He almost knocked my champagne out of my hand when he threw his arms around me.
“I thought for sure it was a guy,” he whispered. “But, god, this is so much better.”
“Thank you,” I squeaked.
“You cut it close on purpose, right?”
“Um . . .”
“Never mind. Don’t answer that.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Mom and Dad don’t know yet, do they?”
I sighed. “Nope. Are you going to tell them?”
“Did you tell them about all the parties I threw when they were away? Or about the time Connor and I went to New York?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. But also, please don’t die.”
“’Kay.”
“Was that story about our great-great-grandmother really true?”
I shrugged. “Could be.”
“You’re something else, Mattie.”
“Thanks. I gotta pee. I’ll be right back.”
I weaved toward the restroom, stopping to tip the band along the way. The saxophone player winked at me, and I tipped my cloche hat. As I strolled down the dimly-lit hallway, I spotted our tour guide from Bristol. I had enough time to smile and wave before someone snagged my arm and pulled me toward the coatroom.
It was Connor.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yeah. Hey.”
He mumbled something, and then stopped and shook his head.
“Are you okay?”
He pursed his lips and stared at me in a way that made him look almost helpless. Almost. “Mattie, I . . . fuck, I don’t even know what to say. I have a lot of things I want to say, and I just don’t know how at the moment.”
“Wow. Okay.”
“I guess I always kinda knew you had something like that in you, but I’m still shocked. And I feel like an asshole for being shocked.”
I wanted to look away, run back to the land of safe conversations with Stella and Miyu and Frankie, but Ginger demanded I stay the course. I feel a real moment coming on, she squeaked. Milk it for all it’s worth.
“Your brother’s my best friend in the whole world,” Connor said. “But I don’t think I can do this anymore. If I don’t put some distance between myself and this place . . .” He let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know if I’m even capable of something like what you just pulled off. But if I don’t get the hell away from here, I’ll probably never find out.”
I consider myself an efficient escapologist, but not a graceful one. Akiko had a kind of easy, happy-go-lucky stage presence that I’ll never be able to emulate. But Connor’s perfectly imperfect words must have infused me with a fleeting note of grace. In one swift movement, I encircled his neck with my arms like a wreath,and nestled the side of my face against his shoulder. He held me so close I could smell the fresh, soapy scent of his detergent and feel his heart beating through the veins in his neck. I don’t know how long we stood there before he spoke again.
“I should’ve been nicer to you. And your first time should have been with—”
“Connor . . . don’t,” I pleaded.
He nodded as I let him go. “Enjoy your party,” he said with a smile. “You deserve it.”
***
After Will told his parents he was gay, they stopped objecting to co-ed sleepovers at his house. Stella and Frankie headed there shortly after the party wrapped up. Will told them we’d be right behind them, but we’d both had a tad too much bubbly. We sat in his car, parked on Knight Street, waiting for one of us to sober up enough to drive.
“We’ll just tell them we hit traffic,” Will said.
“At 2:00 a.m.?” I put my feet up on the dashboard and reclined the passenger seat.
He shrugged, his eyelids drooping, and we both giggled. His phone buzzed and a sloppy smile spread across his face as he pulled it out of his pocket.
“It was a good night,” he said.
“Yeah, it really was.”
He nodded as my phone began ringing.
“Probably Stella wondering where we are,” I mumbled. But when I pulled my phone out of my bag, I didn’t recognize the number. “Huh, weird. Should I answer?”
“I’ll answer,” he said as he plucked the phone from my hand. “This is the incomparable Ginger’s personal assistant. What’s shakin’?”
I laughed until the voice on the other end of the line frosted my veins.
Even with the phone pressed against Will’s ear, I could hear her clear as a bell. “Will?” Meadow asked. “Will, is that you?”
His jaw dropped open.
“Hello?” Meadow said after a long, dread-filled pause.
I snatched the phone from him. “Hey.”
“Mattie?”
“Yeah.”
“So, your mom called Stella’s house and found out you weren’t there.” Oh fuck. “I don’t know why, but she called my house looking for you.” Oh fuck times two. My go-to excuse for being out late had finally come back to bite me in the ass.
“I just called to give you a heads up,” she said. “But I . . .” Her voice quivered as she trailed off. “I can’t ignore what I just heard. Betsy’s my best friend. If you found out Stella’s boyfriend was hooking up with someone else behind her back, you’d tell her, right?”
Double dammit. “Meadow, it’s not like that.”
“Mattie, I get it. He’s a great guy. And things have been weird between Betsy and him for a while. Honestly, I’m glad it’s you and not some awful bitch. She’ll take it better.”
Will buried his face in the steering wheel.
“Uh . . . thanks?”
“Don’t thank me. There’s still gonna be fallout. See you at school.”
She hung up and I noticed the dozen or so calls I’d missed from my parents, along with a string of increasingly desperate texts from my mom.
>Mattie, call me when you get a minute.
>Still haven’t heard from you. Things okay?
>Got your phone on silent? Don’t make me resort to calling Stella’s landline.
I dropped the phone into my bag even though I wanted to chuck it out the window and watch it smash on the concrete.
“Will, you can tell Betsy whatever you want. If you want to tell her we’ve been sneaking around, that’s fine.”
He shook his head. “Oh my god. I just . . . I can’t even think about it right now. Can we please just pretend for the next few minutes that that didn’t happen?”
I reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. I didn’t know how else to comfort him.
He rubbed his eyelids and started the car. “The good news is I now feel stone sober.”
“Me too.”
“Oh my heck,” The Hummingbird’s foster father said as he lugged her suitcase up the stairs to her new bedroom. “What do you have in here? Rocks?”
“Yes. I’m a collector.”
I shimmered at the top of the stairs, giggling at her joke. But there was no sign of joy from The Hummingbird, not even the trademark smirk she’d inherited from her father.
“Is that right?” Mr. Butler said. “My father collected postage stamps. Not as heavy as rocks.”
He and I looked to The Hummingbird for a reaction. Nothing.
I frowned by the window, but Mr. Butler looked unfazed as he continued up the stairs, dragging the suitcase behind him. He’d probably seen this sullen routine before from every other broken teenager he’d graciously taken into his home.
“He might seem dull compared to the bohemians you’ve grown up with, but people will always surprise you,” I told The Hummingbird. “And he’s perfectly nice. Nice is what you need right now.”
She ignored me.
— Akiko Miyake, Cranston, February 15, 2000
Will With Two Ls Steals a Kiss
For the record, oh fuck times two doesn’t even begin to cover it. But you can’t blame Mattie. At that particular moment, she had no idea how high I’d been and thus, how far this turn of events caused me to fall. And I don’t mean high on dope though I had a decent champagne buzz thrumming through my noggin. No, friends, I was high on a few fragrant whiffs of the ephemeral stuff that makes life worth living.
First, I watched Mattie wrap the crowd at Salone Postale around her unpolished little finger and then smirk right in death’s cowed face. I didn’t even care that the dress I’d spent weeks on now had an arrow-sized hole in it. In fact, the hole made it even snazzier, like a badge of courage or a Girl Scout patch awarded for engaging in death-defying art spectacles. As Mattie would say, the dress now had history.
Then, while sipping bubbly at the after-party, I met a boy.
Before you roll your eyes, you should know he was not the kind of boy I’d fantasize about for an hour or two and then forget. He wasn’t a classic beefcake, or a prime cut, or a tall slice of red velvet slathered with cream cheese frosting, or any other creepy slang-isms that turn potential lovers into food. He was one of those quiet boys who’s invisible to most folks. But not to me, maybe because I’m a fellow quiet boy at heart. I first noticed him at Mattie’s house, leaning against the kitchen counter while Mattie’s bro and his loudmouth friend yap-yap-yapped about I-don’t-even-care. I could tell from the way his hazel eyes wandered around the kitchen that he was only half-listening to them. The other half of him was off in daydream land. I know because I’d worn that same look when I escaped to my imaginary speakeasies with my imaginary friends.
And at the after-party, he was the one who noticed me. The funny thing is, even as a fellow quiet boy at heart, I would’ve expected him to be all awkward shuffles and gawky limbs and self-conscious throat clearing to fill the silence between sentences. But he was none of that. When he sauntered up to me with bright eyes and rosy cheeks and said Hey, you were great. Mattie is so cool. Isn’t this place amazing? I thought maybe he’d ducked into the bathroom to snort some blow. Then I realized, like me, he was just high as fuck on Mattie’s act.
“Uh, yeah. Thanks?” I replied.
Turns out I was the awkward one. But I didn’t regress into a fumbling, floundering train wreck for long because Austin is like a cup of chamomile tea. Chatting with him is like curling up with a good book on a rainy Sunday afternoon. After a few stops, starts, and sputters, the words flowed from me. I took a moment to step outside myself and was flat-out shocked to find I didn’t sound bored or antsy or like total palooka.
“How long has Mattie been doing this?” he asked. His eyes flooded my veins with warm fuzzies. I wanted to stare at them all day.
“The escape artist thing? About half a year, I think.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. The first time I saw her, she escaped from an aquarium full of koi.”
“An aquarium? They actually put an aquarium on the stage?”
“Yeah, it’s on wheels. They keep it in one of the storage rooms backstage. Do you want to see it?”
He said yes before I even had time to realize I was about to be alone with a guy I kinda had a thing for.
Half a minute later, we found ourselves standing an inch shy of hip-to-hip, gazing at the aquarium. The koi stared back with glassy fish-eyes, their shadows dancing along the dusty floorboards. The buzz of the filter hummed pleasantly in the background.
When he reached up to touch the tank, one of his hands brushed mine in a way that didn’t seen entirely unintentional. He ran a finger silently along the glass. One of the fish swam toward it and swished its nose against the side of the tank, almost like a playful dog who wanted to sniff us through the water. He chuckled softly and turned to smile at me. It could’ve been the bubbly percolating in my noggin, but I swear he winked.
I know this seems like nothing, but take a moment to really marinate on it. When most people stand in front of an aquarium and want to get the attention of its colorful inhabitants, they don’t run their fingers gently along the glass—they tap on it. They tap on it like obnoxious, gigantic toddlers with no regard for the fact that it clearly scares the goddamn daylights out of the fish. Imagine if God really were a big, bearded white dude and He showed up outside your house one day and started rattling your windows and shaking the foundation like, “Hey, anyone in there? Do something interesting. Entertain me!” Admit it. You’d think He was an asshole. And yet, I myself am guilty of occasionally tapping on aquarium glass and making silly faces at captive fish.
But not Austin. Austin’s empathetic reflexes are posi-lute-ly catlike. He knew better than to act like a giant toddler-god. Instead, he used the simplest of gestures, like the physical equivalent of a whisper, to say, “Hi, fish friend. Just letting you know I’m here.”
That simple gesture spoke volumes to me and made me want him more than I’d ever wanted anyone in all of my eighteen years. Even more than I wanted Gene Kelly after watching Singin’ In the Rain in seventh grade, which brought on an obsession that rivaled Mattie’s fangirl crush on Wil With One L.
I stared at Austin while he stared at the koi. The seconds passing felt palpable to me, like the ribs of a rope slipping through my hands. I told myself I hardly knew him. I told myself there would be plenty of opportunities, later, when I was ready.
But Will With Two Ls wasn’t having any of it. Maybe it was the champagne, or Mattie’s act, or some combo of the two, but before I knew it my fingertips were grazing Austin’s jaw line. He smiled again and leaned toward me, bracing one arm against the glass of the aquarium. I pulled him slowly into a kiss.
It wasn’t a long kiss, and I certainly didn’t shove my tongue down his throat. But it was assertive enough to send a clear and direct message.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. That was really presumptuous of me.”
“A little. But it’s cool.”
Then we kissed again. For almost a full minute. And there might have been a little tongue involved.
So there was that. And now, let’s contrast that glorious moment with sitting in the driver’s seat of my parents’ Lincoln, knowing I was royally screwed in the Betsy department and everything was about to come crashing down. At first, it didn’t even feel real. It felt like a cruel joke. And then my mind slipped into that same place it had the night I’d told Mattie my ultimate truth. It flailed, grasping at every possible straw that might, someway somehow, turn back time. But deep in my solar plexus, I knew that wasn’t possible.
Mattie squeezed my hand and, though I appreciated the gesture, nothing—not even Austin’s warm hazel eyes and soft voice—would have soothed me.
I watched, shimmering by the window, as The Hummingbird marked another day off on her calendar with a big black slash in permanent marker.
“Why do you do that?” her foster sister asked. “You don’t even know how good you have it here, do you? I’ve caught some really bad ones. Like, really bad. The Butlers are freaking saints. Don’t be an ungrateful bitch.”
The Hummingbird didn’t respond. If she did, she’d probably end up in a fistfight she was bound to lose. Her foster sister had a good head on her shoulders, but the “bad ones” she spoke of had obviously toughened her like a callous. She kept her nails long and sharp and painted a steely blue. And she didn’t lay her head down without a Swiss Army knife tucked safely under her pillow.
The Hummingbird climbed into bed and kept her mouth shut. She thought that once she turned eighteen, none of this would matter. She thought that once she earned the so-called freedoms of adulthood, this stranger’s house and the strange girl she shared a room with would fade from memory like a fog evaporating in the heat of the morning sun.
I wasn’t so sure. Even the slipperiest of escapologists can’t escape the past once it’s buried under her skin.
– Akiko Miyake, Cranston, September 30, 2000
I decided facing the music would be better sooner rather than later and asked Will to drop me off at my house.
“When are you going to tell Betsy?” I asked as I unbuckled my seatbelt.
“Tonight,” he said with a nod. “I’m still hoping I can get to her before Meadow does.”
“Let me know how it goes.”
“I will. Call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.”
The kitchen lights were blazing down when I walked in. My mom sat at the head of the kitchen table, flanked by my dad and my brother. I couldn’t get a read on her through all that icy serenity, but the dark circles under her eyes scared me. My dad gave me a brief smile, but didn’t say anything.
“Your Great Aunt Millie died,” she said. “Funeral’s on Wednesday. That’s why we were trying to get ahold of you. At first, anyway. Then we were just terrified you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“Oh my god, mom. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Have a seat.”
I pulled out a chair, the legs squeaking against the linoleum like nails on a chalkboard.
“I don’t want to be one of those willfully ignorant parents,” my mom continued. “I won’t pretend I have children who always do what they’re told and never put themselves at risk. And if my older brother invited me to go out drinking in Providence with him and his friends when I was a teenager, I probably would have said yes.”
I shot Kyle a glance. I’m forever in your debt, big brother of the year.
“But there’s a happy medium, Mattie. You need to be honest with us. You need to be careful, and you need to tell us where you are.”
“I know. I’m really sorry.”
“I hope that’s a sincere apology and not an empty attempt to placate us,” she said.
My dad cracked a grin, but tried to hide it by turning to cough into his fist.
“It’s a sincere apology,” I said. “But, to be fair, if I’d told you what I was up to, you wouldn’t have let me go.”
The Art of Escaping Page 20