by Holly Cupala
A wall of smoke and live bass hit me. Delaney lit one up, exhaling a lazy cloud. Chloe followed suit, and even she looked mysterious in the half-light of the club.
Kamran settled behind me, close but not too close. A vast gap had come between us in time and space. I wasn’t sure how to cross it. “Miranda,” he said. He never called me Mandy or Rand, always Miranda. “It’s good to see you. You look pretty.”
Did he have as much to say to me as I did to him? And how would I tell him?
“You said we need to talk.”
His face darkened. “Yeah, but not right now. Too loud to talk here anyway.”
He wrapped his arms around my ribs. I winced at the swelling in my chest and pulled away. “Okay, but we haven’t even seen each other since…I mean, I want to spend time with you.” I want things to go back.
“We’re spending time together now, right?” He smiled. “You’re so serious about everything, Miranda.” I followed his gaze out to the dance floor, where Delaney’s laughter wafted over the music. “Why can’t you be more like Delaney? Lighten up. Have a little confidence in yourself.”
“Right,” I said. “Confidence. No problem.” A little confidence, coming right up.
They all got sodas, and Delaney reached into her bag for a flask. I got orange juice. Anything bubbly would make me hurl.
“OJ and rum?” Delaney asked.
“I heard it was good.”
Delaney shrugged. I flipped the flask and pretended to pour. Nobody noticed my thumb over the opening.
“Is your brother here?”
“Dylan? Nah. They said he cut out early. So he can’t get in trouble for us being here—too bad. I think you’d like him.”
The melody was intoxicating. Delaney snaked her way around the dance floor, and the rest of us followed in her wake. We had heard this band Gravity Echo before, a blend of indie electronic and a mournful exotic thread winding its way through the beat. Delaney shimmered like a mythical creature, her top reflecting the black lights and silhouetting her ribs and shoulders. She undulated to the beat. Next to her, my dancing would be the old middle-school step-touch. I imagined myself as a belly dancer caught in the music, shushing the idea away.
A ball of pain settled in my stomach, and my heart picked up. This was supposed to be my deadline—by the time I saw him—but the cramp gave me hope. “Be right back,” I said to no one in particular.
The band’s tunes beat against the walls of the bathroom, echoing the pounding in my head. My white patch of cotton panty blinked up at me in the black light.
Somewhere, I had taken a wrong turn and landed in the wrong life. Any moment I would find my way back. With any luck, I wouldn’t have to wear this bra when I got there.
If nothing happens by the time school starts, I’ll take the test then. Two more days.
I teetered out of the bathroom and headed toward the dance floor, trying to remember exactly when I would normally get tipsy. “Heeey,” I practiced, lurching to the left. But the act dropped the second Delaney sidled up to Kamran. The dull ache in the pit of my stomach became a burn.
Red lights flashed over the crowd, and I could see her wiry frame shadowed by his taller one. Both of them had their hands in the air, her backside swaying against him. They parted, laughing, neither one of them seeing me on the sidelines. It was nothing, Kamran would say. They were playing around. Still, it should have been my backside.
Delaney caught my gaze and put her hand over her mouth in an embarrassed giggle. She sashayed over and crushed me in a hug. I could smell the rum and smoke on her breath. I will not throw up here.
“Sssno big deal!” she said, giggling. She hugged me harder, and I bit my lip. “I just wanted you to know, Rand, that you—you are my best friend. You and Chloe are my best friends in the whole world, you know that? You and Chloe and Kamran. I love you guys. You’re all the best. Oh yeah, and Milo’s okay, too,” she said, spotting him dancing close to us. He smiled a lazy Milo smile and nodded his head when she draped herself around his neck and swayed to the curling beat of the music. Chloe, who had been dancing with him, caught my gaze. A flicker passed between us, then it was gone.
We always stayed at Delaney’s dad’s house when we went out—he wouldn’t think twice about us coming in smelling like drunken ashtrays. Not that he was a bad parent—he just exhibited an unusual amount of disinterest in his daughter’s nocturnal activities. None of us could argue with that.
We parted ways with the boys at the club, but not before they gave each of us a good-bye hug and Kamran put his lips to my forehead, a warm spark. But nothing compared to the lightning conducted through my spine when Kamran wrapped his arms around Delaney and dipped—closeness cultivated by weeks of togetherness at Big Boss.
On the way to Delaney’s, we got into the “poor me” routine. This was our game, mine and Essence’s, the one I made up to tease her about her never-ending stream of complaints. It was annoying, but at least she could laugh at herself. Never mind the pang of guilt I felt playing it with Delaney and now Chloe.
Delaney started: “I am so drunk, I am going to be completely sick all over the floor when I get home and my dad might finally kill me, if I haven’t already died. Poor me!”
Chloe and I echoed, “Poor Delaney!”
Next, Chloe: “Nobody danced with me all night. Or at least, nobody cute. Just some dorky guy with a boy band T-shirt. Oh, and Milo. Poor me!”
“Poor Chloe!”
Then me.
I could say any number of things.
Like, “I miss my sister.”
Or, “My best friend is moving in on my boyfriend.”
Or the worst: “I haven’t had a period in two months, and I’m scared out of my mind.”
Delaney and Chloe were waiting.
Finally, I said, “My bra is too tight and my head is killing me. Poor me.”
Five
Two days later, summer officially ended and I started life as a senior at Elna Mead High School. Kamran was taking AP Virtually Everything—calculus, computer science, physics, econ, U.S. history, and the English class we shared. I had AP art plus a couple of classes with Delaney. She had French with Chloe, where they learned to conspire in not one but two languages. Essence and I didn’t cross paths at all. But with two thousand students, five hundred seniors, eighty classrooms, ten bathrooms…I was bound to run into her sooner or later.
Returning to these corridors after a whole summer had the same effect as coming home—displacement, like I was walking around in someone else’s life. All day my mind had been traveling through timelines, possible outcomes. Yes. No. If no, then nothing would change. If yes, then another set of choices would branch out before me.
Posters lined the bulletin boards, advertising various activities and clubs. Online Gamers. Geography Club. Mock Trials. THE WINTER BALL COMMITTEE NEEDS YOU!
Right outside the theater hung a flyer for this year’s musical tryouts: Guys and Dolls, Essence’s favorite show. She knew every one of Adelaide’s songs. I knew every one of Adelaide’s songs, after she made me listen to the Broadway recording a hundred and fifty times. If I wanted to avoid Essence, all I had to do was stay away from the theater. She would know just by looking at me that something was wrong—ten years of friendship couldn’t disappear that easily.
The test rattled in the bottom of my satchel. There was no way I could take it at home—not with my mother waiting to zap rebellion like bacteria. What would she do if she found out?
She wouldn’t. The consequences were too horrible to imagine.
I was so wired that I didn’t even notice Kamran hovering by my locker. He wore beat-up jeans and a hoodie with his hair tousled, a new and unfamiliar version of him.
“Miranda,” he said. “You’re off in space.”
His smile made me flicker. I could tell him now, before I even take the test.
Kamran balanced two jobs, AP classes, homework, practice tests, spent every lunch period in the library, all to fulfill his dream�
��which may or may not include me. If I told him, what would he do?
If I haven’t gotten it by art class.
“Yeah, just thinking about classes and stuff. How I’m going to fit everything in.”
It had to be a mistake. Any second my body would return from its trip through hormonal haywire and the hall would quit spinning. I reached out for Kamran’s arm.
“You okay?” he asked. Of course he was concerned. Because before the cabin trip, before he met Delaney, we had a deep, tangled connection. Was it possible to go back?
“We should hang out later,” I said. “I’ve got…we haven’t really had a chance to be together since…”
“Yeah, about that—I can’t meet after school today. I’m studying to retake the SATs, plus I’ve been trying to hook up with this MIT graduate who does student interviews…” He trailed off. “But you’re right, we should hang out. We haven’t really had a chance to talk all summer.”
I said nothing, but my disappointment must have shown on my face. “What about lunch? School just started—you can’t have homework yet?”
“Aren’t you going to hang out with Delaney?”
That’s how it had been all last spring—my life divided into two separate trajectories: getting to know Kamran and spiraling further into a friendship with Delaney.
With Kamran, I had my own con leche. When he wasn’t working one of his jobs or studying for one of the many entrance exams for MIT, we explored Seattle together, talking about time and space and possibilities, where wormholes and labyrinths collide. I told him about Xanda, but never about the way she died. It was too personal, too secret. It was that Andre, even though I didn’t want it to be. Afterward, sitting under the rhododendrons, I would taste the fruit on his lips and the spice in his skin.
With Delaney, I became more than just an actor in someone else’s script, the good daughter holding the weight of the family. Delaney led the way as my sister would have. She broke through closed doors into impenetrable circles, while Essence slipped further into my past. Any attempt to reconcile them resulted in a paradox—Essence the old friend, Delaney the new, with the old me and the new wrestling for control.
All this time, Delaney and Kamran never met. Somehow I knew if they crossed, my future would never be the same. And they didn’t, until that night at the beginning of July, after school got out and we were all going out to party at Delaney’s cabin, and Delaney pestered me about bringing along “that hottie,” and Kamran accused me of shutting him out. In the end, I had no choice but to let the two halves of my life meet.
Everything changed that night.
Then a few days later, my parents packed me up for nine weeks at the kiddie camp, just like nothing had happened.
Delaney’s ears must have been burning at the sound of her name—she came out of nowhere to pounce on Kamran and me at my locker. “So where are we going for lunch? Broadway Grill? Bauhaus?” A slow grin spread across her face. “Café Shiraz?”
I glanced at Kamran. Had he taken her to his parents’ restaurant or just told her about it?
“I can’t—gotta study.”
“During lunch period?” She turned to me. “Is that where you were hiding him all last year?”
Kamran laughed, showing off the tiny gap between his teeth and looking like he’d get a perfect score on a purity test. People like Delaney, like my sister, could do anything, say anything, and everyone still loved them. People like me just looked paranoid.
“Fine, then. I guess I’ll see ya later,” she said to no one in particular, sauntering away and disappearing into the stream.
I could hardly wait for my last period art class.
AP art was like coming back into myself, in a room I knew well. The bank of windows, paint-splattered sinks, drawers of possibilities, all of it seemed to sigh that yes, I belonged here. I found a seat by the window, nodding at familiar faces.
Our teacher, Mrs. Crooker, had a legendary personality at Elna Mead. There were the fat years and the lean years. In the fat years, she was in an excellent mood, letting us do whatever we wanted and usually working on some wild, colorful thing herself. In the lean years, she subsisted on diet sodas and 800 calories a day and morphed into a grouchy tyrant. In the lean years, she had patience as long as an oil pastel and gave assignments involving rigid architectural perspective and golden means. No cubism or impressionism in the lean years. My labyrinths barely slid under the radar as a loving tribute to Escher and da Vinci.
Thankfully, this was a fat year. She was already munching cheerfully on a package of molasses cookies.
Our first assignment was to create a double-sided collage of ourselves—one side our external selves, the other our secret, inner lives. “I want you to reach deep and come up with something fresh. It doesn’t have to be good. I want it to be true. Have fun with it.”
“No labyrinths this year,” Mrs. Crooker said as she swept past me in a tiered cotton skirt. “I picked this assignment especially for you.”
She proceeded to dump a shoebox full of magazine clippings, photocopies, engravings, fabric swatches, and handmade paper onto a table in the center of the room. “Have at it.”
Students got up tentatively at first, then faster as they realized their true selves might be lurking somewhere in that pile of scraps. I held back, waiting, until a tiny black-and-white engraving of a medieval pregnant woman fluttered to the floor—the cap binding her hair in strange contrast to the way she gently held her belly.
There was no way I would be taking that piece.
Instead, I grabbed my stuff and dashed to the front desk.
“Somewhere to go?” The last of the molasses cookie popped into Mrs. Crooker’s mouth while she thumbed through her sketchbook, and I suddenly realized I was starving. Again.
“I’m not feeling so good. Could I get a hall pass?”
Her eyes never strayed from the book as she handed me a pass. “I want you to do this assignment at some point, Rand. You’re not going to get away from faces this year.”
I shrugged and made tracks for the nearest bathroom.
My hands trembled as I opened the package, so much that I almost dropped it onto the tiny beige floor tiles. I stripped the foil down to just the white plastic stick.
Place the absorbent tip in your urine stream for five seconds only, commanded the instructions. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
After two perilous minutes, I peered at the little window. One pinkish-purple line was strong. I looked closer for a second line—so faint it seemed to shadow the first. I read the directions again, to be sure. Lines may not be the same strength of color, it taunted. Over 99% accurate, proclaimed the bold letters. And as I watched, the line darkened to a grim pink. My stomach was the first to respond.
Six
My mother couldn’t control the weather in Seattle, but she could predict it. She picked one of the last sunny Sunday afternoons to keep us in a dim, hundred-year-old church for Christmas montage tryouts. The only hope streamed in through the enormous stained-glass windows, painting shards of colored light across the pews.
Mom wore her hair in a ponytail with a pen tucked behind her ear, looking like the hip director in a white tee and Editor pants. Everything was drawn on, from her eyebrows and plum-colored eyes to her mouth, as if a perfect exterior could mask a woman capable of spawning one hellion after another.
Everybody showed up to read for various parts, but Mom already had her people staked out. Mrs. Hayes, the Kindly Old Woman (sorry, Mrs. Vandermar). Mr. Arthur would play the wise father. And I would be good old Brenda, the female lead. Which made it kind of sad that Essence showed up with “I wanna be Brenda” written all over her face. Even sadder, she deserved it.
Essence’s bedroom had always been lined with show posters where she had played a chorus bird or a maid or, more recently, the lead’s best friend or mother. Delaney was right. She wasn’t lead material. She was chunky, whiny, on the underside of pretty. Just right for comic relief. Someone w
ho’s holding you back, Delaney had said.
Essence stayed after church to help set up for auditions, and I realized I was part of this bizarre love triangle: Essence wanting my mother’s attention and my mother wanting mine. If only Essence was my mother’s daughter, then everybody might be happy.
“How was your summer?” I asked.
“Fine.”
We were in the same spot where we’d met in second grade, the day Xanda showed up at the Mother’s Day fashion show in a dress identical to mine and Mom’s, only hers was shredded and paired with biker boots. We landed on the front page of the Seattle Times’ “Arts and Living” section under the headline PRETEEN PUNK FASHIONISTA CRASHES CHURCH FUNDRAISER—the succubus, the church lady, and me. A new girl stood by in awe—about my age, with freckles and a tan from someplace far removed from the Northwest. She and her mom wore long, crinkled skirts and peasant blouses with strands of clay beads. Definitely not from Seattle.
The girl came up to me after the show, bubbling over with smiles and excitement. “That was your sister?” I nodded. I could hardly believe it myself.
Before long, we were inseparable, even if my sister found her annoying and my mom found her undesirable—Essence’s family fell in easily with Seattleites militant about fair trade, growing their own organic food, and recycling everything from plastics to clothing—exactly what my mom found distasteful about the Northwest. When her mom joined the prayer chain, mine made sure she was on the opposite end. Still, Essence tried out for every one of my mom’s plays without fail.
Apparently some things hadn’t changed.
“Honey,” my mom called from upstage, “could you read some of this script? I’m trying to see if it will be a good section for the tryouts.” Which was weird, because clearly she had already put painstaking thought into every detail. My reading would be of no consequence.
Essence jumped to my mother’s side. “I could read, Mrs. Mathison,” she gushed. “I think your work is amazing. In fact—”