I take a hopeful inhale. I lean back in my chair, and with that, the room starts to close in on me. With open eyes, I see darkness all around. I feel myself getting very small, in danger of actually disappearing. A pinprick of light shines in the distance, and I continue to fade.
The chair is no longer underneath me. My lips are frozen. My body is bound and heavy, as if it withers and sinks at the same time. I want to get up, but can’t. I want to speak, but words refuse to come out of my mouth. My head spins, and I’m nauseous and helpless, infantile, riddled with the possibility that I’m returning to the very beginning, crawling, mumbling, goo-ing and gah-ing, becoming nothing more than a thought. The string that holds me fast to solid earth spins away from me.
Cold hands press against my forehead. Kiki leans over me. Reesa and Roxie enter the room, amorphous figures I can’t focus on.
“You’re going to be all right,” voices reassure me.
“You just had too much.”
“Stay with us.”
“Breathe.”
“That’s a girl. Come on, PJ.”
A muffled song plays repeatedly on a loop. I want it to be quiet, to stop or change, but can’t convey the thought. I am out of rhythm with it and the beat of my heart and the movement of my breath. I have no awareness of time, but I’m very far away from where that matters and yet keenly aware of the density and immobility of my body. And the beat plays over and over and over in the background.
I blink my eyes, drifting in and out of focus. More vague words of encouragement. They mean to be soothing, but I sense fear overlaid with my own.
Everything that composes me, atoms, molecules, blood, bone, it all gets still, quiet, as if waiting for my decision. My mind hushes. There’s nothing left to listen to except for the slow, expectant beating of my heart. One. Two. Three. When I get to sixty, I draw a deep breath.
I don’t want this. I wish to feel and touch and taste my life. I’m not ready to leave.
My lids are heavy, reluctant. I’m not sure what I’ll see when I open them. I count breaths this time. Inhale. Exhale. I blink. I wriggle my fingers and toes. Very slowly, my vision clears, showing the desk and chair exactly as they were before. Kiki and the others sit next to me on the floor. I lift my head and drop it back. I feel like I went away and only parts of me returned. My mouth is dry. “Water,” I rasp.
“You OK?” Kiki asks, putting a bottle in my hand.
I don’t answer.
“That was freaky,” she says too soon.
“Yeah.” Shakily, I get to my feet and stumble to the bathroom, leaving the others stunned and motionless.
My brain moves slowly, as if pieces of it haven’t yet rejoined the parts that brought me to the shower, got me undressed, and remembered how to turn on the faucet.
I let the water trickle overhead and lean against the wall, still shaken up. I don’t try to figure out what happened; I want to avoid replaying it in my head.
All I know is that I never want it to happen again.
The shower stall fills with billowy clouds. I let them envelop me until the water runs cool. When the steam clears, I am sure of one thing: as free and loose as I felt at the club, as much fun as I’ve been having in the dorm, I won’t find salvation in a mixture of cocaine, alcohol, and pot.
I’m not JJ. It was nothing more than a detour, a foolish one, what turned out to be a scary one, but I know well enough how toxic it is. I knew the singular outcome vicariously through my mother, and after tonight, whatever close brush I had, I now know it firsthand. I danced too close to the inevitable. I have to be my own heroine. I’m all I have, and I’m not ready to say good-bye.
When I return to the dorm room, Kiki’s head rests on her desk, passed out, her breathing loud and nasal. The same ambient beat that played when I lost consciousness continues. I turn it off, and for the first time ever, I welcome silence. I climb onto my bunk, draw the sheet up, and fall into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 39
I’m sluggish, as if I haven’t quite recovered from whatever happened the night before. My body and brain conduct a mutiny for all the damage I’ve done. I go through the motions of class, spacing out, my thoughts creeping from fear to the strength of my resolve.
As I continue to struggle with my final project, genuine inspiration eludes me. Then I realize I haven’t done something that throughout my life I’ve spent a better part of days and weeks doing. I grab a fresh sketchpad and leave the dorm, solo.
Over the summer, I became so accustomed to traveling in a pack it feels odd going out alone, but the streets hum with the fondness of home and the familiarity of being on my own. It’s like I have new eyes, but with the comfort of the old, as my fingers curl around the contours of the sketchpad and pencil.
I venture toward Union Square, but stop at a café first. I think back to my week with Grant in Brooklyn. The center of my chest feels like it melts with longing, and the one person who can make it solid and satisfied writes me letters from across the Atlantic. He’s not kissing some guy or girl, dancing on tables, or using drugs. Guilt sweeps through me like a frozen northern wind. There’s howling in my ears, reminding me of my deception. I glance skyward, as though the guiding light of stars will burn brighter than the daytime sun. Instead, a woman leaning heavily on a shopping cart, a young man playing the guitar, and a mother with a small child toddling along beside her usher me forward. I cross into the park. The leaves on the horseshoe of trees dance and shimmy. With that, I let lust, drugs, and Matteo gust away.
Grant is my ocean, moon, and stars. He is my poet, my athlete, the sweetness in my life. Together, we are everything I believe in, and yet I’ve been unfaithful.
I stir my coffee. A truth swirls around the edges of my consciousness, taunting me, daring me to see it. It emerges as I bathe my face in the bright morning sun. I’ve been unfaithful to myself. I’ve disavowed what I know is right. I’ve been doing the things that I hated about my mother. Then a pitiful voice tells me I’m just a teenager, having fun. I make excuses, telling myself if it becomes a lifestyle, it would be worse than bad, but I’m not going to do that. I know better. I thought I knew better.
I find a vacant bench, watch people, and then sketch, streaking graphite onto the paper, slicing through the past and present; clean lines form armor, art, wild ensembles made for hiding secrets and telling stories. Like the stone Grant tossed in the lake, my mind skips from one painful memory to the next. In between, I watch the ripples spread in concentric circles, one thought blending into another. Strangely, there is enough space between each that I don’t feel a desperate need to flee. They’re just thoughts, just memories.
Midday, my stomach growls. I wander over to the falafel place I used to frequent. For once, I have enough money to pay. The cashier doesn’t recognize me; they practically have a new one each week, but from behind the grill, the owner smiles.
“Haven’t seen you in a long time. You look different,” he calls over the sizzle of frying onions.
“Better or worse?” I ask.
“Just different.” He isn’t being insulting, but a lot has changed since I was here last summer, before Laurel Hill, before Grant, before Janet died. I glance at the squares of baklava on the counter and remember Grant and me laughing about the word phyllo.
I sit outside on a gum-stained stoop and dig into my pita. The falafel inside is even better than I remember. The tahini sauce dribbles down my chin.
The woman from earlier, the one with the shopping cart, wobbles by. She’s dressed in layers of rags and dirty cloth, even in the summer heat. Garbage bags fill the basket, but wound on the metal frame are colorful ribbons, breezing alongside her home on wheels with each step. Like a bird, she wound pieces of thread and scraps of cloth to form a nest.
I’ve longed for a home to return to and realize it’s just north in a small town, with an even smaller campus, in a do
rm room I’d like to decorate with ribbons.
I begin sketching, first a nest, and then a woman dressed in a robin’s egg–blue gown, rising from the nest, spun from gold. When I’m done, I get to my feet, searching for the woman, crossing streets, feeling frenzied I might not find her.
When I near the dorm at Parsons, I spot her cart, parked between two newspaper boxes, and opposite, on a stoop of her own, she rests, her eyes closed. I tuck the sketch under her hand and hope when she wakes up, she smiles.
When I return to the dorm, there’s a note tacked on my door. Grant called 11:53 and a number.
I try calling, but with each unanswered ring, my disloyalty and mistakes push him further out of my reach.
My unoccupied dorm room gives me the uninterrupted opportunity to put pieces of my project together. It has to represent what I learned over the summer and what fashion means to me and present a unique ensemble using at least three of the techniques I’ve studied. The broad assignment requires refinement, and as clarity returns to my mind, I finally formulate a plan.
I’ve lost track of time when Kiki waltzes in the room. “Feeling better?” she asks.
“Much.”
“You scared the devil outta hell last night. Glad you’re OK,” she says. Her accent makes the sentence sound like it’s coated in sugar even though it was just the opposite.
“Yeah, me too,” I answer quietly, not ready to lose the thread of inspiration as I hunch over my desk.
She reclines on her bunk and in minutes is snoring sweetly.
The last three days of classes consist of presentations. Everyone has to give a speech about his or her project and explain in detail what each component represents. Looking back, I never thought I would spend a summer studying fashion—my long-held dream—and nearly sabotage the entire thing.
By the time the final person stands and speaks for a half hour, my leg jiggles up and down, antsy. Kiki examines her fingernails, and Roxie’s eyes droop. At the end, a round of applause jolts us all from our distractions.
“Everyone meet here at six a.m. sharp for our final field trip to the pre–Fashion Week event,” the teacher says, dismissing us.
Kiki catches up with me in the hall. “Before we head back to the dorm and start packing and partying, you and I have some business.”
I freeze, worrying that maybe she wants to charge me retroactively for all the money she’s spent on booze and pills. She pulls me outside, hails a cab, and directs it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dumbfounded I ask, “What are we doing here?”
“I think the teachers were holding out on us. I have a surprise for you, and, well, me,” she says.
The cab leaves us off in front of the vast steps of what has to be my favorite museum in the world.
“Really?” I ask in disbelief. We visited loads of galleries, museums, and boutiques over the summer, except, strangely enough, this one.
We stand in front of a sign announcing the largest costume collection on display, dating from classic Broadway to the beginning of color cinema and beyond.
“It’s just opened today, and I got us tickets. Wish I could have sprung for the others too, but I knew you’d appreciate it the most,” Kiki says.
I caught rare glimpses of the real Kiki over the summer, not the spitfire party girl present most of the time, but the genuine girl with a big heart. At times, she reminds me of Sorel, minus the grim adventures to the dark side.
We admire costumes from Singin’ in the Rain to Gone with the Wind to The Great Gatsby and get lost in conversation about style and technique until the docent announces it’s time to leave.
“That was the best last-day-of-summer-school, back-to-school-not-shopping-but-looking-at-clothes trip a girl could ever take,” I say. “I’m not sorry I ever missed out.”
“What? I mean, I’m glad you liked it, but back-to-school shopping, that’s like a rite of passage. What do you mean, you missed out?”
“JJ,” I whisper quietly. “Sawyer, that night—” I say, not really wanting to remember. “At some point he must have sold to my mother. She overdosed last spring.”
Kiki’s lips form a large O, and she pulls me close. “Like I told you, sister from another mister. Better late than never. Come to Atlanta, my mom will adopt you for sure. And we can play dress-up anytime.”
“Thank you,” I say with a smile.
The next day we hurtle through a whirlwind of tents at the pre–Fashion Week event, getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what goes into the production. Fashion, at its core, is an art form, beautiful in its own right, but also meant to adorn, enhance, shock, and express the inner life externally. I miss thumbing through my favorite copies of Vogue, but even more than that, I long for the smooth glide of paint on canvas, colors bleeding together or standing independently, and oil drying like tears.
Pulled in one direction and then another, we conclude the summer program with a banquet that night.
Once back in the dorm room, Kiki pulls out a bottle of Southern Comfort. “We end how we began, a handful of girls and a gay,” she says, looking at Haruki and the rest of us with a grin.
“You girls are so beautiful,” he says. “I’m sad to say good-bye.”
Me too, mostly.
Chapter 40
As the sun burns through early morning haze, I say good-bye to Manhattan, and with tremendous amounts of anticipation, the black sedan carries me north.
Half of me hopes Grant will be waiting in front of Vivian Brookwood and we’ll race across the lawn to meet each other. He’ll sweep me up into his arms and twirl me around like a scene out of a movie.
My backpack slips lower on my shoulders when I approach the vacant porch. Maybe Grant hasn’t arrived yet. As I enter, Connie greets students along with a different senior dorm assistant this year: Charmindy.
“Welcome, welcome,” Connie says, overly cheerful, as if truly pleased to see me.
Charmindy says, “Surprise!” then passes me a Sharpie and name tag. “You know the drill.” But before I can scribble the letters to my name, she gives me a squeeze. I linger there, breathing in her spicy scent, not realizing how much I missed her.
Connie gives Charmindy a withering look. “I know you’re friends, but you have to greet everyone the same. Vivian Brookwood etiquette.”
Shocked, I say, “I want to know why my friend didn’t tell me she was going to be senior dorm assistant, meaning she’ll have a single and I’ll have a new roommate, since we’d planned to share again.” Despite my disappointment, I can’t resist a smile.
“You’ll be in room seventeen, Sorel’s old room,” Charmindy says.
“With?” I say with more impatience than I mean.
“Me!” Charmindy replies.
When I enter room seventeen, the smell of a fresh coat of paint fails to erase Sorel’s essence: nag champa incense, strictly forbidden in the dorm, but she burned it anyway. I deposit my suitcase and backpack and am turning to leave, to see if I can find Grant, when Charmindy appears.
“Long time no see!” she says brightly and pulls me into another hug. Her freshly cut hair grazes her shoulders. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Rajasekhara, appear, chattering about Charmindy’s class schedule. After cordial greetings, Mrs. Rajasekhara asks me about my classes and then tells me I look healthier than last year. She promises to send us care packages more often—sweetly crediting my improved appearance to the goodies she’d sent.
Charmindy’s dad gazes out the window, reminding me of Sorel’s after-hours exit and entry to the room, courtesy of the bulkhead that rests just below his line of sight. I look forward to putting it to use. I’m not sure what Charmindy will think if late-night rendezvous with Grant become a regular thing, especially with her role as senior dorm assistant. Now that a continent doesn’t separate us, I ache, more than ever, for his touch, for his honesty and smile. I
’m turning to leave a second time when a dolly stacked with boxes appears and a staff person peers out from behind.
“Pearl Jaeger?” he asks.
“That’s me.”
“Great, just sign here that you received these.”
I do as asked and instead of leaving as I intended to, I make quick work of unpacking so I can return the boxes before he leaves the building.
A rumpus of flying Frisbees and blaring music in front of the boys’ dorm contrasts with the orderliness of Viv Brooks. As I pick my way up the stone steps, avoiding abandoned boxes and suitcases, a thought marches into my mind: What version of myself did I take with me this time? Manhattan Pearl? JJ’s daughter? An exemplary Laurel Hill student? The girl in the self-portraits?
Pepper lounges in the entry room. “Hey,” he says, lengthening out the word by at least a dozen Ys.
“How was the adventure to Washington?” I ask.
“Memorable.” He smirks.
“Will I hear about it?”
“Most of it,” he says devilishly.
“I can’t imagine what life will be like here without Sorel.”
“Yeah, me neither,” he says, turning instantly glum at the reminder. “I’m going out to see her Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, my sweet potato sugar mama. Don’t tell her I said that. We’re going the distance, long distance, but we promised to stick together; it’s just one year. I’m applying to schools out there.”
“Cool,” I say, offering a smile to conceal my doubt. Sorel dances to her own drummer, and if Pepper isn’t around, she’ll find someone else to keep the beat for her. I scan the room. “Grant here yet?”
“Nope, haven’t seen him.”
The breath in my chest stutters. “Could you let him know I stopped by?”
I plod back to my dorm. I’ve anticipated our reunion with such intensity I haven’t considered anything postponing it. Perhaps he had flight trouble or his dad accompanied him, which might explain the delay. My steps hitch as I consider going back and waiting, but I still haven’t decided if I’ll tell him all the details about my summer. I cheated, but a voice in my head whines, We didn’t exactly set the parameters of our relationship like Sorel and Pepper. I seesaw back and forth between truth and lies.
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