by E. Lockhart
Mikey’s work came easy for him, and Adelaide didn’t want to tell him she had failed multiple essays. And her roommate/best friend, Stacey S, worked incredibly hard. Adelaide didn’t want to tell her about slacking off. Stacey could be very judgy.
In the end, Adelaide was put on academic probation for spring term, which meant she had to get her marks up or be kicked out, basically.
But spring term, things were even worse with Toby. Adelaide’s sleep got worse, too, and her relationship with Mikey was more intense than ever.
Although Levi sat down with her to go over her English papers, she still got a D in Global Studies for handing in half-finished work or no work at all. She flat-out failed the Set Design class. She just didn’t do the final project, which was building a model.
Every day, she told herself she’d start work on it.
Every day, she felt overwhelmed. Or
ashamed. Or
she let herself be distracted by Mikey, by
a Lego diorama she was building, or by
Stacey S, who had interesting romantic entanglements and fashion questions.
It didn’t help that you were supposed to build your set model in Kaspian-Lee’s studio classroom, where all the supplies were. When Adelaide went in there, people were putting finishing touches on their projects, while she hadn’t even started. And when the
shame washed over her, she responded by
sparkling. She had, for example, talked at length to Mikey’s suitemate Aldrich Nguyen, a pimply fencer whose design was both wobbly and frankly half-assed but was nearly finished. She distracted Aldrich for twenty minutes, convincing him to come to the vending machines with her, making jokes, using the photocopier to make pictures of her face and suggesting he use the copies as wallpaper for his design.
But when she sat down to attempt work, back came the shame, filling the room like smoke, and Adelaide’s impulse was to flee. She went to see Mikey, who made her feel beautiful and clever.
Adelaide knew she was wasting this super-fancy education, at least in part, and she knew she was messing up the grades she needed to get into college, but she did not know how to make herself do anything different. The pull of distraction, and distraction by Mikey in particular, was irresistible.
Her favorite part of being a student at Alabaster was the Factory Center for Contemporary Arts. The Factory was technically one town over from Alabaster, a twenty-minute bike ride away. Students could sign out of campus and visit the museum for free. The art history and studio art classes were always going there.
It was built on the grounds of what used to be a paper mill and only featured art made by living artists. Most of it was extremely weird. You entered through an imposing iron gate, and once you were inside, there was a group of mammoth brick buildings. Most of the grounds were concrete, with sculptures scattered about.
Adelaide loved the Factory’s large artificial spaces. They tapped something in her. When she stood in those rooms, her world
expanded. Beyond
Toby’s illness and
Mikey’s sweetness, beyond
her classes and her family.
She felt awe. That’s what it was. Human beings were capable of
creating beauty and strangeness far beyond what nature offered. Their minds could be
weird and grandiose. They could conceive of
more than what was in front of them,
more than facts they’d learned.
Example: An exhibit of dioramas, each about the size of a couch. Each glass diorama box contained a silver mobile home. Underneath the mobile homes, you saw the earth in a cross-section.
Look closely, and in that earth, you saw a rabbit’s burrow and the roots of trees.
There were worms in the dirt.
In one diorama, the earth hid a dinosaur skeleton.
In another, a dead body.
The artist’s name was Teagan Rabinowitz.
Adelaide left that room feeling different about her feet on the ground.
Another example: A room of skeletons. They were bone white and displayed like exhibits in a natural history museum. But they were the skeletons of monsters. There was a minotaur. A griffin. Two dragons. A three-headed dog.
Alongside each one was a card. The one next to the griffin read “Unearthed in a tar pit outside San Diego, California, in 1952 by Gerald Booker and his archeological team. Estimated date of death: 1451. Note the incomplete left wing.”
The art was attributed to the Society for the Excavation and Preservation of Biological Wonders.
The exhibit gave Adelaide a thrill. Maybe such things are real.
There’s no proof they aren’t.
After Jack left the dog run, Adelaide went home and took a shower. She went grocery shopping in her father’s car. Unloading everything into the fridge, she made herself two sandwiches of toasted bread and strawberry jam. She drank a can of seltzer.
Then she looked for Jack. She collected EllaBella from Byrd’s house and walked the old dog around, hopeful of running into him. The Alabaster campus was largely empty. The town was pretty small. Maybe she’d feel Jack’s presence inside a building, pulling her toward him. Or maybe he’d be looking for her.
Then she remembered he had access to the art studio. Adelaide tied EllaBella up outside Blitzer Hall and climbed the stairs.
* * *
The studio was on the top floor. It had sloping ceilings and smelled of paint and turpentine. Because it was summer, most of the easels leaned against the walls. The tables were covered with canvas tarps. Adelaide found Jack sitting there, halfway illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the window.
“What’s up.” Jack said it like a statement.
“Oh, hi. I was just— I need some paint. For my Set Design project.”
“In the closet.”
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s okay. Closet’s right over there.”
Adelaide took a jar of white paint and a jar of black, not needing either of them. She wanted to talk to him, to be witty, to get him to go somewhere with her, to make him flirt with her again. Somehow, her charm would not turn on. She couldn’t always access it.
“See you around,” she said. Stupidly. Ineffectually.
“Bye then,” said Jack.
* * *
Adelaide found Jack sitting there, in the art studio, halfway illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the windows.
“What’s up.” Jack said it like a statement.
“I came by to see you,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d want to get lunch.” She had already eaten two jam sandwiches, but it didn’t matter.
“Can’t. Sorry. I have plans.”
“You do?”
“Yup.” He wasn’t looking at her. He was still painting, leaning forward to see exactly where his brush was touching the canvas.
“You could at least look at me,” she said, feeling a rush of anger that was more at Mikey than at Jack. “You could at least see me, here, talking to you.”
He looked up at her. “I just met you this morning,” he said. “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t even remember your name.”
* * *
“I came by to see you,” Adelaide said. “I thought maybe you’d want to get lunch.” She wasn’t hungry, but it didn’t matter.
“I could eat.”
It wasn’t an enthusiastic yes. Adelaide stood in the doorway, uncertain of her welcome. “There’s a diner with a bacon and egg sandwich,” she said. “They wrap it in foil.”
Jack got off his stool and came over. His backpack was on a table by the door. “Sure, if it’s wrapped in foil, I’m there.”
“Or we could do the cafeteria,” she said.
“No, no. Foil all the way.”
* * *
She stood outside the art studio, looking through the window in the door.
Jack sat in there, half-lit by a shaft of sunlight from the window, painting. Adelaide was filled with longing—to touch him, to take care of him, to learn his secrets. His deep brown eyes with their thick, silky lashes—she wanted them to look at her rather than at the painting. They were filled with a complexity that made her curious about him in a way she’d never been with Mikey. Mikey never seemed to have secrets, or pain; he wasn’t an artist.
Well, he was a photographer, but he didn’t make things from nothing, from the inside of his mysterious head. The way Jack did. The way Jack was doing right now.
His concentration was so complete, so beautiful, she couldn’t interrupt it. Also, she felt shy.
Instead of talking to him, she went downstairs and walked with EllaBella down to the lake. It was nice to have the dog for company.
* * *
—
Two days after Adelaide met Jack, philosophers began creeping onto campus. There were signs posted on noticeboards in nearly every building hallway. They read “Welcome to the Illogic of the Multiverse, a Philosophy Intensive.”
Alabaster Preparatory Academy didn’t run summer programs. It rented its facilities out for groups. College students were coming for a six-week summer program about, apparently, the multiverse. The flyers announced course locations, meeting schedules, film series, and panel discussions.
The philosophers lugged duffel bags and coffeemakers. They were only nineteen or twenty years old, but they all had the serious look of people who choose to spend their summer off from college doing more college. Some faculty arrived too, professorial types with black adult suitcases on rollers, sweating in the heat as they lugged their bags upstairs.
Adelaide was buying a Diet Coke at the vending machine when a philosopher stopped to ask questions. She was a willowy young woman, maybe twenty, with brown skin and very thick dark hair that looked like it had been straightened. She was dressed all in black—a menswear jacket, black jeans, black T-shirt—with brightly colored running shoes on her feet. She asked for directions to the campus gymnasium, and then to the post office.
They got to talking. Her name was Perla Izad. She was a student at Wash U in St. Louis, studying philosophy of mind—“Perception. Mental function. Consciousness. That kind of thing.” She had plantar fasciitis. She didn’t have a boyfriend. Well, not anymore. Did the gymnasium have a pool? Was there a bar nearby?
Yes. And Adelaide didn’t know.
How was the cafeteria food?
There was unlimited ranch dressing.
Where did Adelaide want to go to college?
Ugh. A touchy subject.
Was she interested in philosophy?
Maybe. Adelaide didn’t know.
Perla explained multiverse this way: “It’s a beautiful day, right?”
“Right.”
“And we can agree upon this true statement: It’s not raining. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“Well. That statement implies that sometimes, in our world, it does rain. Right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And we can also say truthfully: It isn’t raining blobs of peach Jell-O today.”
“Yup.”
“Okay, then what we have implied is, It could have rained blobs of peach Jell-O, yeah? And even though there is obviously no way it rains blobs of Jell-O in our world, the fact that we can say it at all implies the existence of parallel universes where it does rain peach Jell-O, other possible worlds,” said Perla. “There’s got to be another possible world for every way that our world might have been but isn’t. That’s what our symposium is on. It’s an idea from this guy David Lewis,” she explained. “It’s controversial. But whatever. Everything in philosophy is controversial.”
Then she asked whether there was a sauna. And whether there was air-conditioning in the library. And did Adelaide want to go to a party? Because Perla was going to a party that night.
“What kind of party?”
“A philosophy party. Kicking off the intensive.” It was at the home of Martin Schlegel, a classics teacher at Alabaster. Perla had been promised “a cheese plate of surpassing beauty” by someone who knew what was up with the catering. “I’m nervous,” she said. “About the party. Is my hair all right? I hate humidity.”
“Your hair is spectacular.”
“It’s not the kind of party where I relax and act like my real self. It’s the kind of party where I watch my alcohol intake and try to talk to professors.”
“That doesn’t sound like a party at all.”
“The food will be good. You should come,” Perla said. “It’ll be nice to have a friendly face there.”
Adelaide said yes. There wasn’t anything else to do, and she wanted to stop thinking about Mikey Double L.
Also, she was flattered that an actual college woman would notice her. Even someone as desperate as Perla.
* * *
—
They met up that evening in front of Wren Hall, Adelaide’s old dormitory. Perla was holding a paper map of the campus and carrying her jacket, which was too warm for the heat of the evening.
They walked past the chapel, through an avenue of trees, and through the brick gateway that marked the edge of the campus. Two blocks later, they arrived at Mr. Schlegel’s. Adelaide had never had him for class, since he taught Greek, but her father had become friendly with him. Maybe not actual friends, but she knew Levi had invited Schlegel and Kaspian-Lee to his home for dinner.
The downstairs of the house was jam-packed with people. They were standing on the porch, sitting on the railing and in the porch swing, leaning forward and gesticulating with their hands. They talked low and intensely, without the squeals or big laughs that Adelaide thought of as the noise of parties.
B-Cake was tied by her leash to a post. She lay sleeping on the lawn, her belly exposed.
“I know that dog,” Adelaide said to Perla. She bent down and stroked B-Cake’s awkward pink belly. The dog lifted her head slightly. Oh, it’s you, B-Cake said. Yeah, I thought you might be at this party.
They went inside. Perla disappeared immediately into the crowd. Adelaide got trapped in the foyer by Sunny Kaspian-Lee.
The teacher wore a large navy garment that was more triangular than dress-shaped, tiny white socks, and brown men’s oxfords. Her black hair was cut sharp at the chin. There were lines in her forehead. She was shorter than Adelaide by several inches. “Adelaide Buchwald, you know you owe me a model.” She clutched Adelaide’s arm and spoke with a serious intensity.
Ugh. Of course Adelaide knew. She had the D in Global and the failing grade in Set Design.
“Come with me now,” said Kaspian-Lee. “We’ll discuss.”
Adelaide had already met with her teachers, and for Global, there was nothing she could do. She had to take the grade. But Kaspian-Lee had given her an extension, since she’d had an A in Design for the Theater, fall term. And if Adelaide got a B or higher on the final set design project, she wouldn’t be kicked out of Alabaster.
Her parents had been weirdly calm on the subject of her grades. Her father did say, in his gentle way, “Do you want to go back and live with Mom and Toby? Maybe this is your way of telling me you don’t want to be at Alabaster.”
But Adelaide did want to be at Alabaster. Mikey was there. And she loved the freedom of living in the residence halls. Also, she didn’t want to go to Baltimore. It was too intense and suffocating.
Her father said softly, “You do know Alabaster’s not free, right? It’s reduced tuition, and they take it out of my salary.”
Adelaide knew. She was ashamed. But Levi didn’t yell or say how disappointed he was. He just asked if she thought she could complete the necessary work over the summer.
She told him yes.
The assignment was to plan a set for Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, then to build a set model for it, then defend the model verbally, to the teacher, in a project-based assessment. That is, Kaspian-Lee would quiz Adelaide about why she’d done what she’d done, and Adelaide needed to be able to explain it. Adelaide could use the studio classroom over the summer.
Now Kaspian-Lee walked Adelaide through the party to the kitchen, where the countertops were covered in wine bottles. She refilled her cup, which was made of red plastic. “Have you read the play?”
“Of course.” Adelaide had only read the first five pages. She knew it took place in a motel room.
“You have to get on it,” said Kaspian-Lee. “I say this with respect. Why would you fail my class? You are very capable.”
“Thank you.”
“You measure correctly. Almost nobody measures correctly. And your glue is neat. I say this to encourage you. You simply have to stop mooning and force yourself to do this project.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“This is my lover’s house,” said Kaspian-Lee, opening the freezer. “I am entitled to go in here. I’m not being rude.” She took out some ice. “Let’s get cheese before it’s gone. Look, people have decimated the Brie. They don’t know how to cut it properly, these philosophers.”
“How are you supposed to cut it?”
“It should always form a triangle. You don’t chop off the point. Here, eat this, it’s a Morbier. Have you had a Morbier? It’s one of the best-looking cheeses. And look, fig jam. The philosophers have ruined that, too.”
Adelaide ate the Morbier and Kaspian-Lee turned abruptly to a tall, heavy young man, only about seventeen, wearing a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up. “Will you play now?” she asked him.