In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Why should Baxter be the one who has all the fun?

  Annie stares into the blackness of the room, her eyes darting back and forth, her mind racing even faster. Not that infidelity has ever sounded fun to Annie before this, but with Colin, well, yes, it sounds a little exciting—a little bit like driving a race car in the goddamn Grand Prix (or even just in Baxter’s Porsche), like flying to the moon and back. Maybe I deserve to fly to the moon and back every once in a while too.

  Colin sighs in his sleep, not kept awake by his own moral debate of making moves on Annie, not lost in his fantasy of flying to the moon and back with her. No, he sleeps soundly, which punctures Annie just enough that she can almost feel the piercing in her heart.

  Her crush planted its roots so long ago, Annie is almost embarrassed that she’s still hung up on it. It’s childish, really. And it’s gross now, she thinks. He’s been with Lindy, and it was no secret that he would have hung the moon for Bea way back when.

  She met Colin the very first day of school. She was assigned to the freshman dorm, the Quad, a rambling three-story spread of crimson bricks that spanned two blocks of campus. Annie and Colin (and the rest of them too) had the misfortune of getting rooms in the unrenovated section: the overhead lighting flickered; the door hinges creaked; the dodgy linoleum floor chilled your feet, so all the girls shuffled around in these shearling slippers that Annie had never seen in Texas and couldn’t afford even if she had. After move-in day, Annie couldn’t wait to rinse the sweat residue off every inch of her body (a heat wave was passing through Philadelphia, and their wing of the dorm lacked air-conditioning), so she snapped off the tags to her new, never-been-washed towels and cranked on the shower. But the hot water took forever, and while the pipes whined and moaned and she stood there waiting, sweating, waiting, sweating, Colin popped through the door in a towel of his own.

  Annie hadn’t realized the bathrooms were unisex.

  Her jaw slackened, her sweat glands sped up though they were already in overdrive, and her cheeks flared emergency red. Annie had never had a high school boyfriend, had never let a man see her breasts, had never seen a naked man up close either. (She once inadvertently opened the bathroom door when one of her mother’s boyfriends was using the toilet and recoiled in mortification, but that wasn’t the same thing. Her mom’s parade of men and their flimsy commitments, their disappearing acts, steered Annie off boys through puberty—not that boys were flocking to her or she had to beat them off with a stick or anything.)

  “Hey,” Colin said, not particularly put out by his near-nakedness and her proximity.

  “Hey,” Annie warbled, very put out.

  “I’m Colin.” He extended a hand, and Annie worried for a brief moment that his towel would drop, like it sometimes did in the movies. But it didn’t, and eventually the steam rose from the shower, and Annie indelicately weaseled her way in, removing her towel and blindly thrusting out an arm to find the hanging hook, only after she’d sealed the curtain as close to shut as she could. And it turned out that Colin must not have found her too horrifying, stranded there like a mute mouse in an off-brand towel from Marshall’s, because the next night, after everyone in their dorm shuttled to a mandatory group-bonding Phillies game and back again, he invited her into his neighboring room (his roommate was out, and Lindy, Annie’s roommate—still a stranger then—wasn’t about to be a third wheel). She tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible while seated cross-legged on his bed, but he kissed her anyway.

  She was still a virgin then (obviously), and she never let him go all the way. It wasn’t like she didn’t want him. She did. But she worried she’d do it wrong; she worried he’d laugh at her; she worried that she’d sleep with him and he’d discover that she was just like her mom: white trash, cheap, flimsy, not the type of girl to take home to his own mother. So for two months she stopped him. And he was kind and respectful, of course. Although his breathing was hard when she pushed him off her, his hand would always flop atop his forehead like he was flushed with fever. Eventually, he just stopped being in his room at night when she would swing by unannounced, and he wasn’t waiting for her in the cafeteria when she would stand with her tray in hand, casting about for a place to sit beside him.

  The whole thing had lasted only two months; it shouldn’t have mattered the way it mattered to Annie for so long—too long, decades. But still, even now, as she lies beside him, the heat from his skin close enough to warm hers, she wonders whether that was why he ended it: if she’d given herself up to him, slept with him, let her become his completely, would she have had more of a chance? Would they have had more of a chance? Or was it that he knew deep down she wasn’t the type of girl he considered worthy, the type of girl whom his mother would approve of? That she was the type of girl whose mom bought Twinkies for the homemade bake sale?

  The night Colin officially ended it (“It’s not you, it’s me”), the fire alarms blared on at three in the morning. Lindy, with whom Annie had forged an unexpected friendship, had convinced Annie that alcohol was the only way she’d sleep after heartbreak. They were dead asleep, practically catatonic, when Bea, their next-door neighbor, banged on their door until Lindy stumbled forward, opened it, and said, “What?”

  Lindy winced against the piercing alarm and squinted toward the whirling red lights that bounced off the box on the ceiling. “Oh, shit.”

  Then their RA ran by, noticeably unpoised, and shouted, “This isn’t a drill! Fire on the second floor! Get out!”

  Lindy and Bea roused Annie, pulled sweatpants over her legs, stuffed her feet into sneakers, and scampered with her down the steps, out the first-floor exit. Colin was already outside, standing with Owen (who also lived on their hall and had quickly become Colin’s sidekick/wingman/bosom buddy), and Bea waved, unaware of the chasm Colin had axed into Annie’s heart just hours earlier.

  The fire trucks pulled up, so loud that none of them could even hear themselves think, and soon word spread: a Goth girl who was always cloaked in an air of mystery (and black eyeliner) had inadvertently fallen asleep with a cigarette. Rumors spread that she’d been wheeled out on a gurney. Catherine slid up to Owen, folded her hand into his, and whispered that she heard the girl was actually dead.

  “Dead!” She whispered again, her blue eyes as shocked as they were wide. This turned out not to be true, but in the moment they didn’t know, and the horror was exactly what six not-yet-indoctrinated freshmen needed to find their people. They were one another’s people now. They’d retell that story—remember how there was that fire, and we all stood outside the dorm and watched as they brought down the dead girl?—forever. And that would be how they came to be, the initial structure of their six-point star. Bea had rescued Lindy and Annie, united them with Colin, and thus Owen, and thus Catherine. What didn’t they owe to Bea?

  Eventually, nearly at dawn, the fire trucks cleared, and they were allowed back into their nook of the dorm, which reeked like a fireplace had exploded. Parts of the second floor had to be evacuated for the week. They stumbled back to their hall—stunned, baffled, exhausted—and piled into Bea’s room, falling on her bed, her floor, her overstuffed armchair.

  Annie murmured, “I don’t know anyone who’s died.”

  And Bea said, “I almost died. Twice.” And told them her story.

  They gaped at her, and every one of them silently determined her to be a hero—to be braver than they were, and stronger and more admirable too.

  Eventually, restless, unwelcome sleep cloaked them all.

  And they woke up changed. They woke up a unit.

  Not that this mended Annie’s heart. For the next week she curled herself into a tight ball on her bed, underneath those Ralph Lauren sheets, and cried. Lindy blared girl-power music like “I Will Survive” and “It’s Raining Men,” and told Annie she was better than some dumb asshole. And Bea started coming by regularly, rubbing her back and telling her th
at he was just an eighteen-year-old guy, and this is the sort of silly shit they do. Bea had been dating since she was fourteen—high school guys for a while and then a guy from NYU last year—so Annie tried to zip up her pathetic sputtering and believe her. Bea seemed wiser than Annie—not just about men, but about everything. She read the New York Times; she’d been to almost all the countries in Europe (including Russia, which Annie hadn’t even realized you were allowed to visit); she dressed like she had somewhere to be, even if she didn’t. Colin deserves someone like Bea, someone special, Annie thought when Bea left her to go retrieve a cup of tea. Lindy offered her Jack Daniel’s while they waited. It’s no wonder she couldn’t hang on to him, she told herself, when there were girls like Bea out there.

  It would have been healthier to exorcise herself from him, from them, to start fresh and make other friends, find a different crowd, a newer crew to run with. But now they shared late-night snacks (Corn Nuts and yogurt pretzels) and occasional late-night cigarettes (Parliament Lights), studied together, ate their meals together, and survived a girl almost dying together. Annie was never good at fighting inertia. Leaving Texas for Philadelphia was enough of a leap to exhaust her. So what was she going to do? She was grateful for their friendship, for their acceptance of her less-than-regal Texas self, and even though she still held out the hope that Colin might turn her doorknob one night and sneak into bed with her, she wasn’t about to ruin everything because he didn’t. Annie understood that everyone else could be casual, nonchalant, so she pretended that she could be too. Still, today, at nearly forty, she worked on perfecting her act.

  Annie turns her head and tries to make out Colin’s profile in the blackness of his old room.

  No, she isn’t going to ruin everything. Not then. Not now.

  Footsteps from the living room echo across the ceiling: Lindy or that guy who showed up tromping into the kitchen. Annie allows herself to shift just an inch nearer to Colin, as if his proximity can stave off what she remembers next.

  One particularly bleak night, just after she and Lindy landed in New York and it was gusting sheets of rain and their apartment windows rattled and the air inside was thick with curry from the downstairs take-out place and damp from the tears of their early twentysomething angst, Lindy threw back three tequila shots and beckoned Annie close, closer, no, closer still. They were sitting cross-legged across from each other on their apartment’s knotty wood floor, and Annie remembers—still, now—her heart beating, her thoughts unsure, as Lindy said, “No, closer, come here scooch forward, closer.” Annie smiled awkwardly and did as she was told until she was so close she could smell the tequila on Lindy’s breath, see the freckle that lay flat just above her top lip.

  “What?” She laughed nervously, so Lindy passed her a shot, sliding it a few inches across the floor, and Annie gulped it quickly, unsure why, but she gulped all the same. While the tequila burned its way down, before she even had time to process what was happening, Lindy leaned forward, breaking the divide between them, and kissed her. Annie was so startled, she froze, and Lindy pulled back. She must have seen the shock in Annie’s slackened cheeks, her wide eyes, so she cackled loudly and reached for another shot.

  “Oh, come on, Annie. I was just playing around,” she said. “We can’t land a guy worth shit, so I was just teasing.”

  Annie scooted back a few inches and tried to laugh, but it came out like an uncomfortable, awkward belch. Later, she would replay the kiss in her mind over and again, wondering if it really happened. It was all so fast, and they were both a little drunk.

  “No, no, I know!” she said, waving a hand, unable to meet Lindy’s eyes.

  “We have each other,” Lindy said, raising yet another shot. A toast. “To us! That won’t change. I promise.”

  Annie raised up a shot of her own, though her fingers were shaking, and they clinked their tiny little glasses and drank, avowing themselves to each other . . . because that’s what best friends do.

  After Catherine and Owen’s wedding, Annie stayed in Bea’s spare apartment in New York until she was brave enough to return to her own, sure that Lindy wasn’t there, sure that even if she were, she’d have the strength to face her. Actually, she was never sure of that, and was relieved that she didn’t have to be, because Bea, back in Honduras, but who always knew everything, e-mailed that Lindy had made her way to Nashville.

  Annie unlatched the door, the lock clicking, her breath caught in her throat, and didn’t know why she was surprised to find it empty. A hush settled over the apartment, a barrenness without Lindy there. She stood in the doorway for who knew how long, letting this marinate—that Lindy was gone, and if she didn’t want to think about her again, she didn’t have to. She stood on the precipice long enough to convince herself of this. Then she strode to Lindy’s empty bed, flattened herself on her old mattress, and swore that she was going to change. She’d tried this already, of course, at Penn. With the faded accent and the too-orangey highlights and the knockoff clothing that maybe no one could tell wasn’t the real thing. Maybe she needed to try harder to make someone love her, to believe in her the way Owen believed in Catherine—the way that, well, she’d believed in Lindy. Best friends forever?

  Fuck that, she thought, staring up at the cracks in the plaster left behind from a faded water stain. Why was Lindy so hell-bent on pushing people outside of their comfort zones? Well! Consider Annie pushed!

  She maxed out her credit card the next day at Bloomingdale’s, and cut off her shoulder-length hair to a modern bob. She tossed her shoulders back when she walked, and tipped her chin high. She got promoted at the PR firm, though when they called her in for the meeting, she was certain she was going to be fired. She got invited to happy hours, though she fretted she was terrible at small talk and occasionally overcompensated with an extra martini (or cosmo or whatever it was that everyone else was drinking that particular month). Sometimes she even went on dates, and was surprised each time a man found her attractive enough to ask. She nabbed a cheap apartment just south of Harlem and ventured out on her own, eating cold soup from a can for dinner in front of the glow of the TV, but she’d done it all the same—done it without Lindy, done it without Colin, without anyone. It should have made her happy, all of this. It didn’t, though. It felt like work; it was work. But it was life, and she supposed it was more than she’d thought she’d get back in Texas.

  And then Bea died just a few months after that. So suddenly and without warning. The funeral had been their last chance, probably, to make things right, to make a U-turn back to being one another’s people. But they’d squandered that too. Still hopped up on their sensitivities from the wedding debacle, and without Bea there left to mend things, well, it was easy to let things unravel.

  Annie mourned her for a good year, sometimes a memory sneaking in on the subway or at the deli or late at night in the stillness of her new apartment, making her catch her breath. Memories of how Bea had insisted on bringing Annie home for Thanksgiving because she knew Annie didn’t have much to celebrate back in Texas; of how Bea made them all choose a costume theme for Halloween (the cast from Scream, the characters from Clueless) and go as a unit, an ensemble. Sometimes she still picked up her phone to call her, simply out of habit. Sometimes she checked her e-mail, thinking she’d get a whirlwind update from some glamorous, exotic locale that Annie could only read about in thick magazines at her dentist’s office.

  But Bea never e-mailed, of course. Annie could never call.

  And then Annie met Baxter. And for once, Annie made her peace with Bea’s passing. Not because she wouldn’t have done anything in the world to bring her back, but because now Annie was unburdened, no immediate history to detach herself from. Only her ancient history, and she’d long since figured out how to outrun that. The accent, the frosted hair, the knock-off clothes, the Twinkies, the wolves—there was simply no one left in her circle who knew her from before.

 
Baxter was a notorious New York bachelor, a trader at Morgan Stanley, a staple on the late-night scene. They met at a post-5K Goldman-sponsored Fun Run, and Annie was two martinis in. Baxter was three deep. He plugged her info into his phone by his fourth, and then e-mailed her, with her standing beside him, asking if she’d like to come home with him.

  Annie knew better, so she declined.

  She’d read The Rules, after all.

  Instead, the next night he took her to a tiny hole-in-the-wall in Little Italy, with homemade gnocchi and to-die-for tiramisu, and they talked about all sorts of things that were out of Annie’s league: the opera and weekends in Europe and yachting and childhood country houses. But they weren’t out of Annie’s league anymore, because now she was whoever she wanted to be. Two bottles of pinot and twelve hours later, she woke in his apartment, under six-hundred-thread-count sheets, a note next to the bed saying he’d gone for a run and to stay for the morning. She pulled the sheets high up to her neck and vowed to be the person he thought she was, be the person she really had become now. He didn’t need to know her secrets; she hadn’t asked him about his own.

  He proposed quickly, after only four months. They’d flown to Antigua, Annie’s first time out of the country (she never told Baxter), and he knelt on one knee at sunset on the beach. He cried, and then she cried too, and they both vowed to remember that moment forever. They really did love each other once. Even years later, Annie would remember that gasp of a moment and wish she’d photographed it, wish she’d captured it to share with all her friends.

  Baxter had been married once before—a quickie at age twenty-three that lasted nine months—so he didn’t want a big to-do. Though Annie secretly dreamed of a write-up in the New York Times, she also couldn’t bear the notion of her mother, in an electric-blue taffeta gown from TJ Maxx, mixing with his blue-blood family, and quickly conceded to something smaller, something quieter. Something that didn’t betray her. Annie flew her mom in for a weekend of pleasantries (at Baxter’s insistence), and Annie held her breath for two days straight, so terrified that her mom would embarrass her, give her away, make him stop loving her. But she didn’t. Baxter was nothing but gracious—Annie had to give that to him even now. If he thought any less of her, saw through the veneer she’d constructed, he said not a word.