You Don't Live Here

by Robyn Schneider

  Lily and Adam were staring at me with all of the sympathy I’d been so eager to avoid. Except, somehow, coming from them, it was okay.

  “Oh my god, Sasha,” Lily breathed. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  I shrugged, considering. “Haven’t you ever just had something awful happen and been desperate to walk away without people forcing you to wear it across your chest like a scarlet letter?”

  “Points for the Nathaniel Hawthorne reference,” said Lily. “And yeah. Totally. I wasn’t even in kindergarten when my dad died, but I still remember the looks.”

  “My awful thing was getting you as a stepsister,” Adam teased, grinning.

  “Whatever,” said Lily. “You were a total disaster before I made you cool.”

  “This is cool?” I asked skeptically.

  “This is my maximum level of cool, yes,” said Adam. “What’s the line? ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”

  “Wow, Percy Shelley,” I said. “That was an honors English deep cut.”

  “Academic Decathlon, baby,” Adam preened.

  “His maximum level of cool,” Lily repeated sadly.

  Chapter 20

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I stayed after school for Art Club, and when my grandparents asked me about Mock Trial, I smiled and said it was the same as always. Because I was pretty sure Mock Trial was the same as always, just without me.

  And whenever they asked about Cole, and when he was coming to dinner, I said probably after the soccer season wound down. And my grandparents said great, and to let them know, my lies gliding past them undetected.

  It was worth it, though, lying to them. I actually wished I’d done it sooner. For the first time in a long time, I felt like could breathe again. Like I wasn’t under constant pressure, all while dragging so much baggage with me. Like I’d traded up for an emotional suitcase with wheels.

  I felt myself sliding further and further down a path that I’d only meant to explore for a moment. A path that was so unexpectedly wonderful that even if I could turn back, I wouldn’t have wanted to. Not when I got to spend lunch sitting on the edge of the fountain, laughing at whatever ridiculous thing Lily or Ryland or Adam had just said. Not when I got to ride to school with people who never made me feel embarrassed or left out, or even the tiniest bit weird for loving books and photography and having no idea what the Kardashians were posting on Instagram.

  I was edging closer than I’d ever been to the person I was supposed to be.

  Part of that was my Studio Art class. I’d written it off at first—paints and charcoals weren’t my thing. But just because I wasn’t great at them didn’t mean they weren’t worth learning. It was like Mr. Saldana said: there was value in considering a different perspective.

  I read the book he’d given me, which was surprisingly wonderful, all about the philosophy of taking pictures. The language was gorgeous, and the ideas in there blew my mind. When I gave it back to him, he smiled and asked me about it, and then made me show him my photos.

  “They’re from last year,” I hedged, but he bent over my iPhone anyway, zooming in and studying them for a while before pronouncing them “Just lovely.” I captured a sense of yearning from a distance, he said. And then he handed me Berger’s Ways of Seeing with a wink.

  It turned out photography was about working with light, but sketching was about working with shadows. When I figured that out, suddenly drawing made so much more sense to me. It was like creating a negative instead of a photograph. It was the opposite of what I was used to doing. I didn’t turn into a great artist overnight, but even I could see the improvement.

  Another part of everything feeling so much better—the main part—was Lily. Maybe it was because she’d lost a parent, too. Or because the family she had wasn’t the family she’d started with. But she got how it felt not to fit in.

  And she liked girls. Which didn’t mean she liked me. I had to keep reminding myself over and over. We were friends, and that didn’t have to lead to anything more. No matter how much I dreamed of what it would be like if it did.

  We’d started texting at night, conversations that were only supposed to last a couple of minutes, but which stretched on into the early hours. Curled up in bed with my phone glowing in my cupped hands and Lily on the other side, I felt less alone than I had since moving here.

  Just read about Kintsugi, and it made me think of you, Lily texted once. It’s the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold.

  She sent me pictures, delicate plates and bowls with unexpected threads of gold winding through them.

  They’re beautiful, I wrote back.

  I think so too, Lily said. The idea is that neither damage nor repair are shameful. That actually they’re what makes these pieces unique, because without the broken places, they’d just be ordinary.

  I stared down at what Lily had written, wondering if we were still talking about art.

  But the broken thing isn’t beautiful, I pointed out. It has to be repaired first.

  That’s easy, Lily promised. All you need is someone else to hold the broken pieces together until they’ve set.

  In November, the Art Club went on a field trip to Los Angeles. There was this museum that had an exhibit Lily wanted us to see. Six of us drove up: Lily and Ryland and me in her car, and Mabel with two seniors who I didn’t know all that well, Adrian and Danica.

  It was strange leaving Bayport, which I hadn’t done since my grandparents had driven me there. But it was stranger still to be so much closer to where I used to live.

  I didn’t say much on the drive up. Just stared out at the miles between myself and the town I’d grown up in, watching them disappear.

  My mom and I had gone into LA together when I was little. We’d even driven past this museum before, which featured an enormous art installation of art deco lampposts outside, creating a forest of light. It felt disorienting to be going there now, to visit something I’d seen before, in a different life.

  The art installation was better up close. The hundreds of antique lampposts, arranged in columns, gave the impression of an ancient Greek temple.

  “Wow,” I said, staring up at it.

  I couldn’t figure out how it was so much more than the sum of its parts. Because it wasn’t anything special. Just lampposts. But somehow, having been moved here, with nothing else changed, they were art. And I loved that.

  My mom used to say there was one question she asked as a hairdresser: What else can it be besides what it is? And I felt certain the artist had asked himself the same question when he created this.

  But you could ask that question of a person, too. What else could I be besides what I am? Answering it was the hard part. Although, ever since I’d started hanging around with Lily, I felt like I was getting closer.

  As we were waiting to buy tickets for the museum, the streetlamps turned on, the whole installation flooding with light.

  “Look,” Lily said, her hand on my arm.

  It was like my whole body filled with light and warmth when she touched me, even if it was just the sleeve of my jacket. It was the sort of thing friends did all the time. Like how she linked arms with Mabel during Phys Ed.

  “I wish I’d brought my camera,” I said, staring at the soft, warm glow beneath the lampposts.

  “I brought mine,” Adrian said, digging an enormous DSLR out of his messenger bag.

  I stared at him in surprise. He wasn’t someone I’d ever talked to. A tall, thin senior in eighties-style glasses and white jeans and gold chain jewelry, who’d always seemed more interested in music than anything else. But it turned out he was also into photography.

  “You shoot with a fixed lens?” I asked, curious.

  “Better depth of field. Actually, would you two mind jumping in there? I have an idea.”

  “Sure,” Lily said, pulling me toward the lampposts before I could protest.

  I’d always been ridiculously self-conscious in front of a camera, half afraid
that a secret part of myself would surface in the picture for everyone to see. Or that I’d have food in my teeth, or underwear lines, or I’d look fat, or deeply unhappy, or . . . or anything.

  “Be natural,” Adrian called. “I don’t want anything too posed.”

  “So,” Lily said, grinning. “Life on the other side of the lens.”

  “I know.” I looked around at where we were. It was so different from the inside, where we were standing. “It’s like Narnia. They always came in at the lamppost, remember?”

  “That’s right! I’d forgotten about those books.”

  “Lil, can you lean back a little?” Adrian called.

  “He’s very editorial, isn’t he?” Lily rolled her eyes and did as he said. “But he’s good. You should see the stuff he exhibited in the gallery show last year.”

  “Gallery show?”

  “The one Mr. Saldana makes all of his students submit work for,” Lily reminded me.

  “Right. That.”

  I figured I’d wait until the last minute and hand in whichever piece I produced in class that sucked the least. I had five more weeks before the deadline.

  I smiled weakly, trying not to stress about it. Or about the fact that my grandparents thought I was on an extra-credit trip for class. Or that I was being photographed by a boy with a lip ring and patent leather Docs.

  “Could you guys stand closer together?” he yelled. “Maybe hold hands?”

  My heart sped up at the suggestion. I looked over at Lily, who shrugged.

  All of a sudden her warm hand was in mine, and she was holding on tightly, like I was someone worth holding on to. I could barely breathe. It was so lovely, and so thrilling, being here with her.

  “Perfect,” he called, and I realized he was right. It was perfect.

  The instant we walked inside LACMA, I started to quietly panic. I hadn’t been in a museum since the day of the earthquake, and something about being back in one made me feel queasy, and a little off.

  But Lily was smiling at me, waiting for me to love it, so I tried to stop imagining the floor shaking and the displays falling and the light fixtures crashing to the ground. Instead, I thought about how it had felt when Lily took my hand in hers for Adrian’s photos.

  I took a deep breath, and then another.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m okay,” I confirmed. And after another few moments, I was.

  Part of it was that the museum was amazing. There were real Magrittes—including that famous one with the pipe.

  “Wow,” I said, staring at it.

  Danica was already posting everything to her Insta story, including the Magritte, and barely even looked up from her phone.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Mabel warned. “He painted a ton of those. Lots of museums have one. It’s not like it’s the Mona Lisa.”

  “That’s depressing,” Ryland told her. “Stop ruining art.”

  “I’m just saying.” Mabel shrugged. “It’s the traveling production cast of paintings.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a traveling cast production,” said Adrian. “Bring culture to the masses. Let art chill and be accessible.”

  “Are you calling me an art snob?” Mabel demanded.

  “I’m just saying,” Adrian teased, borrowing Mabel’s earlier words. She glowered, and he gloated, and their argument was so obviously a flirtation that I couldn’t blame Ryland for seeming so defeated.

  Lily and I exchanged a look. He was such a good guy. A little too obsessed with manga and anime, but he was kind and creative and adorable, and it was easy to see the two of them together.

  “That’s the exhibit we came for,” Lily said, pointing to a sign that advertised Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage.

  “Theater and art,” she explained over her shoulder. “Something for everyone.”

  The exhibit was amazing, full of hundred-year-old opera and ballet costumes, yellowed and covered with beadwork so delicate it seemed that if you breathed too intensely they might crumble to dust right there. They’d been painted too, made to look like fantastical beasts and woodland creatures. I only knew Chagall from his paintings; I hadn’t known he’d also designed costumes.

  “I would have loved to live back then,” Lily said wistfully, staring at a leotard painted with leaves and vines that had gossamer wings trailing down the back.

  “Me too,” I said. “I always wanted to live in Paris in the twenties.”

  “Drink absinthe in cute cafés,” Lily added.

  “Fall in love with a penniless writer.”

  “Cause a scandal by wearing trousers.”

  “Die charmingly of tuberculosis,” I teased.

  “Inevitable,” she said. “It was the only fashionable way to go.”

  We laughed. And I stared at the costumes, thinking, these were there. These pieces were created for a different world, one that existed before any of us were alive. One that was gone now. And it wasn’t because of a natural disaster, but because time buried things the way earthquakes did.

  “What are you so quiet about?” Lily asked.

  I told her.

  “Well, you can’t idealize the past too much,” she said thoughtfully. “Being a woman was dangerous. Being gay was illegal.”

  “So I guess it’s better to be alive now.”

  “Is it, though?” Lily smiled sadly. “I mean, compared to a hundred years ago, sure. But I have this awful suspicion that, ever since the election, we’ve started going backward.”

  “I don’t get how so many people can be filled with so much hatred,” I said. “What happened?”

  “It’s horrible,” Lily said, her dark eyes serious. “My mom’s glued to the news cycle. She’s in online groups now where she calls Congress and writes letters and does action items, and she’s never cared about politics in her life.”

  “I think my grandparents voted for Trump,” I confessed. “They say stuff sometimes.”

  Lily made a sympathetic face.

  “Last fall, when I came out,” she said. “The world felt safe. Like we were on the cusp of this amazing revolution. But all of that’s gone now. I leapt, and while I was still falling, strangers took away my soft place to land.”

  That was exactly how losing my mom felt. Like she was my safe space, and I had nothing to worry about so long as she was around, because of course she loved and accepted me. And now that she was gone, I didn’t know what to do.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So am I,” Lily said. “But not sorry enough to take that rainbow pin off my bag. I’m not ashamed of myself, I’m ashamed that the world isn’t good enough yet. Because it should be.”

  “It really should,” I said.

  We were both quiet a moment, but it was a good silence, a contemplative kind. I felt so awful, hearing Lily talk like this. Having her think that I wasn’t feeling any of these things too, and not knowing how to tell her that I was.

  So I stared at the costumes, these gorgeous relics from a world that had been harder to live in than the one we lived in now. From a time that I knew was objectively worse, but had painted in my head as something so much better.

  “Can you imagine living in a world full of such beautiful things?” I asked, staring at the costumes.

  “We still do,” Lily said, turning toward me, her eyes bright and wonderful and still a little sad. “You just have to look for them.”

  And I thought, I want to. God, I want to. I thought, My favorite thing in this museum is you.

  I wished I could save this moment forever. This small nothing of a moment: Lily and me gazing at turn-of-the-century costumes on a cloudy fall afternoon. The soft, tender expression she had when she saw something beautiful. The way she brushed my arm or my hand with hers, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and not an impossible source of electricity.

  Every time she did it, I died slightly. Because I didn’t just want her to like me as a friend. The way I felt about her was bigge
r. More. The way I felt was everything, and it left me spinning just to think about it.

  So I tried not to. I tried to think about the art, and to drift over, away, to be less obvious. To chat with Ryland or Lily or even Adrian, who seemed delighted to meet another photography enthusiast. After we started talking equipment, Ryland shot me a thumbs-up, because we’d bored Mabel so much that she’d gone to hang with him and Danica instead.

  On the drive home, as we sped down the 405, we passed the line where Los Angeles turned into Orange County.

  “Orange Curtain!” Lily yelled. She was driving, her hair whipping wildly in the wind.

  “Booooo!” everyone yelled back.

  I was stuck in the back with Mabel while Ryland rode shotgun.

  “Orange Curtain?” I asked.

  And so Ryland explained.

  “It’s like the Iron Curtain,” he said. “With Capitalist Europe on one side, Communist Europe on the other.”

  “Except it’s urban liberals on one side, and suburban conservatives on the other,” Mabel said with a sigh.

  After that, the mood was pretty much dead. Lily turned up the music, and we passed the next few freeway exits listening to Troye Sivan and not saying anything.

  And I thought about what Lily had said in the museum, about losing her soft place to land. About how she didn’t regret coming out, despite the world changing around her into a less accepting place. I wasn’t like that. Even with a soft place to land, I’d still been hiding. And now, keeping parts of myself hidden was so second nature that I couldn’t even be real with the one person who would understand. Lily looked at me and saw this illusion, this outline. But really, it was all just smoke and mirrors.

  When I got up to my room, I had an email from Adrian on my student account.

  These came out so dope, he wrote.

  Attached were the photos he’d taken of us.

  The ones of Lily and me together. He’d done something with his settings. Made everything brighter and dreamier, until the whole world went out of focus except for the two of us. We were standing between the lampposts, her in the light and me in the shadows. Her head was tilted back, and she was laughing. And I was reaching toward her, in awe.