by Holly Cupala
“Mandy,” said Mom, her teeth clenched as the word pried its way out. “I’m not forcing you, am I?” The question uncloaked me.
Xanda turned to me expectantly. “Well?” she demanded. “Do you want to be in the show?”
“I—I guess so.”
Mom looked smug. Xanda looked utterly defeated. I felt like a traitor.
“Congratulations,” Xanda sniped. “It looks like you’ve successfully created your own puppet government.”
It didn’t occur to me until much later that the role Mom offered had never been about me—only about getting to Xanda. I wondered what my mom had in mind now.
I smiled wearily. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll be upstairs.”
“You must be exhausted from the trip. Take a shower first though, huh? I just washed everything.” She rolled my suitcase down the hall with two fingers, checking the floor for skid marks as she went.
I could hear her unzipping and sorting as I climbed the stairs, the squishy carpet familiar under my feet. I passed frame after frame of my drawings and paintings—all labyrinths. The same labyrinths that had brought Kamran and me together.
After the junior class art exhibit came down, a note tumbled out of my locker, written in tiny staccato handwriting: Meet me under the plum tree.
I read the note over and over, floating through the rest of my classes like plum blossoms. When the last bell rang, I found Kamran there, his helmet in one hand and a second one in the other, motorcycle standing by.
“I have a surprise for you. Hop on.” Before I had a chance to ask where we were going, he fitted the helmet onto my head and slung on his own, then strapped our bags to the back. He mounted the bike and I wrapped myself around him, drinking in his musky smell with the faintest hint of sour-sweet.
As we wound our way through the streets, I couldn’t stop thinking about my body against his or the warmth I felt through every layer. We crested Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, where the past met the present in a violent tumble of brownstones and mansions, transients and transplants, infinite varieties of colors and art and self-expression. We nearly collided with pedestrians, odors exotic and taboo, and a thousand visual feasts.
“That’s my parents’ restaurant,” he shouted, pointing to Café Shiraz, a hole-in-the-wall place with cinnamon and garlic scents emanating from the open door.
“Is that where we’re going?”
“Later, maybe.”
“Where, then?”
He grasped my hand with his nimble and smooth one. “Ask no questions, I tell no lies.”
Commercial buildings blurred into brick apartments then towering evergreens near Cornish College of the Arts. He turned into the campus parking lot and led me through the heavy doors and stained glass to the current art exhibit: Travels through Space and Time.
Later, over kebabs and hummus and his mom’s famous stuffed figs, we talked about light sources and vanishing points, MIT and Baird. He told me about his parents leaving everything to come here and start a restaurant, I told him about my parents disappearing into their work. I asked about physics. He asked about art. I stopped short of telling him about Xanda.
The office and basement were lit when we pulled up to my house—each of my parents in separate domains. Kamran and I sat on the curb under the rhododendrons, exactly the place where Andre parked his green Impala and Xanda disappeared into the night. We watched the sky turn from gray-gold to gray-plum, an echo of the paintings we’d seen at Cornish as we wandered the corridors, hand in hand. He was so close, I could feel the roughness of his jacket brushing up against my skin.
“So you never told me about your poetry.”
“Ah, right.” He grinned. “You mean when I was copying your artwork.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. So where is this so-called poem, inspired by my labyrinths?”
“Oh, that.” He ran his fingers through rumpled hair, olive eyes squinting through dark, dark lashes. “You don’t really want to see that.”
“Oh, but I do.” I felt out of my depth. Xanda would have pulled him close, felt the skin under his T-shirt, his waistband…for me, it was enough to be touching his sleeve.
He rummaged through a folder in his pack for a sheet of graph paper swirled over with that same tight handwriting. Sentences began in one corner and spread out like branches in a tree.
He held it aloft. “I don’t know if I want you to see this—it’s not actually a poem. Well, sort of. It’s more like…strings of possibility.” He sat down next to me, tracing his finger over the lines. “It’s all the things that could bring a person to this point—”
“A person?”
“W-well, two people.” Leaning over his shoulder, I caught only fragments: She follows a path, a labyrinth…A landscape of mystery beneath her lines…A girl seeking shadows, past and future…What secret she seeks, unfolding lies…
The sentences curled away from each other until I reached the top, the one that nearly stretched off the page:…paths cross, time stops…then she and I would meet.
Those sentences uncloaked me, the same way I felt when he lost himself in my mazes—like he already knew me. The thought both excited and terrified.
“To what point?” I asked, my voice unsteady. I could almost taste the figs lingering on his breath.
Then our lips met in our own mad, messy kiss, tender and fruity, pomegranate fireworks, his hands cupping my face and mine warm under his jacket, noses bumping and chins tilting until he pulled away, the two of us existing in a moment of perfection.
It was then that I knew I could tell him anything—about Xanda, the labyrinths. Someday I might even tell him about Andre.
Need to talk, Kamran’s text had said. We’d barely spoken since I left in July, only a few clipped conversations and a backlog of unanswered messages—his and mine. I would have to tell him when I saw him. It would be his secret, too.
I shut myself in the bathroom. Stripping down had become a ritual at camp: hoping, checking, nothing. Delaney once said, “I don’t worry too much if I only miss one.” What if I’d missed two?
If it doesn’t happen today, I thought, I’ll take a test. But I’d have to see Kamran first. Be wrong.
Downstairs, my mom typed away on her laptop. “…Then the narrator, he’ll be telling the backstory at this point, drumming up sympathy for the grand finale, the final moment when she reveals…oh, yes!” The sound of her whispering lines had exactly the same effect as a cheese grater on the back of my neck.
“Mom, can I use the car? I’ve gotta run some errands.” Kamran would probably be at Big Boss now, or at his parents’ restaurant.
“Okay, honey,” she said distractedly. “Pick up a new toothbrush, will you? After two months at camp, yours is probably disgusting.”
“Sure.” The drugstore was already on my list.
“Oh, I forgot to mention—Delaney called,” Mom sang as I reached the front door. “Back from her trip to Amsterdam?” She sure did like that Delaney girl. I would have to call her when I got back.
A half hour later, I steered around the massive Big Boss parking lot. A woman with a toddler rolled a cart piled high with diapers to an SUV while the car in front of me flipped on a blinker.
“Come on,” I muttered, swinging wide with the Lexus.
That’s when I saw him, looking not quite like himself in the red Big Boss vest and chasing down stray shopping carts, but entirely like the person whose body and soul had touched mine. I didn’t even realize how much I’d missed him until now.
Only he wasn’t alone.
He was with her. Delaney. Wearing a matching vest, hips peeking out over her jeans as she slapped him on the butt.
The ground started sliding out from under me.
He laughed.
Collided a cart into hers.
Sent everything reeling, fissures cracking until I could no longer stand the pressure of my body, certain to implode at any moment.
I peeled out of the parking lot before either
of them could spot me. There was a drugstore to find, a toothbrush to buy.
Not to mention a pregnancy test.
Three
Things could have been different if Delaney had chosen Brielle Peterson to show her around school last spring instead of me.
She landed in my first-period class in the empty seat next to me, a left-handed desk relegated to the back corner of the room. While the teacher droned on about world events and our role in them, I decorated my notes with an epic, convoluted network of lines and swirls.
“Psst.” The new girl leaned over her desk to get a closer look. “What are you drawing?”
“Just…drawing,” I mumbled. In fact, I was trying to remember the exact shape of the poem Kamran had shown me, the words curling from one branch to the next. She sat back again, scrutinizing her iPhone.
I’d heard about Delaney Pratt. Getting the boot from View Ridge Prep gave her instant mystique, especially at Elna Mead, home to a small army of punkalikes who were collectively spellbound by her hoarse laugh, street style, and ability to attract the attention of any straight male in the vicinity. Rumors swirled around her. Her dad was a Boeing exec, so whatever she’d done to get kicked out had to be huge.
When the bell rang, the teacher reached out for Brielle, junior-class president and leader of tomorrow. Delaney stood next to me, her hair falling in ripples over a shredded silk jacket, coiling around her limbs like nubby snakes. Something about her seemed terribly, wonderfully familiar.
The rest of the class scurried out the door while Brielle sized her up. As I gathered my book and papers, Brielle was saying, “Sure, I’d be happy to show her around.”
Delaney’s footsteps slowed. “Oh, thanks, but I already found someone to give me the tour.” To me, she whispered, “What’s your name again?”
“Rand.” The teacher shrugged. Brielle rolled her eyes and stalked out.
“God, thank you.” Delaney was rifling through her oversized bag as we walked out together.
“So, um, I guess I can show you to your next class. Do you have a list?”
She found her keys next to a pack of Marlboros and put a cigarette behind her ear and the keys between her teeth. “Not likely,” she muttered. She started toward the parking lot as the last of the students trickled into their classrooms, leaving me standing in the hall. “Coming?”
Essence would be waiting in chem but would forget all about me once she landed in drama with Eli. Kamran would be waiting for me after the last bell rang.
“Sure,” I said, just before I caught up.
We wound our way around Lake Washington Boulevard in Delaney’s Audi through a corridor of eight-foot laurels. A few sweeping estates spilled down the hill to the edge of the lake, just the sort of property my mom would have traded an eye for. Delaney’s dad owned one of them.
In the granite-and-steel kitchen, Delaney poured herself a drink. She took one look at me and laughed. “If you think this is wild, you should meet my big brother, Dylan. He throws the most outrageous Halloween parties—come October, I’ll take you. It’ll crack open your universe.” She took a gulp of her milky amber concoction. “Want some?”
“Won’t your dad notice?”
She snorted. “I’d have to throw myself off a bridge for my dad to notice.”
I knew exactly what she meant.
After my trip to Big Boss, I couldn’t face my mom alone. I couldn’t face anyone. I drove around numbly until I found a random drugstore to buy the test. And, of course, the toothbrush. But no amount of brushing could scrub away the hurt and panic I was feeling.
Kamran called twice that week, but I didn’t trust myself to talk to him. Not now.
When I got home from the drug store, I’d hidden the test in the secret passage between Xanda’s and my rooms. No one would look for it there.
What if he was only calling to break up with me? Telling him now would be like playing a trump card but losing the game. He had to want to fly away with me, like Andre did with Xanda. I could tell him then. I would take the test and we could figure out what to do together.
After his third message, I called back.
“You’re home.” Just hearing the crack in his voice threatened to break my resolve.
My throat caught with the words I wanted to say. I miss you. And I drew a breath to say them when he cut in.
“I need to talk to you…” He trailed off as a girl’s laughter crackled in the background.
“Who’s that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“I’m at work.” Static whirled like a wind tunnel. “Hey, I can’t really talk now. I’m trying to cram in hours before Monday. But I can call you later, or—”
Another voice muttered in the background, something starting with “Dude…”
“I need to talk to you, too. When can I see you?”
Kamran came back on the line. “A bunch of us are going to Chop Suey tonight.”
“A bunch of us?”
“Yeah. Me, Delaney…”
“Delaney? Back from Amsterdam?”
“Yeah. About that…”
I knew all about that. While I finger painted and kept middle graders from sneaking off into the woods, Kamran spent the summer loading family reunion–sized bags of pretzels and motor oil with Delaney. Maybe he was wooing her with descriptions of the space-time continuum. Maybe she had caught him in the sphinx’s gaze of her perfect chest. Maybe I should stop before I drove myself crazy.
“…she didn’t go to Amsterdam.”
“Really.”
“Her dad found out about us crashing at his cabin, so he canceled her trip, made her get a job—”
“That’s what she said?” I felt myself shaking. “And neither one of you told me?”
Pause. “Wait a second. Why are you getting all worried about this?”
“Maybe because you didn’t mention it?”
“I didn’t mention it because…” He stopped himself. “You’re right. I should have said something. I figured Delaney would have told you.”
I knew what he would say—I was being insecure. Why did I worry so much? What did I think Delaney had that I didn’t? Wasn’t she supposed to be my friend?
“You don’t even know her,” I said hoarsely. Maybe I didn’t either.
“You don’t have to come tonight,” he said. “I just thought…” The static went quiet again until I could hear the sound of his breath.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”
Four
When Delaney picked me up to go to Chop Suey, she wasn’t alone.
“You remember Chloe, right? From the French crowd?” I remembered Chloe, the quiet one who always seemed to be turning up next to someone, the serial sidekick. She sat in the front seat of Delaney’s Audi. Since when were we hanging out with Chloe?
“Who’s meeting us again?” I asked as I climbed into the backseat.
Delaney turned around and grinned. “Just us and Milo and”—she added in a sultry voice—“lover-man Kamran.” Chloe giggled.
I felt my face burning. Did Kamran tell her? Maybe while they were stocking the condom shelf at Big Boss? I touched the test in the bottom of my purse, still there waiting for me.
“And maybe Dylan, if he’s around.” Dylan, Delaney’s infamous older brother, managed Chop Suey. He would let us in for shows and stuff, as long as we laid low and didn’t try to get drinks. We didn’t need them, anyway—Delaney always brought her own. I’d seen Dylan before but never actually met him. I’d even been to his house.
“You didn’t invite Essence, did you?”
“Of course not.” A year ago, it would have been me and Essence going out, or more likely hunkering down with cheese puffs, salsa, and Into the Woods. A year ago, I could have told Essence the truth. Now I couldn’t even ask Delaney about Amsterdam.
She sped around the network of streets, chattering with Chloe, until we reached the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It was awkward, with Chloe there. She had one history w
ith Delaney, I had another. I shifted in my seat, tugging at the bra which had suddenly become too tight.
“So,” I said slowly, “Kamran told me about Amsterdam.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Delaney snorted. “My dad found out about our party at the cabin and canceled the trip. It sucked—I had to work the whole summer. It would have been so much more fun if you were here.” Chloe nodded, which both comforted and annoyed me.
A tiny constriction in my body relaxed.
I wanted to believe her. I did believe her. I just wanted everything to go back to the way it was.
Outside the club, the guys were waiting. Delaney’s party buddy, Milo, was half class clown and half class pothead; everybody liked him for one reason or another.
Then there was Kamran. The same messy, dark hair and olive-colored eyes…but different, somehow, like that night three months ago had never happened. His clothes were different—black and rumpled, like he had borrowed them from someone else. When I saw him, I couldn’t even look him in the eye, I was trembling so much. Had he missed me as much as I’d missed him? Did he think about what had happened at the cabin as much as I did?
Then he smiled his beautiful smile, and I wondered if all of my worries had been for nothing. He held out his arm for me to tuck myself under, enveloping me into a hug.
“Are you okay?” he murmured into my ear.
“I’m just glad to see you.” I squeezed, smelling the scent of lingering pomegranates.
“I’m sorry we didn’t talk much. I’ve been working a lot.” And then came the pat. Like a friend hug. Pat, pat, pat on my back, then release.
Delaney led the way into the booming club. Dylan or not, she would have made it in. She flirted with the bouncer, holding his eye contact as the rest of us trickled through. When Kamran passed, Delaney smacked him lightly on the shoulder. “You look smokin’, brotha!” Kamran gave her a friendly jab, leaving me the last one out in the chill night air.