by Phoebe North
Sophie, too, seemed to be threadless.
“Maybe you’d find it if you tried,” I told her, wrestling the bong from her hands. She gave me a withering look. At first, she seemed to enjoy my company, but by the middle of the first semester, I could tell that her affection for me was growing thin. When she asked for a room change for next semester, it was both no surprise, and no great loss.
In the end, I shouldn’t have worried about my narrative. It would find me, like it always did.
It started on a cold day in early November. I was coming back from the library, books tucked under my arm, my face buried in the scratchy synthetic fabric of my scarf, when I noticed a light flickering in a nearby barn. I knew there were classes in the outbuildings sometimes. Parties, too. Hampden was the kind of place where both parts of college life ran together.
I wandered in. There, at the center of it, a half dozen small, groaning space heaters painted directly on her, was a naked woman. She was posing in a crouch, as though she was looking at something on the floor. All around her was a ring of easels and students, drawing her in silence.
“What is this?” I asked someone, watching over his shoulder as he sketched her in charcoal. I’d known there were art classes at Hampden, but I’d avoided them so far. They reminded me too acutely of the life I might have had, had I gone to art school. But right now, I couldn’t resist. The proportions he was drawing were all wrong, tits too full, stomach too narrow. I could have done it better.
“Life drawing,” he said.
“Anyone can join?” I asked, which was a stupid question, because at Hampden, anyone could join anything.
“Yeah,” he said. “You just have to kick in for her sitting fee.”
I looked at her, considering. She had black hair, shorn close. Her dark skin looked almost purple in the dim barn light. I had the sudden urge to sit down and draw her, a flare of desire that was different from anything I had felt in years.
Winter Watcher, I thought, then shook the idea away. I’d come to Hampden looking for Winter Watcher girls, of course, but instead I’d mostly only found stoners and idle rich kids who talked about John Cage and Andy Warhol like they were family friends. The kids I’d met so far weren’t wild, like I was. They weren’t anything, really. They were normal, just in different clothes.
I told myself that she was probably no different from the other girls. Still, her pose was dynamic. I wanted to draw her. Drawing would be easy. It always had been. It was the only way I could express myself without worrying about all the things I wasn’t allowed to talk about. Jamie. What had happened to him. The way I always missed him. The magic I’d grown up with, which had proven itself to be false.
I turned and left that barn. But I returned the next week, cash in one hand, book of newsprint in the other. I put the money into the coffee can by the model’s platform and set up my supplies by an easel.
I was disappointed when the model arrived and it was not the girl. Instead, it was a man, large-bellied and balding, draped in a ratty robe and wearing massive rings on both hands. When he undressed, I sighed. But I leaned forward anyway, taking the pen out from behind my ear.
It’s a funny thing about bodies. Once you’ve seen enough of them, they’re no longer scandalous. You begin to perceive the common threads between them, across gender, across age. The Y shape hidden inside the conch shell of an ear, or the strong tendons at the base of a skull. The way that flesh over a belly puckers. The vulnerability of armpits, of hands, of the soles of bare feet.
All that month, I drew bodies. When Thanksgiving break came, I decided I didn’t want to go home and instead walked across the darkening campus to the barn to join the other stragglers who were orphaned that holiday. I sketched until my hands were black with charcoal and my fingers numb, whether from cold or from effort, I couldn’t be sure. It felt almost like a return. Once, in the woods, I had entered a sacred space where there was no doubt or angst or trouble. Here, that was true, too. There was only the work.
My mother was mad at me for staying away. She called me too often, then started emailing when I didn’t return her calls right away. From the number of exclamation points in her emails I could tell that things were bad back in Wiltwyck again. And then, in early December, they came to a head. Mom called to warn me—called two dozen times to warn me. When I came home for Christmas break, Dad would be there. The entire time.
You’d think my mother would have been happy about it. They were in love again, deeper than the first time. But all she could talk about was Jamie.
“He moved in with that girl,” she told me as I sat on my dorm bed in my nest of unmade blankets.
“Shelley,” I told her. “They’ve been dating for almost two years.”
“Barely a year,” my mother said as I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling, counting the cracks. “He’s too good for her.”
I smiled wryly at that. She wasn’t wrong, but Jamie said he was happy—who were we to argue with that? Hadn’t he earned this small dose of peace?
“Jamie is complicated,” I told her. And from her aghast silence, I knew that she knew I was right.
I heard a crackle on the other end, and then Mom added this: “He told me he’s saving up money for a motorcycle. Can you believe that? He’s going to kill himself. I know it. He doesn’t care who will be hurt if we lose him again.”
It was a gut punch, the thought of losing Jamie. But I couldn’t give in to Mom’s way of thinking. There was no good that would come from traveling down that long, dark path. The only thing we could do was march on, whether into darkness or light, I couldn’t be sure.
I said all the things you’re supposed to say during a phone call like that. I told Mom he was happy, that he was living his life, that he was an adult, that we should be happy for him. I told her that I was sure he’d be responsible, with Shelley and the bike and the apartment and everything else. I told her that I’d be home soon enough, and we’d all be together at Christmas, a family.
“On Christmas, your father wants us to go to church,” she said, as if that was the worst thing of all.
“Okay, Mom,” I said gently. I wasn’t sure if the noise on the other end was laughter or tears. I hung up and left her like that, maybe laughing, maybe crying, and grabbed my portfolio, then rushed off toward the barn.
The model that night was a very old woman. Her knobby fingers were a challenge for the blue Crayola crayon that was quickly becoming my favorite medium. I tore through page after page of newsprint, each new drawing as bad as the last. And then I found a new page. Drew a skeleton. Maybe it belonged to the old woman. Maybe it belonged to someone else. Maybe it belonged to Jamie?
I saw it in my mind’s eye—my brother as a boy, surrounded by wild, dappled light. He was up in the trees. In a tree house, on a long, sunny afternoon. His shirt was off. His chest was skinny and bare. He held something in his hands. Something leggy, delicate. A daddy longlegs, the kind we used to save from the backyard blow-up pool when we were kids. There was someone else beside him, someone in shadow. Another boy, his teeth filed down to points. I began to sketch it out, and then I stopped. It was all too familiar. Where had I seen this? It must have been a story we’d told to each other once. I looked at the face of the other boy there, didn’t recognize him. Or maybe I did, and I didn’t want to admit to myself what I’d drawn. I stopped, shaking, threw my crayon down on the easel’s edge, and put my hands over my eyes. Nobody else noticed. They were too lost in their work.
I tore that page, crumpled it in my hands, then sat down and began to draw again, this time my eyes staying fixed on the old woman’s kind, wrinkled face.
42
Christmas Day, after the presents were all unwrapped, and Jamie’s girlfriend left to join her own family, and Dad and Eli went off to church, and Mom started washing the dishes too loudly in the kitchen, blasting Billie Holiday like her life depended on it, Jamie took me outside to look at his motorcycle. It was a cruiser, too big for his slight frame, an
d it had blue flames along the tank. That December was unseasonably warm, and the bike was bright and shining in the driveway, and when I touched the handlebar the rubber felt warm, too. I thought of Jamie’s hare, smiled vaguely.
“Mom wants to murder you, you know,” I said.
“Yeah,” Jamie agreed. He was sitting in the curb, looking up at me, squinting past the sunlight. There was a question on his brow. I think he wanted to see that I approved.
“She’s nice,” I said, even though the words felt lame and insufficient. I started nodding, and Jamie nodded back.
“Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot to me. I didn’t think you liked her much.”
I frowned. Then, with a laugh, I realized where the conversation had gone wrong.
“I meant the bike,” I said. “Not Shelley.”
“Oh.” Jamie looked down between his motorcycle boots. They were still new, stiff and black. He laughed a little, too, but it was dry—self-deprecating. I went and sat beside him. My hip against his hip, our four boots all lined up in a row.
“Shelley’s nice, too,” I said firmly. “If you like her, I like her.”
“She’s good to me,” he said. “I mean, what more can I ask for?”
I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for Jamie to tell me.
“Hard, sometimes, though,” he admitted. He blew out a stream of air. “That’s why I bought this bike, I think. Shelley’s not like me or you. I try to talk to her about books and stuff, and she gets mad at me. Tells me I’m trying to make her look stupid.”
“Are you?”
Jamie only snorted. He didn’t answer me, just went on. “Sometimes I feel like I just have to get out of that tiny apartment. That I just need to go, go, go. When I’m moving, it doesn’t hurt to think so much. I don’t have to worry about the things I’m not supposed to talk about. I can just fly.”
He let one hand stream out above him, made a faint soaring noise with his lips. I watched him, squinting into the sunlight.
“It’s your new Gumlea,” I said. I was speaking without thinking, and Jamie turned to look at me in surprise. His eyes, so much like mine, were wide. Like he was relieved to finally talk about Gumlea. Maybe he was.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it is.”
We both looked at his motorcycle. I wondered to myself if he’d named it, or if it was as nameless as he thought he was himself.
“What’s your Gumlea?” he asked.
“What?” I said. I couldn’t look at him anymore, could only look down at the scuffed toes of my boots. Part of me couldn’t believe we were talking about this. Finally. At long last. It felt like some kind of dream. I felt relieved, too, but I also felt terrified. Look what had happened the last time I’d been honest with Jamie. . . .
“Just what I said. What’s your Gumlea? What do you do when you need to be all by yourself?”
“Mmm,” I said slowly. “It used to be painting, or drawing, but lately—I don’t know. It kind of hasn’t been enough lately. Like no matter how hard I work, it’s not coming out the way I imagined it.”
“Yeah,” my brother said, as though he already knew how I felt about art, though we’d never talked about it and he’d never really taken interest in anything I’d created. “You know, it’s funny. I always thought that Gumlea would be your Gumlea. Like, forever.”
“What?”
“Well, you know. You always loved it so much. Making up stories. It was an escape for me, but for you—”
“I wasn’t the one making up stories,” I said swiftly. “That was you. You were the storyteller. I was the archivist.”
Jamie snorted. He stood up then and grabbed the helmet that dangled from one of the handlebars. It was kind of cheesy. Had blue flames on it, too, just like his bike.
“Yeah, I used to say that, but I don’t know if it was ever true. Your ideas were the ones that stuck. Do you remember that story you made up about Annit and the harpy massacre? When you were, what, six? So fucking dark. Just completely gruesome. I was so jealous. Tried rewriting that one six or seven times, to prove to myself that I could tell it better. Don’t think I ever did.”
He fixed his helmet down on his head. Now it really hurt to look at him. Because I didn’t believe him. I didn’t know if a single thing he was saying was true.
“That was your story,” I said. Through the narrow gap in the helmet, I could see my brother’s frowning face.
“I think I’d know if something was my story or not,” he said.
I had no idea what to say to that. I stared at him, frowning. Jamie sighed.
“Do you want to take a ride with me or not?” he asked.
I looked at the bike. I’d never ridden a motorcycle before. Part of me wanted to—but there was another part of me that felt distant and broken in that moment. Suddenly, fervently, I needed to be alone.
“No,” I said quickly. “You go. I’ll wait here for you.”
My brother shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and tipped the visor of his helmet down.
I watched from the curb as he climbed on that bike and turned it on. The buzz and stutter seemed to vibrate right down into my guts. For a moment, this felt all too familiar. This was little sister stuff, letting my mouth form a slight smile as he revved the engine, stepped on the gas, and let loose the brake. From the curb, I watched as he sped off down our road. But I only saw that with half my vision.
With the other half, the inside eye, I saw the world as Jamie might see it, a blur of winter gray and yellow-white. I felt the thrum of the engine cut through me. I felt imaginary wings unfurling, and the world fell away as I took off through the sky.
43
I came home after break to an empty dorm room, one bed stripped naked in the center. The funny thing is, I felt more comfortable this way, with Sophie gone. I could have done anything with that room. Could have pushed the beds together or bunked them, could have strung up lights all over, could have hung my drawings of naked ladies on the walls. But I didn’t. I let Sophie’s absence remain clear and conspicuous and confined myself to half a room, as if that’s all that I deserved, and maybe I thought that, deep down. After all, it’s what I had resigned myself to, for a lifetime already.
Without Sophie there was no one to sit with at meals. I told myself I didn’t care. I sat on the edges in the dining hall, doing my homework, spilling stir-fry over my books. After, I went and hid in the library just to avoid the echoing silence of my room. There was something comforting about the buzz of the lights, and the feel of the rough carpet beneath my feet. I’d go to the fiction section and pull out a novel at random and read it in one sitting. Fantasy mostly now. Stuff that reminded me of Vidya. Of Jamie. I started with Tolkien and Anthony and Jordan, authors I’d heard them talk about a long time ago. Yet whenever I put one of their books back on the shelf, I’d hear a voice in my head: You could have written that better than him. But I dismissed those thoughts. I wasn’t a writer. And I’d given up on other worlds a long, long time ago.
Soon, I moved on. Found other voices. Women’s voices. Jo Walton. Octavia Butler. Ursula Le Guin. Shirley Jackson. Margaret Atwood. Helen Oyeyemi. Joanna Russ. Kelly Link. Carmen Maria Machado. When I read their books, my body practically vibrated with pleasure. Sometimes I’d sneak them back to my dorm under my old smelly peacoat like they were delicious contraband just so I could read them over and over again.
January became February and suddenly the mild winter froze over and we were buried beneath three feet of snow. I spent most of my time either drawing or reading, and other than life drawing, I barely ever bothered going to class. I could feel how I was becoming stranger, more inwardly focused. I think other people could sense it, too. No one invited me to parties anymore. I sometimes stayed up at night texting Miranda, halfway across the country, but I didn’t want to lean on her too heavily. She was busy with school, and with LARPing with her friends.
But then one night after life drawing, a boy who I’d seen there often—dark eyes,
disheveled hair, Woody Allen glasses like a thousand other boys at Hampden—asked if I wanted to come to a party at his friend’s apartment in town.
“I’ve been watching you draw,” he told me. “You’re really good.”
As if that guaranteed that I’d be a good party companion? I bit my lip, chewing the chapped skin off it. The truth was, these days I was wary of anyone who was interested in me. I was used to being an outsider, a loner. It was a comfortable sort of solitude.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I’m gay.”
He laughed. “I am, too. I’m Petyr.”
I guess it wasn’t going to be that easy to dismiss him. Still, he had an easygoing smile, different from the guarded looks of most of the students on campus. I held out my hand, shook his. “Annie.”
“Do you have a car?”
For some reason, in that moment I thought of Jamie’s motorcycle, shining silver in the darkness of the night. I shook my head.
“Okay. I’ll drive you. If you’re down.”
I shrugged, packing my pens into my bag. It wasn’t as if I had anything better planned that night, other than tucking myself into my favorite chair in the back corner of the library with my best Thursday- night companion, Susanna Clarke. “Sure.”
We crossed the frigid campus together, our breath a fog on the air in front of us. When we reached his old heap, he threw my portfolio in the trunk, then sat in the driver’s seat to warm it up. He thawed his hands in front of the heater. I sat in the passenger’s seat, rubbing my palms together.
“You cool?” he asked. I looked at him blankly for a moment, my face feeling as if it had been cracked wide open by the cold. Then I nodded.
He reached across me and pulled a baggie out of the glove box and rolled us a joint to share.
Through the falling snow, his little heap climbed the winding road, and the night was the blinding white of headlights against an infinite darkness. Petyr played some kind of loopy hippie music, and it took me a minute to realize that it was the Beach Boys. I laughed at that, and turned the stereo louder, and when his car almost spun on the ice, I didn’t even care that we were about to die. G-d only knows . . . , I thought, but then my brain looped back on itself. G-d only knew what? But soon he swerved back onto the right side of the yellow dividing line, and the thought floated up into the endless night, and then disappeared.