Gordy’s truck pulls up, and before I even climb in the cab, I can tell the ride to school is going to cost more than breakfast. Something’s up. He doesn’t wait for me to ask.
“Sloane.” He has his serious voice on. “Coach Manard told me last night that the school is organizing a memorial for Bill. A big service, down on the football field so everyone can be there. He asked me for your number because he wants you to say something. I knew you’d think it’s lame and you’d probably just hang up on him or say something snide. So I told him I’d ask you myself.” He turns to me. “Will you please do it?”
I want to throw up.
“You mean stand up on the football field in front of the whole school—not to mention Bill’s family? What would I say? That Bill was an extraordinary human even though lots of you didn’t know him at all and virtually none of you really knew him well?” Gordy is used to my rants, but this must be hard for him too.
“You won’t be alone up there,” he says, taking a hand off the steering wheel and putting it gently on my back. “I’ll say something, and your brother is coming home from school for it too.”
“Tyler’s coming home for this?” How could Gordy think that would make me feel any better? Tyler drives me bananas. He always has. Nothing he could say about Bill’s death would make me feel better. He is six-four, sort of good-looking if you like really conventionally boringly “handsome” types. A lot of my friends think he’s cute. He never worries. He has no problems. His life has always been good and easy, at least when it comes to the conventionally boring expectations that he seems maddeningly satisfied with. B+ average? No problem. He bragged about it like he was valedictorian at MIT. First-string quarterback on the third-worst team in our league? Loved it. Was beating off cheerleaders with a stick. No kidding.
“Tyler wants to be there. He and Bill were tight, Sloane. Not like you and me and Bill, of course.” He slides a look in my direction. “You weren’t his only friend.” He says this last bit softly. And it feels like a piano crashing on my heart.
Bill and Gordy and I were a tight threesome. But I guess, sometimes, I feel territorial about our shared grief. And it’s not fair of me. In the past year Gordy and I have wobbled like a tricycle missing a wheel. We haven’t figured out a way to become our own bike.
I take a deep breath and stare at the bright green trees blurring by. Maybe somebody does need to stand up and tell everyone that an irreplaceable human life is gone, and the empty expressions of “so sorry for your loss” make me want to start pounding those phonies to jelly. The worst ones pretend it was their loss. As if sitting next to Bill for one class and never talking to him except to borrow an eraser makes them authorities on what kind of guy Bill was. I mean, I actually heard Mia Wallace brag about how “close” she’d been to him because he’d kissed her once at a keg party two years ago. She was sobbing, telling the story of that kiss like it was a soap on Telemundo, while her girlfriends flocked around comforting her, eating it up like vultures. Bill told me she’d basically jumped him and shoved her tongue down his throat. Of course, he added that she was a nice girl, because Bill was incapable of trashing anybody.
But Gordy isn’t one of the phonies. And it isn’t fair of me to take it out on him. I tell him I’ll think about it, thank him for the ride, and fib that I have a test first period and need to get into class.
At lunch with Lila and Kelly, I decide not to even mention the memorial. No matter how much I love my girls, I can’t really talk to them about Bill. I’ve just never been able to.
Lila can’t stop indirectly asking me to set her up with Gordy, which she knows is an absolute nonstarter, even though I love her to death and Gordy would be so much better served dating sweet Lila than the cheerleader sloppy seconds that my stupid brother Tyler left behind.
Gordy is an athlete too, wide receiver and quarter miler, and thereby unfortunately friendly with Tyler. He is sort of gorgeous, and if I am to be honest, also in a conventionally boring way, but on him, I don’t mind it because he has a good soul. He sits with the Abercrombie-and-Fitch-looking crew at the bottom of the hill. Sometimes I sit with them. Sometimes I sit with Lila and Kelly or with the nerd herd from most of my classes. Most often I just sit up on the hill and see who sits with me. I’m kind of a social floater. I don’t really belong to any one clique but can navigate most of them (except for maybe the hard-core metal heads).
Kelly is on a relentless mission to get me to double with her and Chuck to the prom, which is coming up sooner than I want to think about. Today she reveals Chuck has several candidates prescreened to be the lucky man who wins my hand in promitude. It is true that Chuck isn’t an athlete (boy, isn’t he); however, he is a burner, a slacker, and completely unworthy of brilliant Kelly, except that he is cute and a really fun guy. His friends are just stoners. They usually stumble into lunch a little late reeking like they just rolled out of Scooby-Doo’s van. Kelly spends twenty minutes waxing poetic about their depth of character, and I pretend that I’m not in danger of losing my lunch at the thought of a good-night kiss from Brad “The Weed” Wilcox.
Throughout the day, a couple of people ask me about the memorial, or tell me how sorry they are for my loss. Right. I try to keep it together until the final bell rings—and then I hightail it to the darkroom.
As always, the darkroom is my one refuge. I love the quiet darkness of developing film. And the fact that you shut the door and turn on a light and no one can come in for fear of overexposure. My own, and the negatives’, I suppose.
I pour developer into the tank and start the timer. I like the rhythm and repetition of the process, inverting the tank four times, tapping for air bubbles. Repeating at the start of each minute. Pour out the developer and pour in the stop bath, reclose the lid, and invert back and forth. The pattern is like a prayer or a mantra and helps my busy brain to slow down.
I have been serious about photography since my dad gave me one of those Lomo toy cameras that take those cool seventies-style square shots. He used to take me out for hikes on Bluff Point or excursions in our boat around Fishers Island or walks along Napatree to let me develop my sense of light and composition. We haven’t done this together in a long time, but I kept it up.
I don’t want to be a photographer for a living or anything. I just like observing. I think that helps with my writing, which is what I really want to do. And maybe teach college-level literature like Maggie’s father, Benjamin, used to do. Although I wouldn’t stick to American lit. Too many drunk white men. I want to live in New York, that’s for sure. I will go to Columbia, which I always state with certainty, despite my terror of a slim envelope arriving in the mail next spring. Getting into Columbia is the hatch door in my escape plan.
Just before six, Gordy knocks on the darkroom door. Even though I didn’t tell him that’s where I’d be, he knows where to find me. He takes me down to the Green Marble, my favorite hang-out spot, for a coffee.
All our lives, Gordy has been my true brother and I have been his true confidante. I have seen him through every mismatched girlfriend, his torn medial collateral ligament, which threatened his high school football career (the horror!), every foray his mind would take into literature or philosophy or anything that approached the meaning of life. He is sweet to the bone, and I would spare him any pain and unhappiness and failure that it would be in my power to spare him.
But do I tell him my heart? No. Why not? Because, right or wrong, I fear he wouldn’t completely understand. And that would break both our hearts in pieces.
When we were eight or nine, there was this one night we camped out in my backyard and sort of swore or promised or at least speculated that if we weren’t married by the time we were old (which I think meant by high school graduation at the time), it probably meant we were destined to be together “in that way.” For several years thereafter, Gordy would frequently begin sentences with “When we’re married.” This usually preceded some joke, like how he’ll give up farting indoors. R
eal mature. I perceived this as Gordy’s excuse to kind of keep the door open between us. Like if we wanted to be together, the option was always there. And I would sometimes do the same so that he wouldn’t feel rejected. He sometimes still lapses into that, and I have to admit that I sort of like it. I will actually marry some great, misunderstood genius—a modern equivalent of Salvador Dalí, Franz Liszt, maybe Genghis Khan.
Still, I’m comforted by the belief that someone solid and decent is there to fall back on.
Over coffee, Gordy stares at me in that way he has when he’s intending to be meaningful. “Don’t make me do this tribute alone,” he says. “Please, Sloane. I know you think this is dumb, but we’re not doing it for them. We’re doing it for Bill. And he deserves that. You can be as agnostic as you want, but you don’t know that he isn’t somewhere listening.”
“I’m an atheist, Gordy,” I say. “There’s a difference.” And then I feel bad for making a joke out of it, and I tell him I’ll do it and that I love him.
Which, of course, he already knows.
In bed with the lights out, my mind races. I wish Maggie was real so she could drive up to Mystic and “say something” for Bill. She would nail it cold.
Then the cold panic creeps in about whether these dreams of mine are insane, and where it will take me, and the incredible irony that it’s Maggie who has a psychiatrist. My big fear is that one day I’ll be normal, and fall asleep, and Maggie won’t be there. I’ll just have normal dreams, a good night’s sleep. And she’ll be gone.
But my biggest fear of all is the one I have to always tell myself could never happen. That one night Maggie will go to sleep and I’ll be the one who’s gone.
CHAPTER THREE
maggie
My eyes open to a gray and rainy West Village morning. There’s a sinking hole in my stomach, which is always there on the morning of a callback. Perform and be judged. It’s worse than just an audition because they’ve liked me enough to want to see me again, which gives me hope, but their assessment will be more focused this time around, meaning all my flaws and limitations will be unmissable.
I can handle being turned down, obviously, because it happens more often than not and I’m still walking around. But coming home and dealing with Nicole’s inane comforting when I lose the role requires me to audition for her, to make my disappointment okay for her. In Nicole’s eyes failure and victory are indistinguishable; all that matters is not feeling bad so that you haven’t been parented poorly. Even with very nice parents, there’s an aspect of everything that’s all about them. I won’t do that when I’m a parent. I’ll make different mistakes, of course.
I watch my reflection in the subway windows as the train heads uptown and realize Sloane is better suited to play Jolene, the character I’m trying to land. Sloane has actual boobs. And all that silky, buttery blond hair. And green eyes. Actually green. No matter how well I nail the lines, I still just look like me.
I climb the subway stairs at Columbus Circle into a full-on downpour, not quite getting my umbrella open soon enough, which is not great for my hair. Nicole would say that means good luck, but I’m not feeling very lucky today. I shouldn’t think about Nicole this morning but should concentrate on Jolene and what she would feel, think, and say about the rain, about hair, and about being stuck blabbing with your shrink two hours before you need to become a completely different person. Which, come to think of it, is a specialty of the house.
I go upstairs to Emma’s office. The teensy waiting room has an inappropriately super-feminine décor and I wonder if Emma actually took the time to pick out those cheesy fake flowers or if they just came with the office space. It almost turned me off her when I first came to talk about my parents. But somehow, once in her office, the walls felt like steel, strong enough to hold my biggest secret, so I let it spill out of me in the first five minutes. Maybe I was avoiding talking about my parents, or maybe I wanted to be relieved of it, but either way that threshold decision has tied me to her. She’s the only one in my life who knows that every night I dream I’m someone else.
I flick on the appointment light and wait, knowing that even though she doesn’t have a patient before me, it will take her just under three minutes to collect me. In two minutes and forty-two seconds by the watch my father gave me, Emma opens the door with that phony heartiness and energy that always makes me wonder why I have to be completely straight with her while she’s always playing a role for me.
She always begins with small talk, like it’s putting me at ease.
“It’s raining out,” she sagely notes.
“Sure is.” I go with it because it eats up minutes where I won’t have to talk about Sloane. Luckily, I get to discuss my big panic over Jade’s conking out in class, the brain tumor fears, the bonding afternoon in the park to the point of reenacting Jade’s booty dance in the middle of her office. I just keep running with it until Emma asks me why I’m so reluctant to discuss Sloane this morning.
“Because it’s like every other morning,” I answer, sitting back down on the couch.
And here we go. Am I mad at Sloane this morning? How can I be mad at a fantasy? Easy—there are no consequences, and all you’re really doing is being mad at yourself in a disguised and therefore safer way.
Emma pleads her well-worn case that Sloane is my fantasy because I want a family and good friends and stability and a normal home life with my loving dad around, in which there are no auditions, rejections, dieting, constant focus on my appearance, my technique, and on and on with everything that is not ideal in my world. So-called actor friends who are insincere, competitive, actually adversaries. Men who either don’t realize or care about my youth, who want things from me that of course I will not give but make me worry I’ll be punished for not giving. A life so solitary that I need to fabricate friends by making up stories about every stranger I encounter. Meals alone. Walks alone. Movies alone (at least the R-rated ones). No boyfriend. And finally, finally, after example after example, the dreaded word loneliness. She goes on and on about how I’m deluding myself by pretending that I’m comfortable or even happy.
It just pisses me off, so I try to flip it on her and bust holes in her snotty little theory. Why aren’t I Sloane’s fantasy? I’m an actress; doesn’t every high school girl want to dream of something like this? I live in Manhattan instead of Mystic, Connecticut. Which is the fantasy? My sister is adorable and my best friend and has her own set of cooties. My mom is never breathing down my neck, never trying to control me in any way. Most importantly, the whole world is truly open to me. I can choose to live in London or Paris or Rio or China, and I don’t need an escape plan to make it happen. I am the perfect fantasy for a girl who desperately wants to believe she has options but who has been rooted in one small town, one cozy home, one common life.
“So tell me this,” I say. “Everything in Sloane’s life is a mess and is making her unhappy. You tell me why you think I’d want to invent that.”
“You love to talk about the freedoms in your life,” she answered, “but those freedoms are all external. Emotionally, you have to suppress so much. You perform for your employers, you keep your sister’s spirits up, you can’t really confide in your mom, and you have no truly close friends. Sloane lets you be selfish, angry, even unfair, but all in the package of a basically decent person with a comforting support group. I don’t know why you’re so resistant to seeing this.”
And then she smiles.
“Of course I do,” she says. “You don’t want to give her up.”
“Any more than she wants to give me up.”
“You have to say that immediately out of your fear that if the balance were to slip for a moment, you might lose her. In a way, Sloane is a healthy fiction. It’s you as your own most intimate friend. Even more than identical twins, you know every secret of each other’s heart. While Sloane is in your life, you feel you will never truly be alone.”
“That’ll be $300, please,” I say. And she
laughs.
“Maggie, the problem is that this is a detachment from reality. One you do everything possible to defend. But things like this, and I must I admit I’ve never seen one quite like this, can’t remain stable forever. Something will change. It may just go away, which could happen fast or slow. Or it could morph into a different kind of detachment from reality as you desperately fight to cling to it. I am talking about schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder. Maggie, there’s no cure for those types of mental illnesses. Once they take hold, there’s no way back.”
She has never said this before. I’m so frightened I don’t even think of some smart-ass comeback. She really means this. She is really scared of it. She is really scared for me. Which means one thing more that I hadn’t really thought about. She actually cares what happens to me.
“Maggie, if I could wave a magic wand and let you stay in this fantasy forever, it would be very, very, very bad for you. Can you imagine why?”
I can’t. And in spite of my customary skepticism, I really want to hear.
“Trying to live two lives keeps you from truly committing to any life at all. Imagine you and Sloane each getting married, each having babies, and imagine someday having to explain this surreal kind of bigamy that you’re living in. Where you have these other children who are imaginary—”
“Stop!”
It takes a second for me to realize that I’m crying. Emma stands and comes to me and puts her arm around my shoulders and actually dries my face with her fingertips. And I actually let her.
Great, now I’m crying right before a big audition. When our session is over, I lock myself in Emma’s bathroom for a good ten minutes. I smooth my hair and fix my makeup. Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
My callback is in the office of June Weitzmann, a really wonderful casting director. Making a good impression on her is actually far more important than landing this role. I always tell myself this kind of stuff when I’m playing the lower-your-expectations game. As soon as I walk in the office, I’m being judged. Even the receptionist sizes me up and can’t resist a critical comment.
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