by Misa Sugiura
We’re just down the street from the museum when Willow stops dead and clutches my arm.
“What? What is it?” I ask, but then I see it.
It’s Dela. And . . . is that . . . Arden?
11
I ONLY KNOW HER FROM THE PHOTOS ON WILLOW’S phone, but one look at Willow’s horror-struck face confirms my suspicion. Arden and Dela are framed by the front doors of the museum, face-to-face. Arden is smiling down at Dela, who also appears to be . . . smiling? I didn’t know that was a thing she did.
“But what . . . but how . . .” I don’t even know what questions to ask.
Willow is also struggling to put a sentence together. “What the . . . How could she . . . Already?” Her chest is heaving and her hands, which are now digging into my arm quite painfully, are shaking.
“Maybe they’re just friends?” I venture.
Willow gives me A Look. “Seriously?”
They do seem to be standing a little too close to be just friends. And there does seem to be a lot of flirty body language going on.
“Will you be my girlfriend?”
WHAT? “Your . . . your . . . ,” I stammer. Is she . . . could she be . . . right now?
Her grip on my arm tightens even more and she gives it a little shake. “Please? It wouldn’t be for real. Just so that Arden—” Right on cue, Arden turns her head, and I see the expressions cross her face one by one as if in slow motion: recognition, surprise, guilt, false cheer. She looks at Dela, and the guilt returns to her face for a second—a barely noticeable grimace—before she flashes a big smile at us. Willow squeezes again. “Please.”
My first thought is Duh. Of course she didn’t mean for real, you numbskull. My second thought is She has really strong hands.
“Oh, right! Absolutely. Sure!” I say. “I totally knew you didn’t mean for real.”
Willow sighs and releases her death grip on my arm. “Thank you.” Then she lowers her hand to mine and clasps it loosely as we move forward. “Just act natural.”
I close my fingers around hers and try to push down the disappointment—and the terror—roiling inside me. Ignore it. Act natural. I can do this. I have to do this. Besides, it’s a good thing. We’re holding hands, aren’t we? I’ll focus on that, and on taking care of Willow. I’ll pretend she really does want to be my girlfriend. It’s fine. I’m fine.
Meanwhile, Dela is openly staring at us as if she can’t quite believe her eyes. I bet she doesn’t think that Willow and I belong together. Well, I don’t care what she thinks. She’s rude and pretentious and I’m just going to ignore her.
“Hi there, you!” Willow tosses her hair and takes one of the stances she showed me during our photo shoot, one foot slightly forward, back hip jutted out. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Well,” she corrects herself, “not after recent events, anyway.” Ouch. She may look soft and ethereal, but she has a core of pure, razor-sharp steel. But there’s an undercurrent of pain in her voice, too. It makes me feel protective.
“Yeah, I didn’t expect to come here, but Dela and I got to talking about her installation, and I just had to see it,” says Arden in a voice like warm smoke and honey. She’s just as beautiful in person as she is in Willow’s photographs: soft and curvy all over, from the mass of tight curls in her side-parted hair, to her round brown face, to her dimpled hands, her strong thighs, and her perfectly pedicured, rounded toenails. She looks at Dela, and then back at Willow and me, her face a portrait of sympathy. “I’m sorry. I hope this isn’t too weird.” Wow, she is good. If I hadn’t seen the guilt on her face a moment ago, I would never guess that she was faking, too.
“No, it’s totally fine,” says Willow, even though it’s clearly not. And then, “Oh! I haven’t introduced you to Nozomi. How rude of me. Nozomi, this is Arden, my um . . . well. You know. And Arden, this is Nozomi.” She makes a show of smiling at me adoringly and looking down at our intertwined fingers and going, oh, oops! and letting go, as if she’d forgotten we were holding hands and suddenly realized that it might make Arden uncomfortable. She’s so good, I almost believe her.
“Hi,” I say. “Nice to meet you.” I consider adding, I’ve heard a lot about you, but I don’t have the nerve.
“Nice to meet you, too,” says Arden, and adds, “I’ve heard a lot about you,” because she evidently does have the nerve. She grins at Dela, whose expression changes from brazenly curious to acutely embarrassed; she shifts her feet and refuses to meet my eye, and it’s my turn to stare. What has she been saying about me? It can’t have been anything good.
“Well! This was fun. But I have to get back to work, so . . .” Willow glides through the space between Dela and Arden, forcing them to step farther apart, and I trail after her, trying to emulate her icy dignity. She pauses at the door and takes my hand in hers again. “Bye, you two!” she trills as we pass through. Once we’re inside, she murmurs, “Can you just walk with me to the gift shop?”
I am one hundred percent in favor of walking with Willow to the gift shop. Especially when she takes my hand again. We walk slowly, all the way across the atrium, through the gift shop, and into the tiny office at the back, where she drops my hand and collapses against the closed door.
“She told me there wasn’t anyone else. Of course there was someone else!” Willow moans. She tells me that Dela and Arden go to the same arts magnet school, where Dela focuses on visual arts and Arden studies drama. The two of them spent hours working together on a collaborative final project for one of their classes. “She told me about her! How could I have missed it? How could I have been so stupid?”
She still loves Arden, I think, crestfallen. Although, no kidding.
“And she works here! At the museum!” Willow’s grief flows seamlessly into outrage as she speaks. “That means I’m going to have to see them together. What the fuck! How dare she.”
“Are we sure they’re together?” I can’t help asking one more time.
“If they aren’t together yet, they will be soon. Why else would she have come here?”
“But wouldn’t she want to avoid you if she’s dating someone new?”
“You don’t know Arden,” says Willow darkly. “She wants everyone to love her. She wants everyone to be her friend.”
“Even the girl she dumped on their one-year anniversary?”
“Especially the girl she dumped on their one-year anniversary. It proves that she’s evolved.” Willow groans and closes her eyes. “I hate this so much.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I tell her. “You’re strong and you’re resilient. Look, you ran into your ex and her new . . .” I don’t want to say girlfriend, since who knows? “. . . and Dela. And you made it through! I was in awe of how smooth you were, really.”
“But that was only because you were there with me,” she protests.
“And I’ll keep being here whenever you need me.”
She nods her thanks and we lapse into silence for a while. Then she turns to me, a strange light in her eyes. “How would you feel if we kept pretending to be girlfriends?”
“Kept pretending . . .” I can’t finish the sentence. It’s not quite where I’d hoped our social media romance would lead.
“If we go back to normal tomorrow, they’ll know today was an act. Dela would figure it out for sure, since she’s here every day.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It wouldn’t have to be for very long.” Willow starts pacing back and forth across the cramped space, newly energized. “Just a few weeks. Just long enough to make Arden believe that we’re for real.”
“For real,” I echo.
“Exactly,” she says, barely listening to me. “We wouldn’t have to go on dates or anything. We could just keep posting pictures . . . Except could you come with me to Arden’s birthday party? And the gala! And maybe we could even do a double date at some point!”
“A double date?” I’m scrambling so hard to keep up that it seems I’ve lost the brain power to do anything but re
peat what she says.
“Just enough to make her see what she’s missing—” She gasps. “Do you think it might make her want me back? Doesn’t that happen all the time? The one person who’s afraid of commitment breaks up and leaves, and then they realize what they’ve lost, and they beg their ex to get back together!”
“Back together?” Stop, Nozomi!
“It happens all the time in movies. And in real life! It happened to my cousin.”
“It did?”
“Uh-huh. His girlfriend wanted to get married, and he didn’t, so they broke up, and he came to his senses and begged her to take him back, and now they’re married!” Willow smiles exultantly. “So, will you help me?” she asks.
When the fog finally clears, I am conflicted. On the one hand, I realize, she’s essentially asking me to play a character in a movie she’s going to produce for Arden’s benefit in order to win her back.
On the other hand, my character would be Willow’s Girlfriend. I’d be going on dates with her. I’d be the one who helps her through her heartache. I’d be an accomplice. A trusted ally. And as long as we’re talking about movies, in every rom-com I’ve ever seen, the fake girlfriend becomes the real girlfriend in the end. Every. Single. Time. That’s pretty good odds, if you ask me.
I take a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Willow pumps her fists in triumph. “Yes! Oh, thank you! You’re so sweet—I knew you’d say yes. I bet you’d make an amazing girlfriend in real life,” she says, and she stops and smiles at me, whereupon I promptly melt into a puddle of goo.
“Ha-ha! What are you talking about?” I manage, despite my gooification.
“No, for real, though. I’ve been such a mess, and you’ve totally had my back. I’m so grateful,” she says. “Truly.” She smiles at me again, and for one breathless moment, I forget myself and almost close my eyes for a kiss, but she throws her arms around me and hugs me, whispering, “Thanks for being a friend.”
Our first hug. As friends.
I sink into it and breathe in the sweet, citrusy scent of her shampoo. I think I might pass out, though whether it’s from hope or disappointment, I can’t tell.
12
IN A PERFECT WORLD, I WOULD NEVER HAVE TO deal with Dela again. She’d stay in the courtyard and glare at people and build her art installation with her dad, and I would write about the museum collection and pretend to date Willow (and later, please-oh-please, actually date Willow), and our paths would never cross. But Stephen asked me this morning to stay after work and help Dela with her boxes.
“Do I have to?” I whined. “Why can’t Max do it?” I rarely get whiny with Stephen, but I was hoping to spend my afternoon savoring the comments on my First Date with Willow at the Fairmont post and maybe going to Sephora to look for eye shadow.
“Please, Zozo.”
So now I have to stay late so I can work with a surly porcupine who hates me and almost certainly doesn’t want my help. This should be fun.
I find Dela across the street, wrestling a huge cardboard box out of the back of her van. Being a kind and thoughtful (and okay, conscripted) person, I ask if I can help.
“No, thanks,” she says, and grimaces, as if talking to me is causing her actual, physical pain.
“You sure? I really don’t mind,” I say, but she shakes her head.
“I’m fine.”
“I can hold the door for you,” I offer, and when she doesn’t answer, I finally say, “Look. I’m just trying to help you. This box is obviously too big for you to carry all by yourself, so why don’t I just—”
“I said I’m fine.” She butts in front of me and pushes the door closed with her hip.
“Did you remember to lock the front doors?” I ask. “I could do that for you.”
Dela pauses for a moment and sighs before putting the box down, saying, “Don’t touch it.” Then she adds as an afterthought, “Please.”
“What’s inside?”
“Nothing. Just don’t touch it, okay?” Cursing and muttering, she walks past me toward the front of the van as if I’m not even there.
How rude.
I look at the box. The flaps at the top are arranged so that each corner is tucked under the flap on the adjoining side—but one of the corners has come loose. Someone was clearly in a hurry, or maybe it got jostled in the van.
Hmm. I hear Dela’s voice near the front of the van—from the sound of it, she’s on the phone. “I don’t know where it is, Dad,” she’s saying. “You’re the one who was in charge of loading it.”
I call out, “You want to give me the keys so I can lock the back?”
“No! Just stay with the box,” she snaps.
I don’t know what Arden sees in her.
I listen to Dela argue with her dad. I look at the box. What could be so top secret that she won’t tell me what’s inside? Human skulls, maybe. Black-market bat wings. I wonder if Arden knows. I bet she does. How come Arden gets to know what’s in the box and I don’t? I bet Dela thinks I wouldn’t understand it. I bet she thinks I’m not smart enough. Well, she’s wrong. After all, contrary to what she may think, I’ve actually studied art. And am I the Digital Archive Intern, or am I not? You could even say it’s my job to know what’s inside that box.
There’s nothing wrong with pulling on that loose flap and taking one tiny little peek. I’ll tuck it right back in afterward. She’ll never know.
I have no idea what I thought I’d find, but I am definitely not prepared for the colorful chaos of a thousand origami cranes and butterflies. Intrigued, I pluck out a crane and hold it in my hand. It’s perfect. Delicately balanced and precisely folded, it looks ready to take flight. How odd. It feels like the exact antithesis of Dela, with her big black boots and perma-scowl. I lean around the corner of the van to see if I can catch a glimpse of her, trying to find some visual connection between the whimsical contents of the box, and the dour girl sitting in the front seat of the van.
“Yeah,” Dela is saying. “Okay, fine, then.” Her voice has the sound of someone about to hang up, so I drop the crane back into the box and try to fold the flap back under. But it’s trickier than I anticipated, and as I struggle, the other flaps come loose, and then I hear the van door slam, the keys jingle, and Dela’s voice saying, “I’ll see you in a minute. Bye.”
Shit. In a panic, I consider my options: Run away? She’ll see me and figure it out. Hide behind the box? What am I, a toddler? Under the van? Not enough space, plus—gross. Maybe I can blame someone else? A sneak attack from a notorious box-opening menace prowling the streets?
“Hey!” Dela has rounded the corner of the van. What do I do? What do I say? In the face of her fury, I surrender my last remaining shred of rational thought, pick up the box, and begin walking across the street. If I can just get this inside the building, everything will be all right, is what’s going through my head. I will have helped her. It will all be fine.
The box is light, but it’s huge and awkward and I realize almost immediately that I can’t see my feet; a calmer me might reconsider the wisdom of my plan at this point, but panic-mode me is fully committed. I can hear Dela yelling at me, but it does nothing to make me stop. If anything, it makes me walk faster.
I’m about halfway across the street when the box begins to slide out of my grasp. I try to hoick it up to readjust it, but it goes all crooked and tips over slightly, and then the wind picks up, and cranes and butterflies begin spilling out of the top and flying down the street.
I’m dimly aware of Dela still shouting at me, but all that matters is the voice in my head saying keep going, keep going, and then my foot catches on something and I’m falling, and there’s a screech of tires and for one terrifying moment I’m sure I’m going to feel a car slam into me and hurl me ten feet into the air—but what I feel instead is the box collapsing beneath me as I land on it with a whump.
I lie there for a moment, trying to catch my breath as my heart attempts to bang a hole right through my
chest. I’m breathing. My heart is going. Which means I’m alive. That’s good. I look in the direction of the tire screech, ready to reassure the driver who’s probably leaped out to see if I’m okay, but all I see is a garbage truck rounding the corner, and a few pedestrians craning their necks at me from the sidewalk, as if they’re trying to decide whether I’m in enough distress for them to come out and help me.
So not a near-death experience, then.
Slowly, I pick myself up and survey the damage, and—oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no. This is not good.
The box has a me-sized dent mashed into it, and the force of impact has whooshed most of the origami forms onto the street. I scrabble at them, frantically trying to sweep everything into a pile, but at that moment, the garbage truck groans past and all the cranes and butterflies whirl up and tumble away from me, sucked into its wake. I pick up the ruined box and a few sad, squashed cranes trickle out.
This is very, very bad.
I stand still for a moment, partly because my body seems to have turned to lead, and partly because I’m afraid to turn around and look at Dela. I really don’t want to see what this has done to her. She already hates me so much.
Finally, I force myself to face her. She’s standing motionless, her face stricken, staring first at the escaping origami forms and then at the crushed box in my hands, as if she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. I have this bizarre sensation that the two of us are trapped in this wretched moment while the rest of the world trundles along, blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding here on the street. I wonder hazily if I can rewind my life back to the moment just before I decided to open the box.
And then she starts screaming at me, time lurches forward again, and reality comes crashing back.