Where You End

by Anna Pellicioli

  “Good,” I say.

  “Yeah, good, and what’s your plan?”

  I cross my arms, hiding the address. “My plan? I don’t know, Adam. What’s yours?”

  “The same it’s always been. To look at stuff around me, to let it in, to stay awake, ask questions, see the beauty and the pain and all that shit we used to talk about. Everything that makes us different.”

  “Well, watch out,” I say.

  “For what? Watch out for what?”

  “All of that.”

  “I’m not scared of life, Meem, and you shouldn’t let one sorry dude make you scared of it either.”

  I think of what Paloma said about me figuring it all out, how she picked me for a reason and she was sure I could help her. I pushed a Picasso, met with a runaway at the National Cathedral, and am now going to Columbia Heights to spy on her family. I’m not scared of life either.

  “You haven’t been the same, and I get it,” he says. “I get that it’s hard, but I miss you. Everybody misses you.”

  “I’m sorry. Tell everybody I’m sorry.”

  “That came out wrong.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “It’s all right,” I say. “You were just trying to make the words say what you want to say and make me hear them as you want me to hear them.”

  “What?” Adam looks confused.

  “Nothing.”

  “No. Not nothing. What did you say?”

  “It’s nothing, Adam. It’s from a poem.”

  “Oh,” he whispers, examining my face for clues.

  I find my sweater and put it back on.

  “You’re not going to explain anything, are you?” he asks.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  I wait for him to leave.

  “Can I ask you something?” he blurts.

  He’s still standing next to me.

  “Sure.”

  “Did you tell your parents you went to the Winogrand?”

  I hate lying to this guy. “Yes.”

  “Why did you do that?” he asks.

  “I just didn’t want to explain.”

  “But you didn’t go, right? Because I didn’t … ”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Did you tell them about the sculpture?” he asks.

  I swallow hard and feel my face warming up. He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows.

  He looks worried. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because your mom didn’t know about it, and she was really messed up when I told her.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “That someone knocked it over, and they tried to blame the school, but nobody knows who it was.”

  “Oh,” I say, relieved but terrified. This adds a whole new layer to the lie.

  “She kept saying she didn’t know why somebody would do that. You know how your mom is with her art. It’s like someone stabbed her dog or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “Nope.”

  He shrugs and turns toward the door. I’m not quite done.

  “Hey Adam,” I say before he can leave, “do you think it’s a big deal to knock over a sculpture?”

  “Well, it’s a Picasso, but nobody stole it, and maybe it was falling apart in the first place.”

  “But you said that couldn’t be.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes? You said those things don’t just fall over. You said it’s impossible.”

  “Yeah, well, I could be wrong.”

  In theory, but he isn’t. Someone saw me push it.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Adam asks.

  I really do hate lying to this guy, so I walk past him without answering, toward my bathroom, and my hand brushes his leg on the way out. I turn on the shower and let the steam swallow me up. I run over our conversation many times before my neck relaxes under the hot water, then I draw a square on the glass and wipe it clear with my hands. I see tweezers, toothpaste, a cotton puff. Click. There’s my picture. I can’t help it. It’s like breathing. Some people think in words, others in music. We think in stills.

  I shave, to buy more time, and notice that my breasts seem bigger, almost swollen. I cup the right one in my hand and it feels sore. I poke the mole on my left one to compare: same. I lather enough jasmine shampoo to smell like an Indian wedding. Three times over. I’m going to have to make it up to Adam tomorrow. I’m also going to have to tell him about the Picasso. I can do it. He will understand. He’ll help me out. He said my pictures were beautiful.

  I wrap a towel around myself and realize I forgot to take my clean clothes in here. It’s all right, I tell myself. It’s only Adam.

  Back in my room, he’s gone, and I’m actually disappointed. I take off my towel and lie face down on the bed. I miss you, he said. The water drips from my hair, down the slope of my hips, to the bed. I think of Adam looking through my pictures. All the feeling in my legs rushes up to the tiny spot where my body touches the sheets, below my belly. I shift my weight onto one hip to ignore it, but the thought insists and I rub my body against the bed until it’s too late and my fingers reach down between my thighs with great, hurried purpose to find a place where I’m forced to let go. When I lift my hot face from the pillow, I realize I’m not at all ashamed. Just hungry.

  eight

  YOU DO HAVE A CAMERA, RIGHT?

  yes.

  OK.

  AND REMEMBER YOU CAN’T LET ANYBODY SEE YOU.

  i understand.

  YOU SOUND ANNOYED.

  i don’t know what you mean.

  YOU SOUND LIKE YOU’RE THE ONE DOING ME A FAVOR.

  just tired.

  EVERYBODY’S TIRED. YOU AGREED.

  i know. i’ll let you know. i have a camera.

  THIS IS NOT A GAME FOR ME.

  me neither.

  IT’S TOO IMPORTANT.

  i understand.

  GOOD. YOU DON’T. BUT GOOD.

  nine

  I wake up with a pair of headphones stuck to my face. My ears are killing me, and it takes me a minute to remember the music I was listening to. There was screaming and singing and guitar. There’s a photograph on my belly, and the light is still on. I must’ve fallen asleep while looking at it. The picture is of Elliot on the Metro, on our way back from a show. He’s looking down and smiling, as if he’s shy but flattered. It’s my favorite Elliot face.

  Elliot loves music as much as I love photographs, maybe the way Paloma likes poetry and her mother likes the organ. He can’t survive three hours without a song. He’s been to a hundred shows. Wherever they would let in a kid, he was there.

  The night of the picture, we’d gone to the 9:30 Club to see an Irish music man who sings like his heart is a boat in the middle of a storm. We were in the front, near the small stage, and I was too embarrassed to tell Elliot this was my first concert. My hair had been ruffled by plenty of painters and photographers, but no rock stars ever came to dinner at our house. I was trying to act cool, like I could hang with the crowd of people who’d come to see this guy sing. More and more people poured in, and Elliot took my hand and led me through the crowd to a good spot near the stage. He held my hand as we waited for the guy to come out. That’s when Elliot put his chin on my shoulder and told me my life was about to change. Those were his words, not mine. Your life is about to change, he said. Because of one man, on stage, holding a guitar with a gaping hole.

  So, the singer said a few words, and everybody laughed, and that’s when he tuned his guitar and started singing, gentle and sad at first. Everybody got real quiet, and Elliot stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist and the guy got a little louder, and the room felt like it wa
s rising, until he was actually screaming this song, but it was still a song, except it made so much noise, inside and outside.

  Photographs don’t make noise. They don’t rise and fall like that. They don’t fill the whole room and take over your insides. They just stand still and sometimes you have to squint to really see them. This was more like swimming. When the first song was over, I couldn’t wait for the next one, but I also knew it would never feel like that again. I’ll never forget that first song.

  After the band left the stage, I looked at Elliot for the first time in hours, and he looked so incredibly happy, and I wanted every single bit of him. I wanted to live in the middle of those waves, to have something to scream about, to really understand what made that man write songs.

  When we got on the Metro, our ears were still ringing, and we had to shout to hear each other. People were looking at us. I remember thinking everybody else looked tired. Elliot kept shaking his head and talking about how great it was, how it was so much better live than on the record. He leaned over and spoke in my ear, so I would hear him. He explained that music was like a knife for him, something that cut through everything. Then he sat back up, and that’s when I took the picture.

  It’s of Elliot’s face after the show, but it’s about me. It’s about the way I was looking at him and trying to understand him.

  I drop the print on the floor and try to fall asleep. It’s late. It’s been a long day. I kick the music off the bed, rearrange the blanket and read a poem from Paloma’s book. Nothing helps. Fuck it. Do what you need to, Miriam.

  Minutes later, I’m on the bike, crossing the city in the middle of the night, going much farther than I usually go. The hills are tough and gradual, but I’m so mad I can’t even feel it. I start on the side of the street and end up in the middle, since no one is there to honk or run me over. It’s a little scary, but mostly it’s nice to be alone.

  It’s hard to explain, especially in the middle of the night after a really long day, but I think I get what Elliot meant when he said music was his knife. So, there’s life, right? There’s breakfast, and your parents, and the landscape outside the bus window, and your friends, and the guy you buy your coffee from, and your house, with your room, and your things, and your street outside your window.

  Let’s say you even have love, maybe sex, definitely fear. You’re cruising—with your fair share of surprises and interruptions, but you’re still cruising. Even when you get hurt, or when you are totally triumphant, you are sort of cruising, because the story is rolling, and you’re in the middle of it, and it still makes sense. You’re on the surface of your life. You are moving.

  But sometimes, some days, some moments, something different happens. It doesn’t have to be big. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. Most of the time, it’s a lady with a red coat who’s crossing the street, and you can’t take your eyes off of her. Or your mom undoes her hair, and it makes you want to cry. Or a dog runs toward you at full speed and you can’t move, and you think he’s going to rip into you, but you just stand still and he stops right in front of your legs.

  Those moments are the knife. You don’t know why, but things feel so clear and pure and real, you know it must mean something big, but you don’t know what. Actually, when you try to figure it out, everything recedes and gets foggy, and you start moving again. That’s why you need a knife. Once in a while, we all need to cut through the layers and access that place. Even if it means riding your bike across the nation’s capital in the middle of the night to take a picture of a stranger’s house.

  Paloma’s street is off a main road in Columbia Heights, where the buses have already stopped running for the night. There are only a few tired men coming home, maybe from work, walking under those bright store lights that make everybody look sick and yellow. Most people are in bed, including Paloma’s little brother. But I can’t sleep, so why not check the place out? She sounded antsy in her texts; maybe this will calm her down.

  I get off my bike and walk it down the block. It’s row houses. There are two street lamps, one at each end, so I’m relieved when I realize Paloma’s house is in the middle, where it’s a little darker and easier to hide. Thank God the whole block is asleep.

  The house is three floors. A set of stairs leads up to a small concrete porch, where they crammed a rusty glider and a tricycle. There are bars on the first floor windows, and a basement apartment. I don’t know what I’m supposed to look for, how I can make sure she knows I got the right house. On the top floor, I see a window covered in white spots. I use the camera to zoom in, and it looks like it’s stickers, like the backs of dozens of stickers. This could be her brother’s room.

  I take a picture before I can stop myself, then ride back to my bed in one hurried breath.

  Under the covers, a few hours left until morning, I think of a knife. I think of a knife making a clean cut, and I can see what’s underneath, but it’s hard to keep my eyes open. It’s hard to look at what’s inside. It’s hard to be there for all of it. But I have to. Everybody has to. We all need a knife. Elliot’s knife was music. I like to think my knife is photographs, but what I’m really scared of, what scares me most of all, is that maybe my knife was Elliot. And what am I supposed to do now? Go back to cruising?

  ten

  HEY, NOT MAGGIE! I DID SOME RESEARCH.

  research?

  PICASSO HAD FOUR CHILDREN.

  ok.

  BY THREE DIFFERENT WOMEN.

  ok.

  HE WAS A COMMUNIST.

  oh.

  LOTS OF HIS ART HAS BEEN STOLEN.

  that sucks.

  YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

  i did not steal.

  PARDON ME. DESTROYED.

  HOW IS THAT PICTURE COMING?

  I have it.

  I KNEW IT.

  eleven

  “Go ahead and move those books, Miriam, so you can sit on the couch.”

  Ms. K’s room looks out on the parking lot, where the seniors have written their last battle cries on their car windows in magic marker that won’t wash out in the rain: Watch out, 2014. We’ve grown facial hair. We’ve had sex. We’ve walked home wasted. We have 357 Facebook friends. We know what motivated Othello and how many liters of water must be added to change the level of acidity. We’re ready.

  “Do you want any tea? I have some sugar in that closet,” she says in a calm voice.

  This is a new addition, the spa greeting. The last time I was in this office, I was a sophomore. I hadn’t met Elliot yet, and I was still debating which AP classes would be most challenging, how we could sculpt my “edge.” Mrs. C, our previous counselor, was into edges. Ms. K, the new woman, is into tea, and I’m in no position to refuse.

  I got called in here this morning during the last ten minutes of advisory, before classes start. I began to sweat when I got the note, and now I’m down to my last layer of clothes. Either Paloma packed it in and called the school, or the museum did. It’s Monday—three days have passed since the field trip. It’s about time someone figured it out. I should be grateful. This part will be over, and I can erase last night’s picture.

  “I only have green left. Is green tea all right?”

  Sure. I look around the room for clues, something I can work with. There are no diplomas on the wall, no pictures of children in a silver frame, no knickknacks or itchy pennants. The only thing is a huge close-up of a forsythia bush, an explosion of thousands of bright yellow flowers.

  Ms. K hands me the tea in a Styrofoam cup. It tastes like my front lawn. I sweeten it with two packs of sugar and keep the wrappers in my hand, unsure of how to get rid of them. I hope she gets to the point right away. I’ve had enough of mystery meetings.

  “So, Miriam, how’s it going?”

  Obviously we’re going to play some kind of game for a while. “Good” is a good-enough answer for now. I pick up a blue pillo
w my mom would buy and immediately put it back where I found it. My mom is going to erupt when she finds out. She’s going to make me hold up that sculpture up for the rest of my life. I’m going to take out loans for the Picasso while everybody else goes to college.

  “I called you in here so we could talk a little. Do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

  Ms. K stays quiet, which makes me extremely uncomfortable, which makes me sweat even more. Sipping my tea would help, but it’s unbearably hot, so I just cup it in my hand and look around for a place to set it. Would Styro­foam stain the side table? Can I put cream in green tea? This is the stuff we need to know, what they should be teaching us in school. I take a breath. She seems serious about wanting to know what’s on my mind.

  “I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to say.”

  “Right,” she answers patiently, like she’s been trained. “You can start with anything you want. Do you know why you’re here?”

  I have some guesses, but I’m not quite ready to share them. I shrug.

  “Do you have any questions?” she says.

  Sure. For instance, who exactly called you and what did they say? Are you familiar with Picasso? Have you ever been to the organ rehearsal at the National Cathedral? Is your period always regular? Do you know Elliot?

  “Where did you go to college?” I ask.

  Ms. K looks a little surprised, but she quickly gets it together again.

  “Maryland. University of Maryland. Not too far from here.”

  I comb through my mascot inventory, one of Dad’s favorite car games.

  “The tortoises?”

  “Terrapins,” she says.

  She sips her tea, so I sip mine. I’m good at stalling.

  Ms. K tells me about the process without really telling me what we’re processing. I nod along, and she appreciates the gesture. It’s pleasant and informative. She says she’s spoken to my teachers, who all agree that I’m talented and smart. That’s nice. I still don’t know why I’m here, and I’m not about to ask. She has not mentioned a call from a woman named Paloma yet.