Roomies

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  “Never. And like I said, I’m sorry for being out of touch. My family—”

  “I know. Your family needs you.” She sounds bored. “Always such a handy excuse.”

  “There’s a difference between a reason and an excuse.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I know.”

  Before I can answer, she stops and walks backward a couple of feet. “It this it?” We stare at a nondescript storefront with the name THE WALL stenciled on the glass door in modern-looking block letters.

  “Yep.”

  We step in. It’s small; a few bare, narrow rooms, little but the art on the white walls. There are a few other people here. It’s hard to tell who’s working and who’s like us, looking. “So what do you do in an art gallery?” I whisper to Zoe.

  “Stroll around. Look thoughtful. Nod.”

  We do, and spend some time staring at a single huge canvas painted green, with three small white squares in one corner. “This one’s only five thousand seven hundred dollars, Zo.”

  She nods. She looks thoughtful. “Would be great for your dorm room.”

  “Did you have any questions?” a voice behind us asks, and I turn around and I just know from how he’s dressed and the whole effect of him that he’s the owner. Ebb’s dad, I assume. He’s super-good-looking, like one of those middle-aged guys in a Ralph Lauren ad, on a yacht, tan and windblown and slightly squinty.

  “No, thank you.”

  But Zoe says, “Actually, I wondered, what’s this painting supposed to be… saying?”

  “Did you read the artist’s statement?”

  I detect a slight New York-y kind of accent. It has to be Mr. Ebb. I mean I guess he could have a partner or a partner, also from back east, but I have this feeling.

  “Oh,” Zoe says. “No?” She glances around the room.

  He goes over to a small wooden stand and picks up a trifold brochure thing and hands it to Zoe with a smile. His teeth are very straight. I try to construct a face for Ebb made up of some of his features. Does she have the blue eyes? The narrow nose? I’m suddenly filled with an urgent need to see her, as if this will answer all my uncertainties about her as a person, roommate, and potential friend.

  And I could send a picture of me. Maybe with Keyon. I’d like to have a picture with him and me together before I go to school.

  Zoe reads the artist’s statement, then hands it back, unimpressed. “Hm.”

  “Not for you?” Mr. Ebb says.

  “Not really.”

  “I’ve got a new artist coming in next week. A local, Edward Sherman. You should come back. He’s more accessible. More representational.”

  He reaches into his chest pocket, withdraws two business cards, and gives one to each of us. I look at the name. Neil Owens. That’s him. “Thanks,” I say.

  “Thank you for coming in.” He bends from the waist slightly, with his hands behind his back, then moves on to a hipster couple examining the green painting.

  Out on the street, Zoe asks, “Do you feel cultured now?”

  “I feel… hungry.”

  If Zoe knew the real reason for my wanting to be here… well, she’d love it. But I don’t know, I guess I do already feel some loyalty to Ebb and don’t want to turn her into a story for Zoe. From her last e-mail, it was obvious she does find the affair issue totally upsetting, and life with her mom seems generally not awesome.

  We head to Blondie’s for a slice, and when I’ve wiped the pizza grease off my hands, I ask Zoe, “Can you show me how to e-mail from my phone?”

  “Oh my hell, Lauren. You are so pathetic! You probably don’t even have a data plan.”

  “Data plan?”

  “E-mail from my account if it’s that urgent.” She sets it up for me and I’m not even sure I remember Ebb’s address right, but I try.

  Hi it’s Lauren. A sickness has befallen my house and I’m exiled. Long story I can explain better later. Is it weird we haven’t sent each other pics yet? I know, I should be on Facebook. But I’m not, so… send me one? I’ll send one too when back to my computer after safe from plague. Sorry so short on Zoe’s phone.

  I hit Send.

  SUNDAY, JULY 28

  NEW JERSEY

  The words—one and month—keep colliding in my head like bumper cars and I’m almost jumping out of my seat with nerves and excitement and something else as Mark and I drive through town.

  One month.

  One month from today is August 28th. (I actually pulled out my plane tickets this morning, to be sure I had the date right.)

  The big day.

  I’m entirely preoccupied by one question: Can I survive a month or do I really need to get out of here sooner than that? Lauren hasn’t written back to give me advice or to judge me—only to alert me to the plague—so I’ve realized I need to come to my own decision about whether to reach out to my father. I am not making it up when I say that Mark is hitting his radio presets in the car and the freaking Clash comes on with “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and, of course, he stops there and turns up the volume.

  “What’s going on with you today?” he asks. “You seem… on edge?”

  “Just thinking about how I leave in exactly one month.”

  Or sooner?

  “No fair,” he says. “I leave in a month and a day or two, so you get to go first.”

  He’s driving. We’re on our way to the beach after stopping to finally buy me a new phone and I feel okay about the bikini under my clothes since I survived the water park yesterday intact. I didn’t end up feeling that self-conscious at all in my swimsuit—at least not after the first few minutes, not when I got the sense that Mark liked what he saw. Is it weird that I found that exhilarating? Whenever Alex used to look at me that way, I felt all nervous and somehow put-upon. With Mark it’s different. It’s not that he’s a total look-but-don’t-touch sort of guy. He definitely likes to touch. But there doesn’t seem to be any pressure behind it; it’s like he enjoys it for what it is without the annoyance of wanting more. And there was something about going down crazy water slides and shooting at each other with big water cannons and laughing so hard that my stomach still hurts that made me feel like a kid again, and I liked it. I hadn’t had fun—good old-fashioned fun—in the longest time, too long, and it was almost like my body had chemically changed by the time we’d turned in our tubes and dried off and headed for the car, holding hands, all achy and giddy. It was as if we’d stepped through a kind of magic mirror when we’d entered that park and had somehow relived a moment from a childhood we’d never even shared.

  I am in complete denial about the secret I am keeping from him. And that secret is multiplying now that I am considering skipping town early but haven’t told him.

  “Okay,” Mark says. “So let’s talk about this.”

  I push some hair out of my face—we’ve got the windows down. “What’s there to talk about?”

  “You’re serious?” He looks over at me.

  I shrug a shoulder and don’t know why I’m acting this way, why I don’t tell him that I’ve already gone online to see how much plane tickets between California and Chicago cost. (His going to Northwestern gets him closer to me but not by much.) Why I don’t unload about my mom and his dad. Why I don’t tell him everything.

  “Us,” he says. “That’s what there is to talk about.”

  “But what about us?” I just want him to say it, whatever he’s thinking—whether it’s that we should give the long-distance thing a try or absolutely plan on breaking up. “I mean, what do you want to do?”

  I can’t look over at him while I wait so I watch this woman crossing the street in front of us. She has a baby strapped to her chest in some kind of fancy harness and another kid, like three years old, in a stroller. The baby is clawing at her neck and she’s holding her head at an awkward angle to try to avoid getting mauled and he’s bouncing against her chest, like he really doesn’t want to be strapped in. It looks painful for both parties involved.

 
; “What do I want to do?” Mark says. “I want to pull over and kiss some sense into you is what I want to do.”

  I smile as he pulls into the beach parking lot and parks as far away from other cars as possible. He turns off the engine and leans over and kisses me and I feel calmer, but not by much.

  When he pulls away he says, “If you go by anecdotal evidence, we’re doomed. Most relationships that start in high school—and probably right after, like us—don’t survive the transition to college. There’s too much in the way of temptation.”

  For a second I can’t imagine myself being tempted by anyone else more than I’m tempted by Mark but I also know that a part of me doesn’t want to go away to school—to freedom—wearing any kind of shackles at all. Also, ending things makes the whole Keeping of the Secret easier. If we never get serious, I’ll never have to tell.

  “So I think we need to make the most of this month,” he says. “Try to pack as much relationship stuff in as possible and then go off to school and just see. But with no hard feelings or pressure, you know? We’ll give it the ol’ college try, as they say.”

  We get out of the car and grab the beach bags from the trunk.

  I say, “That all sounds highly reasonable.” Which is good. Because I know that I am not feeling particularly reasonable about anything these days, and if this is what a reasonable person thinks is wise, then that’s okay by me.

  “Who knows?” he says as we head down onto the sand. “Maybe we’ll have a fiery breakup before then anyway and then it won’t even be an issue.”

  “Do you have a lot of fiery breakups, in general?” We haven’t talked about previous relationships or experience at all. The fact that he likely has some serious ex-girlfriends—girls out there in the world whose breasts, and more, he has touched—actually makes me sort of ill.

  “A few,” he says, “but I bet a fiery breakup with you would be a lot better.” He puts an arm around my shoulders as we walk toward a blinding ocean, and says, “Everything with you is better.”

  This prompts me, for no good reason I can think of, to ask, “Do you want to have kids?”

  He looks at me funny as he spreads out a blanket.

  “I mean, not now,” I clarify. “I mean, like someday.”

  “Yeah, definitely.” He nods. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know.” I guess it was the woman crossing the street but I’ve also been thinking about my theory about our parents determining who we are, and how Lauren entertains the idea of never having kids and how I just always assumed I would. It’s not like I look at people like that mom crossing the street or the Schroeders and think, I want that, in some lovey-dovey urgent way, but I like the idea of having a family. “You know how I’ve been e-mailing with my roommate for this year?”

  He nods.

  “Well, she has five brothers and sisters and she said she’d rather have zero kids than six. And I’ve always thought I wanted kids, but maybe I don’t really. Maybe I want a family but not kids. Like I sort of wish I could pop out a couple of siblings for myself right now.”

  He laughs and I laugh.

  It’s funny because it’s true.

  “I want a big family.” Mark plops down on the blanket and I do the same. “Huge, in fact.”

  “Really?” I laugh.

  “Well, I don’t know. I mean even three kids would seem huge to me, since there’s just me and my brother and he’s never around anymore. But of course I want to make sure I have those kids with the right person.”

  I am only seventeen, I say to myself. Eighteen in October, but still. I will not take the bait. I will not ask him if he thinks it might be me. I will not imagine that scenario for us at all, will not ask myself whether he is the right person for me.

  “My parents sort of screwed that one up big-time,” I say.

  He finds my hand and squeezes it. “Mine, too, I think, though they are too blind to see it.”

  I watch a wave crash on the shore and imagine it washing my secret out to sea like so much seaweed.

  We go bodysurfing for a while and when we’re drying off we make a list of things we think we should do in the next month in the spirit of packing in as much relationship stuff as possible. Highlights include “have a fight,” “make up,” “pick ‘our song,’ ” “slow-dance,” and “buy each other a present.”

  I put “tell him the truth” on the list in my head, sort of like I’m skywriting it in there, then cross it out.

  I lie down on our blanket when we’re done with the list and close my eyes and see a kaleidoscope of yellows and reds and greens behind my lids. I think about the present Alex gave me for Valentine’s Day—a super-tacky, super-Jersey gold necklace with my name written in curly script. I only ever wore it when you couldn’t really see it because of the cut of my top. Still, I have no idea what I’ll get Mark.

  I feel his arm sneak across my belly as he curls up on his side next to me. He says, “I’m falling for you really hard, EB.”

  “Me too,” I say, and I can’t imagine a better gift he could give me than this moment.

  “Oh,” he says then. “One more thing. For the list.”

  “What is it?”

  I’m half expecting him to say “make love” because even in this sweet moment I feel like our bodies are connecting to each other, relaying some kind of heat back and forth.

  “Meet the parents,” he says.

  “Nooooo,” I say, and it comes out like a funny sort of moan, even though I’m not trying to be funny, or at least didn’t plan on trying to be funny.

  “Parents ruin everything,” I say, all too aware of how perilously close I am to the edge of the Cliff of Secrets. “And anyway, I met your dad that one time.” It’s seriously like rocks and earth are falling away by my feet.

  “I mean, I want you to meet my mom,” he says. “She seems sort of down lately with my dad traveling so much and I think she’d like you.”

  I teeter there on that cliff for a minute, as if knocked off-balance by some gust of wind; then I pull back. “We’ll see,” I say. “We’ve got a lot of other stuff on that list.”

  I’ve been waiting for another e-mail from Lauren—one of substance, with a picture attached—for more than twenty-four hours but it hasn’t come yet so I decide to just send her mine when I get home around dinnertime. When I’m on Facebook looking for a good shot, I decide to search for her friend Zoe, because Zoe’s e-mail is her name @gmail and her name isn’t that common and sure enough she’s got a Facebook page—at least I think it’s her since it says San Francisco, CA, under her name. She’s cool looking—and white, which seems to maybe confirm my hunch about Lauren. I can’t see anything else on her page because it’s blocked unless you’re her friend, and anyway this is stalkery. I click away.

  I hear my mother come home, and for a second I’m tempted to hide in my closet, another weird thing I used to do when I was younger. I’d climb in there with a book and a blanket and a flashlight and pretend I was like Anne Frank, hiding from evil forces. And now that I’m thinking about that—and the bath mat fantasies—I’m even sadder about leaving this condo, and my childhood, even if it all suddenly seems even more sucky than I thought. Surely you can’t hide in your dorm room closet when you’re a college freshman, at least not without your roommate calling an RA and probably putting you on suicide watch, so I had best come up with some new coping skills.

  I hear cabinets being opened and dishes being taken out and decide that I need to make my presence known if only because it might score me some kitchen scraps, so I walk downstairs. She doesn’t turn to look at me, so I say, “Hi, Mom.”

  “Oh!” She startles. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

  I’m sure she’s faking her surprise—the stairs of our house are pretty squeaky—but I don’t call her out on it.

  She says, “It’s hard to keep track of your comings and goings these days.”

  I want to say “Right back at you,” but I don’t.

&nbs
p; “Sorry about that,” I say.

  “It’s what you’re supposed to be doing,” she says. “I know that.” She puts down the butter knife she’s using to spread peanut butter and jelly onto bread and presses her hands on the countertop. When I hear her exhale hard, it all has the combined effect of signaling to me that she’s about to cry. “I guess I’m not sure what to do with myself.”

  “Oh, Mom.” I slide into a kitchen chair. “You’re plenty busy. You’ll be fine. You really will.”

  She turns and presents the sandwich to me and she doesn’t look like she’s going to cry anymore. “I don’t know why I even made this,” she says. “I’ve got a date.”

  I study the sandwich and I’m suddenly not hungry. “Please tell me it’s not with the married guy.” I actually close my eyes.

  “Elizabeth,” she says. “I’m a grown-up.”

  “Well, then, act like one!” My voice goes up as my eyes open. It had, honestly, never occurred to me that she might continue to see him.

  “He’s leaving her,” she says. “They’re going to get a divorce.”

  “Mom! Are you really that gullible?” But I wonder, is this what Mark was talking about, when he said his mom was feeling down? I sincerely hope not. Because if his dad leaves his mom and then introduces his new girlfriend to Mark and it’s my mom, I am in some serious trouble.

  “How do you know it’s not true?” My mother’s voice is shaky. “It could happen! Someone could love me.”

  “I love you, Mom. Me. I do. And I’m telling you, this is a bad situation and you need to walk away.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one,” she says. Then she drifts out of the room, saying simply, “I’ve got to go get ready.”

  Upstairs, after forcing down half the sandwich, I attach a picture to an e-mail file; it’s one that Tim took of me the week we were working in Mark’s parents’ garden, with the weeping false cypress behind me—and enter Lauren’s address. Then I delete her address and put in the info@ e-mail of the gallery and the subject heading I come up with is this: FOR NEIL—PERSONAL.