“Holy crap,” I said as I gazed at my handiwork. A pair of hand-carved jade earrings rested on the silk cushion inside the box. The sight of them made my heart hiccup. I pictured Akiko in one of the few television interviews she’d given during her career. She smiled and tugged at one of those jade earrings when the reporter asked how she became interested in escapology. A very young Miyu had been flitting around, humming the Pokémon theme song and making silly faces at the camera.
Miyu, now the polar opposite of that energetic little kid, snored from the chair across from me, her head dipped back at an awkward angle.
“Miyu, wake up. I’m done.”
She snapped to with a snort and studied the table. “Took long enough. I mean well done, Girl Scout. Now go home and get some sleep. And take a shower for god’s sake. You reek.”
I drove home on a rush of adrenaline.
***
All my victory adrenaline had faded by the time I cracked open the back door and tiptoed through the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning. But after giving Guinan, our ancient Shiba Inu, a good scratch behind the ears, I still had just enough energy left for a sad little ritual I like to call Mattie Pokes the Bear. The bear wasn’t an actual bear with fur, claws, and picnic breath; it was a toxic trio of twenty-something dudes who I found sprawled over the couches in the living room watching late night TV. They’d probably gone to a bar for cheap beer and come back because my parents were tolerant, and because they didn’t have anywhere cooler to be.
My brother Kyle, his best friend Connor, and their handpicked runt of the litter, Austin, were perfectly content to ignore me and keep their glazed eyes glued to the tube. But I would not stand for it.
Phase One of Sad Ritual: Say something obnoxious to ruffle the toxic trio.
“How was your evening, slackers? I’m sure you guys needed to unwind after a long day of being a burden to society.”
“I have an actual job, man,” Austin protested.
Kyle squinted at me. He was wearing the same pair of flannel pajama pants he had worn all day. And the day before. And the day before that. “You were out late.”
Connor just glared at me from the couch, probably because he knew what was coming. My opening line stirred the bear from its hibernation cave, but now I was going to get all up in its snout.
Phase Two of Sad Ritual: Hone in on the real target.
I plopped down on the couch next to Connor, taking up almost two full cushions so he had to scrunch himself to one side to avoid spooning with me.
“Why do you smell like gasoline and sod?” he asked. “Do they have you doing landscaping at the café now?
“You had a morning shift,” Kyle said slowly. “Where have you been?”
“Worked a double.” Lying liar-face.
“But the café closes at nine.”
I shrugged, and it probably came off as aloof, but I really just couldn’t think of a good excuse and was secretly cursing myself for being such a dismal liar.
“Oh,” Connor said. “Oh, I see what this is all about. She wants us to think she was out with a special someone, but if we asked who, she’d probably tell us we don’t know him because he’s from Canada or some bullshit.”
That earned a laugh from both Kyle and Austin. In the background, the late-night host made a crack about politically-correct hippie-Nazis.
“Give me the remote,” I said. “This guy is an ass.”
“You brought this on yourself, Mattie,” Connor said. “You don’t get to change the subject. So. Anyway. As I was saying, the only person you ever hang out with is that preppy weirdo with the nasally voice . . .”
“Stella’s actually pretty cool,” Austin chimed in.
Both Connor and Kyle told Austin to shut up before Connor continued. “She’s at brainiac bootcamp for the summer, so I know exactly how your night played out. First, you picked out the perfect poem by Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath or some other depressive chick to post on LifeScape. After that, you walked around the mall but didn’t buy anything. Then you picked up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, snuck it into a chick flick, and seasoned it with your sad, lonely-girl tears.”
I smiled, not just because Connor would never in a million years guess that I’d spent the night learning to pick locks, but also because he’d left me a picture-perfect opening.
“It must be hard for you to imagine a satisfying night alone considering you and Kyle have been co-dependent since you were five.”
“Yeah. It’s such a burden having friends. You know, more than one.”
This is the point at which I’d usually feign boredom and stalk off to my room to listen to jazz records with my giant headphones and dig into some fantastic piece of historical nonfiction. But my sore fingers and cramped shoulders and adrenaline hangover must’ve brought out something mischievous. And maybe even a little dark.
“Do you really have friends, Connor? You and Kyle are psychologically dependent on each other, but that’s more like some sick symbiosis than friendship. And everyone else you hang out with tolerates you only because you’re always in close proximity to Kyle.”
Austin snickered from the armchair, and Kyle shook his head.
“You’re on the rag right now, aren’t you?” Connor said, still cool as a cucumber. “You can be such a little cun—”
“Connor, knock it off,” Kyle said.
Phase Three of Sad Ritual: Let big bro do his big bro thing.
“Dude, she started it.”
“She always starts it. And then you always feed into it.”
I flashed Connor my best Disney Princess smile before heading upstairs to collapse on my bed. “’Kay, g’night.”
It probably looks like this ritual is all about me. But honestly—I swear—I did it for their benefit. Austin got to point out he’s the only one of the three who’s gainfully employed, Connor got to be pissed off about something (which is the only thing that makes him happy), and Kyle got to feel like a classic big brother, straight out of a bad teen comedy.
And, yeah, fine. Maybe when you spend your schooldays being mostly ignored by your peers, this is the kind of fucked up attention you crave. I’m not a shrink, so I don’t really know.
And, yeah, sometimes I probably took things too far with Connor. But it was like jumping into the deep end of the pool with water wings on. I knew he’d never say anything truly devastating to me because I still had a secret hanging over his head.
Many months ago, during a raging party my brother threw while my parents were in New Jersey, visiting my mom’s favorite aunt, I heard a quick knock on my bedroom door. I looked up from my copy of The Devil in the White City just in time to see Connor slip into my room, his smirk dampened by one too many craft beers. Without a word, he pulled the book from my hands, extracted my giant headphones from my hair, and planted a soft kiss on my closed lips.
I probably should have pushed him away, stomped off, woken Kyle up from his drunken slumber on the bathroom floor, and told him his best friend had just made a pass at his kid sister. But the ugly truth is, I’d been wanting something like that to happen for a long while. So I leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around me.
The making out part had been great. More than great, actually. Thrilling and safe and soothing and terrifying all at the same time. When I pulled his clothes off, I swear I forgot all about the time he’d said the Joan of Arc Halloween costume I’d slaved over for weeks made me look like a “faggy squire.”
But the sex had been meh at best. Awkward enough to make me realize what a huge, irreversible mistake I’d made. When Connor asked me afterward if I was okay, I’d just smiled cryptically and the two of us tacitly agreed to never, ever speak of what had happened. No one, not even Stella, knew what had transpired between Connor and me, and I thanked the mystical forces of the universe that my brother never found out.
But none of the tiny, icky things, including Connor, were going to bother me on this particular night. Not when I’d mowed a prairie-like lawn to win over a recluse and then trounced a table full of tricky locks.
The magician and I stood backstage, ready for our inaugural performance at The Golden Pebble, a theater that sat an audience four times the size of the rinky-dink cabarets we were accustomed to. I wrapped my fingers around a lock of hair behind my ear and tugged. The sensation took the edge off my nerves, helping me to focus on the task ahead.
“What are you doing?” the magician whispered.
“Nothing,” I snapped. “Just something I do when I’m nervous.”
I tugged harder and prepared for the stage lights and a thousand pairs of eyes to bear down on me.
– Akiko Miyake, Tokyo, May 4, 1975
Mattie in Real LifeScape
I took a seat on an overturned crate in the storage-slash-break room at Café Italiano and pulled out my phone. As soon as I opened the LifeScape app, I was hit with a news feed that made my skin prickle. Everyone, including people I’m not even “friends” with, was asking about me. “Where’s Mattie?” they wanted to know. “She hasn’t posted anything in four days, six hours, and seventeen minutes. How are we supposed to keep tabs on her?” I powered off my phone and shakily exited the break room for the gelato counter.
“Marni had to leave to have a tooth pulled,” my boss said. “I need you on the register for a bit.”
I nodded and tried to rub the goose bumps off my arms. I attempted to ring up a customer, but found the screen at the register somehow displaying my LifeScape feed. “Did Mattie just shut off her phone?” people were asking. “Why would she do that?”
“Did you really shut off your phone?” the customer asked. “How are your friends supposed to know what you ate for breakfast, or what your favorite memes are, or where you are on Friday night?”
I bolted from behind the counter and busted through the front door, scanning for places to hide as I scrambled down the cracked sidewalk. I half-ran, half-slid down an embankment on my worn-out sneakers and spotted Kyle’s old tree house. I struggled up the rope ladder, beads of sweat dripping off my forehead and blurring my vision. I yanked the rope ladder up into the tree house, but it was no use. My LifeScape “friends” had found me and were poking their desperately curious claws through the hole in the floor and between the wooden slats of the fragile walls. I cowered in a corner, covering my face with my hands. “Why are you doing this?” I screamed. “Why do you even care? I have nothing to offer you, okay? There, I said it. I have nothing to offer, nothing even worth judging. My life is boring.”
I awoke in a panic, realizing I’d had another of my recurring LifeScape nightmares. Still wearing my grubby clothes from the night before and now coated in sweat and a sheen of paranoia, I sat up and stared at my laptop screen. I resisted the urge to double check whether I’d logged out of my account as I climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom to take a shower.
As we’ve already discussed, I’m not a shrink. But I possessed enough self-awareness to glean some insights from my LifeScape nightmares. The details of each dream might change from night to night, but two things were always the same. One, I was terrified of being looked at, scrutinized, put on display. And two, I was even more terrified that if someone took a good, hard look—like, got all up in my nooks and crannies and crevices—there’d be nothing to see, aside from some meticulously alphabetized jazz records and a collection of antique knickknacks in need of a good dusting.
I shuddered under the shower’s scalding water. I’d officially crossed the line from consumption to creation, and now there was actually something to see. But my something wasn’t playing co-ed volleyball or volunteering in Ecuador for spring break. My thing was weird. Dangerous. My thing required an explanation. My new hobby wouldn’t earn me a flood of hearts and two thumbs up. It would earn me a blistering comment blast full of whys and GIFs of shocked faces.
***
“Mattie, I have laundry,” my mom shouted through my bedroom door as I was getting dressed.
“Just a sec.” I buttoned my jeans, adjusted my t-shirt, and opened the door.
She stormed in with a basket full of folded clothes, like a frowny cloud of disapproval dressed in a sweater set. “You realize it takes two seconds to pop your own dirty clothes in the washer, right?”
“But then I have to fold it,” I whined.
Instead of dignifying my whining with a response, she changed the subject. “You look tired. Up late at Meadow’s?”
Oh fuck, that’s right. “Yeah. We started a horror movie marathon around midnight.”
“Ah. Watch anything interesting?”
“Not really. Just schlocky standards like Nightmare on Elm Street and one of the Child’s Play sequels. I tried to get Meadow to watch Vertigo, but she didn’t go for it.”
I’m pretty sure I managed to say this without batting an eye, but inside I was tearing my own hair out and screaming The lies! Dear god, the lies!
“You know, I haven’t seen Meadow around since you were in middle school.”
Double fuck. I didn’t want to reveal any fabricated details that might come back to haunt me later, so I just played the aloof teenager card and said, “Hm.”
“I hope she’s still a good influence.”
“Ugh. Mom.” This conversation clearly needed to be steered into new territory. “Dad home?”
“Had to do some emergency rewiring for one of his customers in Grayton. A power surge blew up a TV or microwave or something.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“Working at the café today?”
“Yeah. I have an afternoon to evening shift, and then I’ll probably go out again. Or, you know, hang out at Meadow’s.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “But promise me that this week—yes, this week—you’ll pick out a few colleges and line up some tours. The fall will be here before you know it.”
“Hm. Hey, can I pull a Dad and go to trade school instead of college?”
She scowled at me. “I’m not having this conversation with you again. I’ll be in my office.”
My mom referred to her nook off the kitchen as her home office, but she spent most of her time in there listening to obscure post-punk records and reading back issues of Bitch magazine. My brother and I had dubbed it the mom-cave.
After narrowly avoiding another iteration of the College-Is-Not-An-Option Argument I’d had with my mom at least a dozen times, I drove Stella’s Bug to Tivergreene’s small center and took my post behind the gelato counter at Café Italiano. I stretched and cracked my wrists in preparation for a long shift of scooping.
“You need to refill the stracciatella,” my boss remarked as she emerged from the walk-in freezer.
“It’s still got one scoop left. I don’t like to mix fresh stracciatella with the old stuff.”
“Then clean it out. What if someone comes in here and wants two scoops.”
“Then he or she should acquire some patience.”
My boss rolled her eyes but dropped it. She didn’t seem to mind my attitude as long as I kept it in check in front of customers.
The bell at the door jingled and Meadow Winters’s best friend, Betsy Appleton, trotted into the café with the effortlessly cool Will Kane in tow. I tried not to flinch. Though I preferred scooping gelato to most of the summer job alternatives—junior camp counselor, lifeguard, photocopy slave, french fry bitch—the downside of working at Café Italiano was the occasional frequenting by students from Cianci Regional.
“Oh, hey.” Betsy smiled at me as she approached the counter. “How’s it going?”
Instead of answering, I asked, “Would you like to try our new strawberry basil gelato?”
Betsy laughed, and it sounded the way sunlight looks when it glitters on a golden lake. I suppre
ssed a grimace.
“Um, sure. That sounds great,” she said.
I handed sample spoons to both Betsy and Will. They mmmm’ed and nodded at me politely and then revealed themselves to be painfully boring by ordering vanilla and chocolate, respectively.
“I’m going to order an iced tea, too,” Betsy said to Will. “You want a cappuccino or something?”
Will shook his head and lingered by the gelato counter for a few seconds, squinting at me. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to say something. He remained silent and finally waltzed off to join Betsy at the barista counter. At the time, I didn’t give our brief staring contest a second thought. But in hindsight, I wonder if it was a moment of recognition. I wonder if, somehow, the two of us could sense what was coming.
After my mother said goodnight, I sprang out of bed, fully dressed, and pushed open my window. I shimmied out onto the fire escape, trying my best not to rattle it and wake the angry widow who lived on the second floor.
A cool breeze ruffled my hair. In less than an hour, I’d be onstage at a theater in Shimokitazawa. As I closed the window and stared back into my empty bedroom through the smudged glass, I wondered how many more times I’d have to sneak out of my own house to do what I loved most in the world.
– Akiko Miyake, Tokyo, September 18, 1975
A Footnote by Will With Two Ls
Moments of recognition. Entangled lives. Destiny!
What a beautiful, Mattie-esque sentiment. That’s how her romantic historian’s brain works. If a chance encounter precedes a full-scale invasion, it’s a cosmic spark. The first trail marker on the path toward a life-changing destination. The first line of an epic poem. The first tinkling piano note of a jazz standard.
And maybe she’s right about all those romantic notions. But I can tell you exactly what I was thinking as I stared at her just long enough to make it awkward.
Two things:
One: that gal needs to use more conditioner.
Two: more importantly, she doesn’t care about her frizzy hair or my opinion because she doesn’t give a muskrat’s ass about what anyone thinks of her.
The Art of Escaping Page 3