here we are, at the end of this, and it’s all come down to Iliana after all.
“You need to go,” I say.
I’ll give myself this: It feels like I’ve lost something tonight, seeing the Capstone going to her. I’ll be happy for her tomorrow, I hope, but tonight the grief is real in more ways than one.
“But—we need—” Iliana glances back at her mom. Applause thunders from inside the tent, and people are peeking out into the courtyard, grinning.
“I need time,” I whisper. “Go. You’ve worked so hard for this.”
Iliana rocks forward to kiss me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispers. “For everything.”
With that, she leaves the umbrella in my hand and darts back toward the tent.
Applause hits a crescendo, and I turn to the sidewalk to walk two blocks back to the condo with Iliana’s umbrella over my head.
For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had
happened lately,
that Alice had begun to think that very few things
indeed were really impossible.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
CHAPTER 30
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 2w ago
I thought my first night back at Sylvia’s since the scholarship award would have entailed a hero’s welcome. My entire world flipped on its ear in Nashville, but being back here in Birmingham, strung up in one of Sylvia’s frilly aprons, feels like some modicum of my normal life.
Plus, I was right: Telling Rhodes the truth put the universe back in balance.
Except it isn’t in balance at all, because this level of security is something I’ve never actually experienced before. For the first time, maybe ever, I feel like I can think past what will happen to me in a week. A month. A year. Five years.
I’ve burned bridges and broken hearts, but now everything is paying off—I know where I’m going to college, and I know how I’m going to pay for it. The Capstone Award women have shifted from horrifying, Argonaut-esque harpies into women who champion for me in every area—Bootsie Prudhomme asked her friends to help pay for my freshman year art supplies. In spite of June Baker’s fallout with the organization, her daughter-in-law asked their junior league chapter to help me buy a new computer.
The thing is, I don’t really know if I can call it “paying off” at all—maybe a year ago, I would have been okay with the way all of my relationships became collateral damage in my fight for all this.
But so much has changed since then, and there is this chilly, impenetrable silence that has been draped over my life like some kind of burial shroud—there is no one around me to share in my joy. My parents are thrilled for me, sure, but I have no friends who care about me enough to really be happy for me.
I’m lonely. I ache for what I don’t have anymore.
It’s been two weeks since the Capstone Award finals, and I haven’t spoken to Rhodes since. Lord knows I’ve tried—I texted her a week after finals. I tried to call her in a moment of weakness a few days after that, even though I knew that if she wanted contact with me, she would have texted me back in the first place. Then I emailed her.
I eventually accepted that I had come on too strong.
It’s what I do when there’s something in front of me that I want—and it’s the trait that got me into this whole mess to begin with. This time, though, I didn’t push forward.
I gave her what she needed—space—and I turned my heart toward the very specific pain of getting used to the idea of what life will look like now without the person who filled it with color.
There was never going to be a timeline where Rhodes and I would even be friends, much less anything else. I wish I could say I’ve resigned myself to the truth of this. The only thing that keeps distance between us is that we both know I deserve it.
Sylvia stands at the counter with her old-fashioned reconciliation book opened wide in front of her. Sammy Davis Jr. croons over our heads, and Sylvia hums along as she counts tiny pots filled with margarine under her breath.
Sleigh bells crash against the glass door.
Kiersten Keller appears in the threshold, bringing the cold in with her.
There’s nothing to be afraid of with Kiersten. I heard through the grapevine that she was the one to break the truth to Rhodes; I heard it was sneaky and calloused and expertly sandwiched into a barrage of lovely, well-executed platitudes.
A bitch slap followed by the stroke of a cheek.
No, I’m not afraid of Kiersten anymore.
I don’t even hate her.
All I see is a fun-house version of myself that I’m growing out of, cutthroat and desperate, and I’m sad for her.
“You gonna make me get that?” I ask Sylvia, already grabbing for a menu.
I still have no desire to talk to her.
“You work here?” Sylvia licks her thumb, then flips the page.
“Fair enough.” I step around the Formica-topped counter and meet Kiersten by the door.
Kiersten’s face goes red, and she squares her shoulders. Nothing about her has really changed since the Capstone finals—she still has the same pink-to-purple hair, the same violently red lips, the same look of bored defiance in her eyes. But she’s foregone her usual BeDazzled leather jacket in lieu of a sensible black peacoat. The only true essence of Kiersten is in the hand-dyed silk scarf at her neck, embroidered in such a way that I know it’s something she’s created for herself.
Her shoulders tug just a little farther toward the ground.
“Just one today?” I glance behind me. “All the tables are taken. There’s only room for one at the counter.”
“I’m not here to eat.” She might as well have spit the words onto my feet.
I raise my eyebrows and wait.
“I—” She swallows. “I’m here to ask for my job back.”
After she rage-quit, I’m amazed she has the guts to show her face in here at all.
“You really think Sylvia’s gonna give you another chance?” I tuck the menu into the back of my apron. “Her niece just started after the holiday.”
“My parents are making me, okay?” Kiersten’s features twist into a snarl. “It’s nice for you that your college is paid for, but some of us still have to work.”
“I’ll have to work until the day I die like everybody else,” I say, “so cut that shit out. You know, you wouldn’t be in this situation at all if you took five minutes to think about the way your shitty behavior affects people. You may not have won the scholarship, but you’d still have a job.”
“Oh, like you have any room to talk, Iliana Vrionides.” Kiersten tries to push past me, but I step in her way.
I don’t know when I’m going to have the chance to say this again.
“You know what? I learned some things. And even at my worst, I would have never—ever—ever—destroyed someone else’s chances at the scholarship. Even if you’d have been the best entry there, you still wouldn’t have deserved it because you’re a damn snake and karma is a bitch.”
“Wait—what?” Kiersten takes a step back. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re trying to tell me that you weren’t the one to tell the Capstone board about Rhodes’s mom buying her way in? Or the one behind the ink balloon in my locker?”
Kiersten’s eyes widen. “I had no idea that’s what happened with yours. It all seemed very … intentional. Like you’d planned it that way.”
“That’s because Rhodes is a genius,” I say. “She helped me because we wanted to beat whoever was responsible for this. You.”
Kiersten’s features soften. “Look, I was pissed about the fight at the project presentation, and I felt bad for Sarah because she seemed kinda caught up between y’all, but I swear to God I never would have tried to sabotage you or anyone else.” She shrugs. “I wanted to screw things up between you and Rhodes because I felt like you deserved it, but I wanted to beat you both the old-fashioned way.”
We regard each other.
For better or worse, it’s easy to see that we’re both cut from the same cloth.
If it had been anyone else, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done the same thing. In an alternate universe, I wonder what kind of friends Kiersten and I could have been. Probably the kind that would have ruined everyone’s lives and laughed about it.
“Sylvia’s at the counter.” There’s nothing else to say about the Capstone. I gesture behind me. “I’d lead in with groveling if you want a snowball’s chance in hell.”
“Thanks,” Kiersten says. “And, um. Sorry about Rhodes. And what I did. You were cute together.”
