Summer in the Invisible City

by Juliana Romano

  “I’m sorry—did you say half birthday?” Willa scoffs.

  “Yeah, because her birthday is so close to Christmas she celebrates it now,” I explain. “Anyway, I’m sure you can come if you want.”

  Willa doesn’t say anything and I see a ripple of something roll across her face, but it’s gone before I can decipher it. “I can’t tomorrow.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “I have to stay home and catch up on all the TV I missed.” She play kicks me so that I almost drop the nail polish.

  “Don’t do that. I’m gonna mess up!” I squeal.

  “I don’t care about my toes.” She laughs. Then she rolls away from me and stretches like a cat.

  Willa’s room could use a makeover. She still has the floral lavender wallpaper she picked out in third grade and a framed Dr. Seuss illustration on the wall. My mom and I have moved apartments every few years so my rooms have never had the chance to be really mine. I don’t envy Willa’s room, with its fading little girl decor, but sometimes I can’t help wondering what it would feel like to have a room that was so completely your own.

  —

  “We hear the photography class you’re taking is very competitive,” Annette, Willa’s mom, says over dinner. It’s just me and Willa and her parents because her sister is in Spain for two weeks with her roommate from Yale.

  “I mean, yeah, I think a lot of people wanted to take it,” I say. “But that’s just because everyone thinks it’s an easy A.”

  “Don’t downplay it,” Willa says, kicking my shin under the table. “Sadie is the best artist in school.”

  “It’s not really like that,” I say. “There’s no ‘best artist.’”

  “The fact that you’re saying that proves that you’re the best,” Willa retorts.

  “Is there more rice?” Willa’s dad asks, his watery blue eyes scanning the table.

  “No, Gene, you’ve had enough carbs,” Annette snaps.

  Gene is small and weak looking, and there’s something about his shy, nervous demeanor that makes it seem like he’s always dissolving.

  “Gene’s lost ten pounds. He looks great, right?” Annette asks me.

  “Yeah, great,” I reply automatically.

  “He looks exactly the same,” Willa groans. “His whole diet is totally fake.”

  For some reason, it’s when Willa is mean to her dad that I feel the most jealous of their relationship.

  Even though I’ve technically gone further than her, she is way less scared of boys than I am. She’s really good friends with her downstairs neighbor, Miles, and she lets him see her in her pajamas and they eat gross food together, just like she and I would. Sure, Miles is a big nerd, but still, he’s a guy. I was never friends with Noah. Not before everything happened. And not after, either.

  —

  I get home to an empty apartment. It’s after eight, but the sun is still out, and the last strands of light that lie across our floor are threads of gold. I love this time of year. The way that sunlight stretches into the night, as if the day is yawning.

  I get a glass of water from the kitchen and see that my mom left me a note on her “Be Here Now” stationery telling me she’s teaching till late and not to wait up. Which I knew already because she told me that a million times earlier and texted it to me. My mom forgets everything.

  In my room, the sounds of the city—sirens, people shouting, music spiking from cars—leak in through my cracked window. I open my laptop and flip through some Tumblrs and music videos and watch five minutes of a movie on Netflix. It’s the same restless cycle I always fall into when I’m home alone, and it’s boring. I wonder what Izzy is doing now. And Noah. I even wonder what some of the other random people from my photo class are doing. Are they finishing dinner with their families, or walking their dogs, or hanging out at a party that I don’t know about? Or are they by themselves, at their computers, like me?

  I close my computer, and in the moment that follows my room is flooded with its own emptiness. But then I see my camera, resting on top of my dresser. It’s staring at me from across the room, its glossy lens like the eye of an animal, and I know I’m not alone.

  Chapter 3

  I’ve basically memorized Allan’s Wikipedia page. “Allan Bell, (born 1960, Pittsburgh, PA), lives and works in Los Angeles. Bell is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been identified with movements in performance, film, institutional critique, and photography. B.A., Harvard University.”

  Allan’s first big break was in the Whitney Biennial when he was twenty-five. He had already shown his work in galleries, but that show put him on the international art world map. For his project, he took over a room and built an installation that was composed entirely of labels from cans of food. The space appeared, at first glance, to be an average suburban living room.

  After that, he stopped making big colorful installations and got into photography. From photography, he moved to film, and by the nineties he was mainly making videos and doing performances in which he would circulate around a gallery, pretending to be a visitor.

  Ten years later, Allan was in the Whitney Biennial again. This time, he showed a film called Love. It was 135 minutes of scripted dialogue between two actors walking through a dreary office park in Denver.

  The night of that Whitney opening, my mom’s roommate, Karen, was supposed to go with her boyfriend. When Karen’s boyfriend canceled at the last minute, Karen dragged my mom. She and Allan met that night. I was born a year later.

  —

  Now, I sit at my computer and reread the last e-mail he sent. Ever since he gave me my camera two years ago, we’ve started e-mailing. I’ll send him articles I find that mention him, and he put me on his mailing list so I always receive notices about his lectures and upcoming shows. I love picturing Allan typing my name into the address bar of his e-mail. I wonder if he stares at my name and wonders about me, the way that I stare at his name and wonder about him.

  The announcement says his show opens in two weeks, but he still hasn’t reached out to see if I’m coming or if we can meet up while he’s here. He must be really busy getting ready. So, I remind myself to be brave and do what I have to do.

  From: Sadie Bell

  To: Allan Bell

  Subject: Visit to NY?

  Dear Allan,

  How are you? I see that you are having a show in the city that opens soon. I am here all summer so maybe we can see each other when you’re here?

  Yours, Sadie

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, I wait for Izzy to pick me up on the stoop outside of our apartment. The red bricks of the old brownstone next door are crumbling, as if the spongy summer air is somehow softening them. An old woman crosses the street diagonally, shading herself with a small parasol. The city smells and even sounds different in the summer, with fragrances that have been frozen all winter coming loose. A taxi rolls down the street with its windows open and music bounces out of the stereo inside.

  When Izzy pulls up, I see that Phaedra Bishop is sitting in the passenger seat, sunglasses holding her blond hair off her face.

  “Hey, you guys know each other, right?” Izzy asks as I climb into the back.

  People always assume that just because you go to school with someone, you know them. The reality is that Phaedra and I have never spoken to each other.

  “Hi,” I say nervously.

  Phaedra glances over her shoulder at me and gives me a quick, polite smile. Then she turns back to the road.

  “Where did you learn to drive?” I say.

  “My dad taught me in the country last summer,” Izzy says. “He’s such a bad teacher, I literally can’t believe I learned at all. He was such a dork about it, too; he even made me watch a drivers’ ed video.”

  “Do you drive?” I ask Phaedra.

  She turns and looks at m
e and her eyes are blank, like I’m a stranger on the subway. Phaedra is so pretty that just looking at her feels like staring, even though I’ve gone through her Facebook pictures a million times. After a minute, she gives me another small smile and says, “No. Do you?”

  “Nope,” I say, feeling my face burn.

  Phaedra Bishop is basically famous. Her family owns everything. The Bishop B is stamped on the packaging of half of the foods you see at the supermarket. Phaedra dropped out of a fancy New England boarding school in the middle of ninth grade to come to our public arts magnet in the city, which already made her more intriguing than everybody else. And then, a few months later, the New York Times published a story about her family in the Style Section. Next to the article, there was a picture of Phaedra in front of their brownstone. I remember staring at that picture, overwhelmed by all the millions of things I could be jealous of in that one small image. Not just what she looked like, but her flawless style, and her perfect family, and the way all of it came so easy because she was born into it. And I don’t think I was the only person who felt that way. I bet everyone who saw that picture, even old people and little kids, felt jealous of her right that second, too.

  I’ve never been to the Rockaways and as we get farther from Manhattan, the buildings get smaller and the spaces between them larger, until the city has transformed into an unrecognizable landscape. The sky seems to drop as we drive, as if the buildings in Manhattan actually keep it propped up high, like a tent.

  “Who else is coming today?” I ask. All I really want to know is if Noah is coming, but I’m afraid to ask. If I told them what happened between me and him, I’m not sure what they’d think. It could make me seem older and experienced, and that would be good. But on the other hand, they might see through my story to the truth.

  “Random people,” Izzy says. “Justin Chang and some of his friends, I think.”

  “Who is Justin?” I ask.

  “He’s our friend from Xavier,” Izzy says. “Who Phaedra is hooking up with.”

  “We’re just friends,” Phaedra insists.

  “Shut up. You are not,” Izzy teases.

  “We are, too! Just like you and Roberto.” Phaedra laughs. She says Roberto with a rolling r so it sounds super Italian.

  I’m about to ask Izzy who Roberto is but then she jumps up in her seat, turns up the volume on the radio, and screams, “Yes!”

  It’s a Taylor Swift song that was really popular when we were in seventh grade. Everyone, even people who don’t care about pop music, know all the words. If Willa were here, she’d cover her ears and moan about how it brings back too many bad memories of awkward middle school dances.

  There’s no traffic this far out and Izzy’s car speeds along. I catch my reflection in the rear window. My hair is going wild, and I’m struck for a moment when I realize I look like I belong.

  Izzy cranes her neck back toward me and says, “Did you know Phaedra met Taylor Swift? They hung out all night at some party.”

  “That’s not true.” Phaedra laughs. “We talked for a few minutes. She was really nice.”

  “Wow,” I say. “What was that like?”

  But Phaedra doesn’t answer. She sinks into her seat and pulls her sunglasses down over her eyes. And just like that, she disappears back into the illusion of her, silent and beautiful and mysterious. Maybe she’s just a mirage, just some imaginary thing that everyone wants to believe in.

  —

  Izzy looks for parking on a residential street near the beach. I can’t see the ocean yet, but I can taste the briny salt in the air, and I can almost hear the water rushing on the shore.

  We park in front of a sleepy-looking house with the lights off and an air conditioner sagging from the front window. We lug a cooler and a bag of towels and walk slowly, our bodies pressing against the wall of hot air. We’re near the airport, and overhead planes circle the sky, flying so low that you can see the logos painted onto the bellies of their rusted metal shells.

  The bright, crowded beach comes as a surprise after the quiet neighborhood. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people stretching out in every direction with their beach umbrellas and multicolored towels scattered around them like confetti.

  “Our meeting spot is this way,” Izzy says as we trudge through the sand past all the different camps of beach-goers.

  “I see Justin,” Phaedra announces. “They’re over there.”

  I look where Phaedra is pointing and my heart sinks. There are eight or nine people sitting around a beach umbrella, but Noah isn’t one of them. There’s one girl I’ve seen around school, but other than that, none of them are NYSA students. I guess if you are popular enough at your own school, you get to be popular at all of them.

  I hang back while Izzy and Phaedra greet the group. A handsome guy with dimples and shiny black hair reaches out for Phaedra, and she lets him hug her for a second before pulling away. That must be Justin.

  “Is anyone else coming?” I ask Izzy as we crawl around on all fours, spreading out the beach blanket.

  “I don’t think so,” she says. “It’s hard to get here so people always say they are coming and then they don’t show.”

  “Oh, okay,” I say, trying not to sound disappointed as I smooth out the corner of fabric.

  Izzy finishes and collapses onto her side. “I don’t care who comes. I’ve accepted the fact that I’m destined to never have a really fun birthday celebration. That’s what happens when you’re born a week before Christmas.”

  I laugh. Suddenly I feel someone looking at me, and my eyes glance up. There’s a boy on the other side of Izzy, in between the edge of her beach blanket and the others. Even though he’s a few feet away, the afternoon sun is so bright I can see that his eyes are a see-through glass green. He has dark blond hair, and he’s wearing a gray T-shirt that’s soaked from ocean water.

  “When is your birthday?” Izzy asks me.

  “Hmm?” I say, my attention snapping back to her.

  “Your birthday?” Izzy asks. “Or what, you don’t have one? You totally wouldn’t.”

  “What do you mean? Of course I have a birthday.” I giggle, confused.

  “No way,” she says. “You’re very, I don’t know. I can’t explain it. You’re just the kind of person who wouldn’t have a birthday. Go with it.”

  “Okay?” I say uncertainly.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” Izzy says. Then she rolls away from me and crawls up to where Phaedra is sitting.

  I check to see if the boy with the green eyes is still looking at me, but he’s talking to someone else.

  Unobserved, I take my camera out of my bag and walk down the beach by myself. I wander down the shore, catching snippets of conversations, arguments, and laughter. I stop far enough from the crowds that the only sound is water crashing. Then, I turn and face up the beach so I can take a big shot of all the umbrellas and the families. All these city people are clustered together, desperate for space.

  I wish Noah could see me now, barefoot on the beach with the wind in my hair. I can practically feel him reaching up inside my denim skirt, the thick material keeping his hand close to my skin. It’s funny: I didn’t know how much I wanted him to be here today, how much I was counting on it, until I realized he wasn’t coming.

  —

  When I get back to the group Izzy is looking up at me, using her hand as a visor.

  “Hey, before you sit down, can you do something for me?” she asks, making a cute little puppy-dog face. “It’s a gigantic enormous favor but if you do it, I’ll love you forever.”

  “Okay,” I say, intrigued.

  “Can you take the cooler and go get us more water from the car? There’s a bunch more bottles in the trunk,” she begs, folding her hands together in a prayer position.

  I look over my shoulder in the direction of the car. The hot sun
burns down on the beach. It’s at least a ten-minute walk to the car with no shade the whole way.

  “You don’t have to, never mind,” Izzy says, waving her hand. “We’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll go with you,” someone says.

  Izzy and I both look up and the boy with the green eyes is standing a few feet away.

  “Oh. Wait, what?” I say. “Really?”

  “Yeah. You can’t carry a cooler full of water alone,” he shrugs. “I don’t mind.”

  “Omigod, you guys are my saviors. I love you,” Izzy sings. Then she closes her eyes and sinks back down onto her back. Without opening her eyes she says, “The keys are in my purse.”

  I pack my camera into my backpack, fish the keys out of Izzy’s purse, and stand up.

  Now that we are face-to-face I see that this guy is tall. He’s wearing navy blue swim shorts and his calves are long and skinny.

  “I’m Sam,” he says.

  Sam. I play the name over in my mind.

  He runs his hand over his cropped blond hair and sand shakes out of it. I hate myself for thinking this because it’s so cheesy, but it looks like gold dust in the sunlight.

  “I’m Sadie,” I say.

  “Sa-die,” he repeats. And the way he says it, so slowly, so gently, it seems to break apart, the syllables floating into the salty sea air.

  —

  Sam carries his sneakers in one hand, his finger hooked into the backs, and the empty cooler in his other as we walk toward the car.

  Now that we are away from the group, our aloneness feels strange.

  “So, you’re a friend of Phaedra and Izzy?” I ask.

  Sam shrugs. “Justin’s a good friend of mine. And he and Phaedra hang out. So, yeah, I see them. You?”

  “I go to school with them,” I say. “Izzy and I are kind of new friends. I don’t know Phaedra at all.”

  “Phaedra’s okay.” Sam shrugs. “She’s just, you know, one of those city kids who thinks the world outside of New York City doesn’t exist.”