Tandem

by Anna Jarzab

  “Yeah,” I said. “See you.”

  I turned and walked toward the house, pausing at the top of the porch steps to look back at him. He was still standing there, hands in his pockets, the wind ruffling his hair. He waved at me, and I waved back before disappearing over the threshold into the dark foyer beyond.

  Two

  When it came to prom, one week was not an ideal amount of notice. First, there was the immediate obstacle of securing my grandfather’s permission. I’d never attended a school dance before, or even been on a date, so it was hard to predict how he’d react.

  Granddad was at the kitchen table when I came down the next morning, hard at work on the daily crossword, a pair of rimless bifocals perched on the tip of his nose. Instead of greeting me like a normal person, he called out, “Eleven-letter word for ‘button seller.’ ”

  “Hmmm. Try ‘haberdasher,’ ” I suggested, pouring myself a bowl of sugary cereal. I wasn’t a crossword whiz or anything, but I’d encountered the word recently in a book and had to look it up. This was a thing of Granddad’s. He liked to challenge me.

  “Excellent,” he said, pleased.

  “That’s a bit easy, don’t you think?” I teased, taking the seat across from him at the table.

  “Well, it is only Tuesday,” Granddad muttered. He looked up, finally, and regarded me with mild suspicion. “It’s seven o’clock and you’re awake. Why do you look so cheerful?”

  “Can’t I just be in a good mood?” The rosy haze of yesterday afternoon hadn’t yet completely faded. For once, I’d had a peaceful night’s sleep and woken up feeling happy and well rested. Of course I was in a good mood.

  “I suppose.” Granddad penciled “haberdasher” into the crossword, then opened the paper, shook it, and turned to the front page. “Have you started your college applications?”

  I groaned. “Granddad, please. It’s May. Applications aren’t due until the fall.”

  “You still haven’t told me where you’re applying,” he pressed.

  “That’s because I haven’t decided.” I hadn’t told Granddad— it would’ve freaked him out—but I was really struggling with the idea of picking a school, and consequently a future. I had no idea what I wanted to study, and even though I knew Granddad had his heart set on me attending an Ivy League school—or, even better, the University of Chicago, where I could get a reduced tuition and live at home—I couldn’t quite imagine myself at any of those places. There was only one thing I knew for certain: I had to get out of Hyde Park. I loved Chicago, and the little neighborhood where I’d grown up, but I was starting to feel restless. Granddad was content with his compact, uneventful life, but I ached for adventure, and I wasn’t going to find it if I was just following Granddad’s plan for me. It was going to be hard to break that to him, which was why I hadn’t done it yet.

  There was something else I needed to talk to him about. Something I hadn’t brought up at dinner the night before, because I’d been too busy trying to decide whether it had actually happened. “Hey, Granddad?”

  “Hm?” he mumbled without looking up from his paper.

  “Grant Davis asked me to prom,” I said. Not that I thought he’d know who Grant was—Granddad wasn’t great with names or faces, and my best friend, Gina, was probably the only one of my classmates he actually knew.

  Nevertheless, the mention of a potential date got his attention. “Who?”

  “Grant Davis,” I repeated. “He’s … this guy. From my school.”

  “And he asked you to prom?”

  “Try not to sound so shocked,” I grumbled. Sometimes I wondered if Granddad assumed I was just as much of a loner as he preferred to be. “It’s not completely absurd that someone might ask me to prom.”

  “I didn’t say it was absurd.” Granddad set to work quartering a hard-boiled egg, sprinkling it with salt.

  I smacked his hand lightly. “You know Dr. Reingold said to cut it out with the sodium.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Alexandra, that’s my job.” Granddad always called me by my given name when I annoyed him, which meant I heard it a lot. I’d gone by Sasha for so long, I would’ve been surprised to find out that anyone except Granddad knew my full name. “And don’t change the subject. This boy. What’s his story? Are his parents professors?”

  “His mom teaches at the law school,” I said. Granddad shrugged; he wasn’t interested in anyone who wasn’t a scientist. “His dad lives out in California.”

  “And is he a nice boy?” He couldn’t quite meet my eyes. The conversation clearly embarrassed him. Granddad had a history of discomfort when it came to the girl stuff in my life, and I couldn’t blame him, but these moments always reminded me just how keenly I missed and needed my mother.

  I had to wonder how my father would’ve reacted to me dating. Like a dad, probably. Cautious and overprotective, like Gina’s dad had behaved when she got together with her boyfriend, Jeff. But I couldn’t really know. My parents had been dead for almost a decade; I’d been seven at the time, so while I had memories of them, they were blurry and fragmented. It was hard to recall what they were like. Granddad was no help, because he almost never wanted to talk about them. Before the accident, his relationship with my parents had been distant; when I came to him, we were practically strangers. I’d never found the courage to ask him why that was, but over the years I’d pieced together what was probably obvious all along—he didn’t like my father. I kind of didn’t want to know why. I loved Granddad and my parents, and if there was something dark in their shared past that would change my opinion of any of them, I was happier not knowing the particulars. But still, the question lurked in the back of my brain. What about my dad had caused them to be estranged for so long? I couldn’t even venture a guess.

  “Yes, Granddad,” I assured him. “He’s nice.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “We’ve gone to school together for, like, ever.” It was best not to tell him that I didn’t actually know Grant that well; it would only feed Granddad’s suspicions, and lower my chances of being allowed to go to prom.

  “Don’t say ‘like,’ ” he grumbled. “It makes you sound silly.” I rolled my eyes. “Well, all right. But I want to meet him before you go out. Do you need money for a dress?”

  I braced myself. Prom dresses were expensive, and there wasn’t enough time to buy one online, so I’d have to troll the department stores for something off the rack—and on sale. At least I had Gina to help me in the search. She was aces at sniffing out good deals, and her taste was excellent, certainly better than mine. “Yeah, kind of.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred, maybe?” I winced. I hated asking Granddad for money, but I didn’t have a lot of savings, and I’d had no reason to budget for a prom dress.

  He plucked five twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, handing them over solemnly. “This is a reward for being so good and working so hard. You’re not entitled to this. You earned it.”

  I took the cash and gave him my brightest smile. “Thanks, Granddad. You’re the best.”

  Three

  The days leading up to prom passed in the blink of an eye. Gina and I gave ourselves blisters walking up and down Michigan Avenue before finding the perfect thing for me to wear, a short, strapless navy dress with a sweetheart neckline and a sparkly tulle overlay that was on clearance for $99.99. The dress wasn’t exactly my style—I was definitely more of a T-shirt and jeans kind of girl—but when I looked in the mirror, I had to admit, I felt beautiful in it. I hoped Grant would like it on me just as much as I did.

  Before I knew it, it was Saturday evening, and Gina, Jeff, and I were gathered in the parlor of the Victorian, waiting for Grant to arrive.

  “He’s late,” Gina said. She was sitting in Granddad’s armchair, wiggling with impatience, while her boyfriend loomed over her, taking nips off a flask he kept in his inside jacket pocket. Gina had met Jeff, a freshman at Northwestern, at a concert a few months earlier. Personall
y, I thought he was a little morose and weird, but he was really into Gina, so who was I to judge? Jeff was tall and lanky, and usually his clothes and his hair looked like they’d never been washed. Gina had managed to wrestle him into her brother’s old tux, even though it was a bit too short in the arms and legs and a bit too big everywhere else.

  “He’ll be here,” I insisted. I paced the floor in front of the fireplace. My nerves were out of control. It was one thing to imagine this moment, to look forward to it, and quite another to find myself on the precipice of experiencing it. Plus, what if Granddad didn’t like Grant? I kept telling myself it was a silly thing to worry about—after all, I wasn’t marrying Grant, I was just going with him to one dance—but it was hard to banish it from my thoughts.

  My eyes rested on the framed photographs that sat upon the mantle. Most of them were school photos that charted my evolution from a thick-haired, gawky child to a relatively pretty teenager, all things considered. There were also a few of me and Granddad together in various places, my favorite being one of us standing on a pier at Lake Okobogee, hoisting a ten-pound largemouth bass between us. I smiled at the memory. If it was possible for my parents’ deaths to have a silver lining, it was that I’d gotten a chance to know my grandfather. Even though he could be gruff, I knew that he loved me, and that I was lucky to have found a home with him when mine had been ripped from me.

  There was only one picture of my parents. It was from our last trip to Disney World; we were standing in front of Cinderella’s castle, grinning into the sun. It’d been taken only a few months before the accident, and we looked so happy in it, oblivious to the disaster looming on the horizon of our lives. The sadness that always accompanied thoughts of my parents clanged like a bell in my heart, but my smile didn’t fade. The clearest memories of my childhood were from that vacation. I’d been deep in my fairy-tale phase, demanding that everyone call me Princess Juliana, a name that bewildered Mom and Dad. I’d dragged them to the castle more than a dozen times and pranced around inside it, ordering them around like servants. I still had the princess hat they’d bought me, a cardboard cone covered in synthetic pink fabric with Juliana stitched on the brim and a filmy purple ribbon trailing from the top. When Mom asked me why I was called Juliana, I told her I’d heard the name in a dream.

  Other than my parents, I’d never told anyone about the Juliana dreams, but I’d had them ever since I could remember. When I was young, they came often, three or four times a week, but as I grew up they were fewer and farther between, though more vivid. Like most dreams, however, they faded almost immediately after I woke up.

  In the dreams, I was never myself, but a girl named Juliana who looked exactly like me. They had a linear, realistic quality to them, as if I was literally living Juliana’s life. But things were different in her world than they were in mine. I couldn’t remember all the differences—there were so many of them, and dreams were hard to get a hold on—but this one thing I recalled with absolute precision: in Juliana’s world, the aurora borealis danced in the sky, not just at the North and South Poles, but everywhere. That was always my favorite part.

  My latest Juliana dream had happened two weeks earlier, after months of not having them at all. I’d fallen into bed at two a.m., completely exhausted after a long and painful struggle with my physics homework. I only remembered tiny pieces of it—a painting of a beautiful country house, a small origami star that seemed significant, and, as always, the green ribbons of the aurora borealis in the night sky. The overwhelming sense of foreboding I’d felt when I woke up the next morning had stuck with me through most of the day.

  The doorbell rang. I took a deep breath and hurried to answer it. My heart felt buoyant, but over-inflated, like it was straining against my rib cage.

  I yanked the door open, revealing Grant in all his formal wear glory. I could hear my blood pounding in my ears, and my stomach tumbled when he smiled at me. He was clean-shaven, his hair ever-so-slightly slicked back with some sort of product, and he carried the scent of pine needles with him through the door. The sight of him in a tux sent a sizzle up my spine. Part of me couldn’t wait to be alone with him, and regretted calling in Gina and Jeff as reinforcements, but there was another part of me that felt anxious. I had no idea what to do, or what to expect of the evening. Or, come to think of it, what would be expected of me.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t get out of the house. My mom kept trying to straighten my tie.” Grant stepped back to get a good look at me, his eyes traveling the length of my body unabashedly from foot to forehead, until he met my gaze with his own. “Wow. You look amazing.”

  A fierce blush crept into my cheeks. “Thanks.” I couldn’t remember the last time someone had said something like that to me, and I knew it had never been in a tone like that. I still couldn’t believe this was happening. Why hadn’t Grant asked one of the many girls he’d dated to go to prom with him instead of me, someone he barely knew? I decided not to let that bother me. What was the point? He didn’t seem disappointed with his choice, and neither was I.

  He shook a plastic box with a white corsage inside. “Did you want a corsage? I didn’t know, so I brought one, but it’s probably dumb. You don’t have to wear it.” He curled his arm around it, as if to shield it from my eyes, and I realized that he was nervous, too, possibly just as much as I was.

  “No, of course I’ll wear it,” I told him, and his shoulders relaxed. He slipped the corsage around my wrist, then stepped back, the corners of his mouth quirking. As I admired the flowers—an arrangement of snow-colored roses, with some leaves and baby’s breath arranged along the edges—he reached over and tucked a dark brown curl behind my ear. My hair was naturally straight, and I usually wore it pulled up in a ponytail. Gina had declared that style unacceptable for prom, and she’d spent the better part of the afternoon engaging in an all-out assault on my head with a curling iron and hair spray. It’d felt like overkill to me, but the expression on Grant’s face as he looked at me now told me that Gina’s instincts had been right on the money.

  “I like your hair down like that,” he said in a low voice.

  My skin buzzed where his hand had brushed it. A wave of intense shyness broke over me, and I was anxious to get moving. “Are we ready to go?” Gina and Jeff emerged from the parlor, and suddenly the foyer felt very crowded. All three of them looked at me expectantly. “Oh, right, introductions. Grant, this is Jeff, and that’s Gina.” Grant had gone to school with Gina as long as he had with me, but it was possible they’d never spoken before, high school heirarchies being what they were.

  “Hey, guys,” Grant said, pulling a relaxed, affable tone out of his arsenal of charms and shaking Jeff’s hand like they were old buddies. He smiled at Gina. “I heard about your race this week. That’s awesome.” Gina was a fantastic runner, and she’d won all her events at Thursday’s track meet. She shot me a look, surprised that Grant knew this, but nothing about Grant managed to surprise me these days. He’d clearly done his homework. I was proud of him; I knew how hard it was to subdue Gina’s cynical side. “Thanks for waiting around for me.”

  “No problem,” Gina said. I could tell she was won over.

  “So,” Grant said. “Should we go?”

  “You have to meet my grandfather first,” I informed him apologetically.

  “Of course,” Grant said. “I’d love to.”

  “Well, don’t get too excited. He’s not very friendly.”

  Grant laughed. “Just introduce us.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Grant was starting to seem too good to be true. I called upstairs to Granddad, who descended minutes later, looking less than thrilled to have been disturbed. But he had demanded to meet my date, so he couldn’t complain.

  “It’s great to meet you, Dr. Quentin,” Grant said, offering his hand to Granddad, who shook it cordially. “Thanks for letting me take your lovely granddaughter to the prom.” Grant shot me a self-satisfied smile, and I rolled my eyes. He was trying so hard to
make a good impression, and the more his effort showed, the more I liked him. “Is there a time you’d like me to have her back by?”

  Granddad mulled the question over for a few seconds. “Midnight should do it.”

  “Granddad,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “Be cool.” According to Granddad, that was something my mom used to say to him as a teenager when she thought he was being too strict. He’d told me this once in rare fit of nostalgia, something I’m sure he regretted later, because it worked every time.

  “All right,” he relented. “One a.m., then. But no later.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Grant said. “We won’t be late.” Granddad nodded, trying not to appear pleased at Grant’s politeness, but I couldn’t disguise my own happiness. Granddad was the world’s hardest person to impress, and if Grant was managing to charm him, it meant I had nothing to worry about.

  In a gesture of uncharacteristic sentimentality, Granddad placed his hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the forehead. “Have a good time, dear. And be safe.”

  “Thanks, Granddad. I will.”

  Gina hooked her elbow with mine. “Come on, Lawson. Let’s get out of here.”

  Four

  Grant was a terrible dancer. When we first arrived at the hotel—where prom was already in full swing—he was shy about it, demurring every time I tried to drag him onto the dance floor. Finally, I took his hand in mine; I’d had two glasses of punch, which had most certainly been fortified by something out of a flask while the chaperones’ backs were turned, and was overcome by a sudden boldness.

  “Okay, Grant, what’s up?” I whispered into his ear. “You asked me to prom and you won’t even dance with me?”

  “I don’t know how,” he said, confessing this secret in a voice so low I almost didn’t hear it over the pounding music.

  I laughed, thinking he was joking, and he looked away in embarrassment. “I’m serious,” he said, his expression dark and distant.