by Allie Larkin
There was an envelope on the kitchen counter with Savannah Leone scrawled across it in Diane’s bold, curvy script. The back was sealed with a silver diamond-shaped sticker-an ornate D. I slid my finger along the envelope flap. The seal lifted but didn’t tear. Inside was a bank check for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.
I pulled the check out and looked at it. It was powder blue and water-marked, Manhattan Savings Bank printed in the upper left-hand corner like the framework of an old Roman palace. The check was made out to me, Savannah Marie Leone, in plain block carbon-transferred letters that went from blue to purple to red. There was no other name attached-no insurance company title, no trace of the Driscoll name.
I started to crumple the envelope up in my hand when I realized there was something else in it: a strip of paper folded up like an accordion. It was a photo booth strip of me at thirteen with big puffy bangs that had taken many turns around the curling iron and clouds of L.A. Looks hair spray to perfect. I had a mouthful of metal I was trying to hide. The first two pictures had my forced attempt at a mature and sexy nonsmile. The third was blurred. I was moving my head to look toward the curtain. In the fourth, my mouth was wide open, braces gleaming in the flash, eyes squinted shut with hysterical laughter.
“You better not be flashing your boobs in there, young lady!” Diane had yelled.
It was one of our first hooky- day shopping trips. Diane had never been in a photo booth before and there was one in the food court on the way to the ladies’ room.
She had been bitching that my insistence on drinking a large strawberry smoothie from Fruit & Co. and my greater insistence on not wetting my pants in the middle of the mall were making us late for meeting her personal shopper at Neiman Marcus.
“Van, I told you that a small was enough,” she said, from the stall next to me in the bathroom, where I heard her pee a long steady stream too. “We don’t have a lot of time, and I need a dress for the Neuberger gala this weekend,” she lectured, like I didn’t know why we were there or that we needed to get home before my mom noticed.
As we washed our hands, she shook her head and said, “You’re just like your mother. Drink and pee. Drink and pee.” She sighed and yanked paper towels out of the dispenser.
And I felt so awful, like I was ruining something that hadn’t even taken off yet. I’d annoyed her. I was some baby with a tiny bladder who was turning into an inconvenience. Maybe she wouldn’t take me again.
But as we walked back, she stopped for a second at the photo booth. She ran her hand along the curtain.
“I always wanted to do this when I was a kid,” she said.
“You’ve never been in a photo booth?” I asked. I loved the fact that I had and for that second it made me superior.
I pulled a wadded one-dollar bill out of my pocket, held it tightly from either end, and rubbed it up against the corner of the machine to straighten it out.
“Get in,” I said, feeding the bill into the slot. “Here’s your chance.”
She looked like she wasn’t going to go. The first shot clicked. I grabbed her purse and gave her a little shove.
The first picture on Diane’s strip was just the curtain. The second one was blurry, her hair falling in her face as she sat down. The third caught her trying to smooth her hair, but by the fourth, she was smiling wide and crossing her eyes. I loved that last picture of her, and I loved that I was the only person who knew it existed.
We’d traded strips. She made me pinkie-swear not to show the pictures to anyone. I got the feeling that she’d never made a pinkie swear before either.
I couldn’t believe she’d kept my strip all this time, maybe folded up in her purse the same way I kept hers.
I pulled the ends of the strip of me and straightened them out to see the whole series all at once.
My knees wobbled. I slid down and sat on the kitchen floor. She paid to keep us, back when my mom wanted to be a teacher. She paid us to stay and now she was paying me to leave. This was “stay away from my daughter’s husband” money. This was “start a new life for yourself and forget about Peter” money. This was “I’m done with you” money. She didn’t even want to keep my picture anymore.
The check with my name on it was thin, like onionskin. I closed my eyes and thought about how it would feel to rip it in tiny pieces and feed it to the garbage disposal, but I didn’t. I folded it up and tucked it in my purse. I fished through my purse and found the strip of Diane, folded up like an accordion, shoved in one of the credit card compartments of my wallet. I left it on the counter without taking one last peek of Diane crossing her eyes.
The car ride back was awful. I hit every Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru between Newburgh and Binghamton, and by the time I got to Syracuse, my bladder was bursting. I drove with my thighs pressed together, sweating and praying and cursing all at once.
When I got to the Chittenango rest stop, the only spot I could find was way over with the trucks. I ran across the parking lot in my orange satin heels, brown striped socks, holey jeans, and my mother’s black Boston sweatshirt with the neon pink and orange spaceship on it. Cold air lapped in through the hole under my left butt cheek. Someone whistled and I flinched, knowing that they could probably not only see my ass through the black lacing, but they could see my ass constricted by the cracking band of my granny panties, hanging out there like a big white bratwurst. It had seemed like too much of a hassle to get my bag out of the trunk and drag it up to the carriage house to change before I left, but really, it wouldn’t have been.
“Oh God, oh God, ohGodohGodohGod,” I said, breathing in deeply. I unbuttoned my jeans the second I walked around the bend into the ladies’ room. “OhGodohGodohGod!” I burst into an empty stall, pulled my pants down, and peed. It was nonstop, and I couldn’t keep my balance in those stupid heels on the tile floor, so I ended up sitting full on a wet seat. And somehow, I felt like it was all Diane’s fault.
I got back to the car and turned the radio on full blast. All the New York City stations had faded into crackly fuzz hours ago, and I wasn’t close enough to get my Rochester stations, so I put the radio on scan and waited for something good. There was nothing. I settled on country music because it came in clear enough to play loud. But even with some guy bemoaning his empty refrigerator and the lost love who stole his cat in full twang at high volume, I couldn’t drown out the voice in my head saying, No fair, he was mine first.
Chapter Five
The first thing I noticed about Peter was the soles of his shoes. Not only was I late to my very first class on my very first day at the University of Rochester, but when I walked in the room, the heel of the Steve Madden Mary Janes Diane bought me as a going-away present caught on the lip of the door frame.
I flew forward, throwing my books across the room, landing on my stomach in a dry- land belly flop. When I looked up, I was face-to-sole with a pair of boat shoes-the tan leather kind with laces twisted into funny little knots instead of tied.
Oh, God! I thought. How embarrassing for him, wearing shoes like that. I pretended in my head that it was far worse for him to wear old- man shoes than it was for me to make my first impression on a lecture hall full of students by getting rug burn on my belly. It wasn’t an illusion I could keep up for long, because it was impossible to drown out the laughter that poured from the stadium seating like surround sound.
The boat-shoe soles hit the ground as the wearer of them stood up and offered his hand to me. His fingers were thin but strong: piano hands, as my mom always said. He grasped my hand like he was giving me a firm handshake and helped me to my feet.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “No one noticed.” His voice was deep and amused, his soft lips pursed in a kind smile. His eyes were a dark grayish blue, and they sparkled from the shade of his heavy brows. He had a cleft in his chin like Cary Grant, and his pale skin was shadowed with the slightest hint of dark stubble.
“Well, we can pretend no one noticed, at least,” he said. “Can’
t we?” He moved his bag off of the seat next to him and said, “Sit. I’ll get your books.”
I sat down, tucked my purse under my chair, and crossed my legs.
Just as I thought I’d gotten my bearings, I looked up and caught the glare of Dr. Gurttle.
“Well, well, you certainly know how to make an entrance.” He pulled his glasses down his bulbous nose and raised his eyebrows as the class erupted into giggles again. “Miss-”
“Leone,” I said, glad I hadn’t had time for breakfast because I surely would have lost it.
“Miss Leone.” Dr. Gurttle pushed his glasses back up the slope of his nose. He made a noise that sounded like tah tah tah as he thumbed through the pages on his lectern. When he got to the page he was looking for, he scribbled something and then looked back at me. “Miss Leone, I’ll be looking for you to make up for this first impression.”
Boat-shoe guy sat down next to me and handed me my books. “Don’t worry about it,” he whispered. His breath was hot and smelled like cinnamon. “I hear this guy is a real wanker.”
He settled into his chair and leaned on the armrest. Our arms were touching. And with that, before I even knew his name, I was madly in love.
He bought me coffee after class. I remember every moment of that day, because it seemed like the most perfect thing that had ever happened to me. He paid like a grown-up, unfolding his leather wallet on its way out of his back pocket, sliding a folded ten to the barista with his index and middle fingers, instead of digging crumpled ones out of his front pocket the way I still do. I didn’t offer to pay for mine. I knew it would make me look like an amateur, but I was beet red the whole time anyway.
I suggested walking along the canal path by the chapel, because I didn’t think I could deal with sitting across from him while I got all sweaty and splotched up. But it was Indian summer weather, and way too hot for my black turtleneck sweater. At least there were leaves and the canal and the clouds for him to look at instead of my splotches and sweaty hair sticking to my face.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. He didn’t say anything either, and I felt like I was disappointing him-like I hadn’t earned the cost of my coffee.
The leaves were falling and the clouds parted for a split second before going back to the Rochester gray I wasn’t used to back then. “Rochester has more rainy days than Seattle,” my mom had said when she tried to get me to apply to Sarah Lawrence.
“We’ve never been to Seattle,” I said, waving my yogurt spoon at her, dripping pink all over the place mat, “so we can’t compare it appropriately.”
“We watch Frasier,” she said, sticking her tongue out at me and swatting my arm with the Sarah Lawrence catalog. “Clean up after yourself. What do you think, you have a maid or something?” She laughed freely, enjoying her own joke.
I thought about telling Peter that I was homesick, but it seemed too needy. I thought about asking him if he knew of any good parties coming up, but he didn’t seem like the type to go to a kegger.
“You know, Rochester has more rainy days than Seattle,” I said to Peter, settling on something safe and mature.
“You don’t say,” Peter said, smirking. Even his smirk was charming; it showed off the dimple in his right cheek.
“What?”
“Well, I’m from Mendon. It’s like fifteen minutes from here.” He gestured to his right like it was just across the canal.
“Do you live at home?”
“No.” He laughed, and it was easy and warm. “My father wanted me to get the college experience, but my mother didn’t have faith in me doing my own laundry.”
I thought about the Sarah Lawrence brochures and how my mom said if I went there I could live at home and we’d save money.
“I’m not from here,” I said.
“I can tell,” he said. I must have looked confused. “The accent. New York City?”
It was funny to hear him call it New York City. In Westchester, we just called it the city. Here, that meant downtown Rochester, and everyone’s voices sounded slightly sour when they said it. And it was funny that he thought I had an accent. I didn’t have an accent. People from the boroughs had accents. My mom had an accent from growing up on Long Island, which she said like it should have been spelled Lon Guyland. People from Rochester had accents too-sharp As and weird ways of pronouncing things. My roommate told me she was from a town that sounded like Chai-lie when she said it, but when I saw her high school yearbook on her bookshelf, it was spelled Chili.
“I’m from Westchester,” I said.
“Ah.” He smiled at me like that told the whole story. Even though I knew he had the story wrong, I let him think he was right. “So you’re a long way from home, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, making sure my voice didn’t tremble.
I think it did anyway, and I think he noticed, because he gave me a long, sympathetic look and said, “You’ll get used to it. It’ll get easier.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking deep into his eyes. My heart was thumping up in my throat. The collar on my sweater felt tight.
We walked under an overpass into a park and stood on a footbridge that arched over the canal. The water was littered with yellow leaves and their reflections, sprinkled at the sides of the canal like confetti. Back toward the school, the crew team was just leaving the dock.
“This is beautiful,” I said, looking down at the water.
“Don’t come here by yourself,” he said, resting his coffee on the concrete railing and leaning up against it.
“Oh.” I leaned next to him.
“There’s an element here that’s not safe.” He shook his head and moved a little closer to me.
“What kind of element?” I said, trying not to smile at his stodgy choice of words. As I pushed my bangs out of my face, my elbow knocked up against his coffee cup and it fell into the canal. “Shit!” I reached for it after it was already gone and felt ridiculous. It bobbed in the water and got caught in the current.
“Don’t worry about it. I was almost done anyway.” He looked for my eyes when he talked and smiled when they met his.
“I didn’t mean to litter.” After I said it, I cringed. It seemed like such a junior high school do- gooder thing to say. I didn’t want him to think of me like that-some Goody Two-shoes from Westchester, impeccably groomed for a life of dinner parties and reading the society pages. I wanted to be my interesting and alluring college self.
“I don’t either, but I’m not about to jump in after it. Are you?” A perfect chunk of his shiny dark hair fell across his forehead. It was just short enough to avoid getting in his eyes. “What can you do?”
We walked to the other side of the bridge to watch the cup float down the river.
I pictured myself, perched on the railing, stripping off my plaid skirt and sweater to dive in after his coffee cup. It would be wild and rebellious and faintly reminiscent of an Aerosmith video.
“You’re not, right?” He laughed.
“What?”
“You looked like you were considering going after it.”
“We used to go bridge jumping in high school,” I said, pretending I’d been reminiscing. “In the reservoirs. Off these old train trusses.”
“I didn’t think you were allowed to swim in reservoirs.”
“You’re not,” I said.
“You didn’t get arrested?”
“Nah.” I waved it off. He looked at me in awe, and I liked feeling dangerous.
I’d really only gone once, with my public school friends. Diane was out in the driveway, smoking in her nightgown, when I got home. She’d probably just had another fight with Charles. She gave my wet jeans and dirty bare feet the once-over and said, “Don’t embarrass us, coming home in a police car with flashing lights and that whole mess, Savannah Leone.” She slurred her words, and dragged out my name until it was ridiculous. The next day, she didn’t show any signs of remembering, but I never went bridge jumping again. So much for wild, dangerous rebellio
n.
“My dad would kill me if I ever did anything like that,” Pete said, stepping away from the railing and putting his hand out in an “after you” gesture. “We should go. I have class.”
On the walk back, he told me about how his dad was grooming him to join his firm, and that he expected to be a partner by the time he was thirty.
“So no bridge jumping for you, huh?”
“Nope. I’ve got to keep my nose clean. But it’s a small price to pay for a killer job and a brand- new Audi when I graduate.” He flashed me his perfect white smile.
When we got back to the chapel, Peter stopped and shuffled his feet around. “Well, this is me,” he said, pointing across the street.
“So, Friday,” he said, “there’s this party in my dorm. You game?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying really hard to stifle my smile and play it cool. “I could be game.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll get your number in class on Wednesday.” He was so obviously dropping me off. This was the end of our coffee time. So even though I had to go back to the center of campus too, I pretended that I had to stick around the chapel. He turned and started walking toward campus.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I yelled after him.
He turned around and walked backward so he could look at me. “Anytime.”
I went into the chapel and stared at the stained-glass windows for a few minutes to give him some lead time.
Chapter Six
The first five hours of my trip back to Rochester were fueled by rage and coffee. The two and a half hours from Chittenango to my condo were excruciating. I was so angry and I didn’t know where to put it. The caffeine buzz wore down to jitters. I was lonely. I picked up my cell phone, balanced it against the steering wheel, and scrolled through my address book. It was full of people I didn’t know anymore-college friends who left Rochester after school, who’d stayed in my cell phone to fill up space so I felt like I still knew people. Thirty-seven people in my phone, and I only ever called two. And even if Peter and Janie weren’t on their honeymoon, I couldn’t call either of them about this.