Forever in Blue

by Ann Brashares

  If she knew that, she probably wouldn’t be standing on the ladder wearing the tool belt.

  And now, six weeks after that, Carmen was doing the same thing, only it had lost its feeling of absurdity. She belonged there more than anywhere else. You could get used to almost anything.

  And she did appreciate having something to do, someplace to go after dinner besides her dorm room. She appreciated that Julia was nice to her. Julia introduced her around. She made sure that if the cast and crew were going to get cappuccinos after rehearsal, Carmen came too. Carmen appreciated the hilariously mean impression of Lissa that Julia did to cheer her up when her roommate did something nasty.

  In the theater group, which included many upperclassmen, Carmen felt like she was an add-on to Julia, a low-budget hanger-on friend. She had to remind people of her name too often. But still. It was better being out and about as a friend of Julia than eating candy in her room as a nobody.

  Once in a while she felt sorry for herself. She felt like the prince in “The Prince and the Pauper,” being mistaken for someone unimportant. Do you even know who I am? she thought. Do you even know who my friends are?

  But really, if someone called her bluff, what would she say? Maybe she could answer the second question, but not even she knew the answer to the first.

  What are you getting out of this? she silently asked Julia, these weeks later, as she pinned Julia’s skirt for the third time and Julia gave her a squeeze of thanks. That was the part she couldn’t figure out.

  When Julia came to her in April with brochures from the Village Summer Theater Festival in Vermont, Carmen was startled and, of course, grateful.

  “These are full-scale productions with a lot of really well-known actors,” Julia said. “Do you want to do it? It’s mid-June through the second week in August. It’s hard to get in for acting, but they’re always looking for crew. It could be a great experience.”

  Carmen was so pleased to be invited, she would have agreed for the sole reason that she’d been asked. Later she had to get her parents to agree to pay.

  “Carmen, since when are you interested in theater?” her father had wanted to know when she called him to ask for the check. She’d reached him on his car phone on his way home from the office.

  “Since, I don’t know…Since now.”

  “Well, I guess you’ve always been dramatic,” he mused aloud.

  “Thanks a lot, Dad.” This was the kind of stuff you had to put up with when you asked for money.

  “I mean that in the best sense, Bun. I really do.”

  “Right,” she said tightly.

  “And I remember you as the fierce carrot in the salad in your first-grade play.”

  “Tomato. Anyway, I’m not doing acting.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Behind-the-scenes stuff.”

  “Behind-the-scenes stuff?” He acted like she’d said she was going to eat her own ears.

  “Yeah.” She was starting to feel defensive.

  “Carmen, sweetie, you’ve never done anything behind the scenes in your life.”

  He was in quite the chatty humor, wasn’t he? she thought darkly.

  “So maybe it’s about time,” she said.

  She heard him turn off the car’s ignition. It was quiet. “Bun, if this is really what you want, then I am willing to pay for it,” he said.

  It was easier when he was being annoying. When he was nice, she found she actually had to think.

  Was it what she wanted? She thought of Julia. Or was Carmen just wanting to feel wanted?

  She took stock of her options. Bee was going to Turkey, Tibby was taking classes in New York, and Lena would be in Providence. Her mother and David were ditching her apartment—her home—and fixing up a large suburban house on a street she had never even heard of.

  “It’s really what I want,” she said.

  Bridget stood in the bathroom looking for a toothbrush in the disorderly medicine cabinet, realizing just how long it had been since she’d spent a night at home.

  It wasn’t the product of any design. It was just one thing and then another. Over Thanksgiving, she’d stayed up so late talking at Lena’s she’d just crashed on the couch. She’d been in New York over Christmas break, first with Eric uptown, then with Tibby downtown. She’d gone down to Alabama to visit Greta for spring break. She’d taken all-night buses the time she came home in February.

  And now, on the eve of her trip to an excavation in a remote place halfway across the world, she was touching down at home.

  She kept her eyes straight ahead in the hallway. She didn’t want to see how badly the carpet needed to be vacuumed. She wasn’t going to spend her short time here cleaning the stupid house.

  In her room she sifted impatiently through her duffel bag again. She didn’t feel like putting any of her stuff on the shelves. She had piles of laundry, but she wouldn’t do it here. She kept her contact points minimal: her feet and whatever bit of floor space was required by the bottom of her bag. To sit or lie down extended that contact uncomfortably.

  She remembered her seventh-grade camping trip, the ranger teaching them the principle of low-impact camping. “When you leave the wilderness, make it like you were never there.” That was how she lived in her own house. Low-impact living. She ate more, drank more, laughed more, breathed more, slept more at any of her friends’ houses than at her own.

  She knocked on Perry’s door. She knocked again. She knew he was in there. Finally she pushed the door open. He was staring at his computer screen. He had big earphones on, that was why he hadn’t heard her.

  What was it with her dad and her brother and their damned earphones? The house was as quiet as a crypt.

  “Hey!” she said, about a foot from his ear. He looked up, disoriented. He took off his earphones. He wasn’t used to being disturbed.

  He was deep into one of those online war games he’d been playing since the beginning of high school. He did not want to chat. He wanted to get back to his game.

  “Do you have a spare toothbrush somewhere? I thought I packed mine, but I can’t find it.” She always felt bullish and noisy in this house.

  “Sorry?”

  “An extra toothbrush. Do you have one?”

  He shook his head without thinking about it. “Uh-uh. Sorry.” He turned his eyes back to the screen.

  Bridget stared at her brother. For some reason she thought of Eric, and with that thought came the dawning of a certain set of objective facts. Yes, her family was alienated. On their best days they were eccentric. They were not happy; they were not close. But still. Here she was standing in front of Perry, her own brother—her twin, for God’s sake—whom she had hardly seen this year.

  She pushed a pile of techie magazines out of the way and hoisted herself onto his desk. She was going to talk with her brother. They hadn’t had a single real conversation since Christmas. Out of guilt alone, she would torture him.

  “How’s school?”

  He fumbled with something on the back of his monitor.

  “What have you been taking this semester? Did you do the wildlife class?”

  He continued to fumble. He looked at her once, wishfully.

  “Hey, Perry?”

  “Yeah. Oh, sorry,” he said. He left the computer alone. “I’ve actually been taking time off this semester.” He spoke to the arm of his chair.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t been taking classes this semester.”

  “Why not?”

  His look was blank. He wasn’t used to having to answer questions. He wasn’t used to having to present his life or explain his decisions.

  “What did Dad say?” she asked.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We didn’t really discuss it.”

  “You didn’t really discuss it.” She was talking a little too quickly, a little too loudly. Perry made a face like his ears hurt.

  “Does he know?”

&
nbsp; Perry’s eyes would not engage. She felt as if she were speaking over a PA system rather than specifically to him.

  She didn’t care if he wouldn’t look at her. She made herself look at him. She wanted to see him through objective eyes.

  His hair had always been darker than hers, and now it had turned completely brown, probably accelerated by his staying inside all the time. He had untended fuzz on his upper lip, but otherwise he looked as though he had barely entered puberty. She glanced away, a churning feeling in her chest.

  He was so slight and she so tall it was a wonder they were related, let alone twins. But then, maybe it wasn’t a wonder at all. Maybe it was part of the harsh duality of being born together. What one got, the other didn’t. And Bridget had always been strong. She couldn’t help picturing them stowed together in her mother’s stomach, taking what resources they could.

  It was the zero-sum problem with twins. If one was smart, the other felt dumb. If one was bossy, the other was meek. The equation was too easy.

  Bridget knew she’d always taken more than her fair share. But was it her job to stay small to encourage him to be big? If she withdrew, would he come forward? Was it her fault he had come out this way?

  “I guess Dad knows,” Perry finally answered.

  She stood up. She felt frustrated. What was Perry doing if not going to school? He didn’t have a job. Did he have any friends? Did he ever leave his room?

  “I’ll see you later,” she said tightly.

  “You could ask him,” he said.

  She turned around. “Ask who?”

  “Dad.”

  “About what?”

  “About the toothbrush.”

  Lena didn’t feel lonely easily. Somehow, knowing she had friends was enough to keep her happy. She didn’t actually have to talk with them or see them all the time. It was like other things: So long as she had an aspirin in the cabinet, she didn’t really need to take one. So long as the toilet was readily available, she could wait until the last second to use it. As long as the basic resources existed for her, her needs were small.

  She thought of this on the first day of her summer painting class. The instructor was new to her, the monitor was new. The students were unfamiliar. She was using a new kind of brush. She would probably like these things once she got used to them.

  And in the meantime, Tibby and Carmen were on the other end of her cell phone. The Traveling Pants would come her way soon. Annik, her former teacher, was available for art-related crises, even the little ones. Her old kind of brush was sitting there at the ready, just in case. These were the things that made her bold.

  But did it count as boldness when she kept herself so covered?

  “Up there. There’s a space,” she heard the instructor, Robert, saying to a late arrival. Lena’s main hope for the other students was not that they provide friendship or commiseration. It was that they not set up too close to her and obstruct her sight lines. She tensed up as the new person came closer and relaxed again when he/she passed behind her and kept on going to the far side of the studio. Potential threat averted. She didn’t need to take her eyes from the model.

  When the timer dinged and the model broke her pose, Lena finally looked up. She saw dark brown hair poking above the newly set-up canvas, curly and not very well trained. A tall person, most likely male. She quickly looked down. It was familiar dark brown hair. She tried to think. She kept her eyes down as she went into the hall.

  Lena had developed the habit years before of avoiding eye contact. It was a sad capitulation, in a way, because she loved to look at people’s faces. She wanted to be an artist, after all. She had good, informative eyes, and she liked to use them. The trouble was, whoever she looked at was usually looking back. And though she liked looking, she did not like being looked at. Brain-wise, she was perfectly designed for invisibility. Face-wise, she knew she was not. She’d always been striking. She’d always gotten attention for it.

  That was one of the things she loved about drawing and painting models. It was the only time in her life she got to look and look and look and nobody looked at her.

  She walked back to her easel after the five-minute break, gearing up for the next twenty-five minutes of concentrated work. The late person with the hair was still at work. It made her sort of curious. She saw a hand and a palette. It was a man’s hand.

  For the first minutes of the pose, she thought about the hair and the hand across the way and not about her drawing. That was strange of her. Well, maybe she did avoid eye contact, but she apparently fell for a mystery as hard as the next person.

  At the break, she waited for the face to emerge from behind the canvas. She waited for him to find her face and look at her. Then the world would be normal. He would look at her for a few seconds too long and then she could not care about him anymore.

  Did she know him? She felt like maybe she did.

  Another break passed and he did not so much as peer around his canvas. How frustrating. She actually positioned herself to get a look at him. She had to laugh at herself in the process, craning her neck. The laugh brought in the smell of linseed oil and oil paint and she felt happy in a visceral, smell-induced way.

  Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn’t want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueler paradoxes of human nature.

  She remembered a pair of brown wedge boots. She’d seen them at Bloomingdale’s and passed them up because they cost over two hundred dollars. They probably had lots of pairs in the back, she’d thought. Certainly they would have her gargantuan size in stock. She could always come back.

  And yet when she did go back two days later, they were all gone. She asked the saleslady, who said, “Oh, those wedge boots sold out instantly. Very popular. No, we’re not getting any more.”

  At which point, Lena became obsessed. It wasn’t that other people wanted them. It was that she couldn’t have them. No, that wasn’t completely it either. Partly, at least, it was the fact that they were genuinely lovely boots. She scoured the Internet. She researched the manufacturer, she searched eBay. She would have bid three hundred dollars for those two-hundred-dollar boots, and yet she never found them. “The boots that got away,” Carmen said jokingly once, when Lena rhapsodized about them.

  So how did desire, hopelessly tricky as it was, relate to love? It wasn’t the same. (She hoped it wasn’t the same.) It wasn’t entirely different. They were certainly related. By blood, though, or more like in-laws? she wondered.

  What about Kostos? There was desire, no question. What else? Would she have continued to love him if he had continued to be available to her? Yes. The answer came before she finished thinking the question. Yes. There was a time when he loved her and she loved him and they both believed they could be together. Indeed, such a time it was, it had effectively wrecked all the rest of her times.

  But could she have gotten over Kostos if he hadn’t been taken from her so forcibly? If she’d just been allowed, over the course of months or years, to discover that he snored or that he was prone to zits on his back or that his toenails grew inward and made his feet stink?

  She stopped. Wait a minute. Objection. She demanded that her mind rephrase its question. Would she have gotten over him more easily had he not been forced away? She was over him now. Yes, she still thought about him, but not nearly as much. No, she hadn’t yet been with anyone else, but…

  For the rest of class, Lena found herself looking again and again at the hand to the right of the canvas across the way and the shock of hair above it. He was a lefty, she realized. Kostos was a lefty.

  He worked through the breaks. She couldn’t get so much as a peek at him.

  The last pose ended and Lena packed her things away slowly. She hung around, pretending to be thinking (well, she was actually thinking, wasn’t she). At last she drifted into the hallway.

  And becaus
e the truth must be told, Lena (who didn’t care) loitered for fourteen minutes in the hallway until he finally came out of the classroom and she got her look at him.

  She did know him. Okay, no, she didn’t know him. But she knew of him. He wasn’t her year. Maybe one or two years older. She had certainly seen him.

  He wasn’t the sort of person you would forget, appearance-wise. He was tall, with raucous hair, dark gold skin, and some very good-humored freckles.

  His name was Leo, and she knew that because he had a reputation. Not for being a player, so far as she knew, but for being able to draw. And that, of all things, was a turn-on to one Lena Kaligaris, Greek virgin.

  Her small circle of friends and acquaintances at RISD, art geeks that they were, whispered most fervently about the people who could or couldn’t, did or didn’t. Draw, that was. And this young man of the hair and hand stood among the few, almost legendary people who could.

  She watched him with a surprising little thrill in her stomach and waited for him to notice her. How often did she want that? Not often. What she really wanted, she informed herself, was for him to look at her in a particular way. It wouldn’t matter if he had a serious girlfriend or wasn’t even into girls at all. She wanted him to give her the look, the slightly extended appraisal that would drain him of his mystery and transform him into a regular person. (She did want that, didn’t she?) It was this familiar look that confirmed her peculiar power, easily possessed and rarely wanted.

  These were the things that freed her. These were the things that made her bold.

  But he didn’t look at her like that. He didn’t look at her at all. He fixed his eyes ahead and he kept on walking, bringing to mind for the second time that afternoon the memory of the brown wedge boots.

  “I got in.”

  Brian slipped the news in between the mu shu pork and the fortune cookies.

  “You what?” Tibby demanded, unsure she had heard him properly.

  “I got in.”

  “You did?”

  He looked slightly sheepish. He cracked his fortune cookie in quarters and then eighths, and then it was a crumble.