by Jenny Lee
Kimmie told Dustin how her mom watched Sixteen Candles while on Ambien and her imitation of her mom made Dustin laugh for the first time since he had found out he no longer had a big brother. He felt guilty for a split second, enjoying himself and having a good time when Nicholas was dead, never able to laugh again, but then he remembered his brother’s advice from his letter: life was about love, and if a hard-ass, rap-lovin’ guy like his brother could get all mushy about love, then he should definitely give it another chance himself.
And the only girl who made such a thing possible was standing before him. When she looked at him there was something in her eyes he couldn’t quite read. She paused for a second then took a deep breath. “I need to tell you something.”
“What is it?” he said, staring at Kimmie, her face a montage of guilt or shame or he didn’t know what. “It’s okay, you can tell me anything.”
He could see her gathering the courage. She hesitated then spoke: “When I was in Arizona…”
That was all she had to say before he knew exactly what it was. He had been grappling with the idea of bringing it up to her himself, but had decided against it, at least for now. “I already know what you’re going to say.”
“You do?” she asked, both hopeful and frightened.
Dustin reached into his back pocket and pulled out the letter Nicholas had written him and unfolded it. “There was one more P.S. on the letter that I didn’t read at the funeral,” he said and recited his brother’s final words aloud: “‘P.S. I met your girl Kimmie out here. What a fuckin’ small world, eh? She didn’t know I was your brother and I didn’t tell her. I don’t know why, but I didn’t. She’s a real sweetheart, a little lost, but hell, aren’t we all? Natalia said that she talked about a boy, the one that got away … and of course I thought it was the pretty-boy who stole her from you, but it wasn’t him. It was you. She said you were the smartest boy she ever met, and when Natalia asked her why she didn’t get with you she said it was because she wasn’t ready yet. Dude! You should go for it. Listen to me, I know what I’m talking about, because I’m your brother, which means some of your smarts must’ve rubbed off on me, too…’” He paused and stared at her, both their eyes glistening with tears. “But you didn’t know it was him, did you?”
Kimmie nodded. “I did, but only at the end. Do you hate me? Please don’t hate me…”
“Why would I hate you?”
“Because maybe I could have done something, told someone, gotten him help. I could have stayed, but I left. But I never saw him using, Dustin, I swear he was trying to be good. He loved Natalia. They were my friends. I feel so stupid. Please don’t hate me.”
Without even thinking, Dustin took her hands in his own and looked deeply into her eyes. “Kimmie, I tried to hate you once. It didn’t work.”
She let go of his hands and grabbed him by the face, smashing her lips into his mouth and slipping her tongue between his lips. Her eyes were closed; his eyes were wide open. He wanted to remember this moment forever, but as they kissed, he let his eyelids shut, realizing that this memory wasn’t about the image of her. It was about the sensation of her touch, her taste, her smell. In this moment, he was blind.
Later, sitting on his mother’s couch in the living room, Kimmie and Dustin watched When Harry Met Sally. He remembered how he and his dad had sat on the couch together and cried over Nicholas months ago, but where they had been sitting on opposite ends of the seven-foot couch, Dustin and Kimmie now sat in the center, her head resting on his shoulder. She was enthralled by the film. When the movie was over, Kimmie turned to him and said, “I loved it. It’s a wonderful story.”
“Yeah?” Dustin asked. “What did you like the most about it?”
“I like that they were friends first. And then they weren’t friends. And then he loved her. And then she loved him. And then he lost her, and then he realized his mistake and ran through the streets to tell her he’d made a mistake. And that it ended on New Year’s Eve because that’s when we met for the first time. You know, I’m Harry though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m the one who didn’t know what I had when it was right in front of me. I’m the one who made a mistake and let a good thing slip through my fingers.”
Dustin stared at Kimmie in the dimly lit living room. His mother had never replaced the broken lamp, even after all these months.
“I didn’t know,” Kimmie said quietly. “I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know anything back then.”
Dustin nodded slowly. “Okay, so, I’m Meg Ryan and you’re Billy Crystal? What exactly are we talking about?”
Kimmie smiled. “I’m saying I want you to ask me to go to prom with you again. Now that I’m a full-on feminist, I’d ask you myself. But it’s not my prom.”
“Kimmie,” Dustin said, hoping that there was a heaven and his brother was up above watching his little brother’s own personal rom-com movie moment, When Kimmie Met Dustin. “Will you go to prom with me?”
“Fuck yeah I will,” she said and snuggled back into him, knitting her fingers into his and clasping them tight.
She left a short while later and they made plans to go see a movie the following day. She had refused to let him walk her outside, insisting that she was a different person than she’d been before. “I’m not saying I know who I am yet,” she told him. “But I’m trying to figure it out.” After he let her out and watched her through the window getting into a cab, Dustin leaned his head against the door and, looking up at the ceiling, he spoke out loud to his brother. “I owe you one, dude. Big time.”
XX
It was the day before they were supposed to meet at the Greenwich airport to board Beatrice’s father’s recently purchased Gulfstream G500 for Coachella. The Spring Beak trip was meant as a mini reunion for the A-list dinner guests from Beatrice’s costume party. They were going to see LiviX2 perform, and they had artist VIP passes which meant they could be upfront at every performance and could travel on the secret paths in the backstage areas. Everyone was going except for Rooster, who was on a football recruiting trip.
Anna had already texted Beatrice her decision not to go; however, she didn’t put up much of a fight when her brother argued that a trip West was exactly what they needed.
“We need to make ourselves scarce,” Steven told his sister. “Who knows what shit’s going down with Mom and Dad this weekend?” After the long ice-out, Steven woke up for school to find his mother sitting on his bed. She told her son she had ended her affair with the Dude with the Dragon Tattoo and that she would confess her transgression to his father when he returned from Germany in two days. When Steven questioned why his mother would tell her husband about the affair if it was over, he was surprised to hear the reasoning behind her decision.
She explained that she had long known about her husband’s infidelities and chosen to look the other way. She kept telling herself it was something all powerful men did and that she would accept it as long as it never affected their family name. But the double standard of unfaithful men who expected their wives to be loyal had slowly started to fester within her. Time and time again she thought of confronting him but never found the strength or the courage. She went on to tell her son that she had only been unfaithful to Steven’s father with this one person, and the humiliation of being caught by her own son shamed her to no end. She was confessing to her husband as a way to start the conversation. If he wanted the freedom to keep lovers outside their marriage, then he had to grant her the same rights, or it was time to part ways.
Steven felt empathy for his mother, and though he would normally be loath to discuss his own sex life with the woman who gave birth to him, he decided perhaps his recent experience with Lolly might be helpful. “If it wasn’t for Anna convincing Lolly to forgive me, and Lolly finding it in her heart to do so, I could have grown up to be like Dad. Things between me and Loll are the best they’ve ever been. We’re really happy now.”
Steven reassured his mother that it was obvious how much his father loved her, and he was sure everything would work out. It was easy for him to say, but not as easy for him to believe. Steven wished his mother would just confront her husband about his betrayals, without telling him of her own. Steven’s father’s pride was fierce, and his Korean heritage was deeply ingrained. In Korean culture, men were held in much higher regard than women and the standards of behavior were quite different. Steven suggested they should go away for the long weekend, especially as he and Anna would be in California.
The second and more important reason Anna eventually agreed to go to Coachella was that she’d finally made up her mind what to do about Alexander and Vronsky. Alexander was now off bed rest and would be leaving for Cambridge that weekend, hoping to salvage at least a few credits for the semester. He had already enrolled in summer classes, and a private physical therapist had been hired to help him until he made a full recovery. Anna had seen Alexander only three times in the past weeks since he’d asked her to take some time to think about their relationship, and the visits had been torture for her. It didn’t help that Eleanor ambushed her each time she was leaving, demanding to know whether Anna had made up her mind yet.
Eleanor was under strict orders from her older brother to be nice to Anna, so she faked it as much as she could, but her contempt oozed out with every syllable she uttered. One time Eleanor couldn’t hold back after they had said their good-byes. “He’s T-G-F-Y,” Eleanor whispered.
Anna knew she should keep walking to her car, but she clenched her fists and turned around to confront her headband-wearing nemesis. “What was that, Eleanor?”
“Too. Good. For. You,” Eleanor repeated. “I’ve always known it. The fact that he’s willing to give you a second chance makes him a saint.”
Anna didn’t bother to respond, which she knew would leave Eleanor twisting in the wind, worried that Anna would tell Alexander on her. But when she got into her car, her hands betrayed her as she white knuckled the steering wheel. She pulled her car over to the side of the road as soon as she was out of sight and wept. Over the last two weeks, Anna had replayed the last three years with Alexander in her mind. And though he had never been the most exciting boyfriend, he had put her on a pedestal and treated her like a queen, so her complaint list wasn’t as long as she would have liked.
Oddly, it was Eleanor’s very words that helped Anna make up her mind the next morning when she woke up. Anna didn’t agree that Alexander was too good for her, as he had flaws like everyone else. She did agree that Alexander would be anointed a saint for taking her back, and the idea of being the girlfriend of a saint made her want to fill her pockets with rocks and walk into a river like Virginia Woolf. It was trying enough to be the girlfriend of the favorite son of Greenwich, so why would she want to be the girlfriend of the Saint of Greenwich?
After her last midterm, Anna drove over to tell Alexander her decision. He took the news calmly and admitted he hadn’t been holding out much hope for a reconciliation. She told him she hoped one day he’d forgive her for her behavior, but she also wanted to thank him for pushing her to take the necessary time to really think about what she wanted for her life. “I’m going to see what it’s like to be Anna K. for a while with no added labels,” she said. “I don’t want my name to be associated with a boy. I’m going to spend some time alone.”
When she spoke these words, she meant them. But she also knew that she was ready to see Vronsky again. She had missed him terribly. If they decided to start dating, then that would be fine, too, but she wasn’t going to be “Vronsky’s girlfriend.” If she had learned anything from sitting in a closet listening to Kimmie go off on him for how he’d treated her, it was that Vronsky was not ready to be her or anyone else’s boyfriend yet.
The separation from Vronsky had been good for her. It cleared her mind and body from the overwhelming feelings she had been suffering during their secret affair. She had spent the time catching up on her studies, catching up on sleep, and hanging out with Dustin, who always made her feel like being the person she wanted to be. Of course, there were a million times she wanted to text Vronsky, or call him, or even drive to the city in the middle of the night to watch him sleep, but she didn’t do it. Each day that passed got a little easier, the physical withdrawal symptoms lessening, though it was impossible for her to stop thinking of him. Because her feelings for him stayed true, she felt certain she was truly in love for the first time in her life, and she wanted to see what happened once they were able to spend some unadulterated time together.
She decided not to reach out to Vronsky and let him know she’d broken up with Alexander but would instead give herself another day or two of boy-free drama. She’d share her news on the plane to Coachella. A musical festival on the other side of the country seemed like the perfect place to start off her new life as a single girl who could dance with or kiss any boy she chose, though there was only one boy with whom she’d wanted to do either of those things. Anna asked Steven if he had convinced Dustin to come along as well, but her brother said he felt it was too soon for him to leave his mom. “Not to worry, Dustin won’t be alone. Kimmie showed up on the seventh day of shivah after we left, and the two of them have been spending some time together.”
Anna felt an incredible rush of warmth at this news. Perhaps something good would rise out of the ashes of Nicholas’s death after all. The coincidence of Kimmie spending time with Nicholas and his girlfriend in the weeks before his untimely death, as well as the letter that Nicholas had written to Dustin, had inspired Anna and played an influential part in her decision-making process. She believed love was a power greater than all else, and everyone who was under its spell had no choice but to be beholden to its capricious and magical whimsy.
Anna had a selfish interest, too, in rooting for Kimmie and Dustin. If she ever decided to start to date Vronsky, it would be far less awkward now that Kimmie and Dustin were together. As she finished packing her suitcase for Coachella, Anna felt a spark of hope within her that perhaps everything was going to work out for everyone after all.
XXI
Vronsky asked Beatrice to let Anna know he was going to Coachella but he’d fly back for her at a moment’s notice. Beatrice rolled her eyes and told her cousin this was the last time she would get involved with them. In her entire life, she had never grown weary of “the drama,” but this was getting a little ridiculous. Their sordid affair and subsequent separation wasn’t just bumming him out, it was bumming Beatrice out, too, which frankly was just unacceptable.
Beatrice arrived at the plane early, wanting to make sure it was properly stocked with the food and beverages she had special-ordered for her friends. She loved California and wanted everyone to get in the right mood for their four-day holiday in Indio hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite. Beatrice was bored of the East Coast’s usual suspects and was itching to pry salacious la-la land gossip from the pretty people of the West Coast.
When Vronsky and Claudine arrived, Beatrice was in a fine mood and happy to see her mopey-faced cousin looking better than the last time she saw him. But she was far more excited to meet his traveling companion. When Vronsky introduced his cousin to Claudine, she realized she had met her once before when their families traveled from Vienna to Paris on the VS Orient Express when they were little kids. Claudine was two years younger than her and had been going through an un-fun awkward phase that only made Beatrice’s blossoming beauty more apparent, which in turn made Beatrice like Claudine immediately. Now years later, Claudine walked onto the plane and was totally unrecognizable. All remnants of her awkward gangliness were gone, replaced by curves that made the teenager look even older than Beatrice. Claudine displayed her ample assets in a way that only a Parisian woman could, with a
voluptuousness as elegant as it was enticing.
Vronsky had no interest in the bait his mother had graciously laid at his feet. But even he had not been completely immune to Claudine’s ample attributes. The French girl was more than happy to be dispatched to America in Geneviève’s husband’s plane to distract Geneviève’s love-stricken son from the girl who had abandoned him in the wasteland of her indecision. Claudine was certain she’d be successful, for no boy had ever been able to resist her charms. But Claudine had another agenda for her trip as well. Her sights were set on an even more delectable trophy than the boy known as Count Vronsky.
Adaka, DandyZ, and Clement arrived next, which meant they were waiting for only Murf, Steven, and Lolly to complete their party. Beatrice received a text from Steven that they were five minutes away and that Anna had decided to come after all. Bea wasn’t unhappy over Anna’s change of heart, not like she would have been fifteen minutes ago. Now she was pleased. Beatrice had sensed Claudine’s interest in her from the moment Claudine hugged her and whispered in her ear that she had been counting down the days until she saw her again. “I’ve never forgotten you letting me practice the proper way to kiss on your wrist,” Claudine said, not caring that Beatrice didn’t remember.
Now Steven and Lolly walked up the stairs of the private plane with Anna trailing behind them. Beatrice blocked Vronsky’s view of the door while Claudine taught him how the Parisians made their martinis. As soon as Anna entered, smiling with anticipation of seeing Vronsky, Beatrice moved out of the way just in time for her to witness him eating the cherry that Claudine was dangling above his mouth. Bea loved her front-row seat to the lightning storm of jealousy that flashed in Anna’s eyes, believing for a second that Anna would turn and run. Instead Anna called out to Claudine, “Think you can make me one of those, too?”
At the sound of Anna’s voice, Vronsky promptly choked on his cherry. Anna watched as Claudine lifted Vronsky out of his seat, clutching him from behind and performing the Heimlich maneuver until the cherry shot out of Vronsky’s mouth and landed at Anna’s feet. Claudine rubbed Vronsky’s back and said, “There you go, strapping boy. The big bad cherry will not hurt you any longer,” to which Anna stifled a laugh, her moment of jealousy eclipsed by gratitude that this voluptuous French girl had saved her love from a most embarrassing fate.
