by Beth Turley
“You’re not much better. You have a secret too. And you.” Harlow pointed at me with her fork, eyes like wildfire, out of control. “You barely say anything.”
I stared out toward the rest of the dining room, so I wouldn’t have to watch Harlow accuse me of things I already knew. It didn’t look like a fancy restaurant anymore. The paintings and sconces on the walls were like the tacky decorations in the haunted house Franklin City sets up in the fall. I imagined cobwebs hanging off the fireplace, the host jumping out from behind the marble pillar and yelling “boo” in a monster mask.
Summer and I always do the haunted house together. We link our arms while scarecrows and zombies come to life. We had a million memories like that but they were murky now, like looking through seaweed in the water.
“But you’re the worst one, Cailin. You post pictures about how you love all this stuff but it’s not true, you’re just selling it. And you made everyone think you were torn up about falling on TV when you were glad you did.” Her voice broke on the word glad.
Cailin’s hand wrapped around her fork and her mouth opened like she was going to respond.
“Enough,” Akshita said, loudly enough to catch our attention but quiet enough to not draw the notice of the entire restaurant. “Do you think we choose Flyers who are all the same? No. We want our Flyers to be different. To have different points of view. Different experiences. Not everyone may feel the same way you do. And judging and criticizing them is not constructive.”
Harlow stared at the candle while her face turned burnt red. Her eyes pooled with tears and the sharp lines of her cheeks wobbled.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice thick.
The waiter came over again and stopped short when he took in the scene. Plates of uneaten spaghetti, the last few days shattered like pieces of glass all over the table.
“We’ll take dessert to go,” Akshita said.
I thought about Harlow’s story of the underside of a needlepoint. Maybe magazine internships are like that. Pretty and polished from the outside while covering up the ugly truth. Maybe this was the case for friendships, too.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Aftermath
The hotel room was cold from the air-conditioning, and the TV was on from before we left for dinner. Cailin’s makeup bag sat on the dresser, its colorful tubes spilling onto the wood. It was the worst kind of before and after. Before, we laughed and shared lip gloss. After, we sat in bed, quiet.
The Devil Wears Prada played on the TV.
“Imagine if Akshita went full Miranda Priestly on us,” Whitney said, and looked back and forth between the beds.
“Miranda is cutthroat but she really just has high standards,” Cailin said. She had the spare blanket from the closet wrapped around her shoulders. “My coach can be like that. It stings in the moment but makes you stronger in the end.”
On the screen Miranda’s assistant, Emily, got hit by a car. I flinched.
“Can we just go to bed?” Harlow threw the covers over her head and faced the wall.
Whitney sighed and pressed the power button on the remote. The TV screen went black before Andy could tell Emily she was taking her spot in Paris. Cailin shifted around in the other bed and mumbled “good night” into her pillow. I slowly lay down, toward the window, facing the lights outside. I tried not to smell the berry lip gloss or the slight scent of pizza from a night that wasn’t like this one. I didn’t turn back around to see all of us curled up like tiny, lonely islands.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand. I grabbed it before the sound could disturb anyone and held it close to my face. A message from Summer floated on the home screen.
I’m sorry, Elena.
I clicked the button to turn the screen black again, then put the phone facedown on the nightstand. I squeezed my eyes shut against hot tears. Before this week I would’ve told Summer that all was forgiven. But I could feel it, the way we’d changed this year, and it wouldn’t be fixed with one text. I had to talk to her about it. But how?
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Cave
James met us in front of the Tappiston the next morning. Mindy had filled up the quiet spaces during breakfast talking about our trip to the aquarium, the first item on that morning’s itinerary. We had to take the subway, and it was crowded and warm in the terminal. The halls opened up into the area for swiping MetroCards. Off to the side a woman in a long green dress and knit cap stood with a guitar. Her black hair almost touched the strings while she strummed and sang, her voice filling up the terminal. I didn’t recognize the song and I wondered if she’d written it herself.
“She’s good,” Cailin said. She was in front of me in the line to get through the turnstiles. The woman had her guitar case open in front of her, and some people put dollar bills inside.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice was almost a whisper. I wanted to stay and listen. I wanted to ask her how she was brave enough to sing when people were looking.
“Elena.” Harlow was behind me. She pointed ahead. I was holding up the line. I slid my card through the sensor and pushed through the metal bar. We walked down the platform until I couldn’t hear the singing anymore.
There were too many people on the subway for us to sit together, so we found seats spaced out from one another. I saw James move his camera around like he was trying to find an angle that would capture all of us, but he lowered it eventually, frowning at the display.
* * *
There was a section of the aquarium kept dark, and the fish tanks glowed with white-blue light. In the center was a tank made to look like a coral reef. Bright yellow flounders darted through rocks and angelfish swam, their fins like long white hair. Mindy was friends with the employee watching the touch tank and stayed to talk to him. Every few minutes he’d stop their conversation to deliver a fact about one of the animals.
“Can anyone tell me what sea cucumbers eat?” he asked. He adjusted the collar on his mustard-colored polo. Pedro was stitched into the fabric under the aquarium logo.
“Algae,” I whispered to myself. I’d learned the fact in earth science.
“What was that?” Pedro asked. I glanced around the touch tanks to find who he was talking to, but everyone else’s eyes were on me. I waited for my skin to burst into flames, my throat to squeeze so tight no words could come out. But it didn’t happen. The water in the touch tanks rippled and the lights were dark, and in my head was the yellow poster board Summer and I had put together in earth science, with facts about the sea cucumber’s diet glued onto the right side.
“Algae,” I repeated, loud enough this time for everyone to hear.
“Right.”
Pedro went back to talking to Mindy and everyone else went back to dipping their hands into the water, and nothing bad had happened because I’d spoken up. Maybe someone even knew something they hadn’t known before because of what I’d said. I wandered over to a tank of clownfish. It reminded me that soon I would be back home, and Edgar’s fish movie would be on. Things had gotten so messy here, but I wasn’t ready to leave. I heard a click and saw James nearby. He checked his camera and gave me a thumbs-up. I looked back to the fish and thought that this week away from home was a little like being in a tank. The world was starting to distort. But not in a bad way.
I walked toward the sound of Cailin’s voice. She was with Harlow in front of a tank with murky water. When I got closer, I saw a starfish pressed to a flat rock inside.
“Are you ready to stop hating me?” Cailin asked. She stared at Harlow while Harlow stared at the starfish. Neither of them seemed to notice me.
“I don’t hate you,” she answered, her voice even.
“You fully flipped out on me. I wasn’t even taking a picture of the food or the restaurant or whatever. I liked how the light looked from the candle. And now you won’t even let me explain.”
Harlow finally turned away from the tank.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I just want everyone to sto
p acting like things are so great when they’re not. I want everyone to be honest.”
“I told you all about me falling because I wanted to be honest,” Cailin said. “No one sees me as a real person anymore. I wanted you all to, at least.”
I thought about Summer. The boat launch. Antarctica.
“When you’re somewhere no one knows you, you can be anyone you want,” I said.
Cailin and Harlow turned their heads like they were just realizing I was there. The starfish slid from the rock to the black floor of the tank.
“What did you say?” Cailin asked.
I repeated it, the words Summer had said to me on the dock.
“That’s exactly how I felt. I didn’t want to come here and be Magnet. I wanted to be Cailin.”
In my head, I thought, I wish Whitney were here, so she could see the ice melt away between Cailin and Harlow. And then I realized I hadn’t seen her in a while.
“Has anyone seen Whitney?”
Cailin and Harlow shook their heads. I looked around the dark room, past the coral reef tank and the kids on summer camp field trips in matching shirts. Whitney wasn’t anywhere.
“We should find her,” I said, and the three of us split up. Cailin went to tell Mindy. I walked around the edges of the room, my eyes searching the dim lighting for Whitney’s high side ponytail, the glare from her glasses, her smile.
There was a hole cut into the wall, painted around the edge to look like a cave. A sign said kids could pass through and experience the ocean floor. The light inside was dim yellow and the carpeted floor was green. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled in.
“Whitney?” I called out softly, then listened. There were posters on the wall about different species of fish, what they ate and their methods of self-defense. I called out her name again.
I heard the sharp wheezing, her crackled voice whispering “over here.” I crawled faster, the carpet burning my knees until I found her at the curve of the tunnel in front of a poster about cuttlefish, blocky bubble letters saying they defend themselves through camouflage.
“Are you having a panic attack?”
She nodded. She had her head pressed against the wall and her eyes wide open. Her hair was in a pile on top of her head, her knees tucked into her chest.
“Everything’s okay. You’re here, at the aquarium, and everything’s fine.”
She nodded again, more frantically this time. I wondered if I should go get Mindy or James to help, but I couldn’t leave her alone.
I heard the shuffling sounds of other people crawling into the tunnel and braced myself for a flock of younger kids to race through. Whitney squeezed herself into a smaller ball, her breaths coming too quick for her to get enough air. I reached out and grabbed her hand.
“There you are,” Cailin said, a grin breaking out on her face and then disappearing. She stopped short, which made Harlow crawl into Cailin’s butt and the two of them tip into the wall.
A small, shrill laugh mixed in with Whitney’s breathing.
“What’s going on?” Harlow asked, righting herself back into a sitting position.
“I’m a tiny little fish in a giant ocean,” Whitney heaved out. Her head fell and her arms dropped to her sides. I let go of her hand. “How do I not let it swallow me up?”
I thought about the big red chair that made Whitney panic.
“You aren’t small, Whitney,” I said. “You decorate your space in the world, just like you said. And it’s as big and beautiful as the ocean.”
Harlow and Cailin nodded in agreement in the shadows.
Diagnosis: things aren’t always pretty. Or as perfect as they seem. Life has storms sometimes.
I reached out and took Whitney’s hand again. I held it tight like I had in Grand Central. Cailin and Harlow took the other, all of us connected.
Treatment: sit with the people who care about you, until it passes.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Profile
Mindy took us back to Lot 88 after the aquarium to take our picture for the cover of the magazine. I kept my eyes on Whitney while we rode the subway. After we’d all crawled out of the tunnel, Mindy was there waiting, and Whitney explained what had happened. Mindy pulled her into a hug and said what she went through was so normal, and asked if she wanted to call her parents. Whitney said no at first but changed her mind when we got outside in the sun. She called her parents by the sea lion exhibit. The rest of us stood close by. When she came back over to us, her face was calm, and she still had that peaceful look now as we took the yellow line to the studio.
We walked through the doors of Lot 88, and I noticed the construction out front was gone. Inside, the same white tarp was hung by the cameras, and the long table was set up but there were no props. Mindy brought us over to the table, and I saw it was covered in printed pictures instead. The pictures we’d taken on our first day to represent us. I wanted to close my eyes. Usually pictures showed me all the things I didn’t want to see, like the jeans I’d ripped with Summer. But these were different. My eyes didn’t go straight to my curves. They fell on my smile, on the microphone cord coiled up on the ground, on the pink skirt of the dress billowing like I was in front of a fan.
“We look happy,” Cailin said.
She sounded surprised.
“I have been happy,” I said. I looked at a picture where my eyes were sort of closed and the microphone was close to my mouth, like I’d reached the biggest part of the song.
“The whole time?” Cailin asked.
There’d been not so great parts of the week. But I’d still been excited to read the itinerary in the café every morning. I’d still felt myself crawl further out of my crab shell, inch by inch.
“The whole time,” I said.
Everyone squint-smiled down at the pictures like they were trying to see things from a new angle. At our feet a crack ran like a lightning bolt down the concrete floor. I watched Cailin take a picture of it.
“Where do you post those pictures?” I asked.
Her eyes widened and her fingers stopped moving over the screen.
“On my page,” she answered.
My chest tightened a little. The pictures I’d watched Cailin take, the ones that weren’t of her or Sunny Days Nail Polish, weren’t on her page. Not the lifeguard ring, or the forks from the restaurant, or the spot where the checkered picnic blanket turned to grass. I’d looked.
“My photography page,” she continued. She pressed the screen a few times, her mouth in a straight line and eyes focused, then turned the phone to the rest of us. “It’s called ‘The Everyday.’ No one knows about it. No one knows it’s me.”
Harlow took the phone, and Whitney and I leaned in to look over her shoulder while she scrolled. The feed had pictures of all kinds of flowers, daisies and lilies and puffy white dandelions. There were pictures of wooden fences washed in gold from sunsets. The number of followers was on top of the page—twenty-five. So much lower than the one the world knew about. Harlow clicked on the picture of the lifeguard ring, and the caption said July 12, #TheEveryday.
“They’re so good,” Whitney said.
Cailin thanked her and talked about some of her favorites, pointing to a picture of a teapot. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the screen. This was like Cailin’s own Lyric Libro. It was the way she saw the world. But in secret, so that the world couldn’t see who she really was and judge her for it. Like they did when she was on TV. Like I did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Unidentified Teen
We ate our signature half-pepperoni, half–green pepper pizza off paper towels in the hotel room that night, all four of us cross-legged on Cailin and Harlow’s bed. Harlow had brought her favorite issue of Spread Your Wings with her, the September one from two years ago, and we flipped through. The Flyers that year had gone to Rockefeller Center and a planetarium. They peered into the sky through long white telescopes. Harlow had drawn a heart next to a picture of the Flyers at t
he Donut Hole, and it reminded me so much of Summer and me scribbling on pictures and Post-its that my breath caught in my throat. Her apology text was still unanswered in my phone.
“I can’t believe we’re leaving soon,” Cailin said. She was wearing her Lone Star Elite tank top with the bow on it. Her hair was down, the red streaks glowing from the lamp next to the bed. She turned the page of the magazine. The essay section was next. It looked like the pages of a notebook, words like real handwriting between the lines. The title on top said, WHAT IT FEELS LIKE.
“I can’t believe we still have to write our essays,” Whitney replied. Her eyes scanned the words while she chewed on her bottom lip.
“Don’t remind me,” Harlow said.
We all looked at her with identical expressions. Raised eyebrows, worry lines in our foreheads.
“I thought that’s what you were most excited about. You’re going to do a piece on that vandalism in your town.” Cailin closed the magazine.
“I can’t do it.” Harlow’s voice was low. “It’s too complicated.”
I waited for the words she wasn’t saying. Words like the ones in the Ask Amelia letters.
“What’s complicated about it?” I asked. If I’d learned anything from Harlow, it was that the best way to gather information is to ask questions.
Harlow squeezed her eyes shut and dropped her head.
“He knew how much the statue meant to me,” she said to her knees.
In Central Park, Harlow said four unidentified teenagers had committed the crime. I pieced the truth together. Maybe she couldn’t name the perpetrators in her story, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know who they were.
“Your brother,” I said.
A sound like a whimper rose from Harlow’s throat.
“I heard him sneak in through his window on the night it happened, and I found the paint-stained clothes in his closet the next day.”