You Don’t Know Me but I Know You

by Rebecca Barrow

  They pulled up outside Jen’s church: a pretty, understated white building with flowers creeping around the doors and only a small sign out front. Inside, the place bustled with activity, and they found their way through it all to the sign-in table where Jen’s mom sat.

  “Hi, girls,” she said, white teeth shining behind her glossy-red lipstick. “Thank you so much for coming today.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Archer.” Audrey wrote her name at the bottom of the sign-in sheet, and Rose’s beneath it. “We’re happy to help out. I don’t know how much help I’m actually going to be since I can’t really knit, but I’m willing to try.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Mrs. Archer said. “It’s not as difficult as it looks, and even if you only get one square done, that’ll be great.” She handed them each a set of needles, a small ball of yarn, and a pair of scissors. “Jen will get you all set up—she’s over by the piano with María. Have fun!”

  “Thanks,” Audrey said, and she jabbed Rose in the side as they headed off in search of their friends. “Rose, would it kill you to say hi?”

  Rose twirled one knitting needle between her fingers. “She scares me.”

  “Everyone’s mom scares you,” Audrey said. “Except for mine. But she’s boss, so that’s understandable.”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. “I feel like I’m always one wrong word away from getting in trouble. Like they’re going to ground me or take away my allowance.”

  Audrey spotted María waving and raised her hand. “That’s ridiculous. Your parents don’t even ground you.”

  Rose snorted. “Yeah, they’d have to actually be at home to keep me there.”

  “Hey!” Jen said. She and María were set up in the corner—Jen had orange yarn wrapped around her arm and orange fuzz in her hair, and María looked thoroughly annoyed already. “You’re late.”

  “Barely,” Audrey said. “But we’re here, and we’re willing.”

  “Very willing,” Rose said. “One thing: what exactly is this for, again?”

  “The women’s refuge and the NICU at the hospital,” Jen explained. “They always need blankets and baby things. All we have to do is knit a bunch of little squares, and then they’ll get put together into bigger pieces later. It’s really easy.”

  María let out a frustrated groan and dropped her needles with a clatter. “Easy? You’re such a liar.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jen said as Audrey bent to pick up María’s needles. “Look, let’s go through it again. You all follow what I’m doing, okay?”

  Audrey and Rose pulled a couple of chairs over to complete the circle. Audrey carefully watched Jen’s hands as she wound a length of gray yarn around her hand and slipped one needle through it, saying things like “cast on” and “stocking stitch” as she lifted and twisted the yarn around, a neat row of stitches emerging before Audrey’s eyes. She made it look simple, and at first Audrey couldn’t figure out how to keep her stitches from sliding off and unraveling, but after an hour or so she got the hang of it. Her first couple of squares came out misshapen—“Psychedelic knitwear,” Rose called it—but eventually they evened out, and it was kind of hypnotic: that clicking of the needles, the rhythmic pulling and twisting of the yarn, the hum of talk all through the room. They took a break for lunch and walked across the street for pizza, where they pulled apart the events of last night’s party over double mushroom and pepperoni. When María brought up the Aisha Forrester sighting, Rose only rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. “You know what’s more important than that? I heard someone”—here she elbowed Jen—“was getting high in the bathroom with Lilia George.”

  “I took one drag,” Jen said. “I hardly think that counts as getting high. Plus, I don’t think I like pot. It tastes weird.”

  María hooked a caramel wave behind her ear. “Did you know they’re doing clinical trials in Washington to see if pot can be used to treat schizophrenia?”

  Audrey tipped her head to the side and stared at María. “No, Ree. Only you would know that. I read Elle, not New Scientist.”

  María stuck out her tongue as Jen and Rose laughed. “Sorry for finding medical innovations fascinating,” she quipped, and then, “I read Elle, too.”

  “Of course,” Rose said. “That’s why you have the best hair on the debate team.”

  María smoothed her hands over her black Peter Pan–collared dress—with the pink-framed glasses, she was the perfect Mexican American Wednesday Addams–Barbie hybrid. “Duh.”

  They headed back to the church then and worked for another few hours, until a guy in a Dead Kennedys shirt stood up in the middle of the room and told everybody to start piecing the squares together.

  Needle-and-thread sewing Audrey could do, so she was put to work with Jen stitching baby blankets while Rose and María helped clean up. It was fun, and when the whole thing began to wind down, Audrey was impressed with what they’d managed to make. They packed the blankets into boxes and loaded them into the back of a rainbow-painted van, and when it was time to leave, Jen hugged them all. “Thanks for doing this,” she said, clasping her hands together in front of her chest. “It means a lot to me.”

  “You mean a lot to us,” Audrey said. “Anytime you need us, we’re there. And now we know how to knit!”

  “Speak for yourself,” María said, picking a thread from her jacket sleeve. “Next time let’s cook something. I’m real good at weighing shit out.”

  Jen laughed. “Sure thing. See you on Monday.”

  Audrey and Rose waved as they got into Rose’s car, and Rose cranked the heating. “We should actually volunteer at the women’s refuge,” she said. “This was good.”

  “Yeah.” Audrey flipped down the visor and inspected her lipstick in the mirror. “Let’s check it out.”

  Rose turned off the engine. “I can’t believe she was there last night.”

  Audrey looked at Rose sideways, measuring what to say next. She didn’t want to scare Rose off, now that she actually wanted to talk. Sometimes Rose volunteered secrets, in the middle of the night, whispered between movie previews, or out of the blue like this. These moments were delicate—Audrey had to handle them carefully. Mostly Audrey pulled the confessions out, word by slow word. She had a lot of Rose locked away in her head. That was okay: better in Audrey than in Rose, stacking up until it all spilled over, a waterfall of anger and truth. “You mean Aisha?”

  Rose stared straight ahead at the white walls of the church. “Yeah,” she said, an exhalation. “Aisha.”

  “I’m sorry, Rose. I don’t think Cooper invited her, if that helps.”

  “It’s not fair.” Rose drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, her painted nails flashing in the setting sunlight. “Isn’t one of the rules of breaking up that you stay away from each other’s places? How come she’s allowed to come to my friends’ parties, listen to my friends’ band, walk around like she did absolutely nothing wrong?” She laughed, a soft but bitter sound. “I guess maybe the breakup rules only apply in the case of an actual breakup. Two people fooling around for a few months doesn’t exactly qualify as a couple, does it? And you can’t break up if you were never together in the first place.”

  Audrey flipped the mirror away and twisted as much as she could to face Rose. “I don’t care about the ‘breakup rules’ or how ‘official’ you two were. She treated you like shit, and you deserved way better than that.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes!”

  “We never even went on a real date. We would just go to the drive-through, and if she wanted to be romantic, she’d buy me a sundae.” Rose shook her head. “Do you think I’ll ever find somebody who, like . . . loves me or whatever?”

  “Duh, of course you will,” Audrey said. “We’re seventeen. You have your whole entire life to find someone who, like, loves you or whatever.”

  That got a laugh out of her. “Don’t make fun of me,” Rose said, fighting a smile. “It’s not nice.”

  “I’m being deadly
serious.” Audrey reached across the gear stick and put her hand on Rose’s wrist. “Listen, someday—tomorrow, or ten years from now, or maybe even thirty—you’re going to meet someone who’s totally head over heels in love with you. And whoever that person is—boy, girl, someone somewhere in between—they’ll be lucky to have you.”

  “Don’t make me barf,” Rose said drily, but her cheeks were pink, and she’d given up on fighting that smile.

  Audrey pulled Rose’s lipstick out of her bag. “And who knows?” She uncapped it and touched up the faded lines on her bottom lip without looking. “Maybe they’ll even take you inside the restaurant.”

  “Jerk.” Rose flipped Audrey the bird and then cranked the engine again. “You think you’re so funny, don’t you?”

  THREE

  Audrey chopped the green peppers the way Adam had shown her, careful with the sharp blade of the knife (she’d had more than enough accidents carving clay in art class not to be). The cat wound himself around her ankles while she worked. “Hey, Marmalade. You hungry, boy?”

  “He’s always hungry,” Julian said from his position at the stove next to Adam. “He’s a chunk.”

  “A cute little chunk,” Audrey said. “Adam, is this enough?”

  Adam left his sauce long enough to inspect Audrey’s work. “Plenty,” he said. “Okay, toss ’em in with the onions.”

  Audrey added the peppers to the pan of onions and fragrant garlic Julian was stirring. They were Adam’s assistants for the night, helping him cook the sticky glazed chicken and sautéed potatoes with spinach that Audrey loved. She put her hands on Julian’s waist and stood on tiptoes to peer over his shoulder at the pans there. “What next?”

  When dinner was ready, Audrey set the table and called her mom down from her office. Laura descended the stairs dressed in slouchy draped pants and a T-shirt declaring her Queen of the Desert. “Dinner smells amazing,” she said, delving into the cabinets and coming out with a bottle of wine. “I’m starved! Let’s eat.”

  They arranged themselves around the table in their by-now familiar formation: Audrey with her back to the stove, next to Adam and across from Julian, with Laura on his left.

  “Julian, pass the Parmesan?” Adam asked. “Thanks.”

  Audrey took two pieces of garlic bread from the bowl in the middle. “Mom, how’s the show prep going?”

  Her mom made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Slow. And painful. The script is beautiful, so evocative, but trying to get the cast to stop overacting it is killing me.”

  “Didn’t we see that other one by the same writer?” Adam said. “The one with the marigolds and the dead father?”

  “No, that’s a different company,” her mom said. “This play is so heart wrenching, honestly—you’ll see when it’s ready. If we’re ever ready. I swear to God, if I have to talk to them one more time about being understated, I’m going to cry.”

  Audrey shook her head. “This is why I can’t watch movies with you—you analyze them to death.”

  “That’s what happens when you make an art your life,” Laura said. “You can’t see it any other way.”

  Audrey rolled her eyes but smiled. “Whatever.”

  Her mom was right, she knew: she had a lifetime as an actress to back her up. Laura Vale Spencer had once upon a time been a Hollywood darling, the girl who left school to become a sociopathic killer, a runaway mother, a queen. Upstairs, copies of her films slept tucked inside storage boxes, next to Audrey’s childhood books (for her future grandchildren, Laura said) and props she’d stolen over the years. Her mom acted like those days were so long ago, like people around town didn’t still give her strange looks as she walked around the grocery store—and yeah, it’d been a few years since Laura had taken on any acting jobs, preferring to stay behind the scenes at the theater she ran now. But no matter how far away from that time it got, to Audrey, Laura was every inch the star she’d always been. Sometimes when Audrey’s friends stayed over, they’d sneak movies out of that box and revel in the sheer weirdness that was Audrey’s mom on screen, pretending to be somebody else. Audrey would find herself mouthing the lines along with her mom: What is it, Frank? You want the knife? Fine. Come and get it.

  Sometimes Audrey wondered exactly what it was that had made her mom distance herself from that world, decide to adopt a baby solo, and move to the other side of the country. She’d had a life and a career that so many people would kill for. But if Audrey ever asked, Laura would smile and say simply, “I wanted a baby so bad, and I was lucky enough to be given you. Nothing else compared to that.” Which Audrey was more than grateful for, because even though Laura was still a star to Audrey, first and foremost she was the best mom in the world.

  They talked between mouthfuls of the delicious dinner: about Julian’s band and their fund-raising for a recording session, Adam’s sister and her divorce, Laura’s plans for their first lake house vacation in the summer. These were her favorite times, sitting around with her family, so easy and simple. In the past she had looked at her friends’ families and thought how weird it must be to have so many people in your life—like Julian with his two brothers or Jen and all her many stepsiblings and -parents. Back then Audrey had only had her mom, and Marmalade, who they’d adopted from the shelter, and she’d thought that was perfect. But now it was weird to think that not so long ago it had been just the two of them—no Adam, and certainly no Julian. Not that things hadn’t felt easy and simple then, too, but . . . there was something about having these two people become part of their home that made Audrey indescribably happy. That was all.

  She chewed her food thoughtfully and scrunched up her nose. “Hey, Adam?” Audrey swallowed. Something wasn’t quite right. “Did you do something different with the sauce this time?”

  Adam shook his head. “Same as always. You saw. Why, is it not good?”

  “Tastes good to me,” her mom said, and as if to demonstrate scooped another spoonful onto her plate.

  “Huh.” Audrey scraped the tines of her fork across her plate, resulting in a hideous screeching sound. “Must be me.”

  Julian reached over, fork at the ready. “If you don’t want it . . .”

  Audrey waved him on. “Go ahead.” She poured a glass of water and then swished it around inside her mouth. This was what she got for mixing beer and cheap vodka at parties: the hell of an all-day hangover. She grimaced. When will I ever learn?

  After dinner Julian had to go to a late-night practice session, and Audrey kissed him good-bye at the front door. “See you tomorrow,” she said, touching her thumb to his deliciously full lower lip. “Try not to start any fights with Izzy, okay?”

  “I always try,” Julian said with an innocent look on his face. “What are you implying?”

  Audrey laughed and pushed him away. “Whatever. Go on—you’re going to be late.”

  “All right. Tell your mom and Adam bye for me.” He turned and ran down the steps, almost slipping but catching himself right before falling. “Love you!”

  Audrey swore under her breath, watching him right himself. What a loser. “Love you, too,” she called out.

  FOUR

  On Monday morning Audrey was in art class, planted in front of one of the shiny iMacs donated by someone’s overly generous parent. Not that she was complaining about said generosity—fancy computers equaled fancy photo-editing software, and that equaled a very satisfied Audrey. Kennedy High had slowly but surely shed its eighties’ all-sports-all-the-time skin for its current arts-heavy, creative-encouragement version. Perfect for Audrey, for Julian and his musical talents, for Rose and her dancing. Not so much for those on the AP-everything track, like María, but like she always said, the nonspeaking role in the spring play was worth it if it made her application essays look more “diverse.”

  Audrey plugged her camera into the computer, but the progress bar of her loading pictures crawled along painfully slow, and staring at it didn’t make for thrilling entertainment. She spun around on her sto
ol to see what her classmates were doing: painting (neon-bright still life), chatting (about Saturday night and who’d hooked up with whom), and sculpting (something involving clay and doll parts). Art freaks—they were the best.

  “Audrey, could I borrow you for a minute?”

  Audrey looked to her left to see her art teacher, Ms. Fitzgerald, approaching, trailed by an Asian girl with an unfamiliar face. “Sure thing.” Like Audrey would have said no—Ms. Fitz was her favorite teacher, even when she was harsh on Audrey’s photography, which was often.

  “Audrey, this is Olivia Lee.” Ms. Fitz nodded at the girl beside her, who gave Audrey the tiniest smile. “She’s joining us from . . .”

  The girl jumped in when Ms. Fitz trailed off. “Florida. Orlando.”

  “That’s right, Orlando.” The teacher looked at Audrey. “Since Olivia is new, I thought that you might be able to tell her how we do things in class and, you know, welcome her. Okay?”

  Now the girl looked at her feet, her cheeks flushing pink, and Audrey’s heart swelled. She knew what it was like to be the new girl, could remember standing by the jungle gym in too-white sneakers and tight, tiny braids at the beginning of fourth grade. There’d been a girl playing alone on the far side of the playground, skipping with muddy knees. Audrey had liked her T-shirt: blue with pink birds flying across it. When the bell rang and they filed back into the classroom, that girl found a note from Audrey on her desk and, to Audrey’s relief, responded with a gap-toothed grin. And that was how she and Rose had become Audrey-and-Rose.

  “No problem,” Audrey said, and Ms. Fitz clapped her hands together so enthusiastically that half the class looked up, which the new girl must have absolutely loved.

  “Excellent!” she said. “Okay, Olivia, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Ms. Spencer here, and if you need me for anything, don’t be afraid to come and ask.”

  Ms. Fitz turned and made her way back to the front of the classroom, the girl—Olivia—looking after her forlornly. Audrey pushed out the stool next to her, and the scraping noise it made caught Olivia’s attention. “Here, sit.” She smiled. “I’m nice. Promise.”