I listened, and they spent at least as much time explaining context to me as they did talking to each other. It was like getting caught up on a television show I had missed three seasons of.
“Claire is an incredible pianist. Beautiful.”
“Kitty would beat every school record we have if she would just try out for the team.”
“Claire won a piano competition for all of eastern Virginia last year. But I can’t listen to Beethoven any more. Not like he was big on my rotation anyway.”
“Kitty gets up to run in the morning all by herself. Because she wants to.”
“Sam’s history teacher is really into hosting events where you have to dress up like famous historical figures. We think he does Civil War reenactments on weekends.”
I recognized the rhythm. It was friendly and it was also showing off. Look how well we know each other. In Kitty and Claire’s case, Look how well we love each other. Jess and I would do this to strangers at parties sometimes, but never to people at school. With someone you saw every day, the danger of inviting them into your friendship was too great. Banter like this could make a person feel included.
After the bell rang, I texted Jess. people here are not 100% terrible. I had a good lunch! She responded a few minutes later, so I had to pull my phone out of my pocket secretly while my math teacher had her back turned. good!!! she said. I swear to god if you replace me, though… To which I responded, of course, never.
We talked on the phone that night, which she generally disliked, but—
“I’m doing this for you,” she said, her voice bright and fuzzy over the miles. “I hate talking on the phone, but I love you.”
“I love you, too. Let me tell you about my photography class.”
“Great, and let me tell you about Patrick’s new car, because God knows it’s the only thing I’ve been hearing about for the past week. It’s his grandparents’ used minivan. How much time can we spend discussing it? And yet he will not shut up.”
I explained the photography and the cold and the lack of coffee and the strangeness of living with Oma. I complained about Ellie, who was sitting beside me on the floor while I talked to Jess, and about Ellie’s fur, which thinly coated every upholstered surface.
I mentioned Sam and Kitty and Claire, but when Jess went off on a tangent about her parents’ wildly inconsistent disciplinary methods—grounding, except when she could negotiate it, and taking her phone but then giving it back—I didn’t pull the conversation back to my new friends. After I hung up and turned over in the dark, I still wasn’t sure why. Maybe I didn’t want to make her jealous. Or maybe I was worried that she would find fault in them from afar, and I would need to back away from them as quickly as I had approached.
* * *
The next day, I forgot my physics book, so I went back to the condo to pick it up and eat my lunch there alone. I made a silent pact with myself to never forget a book again. Not only was it freezing, but once I got home, Eleanor Roosevelt followed me everywhere, begging for treats, unused to having people at home during the day. The sensation of being home in the middle of a school day was equally peculiar to me, and I wandered around the few rooms with the dog at my feet, opening cupboards and flipping light switches on and off.
I got back to school with a few minutes to spare before my next class, and Kitty waved at me in the hall. “Claire made me stay outside for twelve minutes today,” she told me in a low voice. “It was terrible.”
“I sympathize,” I said. “I had to run back home and grab a book. Wind was in my face both ways somehow. At least it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow.” The weather forecast had predicted a tiny upswing in temperature and clearer skies.
“Thank God,” she said. “Actually, you know what—” For a moment, she looked unsure of something, and then she shook her head as if to clear it. “Yeah, Claire won’t mind. Do you want to get brunch with us tomorrow? We’re going to Harold’s. Celebrate the first weekend of the New Year, et cetera.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude.”
“Yes, definitely,” she said, sounding much more certain. “Claire and I specifically have a New Year’s resolution to make some new friends. See you at noon?”
I laughed. “In that case, yes.” I wondered briefly why the resolution was necessary, not entirely sold on being a project. But I couldn’t fill a whole weekend’s worth of silence with Oma, just the two of us in a home tailored for one. At least now I had one thing to do on Saturday.
The rest of my classes that day were difficult enough that I didn’t have time to dwell on whether Claire and Kitty really wanted me to hang out with them. I was behind the curve in Spanish and had trouble understanding the way my new math teacher taught precalculus, though I had been doing well in precalc at Greenmont. In physics, instead of getting into our groups, we had a long and complex lecture. I shouldn’t have worried about filling time with Oma. I would need to spend most of the weekend catching up.
On the walk back home, the sun sat low and bright in the sky, glittering off the river and the tops of parked cars. The air felt infinitesimally better, the start of the warm front the news had promised. I opened the gate and paused. Half of the empty courtyard was yellow and sparkling in the sunlight, the other half shadowed and gray. It was beautiful, like a garden in a storybook. A concrete bench sat in the middle, split in two by the sun.
Erica had said, “It doesn’t matter what you take pictures of for this week’s homework. It can be anything that catches your eye.” I pulled out my camera from where I had tucked it at the bottom of my bag the day before. I lifted it to my eye and moved the dials in the ways I had learned, but depending on where I pointed it, the light meter told me it was either too bright or too dark. Areas of high contrast can be difficult to capture, my textbook had said. I got as close as I could to the center, chose the side with the light, and snapped.
Six
“But…surely it couldn’t be…”
“Yes. The gardener was his half brother.”
“Which means…”
“Which means motive, Matilde. Motive enough to kill.”
On-screen, Matilde staggered back, and Oma murmured, “I knew it.”
It was Friday, and we were watching a twentieth-century British crime drama, which was, I had learned, Oma’s favorite genre of television. I was not opposed to it. At home, I generally watched whatever the twins did, which meant either action movies or weird, emotional cartoons. Murder at the Manor was a welcome break.
I was also texting Jess, who was with Ethan and Patrick at a belated New Year’s party at Melanie Lane’s house. According to Ethan, it was better I wasn’t there.
I hate every single person in this room, he said to me.
I WISH YOU WERE HEREEEEEEEE, popped up a message from Jess simultaneously.
I really wish I was there, I said to both of them in separate messages.
you don’t, I promise, Ethan typed back quickly. Jess didn’t answer. I pictured them. They would be on either side of Patrick, Jess pressing her body into him from the right. She would be laughing, her drink clutched precariously between her thumb and middle finger, going joke for joke with the other people in their circle. Ethan would be on Patrick’s left. He’d be standing back from the group, staring at his phone, brushing his dark hair away from his eyes. In addition to texting me, he was probably texting his friends from Eagle Scout camp while ignoring the rest of the room.
I did not miss Patrick. But I missed Ethan. When Patrick and Jess had gotten together, I had considered the idea of a crush on Ethan, but it had never fully materialized. Patrick and Jess had liked each other instantly; as soon as Jess brought him to lunch one day in our second semester of sophomore year, I knew they would date. I couldn’t understand what she saw in him, but it was clear that no number of gentle hints about Patrick’s lack of personality would ma
ke a difference to their love.
Ethan Martinez had tagged along to our cafeteria table that day, more earnest and not as cute. A good guy, though. A nice guy with actual interests. He was on the swim team, had decent taste in books, and understood math better than anyone I knew. He and Patrick had been best friends since they were five. With Jess and Patrick connecting us, we spent enough time together that we grew pretty close. I would have happily dated him except that I didn’t want to. I suspected he felt the same way about me.
Jess, however, desperately wanted us to get together. I think she liked the idea of true double dates instead of what we did when the four of us hung out now—namely, the two of them hanging all over each other while Ethan and I sat on opposite ends of the couch. We never talked about it as a group. But when it was just me and Jess, we talked of nothing else.
“He’s into you,” Jess would protest for the millionth time. I was sure this wasn’t true, but she made up signs from whole cloth. He asked me if I was cold on the first chilly day of autumn. He told me he liked my haircut. Hanging out at Patrick’s house on a Saturday night, he let me choose the movie. “You just have to give him a signal.”
“If he’s getting a signal that I don’t like him that way, that is accurate,” I told her.
“But he’s so great.”
“You date him, then,” I’d retort, and she would give me a look, and the topic would change.
Lord knows what kinds of conversations Ethan was having with Patrick. Sometimes I would catch Ethan’s eye and try to communicate wordlessly: I’m sorry. We can be friends. This is good the way it is. Maybe the message got through, because he never asked me out. But Jess also never stopped trying. Until we got caught at the dance, and then we both forgot all about Ethan in favor of the larger crisis.
Now, the credits scrolled on Murder at the Manor, and Jess and Ethan both went quiet on my phone. Maybe someone was proposing a game. Or making a scene. I felt a pang of longing and nostalgia for the kind of party they were at right now. I had mostly hated those parties. They were loud and boring, either too crowded or too empty, and thrown by people, sometimes older people, whom Jess knew through someone else. I had always stood in the corner or waited outside, looking at my phone until we left.
At the same time, though, I had liked being there with Jess. I liked her looking around the room and seeing all these people, strangers or people we knew from school behaving like strangers. And I loved the moment when she turned to me and said, “Fuck this. Let’s go home.”
The next episode started. Oma sighed in satisfaction, paused the show, and got up.
“Another episode?” she asked.
I checked my phone: after 9:00 p.m. “I can’t,” I said. “I told Mom and Dad I’d call them tonight. But you can go ahead without me.”
“Oh, no, I don’t want to deprive you of discovering what happens to the duke. I think we’re going to get the full story next episode. I’ll just read a bit.”
I had lived with Oma for a week now, and I had not yet learned how to tell when she was joking. I was deeply afraid that the answer was never. I carried my plate to the kitchen and washed it, went to my room, and shut the door.
Waiting for my parents to pick up, I tried to decide what to tell them, how to tell it. I had silently admitted to myself that Virginia was not as bad as I had expected it to be. But the whole week had been diluted with the cold, consistent tension of being in a place that was not home, with quiet Oma and her singular space, with strange new people and no Jess. I had gotten myself in trouble. I had no illusions about my expulsion; it had been my fault. But my parents had chosen to send me away. I didn’t want them to think that I was happy.
My phone dinged, and my parents’ pixelated faces appeared, crowded in the center of the screen. They waved, fingers creeping in from the edges and wiggling.
“Hi, June,” Dad said, cheerful, efficient.
“Hi!” yelled Mom. Her voice got louder whenever she talked on the phone or video chatted, for reasons she had never been able to explain.
“Hi,” I said.
“How’s it going?”
“Fine. I guess.” I looked at myself in the bottom corner of the screen. My nose looked large and red. I angled the camera up a little and farther away from the lamplight. Better. I waited.
“So,” Mom pressed, “living with Oma is okay so far? Do you think you’ll do well in your classes?”
“Yeah. It’s all fine.”
“You’re not behind in anything?” Dad asked. “Oma told us that you should be able to pick up right where you left off, but…”
“Mostly, yeah. It’s hard to get used to new teachers. And new teaching styles. My math teacher is awful. But I’m not behind. Ahead, if anything.” I omitted history and Spanish. I would do some flash cards and extra reading, and by the time our first quizzes rolled around, I’d be fine.
“Good,” Mom said, ignoring my flat voice. “Are you—”
The call froze. I sat up in bed and scooted forward, and my parents’ faces appeared again.
“Sorry, call cut out. What did you say?”
“I asked, do you want to plan a weekend visit in February, or do you want to wait to come home until spring break in March?”
I hesitated, and Dad jumped in. “Obviously, we can’t come up and get you every weekend, and your mother and I agree that it’s best for you to stay there and get settled through January, but after that…I mean, we’d have to coordinate around the twins’ schedules, but—”
“Spring break is fine.” I wanted to be home every weekend. I wanted to be home now. But I knew what the twins’ schedules looked like, and between them and me, I knew who would come first. The negotiations would take time and phone calls and angst, and they might not even go my way. Spring break, at least, was an entire week.
“Okay,” Mom said. Her smile wobbled and glimmered on the screen. “Well, we miss you tons.”
“Tons,” Dad echoed.
I focused on my own face rather than looking at theirs. One long second passed, two, three. “I miss—” I started to say, but Mom spoke at the same time.
“We have some news here,” she said. “Candace, do you want to—”
The camera shook, briefly pointed up at the ceiling, and centered again on my sister’s beaming face. “I got the lead in the middle school musical!” she shrieked. “A seventh grader never gets it, and I got it. And I get two solos.”
“And—” came Bryan’s voice. Another camera shake, and he joined the frame. “I got reelected to second semester student council! And in an even better position than secretary! Vice president. I’m gonna try for president next year.”
I could feel the energy through the screen, and I smiled even as a lump grew in my throat. “Y’all are the best,” I said. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks,” they chorused.
“What weekend are you coming back again?” Bryan chimed in.
“Yeah, we miss you,” Candace said. “Are you gonna come back for the musical?”
“You gotta tell me when it is first,” I teased. The lump grew, pressure, pain.
“Umm…” She paused. “It’s April sometime. I don’t know. Mom is gonna tell you. Here.”
“Love you!” Bryan yelled from off-screen as the phone was passed from hand to hand.
“Yeah, love you!” Candace screeched. At moments like this, it was hard to remember that she had the best singing voice I’d ever heard. But she did—clear and perfect as a spring day, ever since she was little. I could barely carry a tune, and Mom and Dad didn’t have any musical talent whatsoever, but Candace was better than the girls we saw in singing competitions on TV, better than the radio.
My parents’ faces appeared again, but they were still looking at the twins, who were doing something on the other side of the room. I could hear their mutters and giggle
s in the background, the familiar, half-spoken twin language I had known for most of my life without ever being a part of it. I felt like I was going to vomit.
“Isn’t that amazing?” Mom said, grinning, her eyes focused above the camera. “I’m so proud.”
“I’m glad they’re having a good start to the year,” I said, smooth and friendly. I didn’t want to fight with my parents. I didn’t even want to be on the phone anymore.
“Do you have plans tonight?” Dad asked, finally looking at me again. There was a little tension in the question. At home, on a Friday, I would have had plans.
“No,” I said. “Just staying in with Oma. Watching TV.”
It was the answer he was looking for. He smiled.
“We’re glad you’re doing well, too,” Mom said.
Off-screen, Candace yelled, “Mom, you said you’d play a game with us!”
“Sorry,” Mom said and laughed. “Pun intended. Seems like we’ve gotta go.”
“Talk soon, June,” Dad said, hitting the rhyme like he did every time we ended a phone conversation.
“Okay,” I said.
“I love you,” they said, one after the other.
“Love you, too,” I answered, and the screen went dark.
So proud. They had not asked if I missed being home. We’ve got some news here. They didn’t ask about my photography class, though I was sure they had seen it on my schedule, and they knew it would be something new for me. Of course they made sure I was still making good grades—which they had no reason to doubt; I always, always had—but they didn’t ask if I was happy. They must have known I wasn’t.
I fell back on my bed, my head resting on the edge of the unfamiliar pillow, and stared at the ceiling. A hairline crack in the plaster whispered its way out from the wall. Outside the window, the air was black and quiet. I suddenly needed to be out of the apartment. I got up, startling Eleanor Roosevelt, who had snuck in with me and was dozing next to my bed.
She followed me into the living room, where Oma had resettled herself in her chair and opened up a book. Oma looked up when I came in.
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