by E. Lockhart
Mikey typed,
Ha!
Seriously.
Very funny. Xo
Adelaide felt dismissed. She had showed her real, disgusting situation to Mikey and he had dismissed her. Had he ever really wanted to hear the truth about her life?
* * *
Her phone pinged.
There was a text from Mikey Double L. It was a photo of them at the spring formal. Adelaide was wearing a strapless black dress and laughing so hard her gums showed. Mikey had his arms wrapped around her. They had been dancing, and he looked sweaty in his clean white shirt and green tie. But clean sweaty, like always.
A second later came another picture. From just a couple of minutes later on the same night, a selfie of the two of them kissing. Adelaide’s chin looked weird. Mikey looked hot.
And a third text:
Us.
Adelaide looked at the photos for a long time. She stood up and walked to Rabbit’s kitchen. She cleaned up the mess and all the doggie footprints. She scrubbed the stain off the couch. She got the dogs leashed and washed her hands.
Then she texted Mikey back:
There is no us anymore.
* * *
Her phone pinged.
There was a text from Mikey Double L. It was a photo.
And then another.
And a third text:
Us.
Adelaide texted him back.
Hi.
The phone rang. “I miss you,” he said when she answered.
“I miss you too.”
“I owe you seventeen apologies. I wish I could see you right now and say everything that needs saying in person. It’s so awkward on the phone.”
He could see her, of course. He was back from Puerto Rico and he lived only three hours away.
“I’m with the dogs,” she said. “There was a poop catastrophe this morning of truly epic proportions.”
“How’s that going?”
“The catastrophe? It’s nearly cleared up,” she lied. “And the dogs love me,” she said. “So that’s a plus.”
“I love you.”
“What?”
“I made a terrible mistake, breaking up with you.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Mikey, his wonderful, familiar voice in her ear. “It was just stupid. I got scared of being together all summer. Without our friends. It seemed too intense. I got home, and at first, I was relieved. But then, in Puerto Rico, all I thought about was you. I couldn’t even look at other girls.”
Adelaide was suddenly
gloriously happy. It was
terrible to be
gloriously happy that
Mikey was
sad, and
terrible even to be
gloriously happy that
Mikey loved her,
since Adelaide had been a complete failure at happiness when he didn’t love her. It was, after all, a bad idea to hinge your happiness on someone else’s feelings.
But that was just how it was. She did hinge them.
“I miss you, Adelaide,” Mikey said. “I miss you so much. Will you let me come see you?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can come see me.”
Adelaide felt clearheaded for the first time all summer.
Stacey was right. Everything about Jack was really about Mikey Double L.
And Jack was right. She had
objectified and idealized him and been weird about his physical difference and his scars and his grief.
Hadn’t seen him truly.
But that was because she was
incapable of seeing him truly, because
the person she loved was Mikey Double L.
She couldn’t wait to hear his voice in her ear and to smell his clean Mikey smell again; to feel his shoulder muscles under her hands and to look into his open face and feel happy again.
Her father said Mikey could stay with them, but he had to sleep on the living room couch. Adelaide said fine and Mikey said he had to work at the fencing camp all week but he’d arrive at the bus stop at ten p.m. on Friday.
Adelaide planned to meet him there, in front of the main campus entrance, by the fountain that displayed the unofficial school symbol, a fish statue everyone called the Guppy.
Close to ten, she walked over. She planned for Mikey to come meet the dogs right away, since she had to walk them before bed.
But Mikey wasn’t there yet. Instead, Perla Izad was sitting on the broad ledge of the fountain’s pool, talking to Oscar and Terrance.
“Good evening,” said Perla.
“Adelaide!” said Oscar. “We’ve been to the movies.”
“Hi,” Adelaide said, scanning around for Mikey. “You guys know each other?”
“We do now,” said Perla. “We met this evening at the philosophy film series.”
“It was the creepiest film,” said Terrance.
“Catherine Deneuve was good, though,” said Oscar. “Terrance and I snuck in, even though we don’t go here.”
“You didn’t sneak in,” said Perla. “The film series is open to the public.”
“I felt like we were sneaking in,” said Oscar.
“Everyone there was in college,” said Terrance. “It definitely felt weird.”
“The movie was sexist,” said Perla, “but also symphonic.”
“Symphonic, seriously?” said Oscar.
“I like big words.” Perla collapsed in giggles. Adelaide wondered if they had been smoking pot.
“I don’t think you really know what symphonic means.” Oscar turned to Adelaide. “The director was Roman Polanski. He’s a very creepy person. Except the movie was also amazing. We’re debating whether we can like it.”
“I don’t think we can, actually,” said Terrance.
“Deneuve had good hair,” said Perla. “How did she get it like that? Do you think it was a wig?”
Oscar shrugged. “I have no understanding of hair.”
“My friend is supposed to meet me here,” Adelaide said. “Did you see an Asian guy, short hair, waiting?”
“We did not,” said Terrance.
“Do you know if the bus came already?”
“We would have remembered,” said Perla. “We’ve been sitting here for, what, I think two hours? Yael was with us for a while, but she went to bed at least an hour ago.”
“Her name was Yael?” said Oscar. “I forgot her name.”
“Yes. She goes to Oberlin.”
“Ooh, I want to go to Oberlin. They have a music conservatory.”
Adelaide looked at her phone She didn’t have any texts.
She sent Mikey one:
I’m here. Where are you?
“My advice,” said Perla, “is if he makes you wait, he’s not worth waiting for.”
Terrance laughed.
“I’m worried something happened to him,” Adelaide said.
A text from Mikey pinged back.
I sent you an email earlier. Didn’t you get it?
Adelaide almost never checked her email in the summer.
She checked now.
He had emailed her this morning.
Dear Adelaide,
I’ve been up all night thinking.
I shouldn’t come visit.
I do miss you and I do have feelings for you, but I’m too confused right now. I have to sort myself out.
Mikey
Adelaide texted back:
Why would you send that by email?
And Mikey didn’t answer.
And still he didn’t answer.
She texted again:
Why? I didn’t see it till now.
Oscar, Terrance, and Perla had been talking.
“Did you get stood up?” Perla asked Adelaide.
Adelaide nodded. She bit her lip.
“Come sit with us,” said Oscar.
“Whoever it was doesn’t deserve you,” said Perla. “And the night is beautiful.”
“We have peanut M&M’s,” said Terrance. “Or Perla does.” Perla rummaged in her tote bag and pulled out a giant bag of them, half-full.
Adelaide took a couple. She concentrated on the two-part crunch between her teeth, candy coating and then peanut. She concentrated so she wouldn’t cry. “I used to wish on the green ones,” she said. “With my brother.”
“Here, let’s all get green ones, then,” said Oscar. Perla let him peer into the M&M’s. He found a green and held it up. “What do we do?”
“Don’t talk to each other when we’re chewing or our wish won’t come true,” said Adelaide.
“Wait,” said Perla. “We should all do it at once.”
“Okay,” agreed Oscar.
“Wait, I need one,” said Terrance, standing up to look in the bag.
All four of them took a moment to wish.
Adelaide wished to love someone and be loved back.
And to love someone and know that it was him she loved, not some idea of him.
Maybe that was two wishes. Maybe it was only one.
They chewed their M&M’s in silence.
Then Adelaide left them and went to take care of the dogs.
* * *
—
She brought EllaBella home last, that evening. She wandered through Mr. Byrd’s house, turning on the lights. She looked at his books. There were so many they wouldn’t fit on his shelves. They were piled on the coffee table.
The office was the biggest room in the house. EllaBella had a dog bed there, and there were free weights in the corner. There was a large framed print of a young Black man, surrounded by flowers, like an old-style portrait made modern.
Adelaide knew she shouldn’t wander around Byrd’s house this way. She just wanted to…well, see who he was. How he lived.
His bed had blue sheets and pillowcases.
The master bathroom had several different kinds of moisturizers.
She lay on his bed, on top of the blankets. The pillows were cool in their blue pillowcases.
EllaBella got up there with her. Adelaide flicked on Mr. Byrd’s television, flipping through the channels.
Adults like him probably knew how to love other people so that the other people liked it.
They didn’t talk too much. They weren’t too angry or too sad.
They were loved back, by their lovers, by their siblings.
They didn’t get overly attached to dogs who didn’t even belong to them.
Texts.
Adelaide.
Toby.
In 12-step we apologize to people we wronged while we were high.
I know. You apologized to me already.
I want to apologize again.
I was a selfish stupid horror person to you. I hope I haven’t ruined us forever, because you are my sister and I think you’re cool.
This morning I found some of the letters you wrote me when I was in rehab. And the instax photos you sent.
I never wrote you back.
It’s okay.
It was like I wasn’t even me then.
I wasn’t the werewolf, either. I was like, I don’t know, a cold rock.
Rocks cannot write postcards. Or text. They totally suck at being brothers.
So that’s what I’m sorry for.
When you were in Kingsmont, you know Mom and Dad mostly told me not to visit, right? They said, Don’t visit. That’s why I sent you mail.
But I wish I had visited.
The letters are good, actually. I’m gonna keep them till they’re super old and get them out again on your fiftieth birthday.
Weirdo.
Adelaide knew she was close to finishing the model for Kaspian-Lee, but her lighting rig had been refusing to attach. In fact, she had broken the rig at one point and been forced to start it over. Now she had a new idea for getting it to stretch across the top of the box.
When she fastened the rig as planned, nothing went wrong. The pieces slid into the grooves she had made for them. The hot-glue gun worked.
She was looking at a complete model.
* * *
It was a motel room glazed in reflective paint,
like the paint they use to put white stripes down the middle of the road.
The seedy furniture sat oddly in this
surreal, almost
transcendent room that
glowed and flickered from
floor to ceiling.
It was a room strewn with
feathers from pillows ripped open.
Feathers coated the walls and the
chairs and the table. All May’s
possessions were
red, like her dress. Her
suitcase was red,
her coffee mug,
the hangers she used for her clothes.
It was a motel room filled with
skeletons of people who had
slept there before. There were
skeletons in the chairs,
skeletons under the bed, even a
skeleton in the
bathtub you could glimpse through a door.
* * *
It was a solid gold motel room, with walls of exposed gold brick. The bed hung on the wall, unmade. It was larger than a normal double bed too, and it faced the audience, dead center.
There was a
television. And a
coffee maker. Both looked
pitifully cheap, varnished gold.
May also had a number of
postcards stuck to a sad little corkboard. They weren’t gold, but served as evidence of
May’s interior life beyond the room.
Outside the window was nothing but
dirt, with a few old tin cans buried in it.
Below the motel room you could see the
foundation and the
dirt on which that lay, and under it,
two human skeletons buried together, their bones entwined.
It expressed, Adelaide felt, the
weird grandiosity of the human mind.
May and Eddie, the lovers in the play, definitely had that weird grandiosity.
And the play itself did too.
Adelaide had made this strange object during this lonely, obsessive, egg-yolk-of-misery summer, and she was
proud of it.
* * *
The teacher was in the studio when Adelaide arrived with the finished model. B-Cake was snarfling around the floor, looking for something to eat.
“Congratulations,” said Kaspian-Lee.
“On what?”
“I’m stunned,” said Kaspian-Lee. “I always suspected you had an original mind. You understand the way a creative project can hang together even though the parts don’t seem related to one another. You comprehend the way something ridiculous or surreal can reveal something deeply true about human experience. This work is wildly fresh and strange, Adelaide Buchwald.”
“Thank you.”
“I have seen many, many designs for Fool for Love, but never has one moved me like this one does. I can see the tragedy of May and Eddie written on the walls. It’s beneath the floors before the show even starts, and the tragedy is compelling and simultaneously dirty and ugly, like a stain. T
hese characters can’t escape it.”
Adelaide felt a rush of validation. She was good at this.
She had been seen.
* * *
The teacher was in the studio when Adelaide arrived with the finished model. B-Cake was snarfling around the floor, looking for something to eat.
“We have to have a discussion.”
“Okay.”
“Because you didn’t do the assignment.”
“What?”
“It’s not the assignment,” Kaspian-Lee repeated. “Are you surprised?”
“Very.”
“I can’t see why.”
“I was careful with the measurements,” Adelaide told her. “And it’s a motel room. It has all the things you need for the story—I mean, I figured the coffee maker would also make tea. Eddie offers tea, not coffee. I know that.”
“It doesn’t serve the play.” Kaspian-Lee said it neutrally, as if it were a fact, not an opinion.
“What do you mean?”
“You put so much Adelaide Buchwald into it, there’s no Sam Shepard.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Set design is meant to assist in telling the story the playwright has put into words. What you have done is play with gold spray paint and put a lot of obvious symbols all over the place,” said the teacher. “I wasn’t asking you for an amateur art project. I was asking you to facilitate Shepard’s storytelling.”
“Can’t you listen to my defense? I prepared answers to all the prompts you gave me. I worked really hard.”
“When you tell me how hard you worked, you miss the point,” said Kaspian-Lee. “The work you put in is irrelevant. The result is what matters. And this design fundamentally fails, because it’s nothing but you showing off. I’m sorry, Adelaide, but it’s true.”