Mac shot her a pointed look before getting up to refill his glass of water from the tap. Olivia snuck a peek at Violet, who was staring at the back of Mac’s head. Probably noticing all the new gray hairs, Olivia thought, or the stiff, awkward way he moved around now. Like he was recovering from an injury, taking time to bounce back.
Only it wasn’t an injury. And he wasn’t recovering.
Olivia looked to Bridget, who was carefully chewing as if nothing was wrong. Her BlackBerry buzzed again and she quickly grabbed for it. Olivia lowered her eyes to her plate and pushed a noodle through a puddle of sauce.
Bridget made a few small sounds of acknowledgment before laying the device back down and returning to her pasta.
“Yikes,” Violet muttered from her countertop perch. Olivia rolled her eyes in silent agreement.
Mac coughed abruptly as if a piece of food had gone down the wrong pipe, and reached for his water at the same time Bridget was helping herself to more salad. Their hands collided sloppily, sending Mac’s glass toppling and water pouring onto the table.
“Damn it, Mac!” Bridget shouted, clutching her Black-Berry and backing violently away from the dripping table as if she’d been doused in kerosene.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Mac grumbled. “But you shouldn’t have that stupid thing at the table. We’re trying to eat here.”
Bridget dabbed at her pants with a dishcloth before carrying her plate to the sink. “Not anymore,” she said coolly, wiping scraps of soggy food into the disposal with her fork.
Mac dropped his silverware onto his plate with a clank and pushed back from the table, throwing down his napkin and grumbling as he rose to his feet. He stomped across the kitchen and swung the basement door open, loudly descending the squeaking stairs. Moments later, the jumpy thud of a table saw vibrated up through the floorboards, shaking the legs of Olivia’s chair like an aftershock.
Violet looked from Olivia to Bridget, who was still standing at the sink, quietly rinsing her plate.
Olivia sat frozen at the table, her ears throbbing, her fingers trembling in her lap, while her mother dried her hands with a towel.
“Do you mind running the dishwasher when you’re finished?” Bridget asked, dropping a hand on Olivia’s shoulder as she passed on her way upstairs.
Olivia brought her plate to the sink as Violet lowered herself down from the counter, pressing an ear against the basement door. Olivia pulled the heavy dishwasher door toward the floor and began to sloppily load the remaining plates and glasses.
“Well, that was fun,” Olivia muttered under her breath, shoving a handful of silverware into the plastic divider. “Aren’t you glad you came back?”
Olivia looked up to see Violet still pressed against the door, staring sadly at a spot on the floor by her feet.
Olivia wiped her hands on the tops of her jeans and turned a knob on the dishwasher as it jolted and whirred into action. She walked over to Violet, linking elbows and pulling her sister toward the stairs. “Because I sure am.”
12
“Anybody who tells you to just be yourself was clearly a loser in high school.”
Olivia was nibbling on a bagel by the library windows and counting tiles on the glossy checkerboard floor. After two bus rides’ worth of trying to look normal with Violet chattering away beside her, Olivia had decided that her only hope was in the details. As long as she had something to focus her eyes on, she was golden. On the bus, it had been the fedora of the elderly man sitting in front of her—the silver hairs on the back of his neck had been trimmed into a neat, solid line.
And here in the hallway, tile-gazing did the trick while Olivia waited for homeroom bell, pretending not to be receiving the latest installment of Violet Larsen’s High-School Handbook, the telepathic audio version.
“What does that even mean, anyway? Be yourself.” Violet was speaking rhetorically, gesturing like a frustrated philosopher. Olivia rolled her eyes and took a bite of cinnamon-raisin bagel, crumbs tumbling onto the lap of her honey-colored corduroys.
“I’m serious,” Violet insisted. “Nobody has any idea who they are. Arguably ever, but certainly not in high school. Am I wrong?”
Olivia, starting to master the art of acknowledging Violet without looking like she belonged in the loony bin, shook her head no, in a way that could have been just as easily interpreted as a casual flipping of her hair.
“And who knows what makes some kids cool and some kids not,” Violet continued, then paused. “Actually, I do. It’s confidence. That’s all there is to it. It really doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you commit to being that person one hundred and fifty percent.”
An overwhelmingly under-confident sophomore with shifty eyes and a slightly suspicious overcoat shuffled through the library doors. Violet gestured to him as evidence, just as the bell rang for homeroom.
Olivia wrapped up the rest of her bagel and shoved it into the outside pocket of her backpack, hopping down from the cushioned window bench and heading to class.
Violet skipped alongside her, continuing her foray into motivational speaking. “And it’s a tricky thing,” she went on, nodding as if agreeing with her own excellent point. “Because it seems like to be cool, or popular, at least, you have to be confident. But it’s kind of tough to be confident when you’re not already cool, right?”
Olivia snuck into homeroom, wishing Violet would save the question-and-answer portion of the seminar for a time when she wasn’t slinking down the center aisle of a bustling classroom.
In the back corner, Calla, Graham, and other members of their crew convened at the floor-to-ceiling windows. They were sprawled out over any space that wasn’t a chair, as if collectively allergic to the furniture. Graham leaned on a wooden ledge by the window, drumming his fingers on the glass, and Calla lounged on the floor, a strand of dark hair angled in her mouth, scribbling in a Moleskine notebook.
Olivia kept her head down and sat at a desk near the front, taking out her assignment notebook and needlessly confirming that she’d done all of her homework.
“But the good news,” Violet said animatedly, hopping on the table and crossing her long legs over the list of checked-off assignments, “is that confidence can be faked.”
Ravi, the lumbering physics teacher Olivia had for homeroom, started to call out roll. He had long, greasy hair, which he was forever tucking back behind one ear in a way that made him look simultaneously girly and like he needed a bath.
“Exhibit A: Listen to how people react to the sound of their own names.” Violet nodded to the front of the room.
“Christian Baker,” Ravi droned.
Christian, a small boy with an upturned nose and glasses too big for his face, mumbled an almost unintelligible response.
“Not confident,” Violet judged disapprovingly.
Ravi ran through the list, Violet assessing each response for Olivia’s benefit.
When he got to Calla, both Violet and Olivia held their breath.
“Calla Karalekas?” Ravi said, looking up with slightly more anticipation, it seemed to Olivia, than he had shown about anything else all morning.
“Morning, Ravi,” Calla cooed. She waved one hand in the air, and Olivia saw that she was wearing red and black striped fingerless gloves.
Ravi looked quickly back to his book, marking Calla present with exaggerated effort. “Yes, uh, good morning,” he stammered before moving on.
Violet gave Olivia a meaningful look. “Looks like Ravi could use a lesson or two,” she remarked, giggling infectiously.
“Olivia Larsen?” Ravi continued down the list.
Olivia jumped at the sound of her name. The remnants of a probably-crazy-looking smile faded from her lips as she straightened abruptly, her head swimming with possible responses. Here? Hi? Nice to see ya?
“Present,” Olivia said, too loudly and with a bit of a nervous tremor. It almost sounded like singing, and not in a good way. She listened hard for a chuckle from the back of the room, b
ut there was only silence, charged and threatening to swallow her whole.
Violet cleared her throat and hopped down from the table. “Well,” she said brightly. “The other good news is that there’s always tomorrow.”
It was finally lunchtime, and Violet was close to throwing in the towel.
For the most part, she had reported with irritation, Olivia wasn’t even making any kind of effort to have fun. And when she did, it definitely wasn’t the right kind.
First, there was the incident in studio art. Despite Violet’s urging to sit at a table with some of the kids Olivia recognized from the party and homeroom—Austin, a pixie-haired blonde, and her boyfriend, the dreadlocked bass player Nemo, or Reno, or some other two-syllable word that wasn’t actually a name—Olivia had chosen a seat by herself in an alcove by the materials closet.
The class was working on self-portraits, and while Austin and Tevo flipped through vintage photographs and album covers for inspiration, Olivia was stuck watching a gumsmacking goth girl work on an impressively scary piece of chain-link armor.
Remembering Violet’s advice, Olivia turned to the gloomy girl and cleared her throat.
“How long do you think that will take?” Olivia asked with confidence. “Until your armor’s finished, I mean.”
The girl turned her languid eyes and downturned pouty lips in Olivia’s direction. “A lifetime,” she mournfully replied, before snapping another link in place.
Violet dropped her head dramatically on the table.
Next had been Eastern religious studies, which Violet had insisted they switch into, claiming that Olivia needed to be exposed to more interesting people and actually learn something, as opposed to re-memorizing the dates of the Hundred Years’ War.
Violet had been right, for the most part, and so far the class had involved lively discussions about whose mother had converted to Buddhism on which trip to India and what Angelina Jolie’s Tibetan tattoos really meant. Violet was so totally enraptured by the conversation about the exotic birthplaces and/or travel destinations of everyone in the class that she seemed to have forgotten her self-appointed role as Olivia’s life coach.
Olivia absentmindedly doodled on the back of her binder, wondering what the Chinese symbol for “failure” was.
And then, at long last, lunch. Golden Gate was on a rotating schedule, with four different lunch periods, which meant that some mornings Olivia was forced to eat a tuna sandwich at some ungodly breakfast hour, and other days it was all she could do to keep her growling stomach from digesting itself way past noon.
Today she was somewhere in the middle, and so, it seemed, was everybody else: The courtyard was beyond packed as she made her way inconspicuously to a quiet corner by the pond.
As soon as she’d settled onto a rock and started to pull out the rest of her bagel, Violet dragged her up onto her feet and marched her back inside. “I have two words for you,” she announced as they pushed their way through the glass doors and stepped onto the tree-lined street. “Open. Campus.”
“I’m not hungry,” Olivia muttered as Violet skipped down the block. She’d hoped that Violet’s appearance would have signaled the return of her appetite, as well. But so far, no such luck.
“Fake it,” was Violet’s advice. “Or get a tea. People love their tea around here, huh?”
Olivia tore the sleeve of her sweater free from Violet’s vise grip and pulled her sister into a sunken alley in the middle of the block.
“Face it,” Olivia sighed. “I suck at this. It isn’t me. Can’t we just call it a day?”
Violet threw her hands in the air. “You’re not even trying,” she yelled. “It’s like you don’t even want to make friends.”
Olivia shrugged and leaned back against the brick wall of the building behind her.
“Why do I have to?” she asked, quietly. “I mean, you’re here now. Right?”
Olivia saw Violet’s features soften out of the corner of her eyes, and then felt her sister’s hand closing firmly around her shoulder. “Snap out of it,” she commanded. “If not for you, at least for me. You’re in the middle of the city, for God’s sake. Act like it!”
Olivia looked into Violet’s pleading eyes and grumbled, slumping toward the sidewalk and allowing her sister to pull her along.
The People’s Republic, the popular coffee shop around the corner from school, was even more crowded than the courtyard, and Olivia figured that by the time she’d waited in the zigzagging line for a chai or a muffin, she’d already be late for next period. But Violet was on a mission. The girls stood patiently next to the glass counter, Olivia silently pondering the irony of vegan cream cheese, while Violet oohed and ahhed over the selection of flavored coffee drinks.
Once Olivia had successfully ordered a peppermint tea and an oatmeal cookie, she turned to find Violet already seated at a table in the center of the café, face-to-face with Calla Karalekas.
Violet waved her arms so wildly that Olivia was nervous she might somehow disrupt molecules and send an invisible tornado spinning across the room. Olivia felt her pulse drumming and tried to steady her ragged breath as she cut between tables toward Calla and her crew.
She carefully balanced her tea and cookie in the same hand, using her free fingers to unwrap a lost strand of hair from around the tip of her nose. She took a final, leveling breath, her eyes meeting Violet’s eager and encouraging stare. Should I ask to sit? Olivia anxiously wondered. Or just sit. Probably just sitting without asking would seem more confident. Who asks to sit? It’s a free country, she insisted to herself in Violet’s voice. She circled the table, planting herself beside Violet and lowering her drink to the table…at the exact moment that Calla spun around and stood up.
“Let’s get out of here,” Calla exclaimed hurriedly to her blond friend. “I forgot I told Soren I’d meet him at Amoeba. He’s been trying to get me to buy the new MGMT for, like, weeks.”
It wasn’t a planned escape. Both Olivia and Violet could see that. Partly, it was just bad timing. But that didn’t account for the fact that no matter what she did, Olivia seemed destined to remain, like her sister, hopelessly and irreversibly invisible.
13
“How’s it coming in there?”
Olivia was sandwiched between piles of dresses, skinny jeans, and sky-high heels in an almost impossibly tiny dressing room, staring at her frazzled, half-dressed reflection in a three-way mirror. She struggled to remain decent at all times, as the door had no latch, and the chatty sales help—all of whom appeared to be identically twenty-two, rail-thin, and not at all shy about barging right in.
After a day of pushing Olivia to assert herself in class, strategically picking out places for her to sit at lunch, and counseling her on how to do everything from walk down the hall to demand (not ask for) permission to go to the bathroom, Violet had decided that the only thing left to overhaul was Olivia’s tired and lackluster wardrobe.
“You want to know why nobody notices you?” Violet had asked during a dejected walk home from the bus. “It’s because every single one of your sweaters is exactly the same shade of beige, and it matches the paint on the classroom walls. Half the time, I don’t even see you.”
And so, when Olivia returned home from school Monday afternoon, shocked to discover that her mother was working from home, Violet convinced her to do the unthinkable and ask Bridget to take her shopping.
Three hours, six boutiques, and two different covers of the same Rolling Stones song later, Olivia was pressed against the dressing room mirror, with eager, multi-pierced hipsters filing in and out, piling dress after vintage dress into her outstretched arms. At first, Violet had been there, too, assessing each item one by one, but even she had been overwhelmed by the cramped quarters and myriad outfits, and had vanished to peruse a selection of oversize sunglasses by the window.
“Olivia?” her mother called out again from the plush crimson armchair in the narrow hall, tapping her taupe Tod’s loafer against the carpet and clic
king through e-mails on her BlackBerry.
“She looks amazing,” one salesgirl or another informed her. “Almost like a young Sophia Loren, don’t you think?”
“Definitely,” the other wholeheartedly agreed.
Olivia rolled her eyes and freed a belted, vestlike garment from a hanger, holding it out in front of her shoulders.
“A vest?” Olivia muttered to herself, slipping her slender arms through the open sleeves. “Who am I, Charlie Chaplin?”
“What’s that?” her mother called out.
“Nothing,” Olivia covered, choosing from a pile of skirts, many with pleats and almost all about six inches shorter than she would ever consider appropriate for public viewing. She was struggling to pull up a pair of thick knit stockings while standing on one foot when she lost her balance and tumbled backward into the door.
“Everything all right?” her mother tried again lightly.
Olivia sort of grunted as she shimmied the skirt back over her hips.
“Come out and show me.”
Olivia looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her red hair was frizzy and her cheeks were flushed, and all she wanted to do was put on her favorite paper-thin zip-up sweater, even if it was the color of a dirty Band-Aid. She didn’t care anymore if vests were all the rage—she felt ridiculous.
“Come on,” she heard Violet calling. “You’ve been in there for twenty minutes—there has to be something you like.”
Olivia sighed and pushed the door open, tugging at her sleeves and stepping out into the hall. She had been so closely watching for Violet’s reaction that she almost didn’t hear the small sounds Bridget was making in her chair, or the flutter of her fingertips as they searched for her mouth. She looked down and saw that her mother’s eyes were clouding, the soft creases at the corners deepening into hard, tired ravines.
“Mom?” Olivia spoke quietly. “What’s—”
Bridget shook her head silently from side to side as Violet stepped behind her, placing her hands lightly on the back of the chair.
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