“You want me to give you a private concert?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He kissed me. “Are you going to tell me why you won’t come later?” he asked.
“No. I want you to let it go.”
He put his fingers through my hair and held my face. “You are so precious.” That was the moment. The most confusing moment of my entire life! In that moment, he had taken my breath away. That was something I thought only Noel could do.
I just wanted to drop down to the floor and cry. I surrendered to love. I didn’t understand any of it. I felt wrong for loving Noel, but how could it be wrong and me love him so much? I felt wrong for not loving Merek more than I loved Noel, because he loved me and he deserved it and I could be happy with him. I wished someone had told me the rules. I just kept fouling out of the game left and right. How was I to win? Who did I really want to be with?
He kissed me softly. Every time we kissed, it was different. This one was gentle. Slowly, my headache went away. And that was lunch.
Registration had the bright idea of giving me study period in the middle of the afternoon during seventh instead of at the end of the day. Merek and I spent half the period at the library going over our coursework from each syllabus. Then, well, it was him and me, kiss and kiss.
Eventually, I’d crack down and give him what he wanted: another serving of me. One of these days would be a second go-around. It wasn’t bad at all. That wasn’t it. It just wasn’t everything I had dreamed of. But I was a good girlfriend. Perfect. I kept my boyfriend happy. And people at school liked to see us together. We were a power couple, like my mom and dad. Tears welled up in my eyes at the thought of my mother.
“Are you okay, princess?” he asked me.
I shook my head yes. He kissed me on the cheek. Then he kissed me on the lips. As we sat there, making out in the school performance arena, I found myself becoming bored. I wore Mama’s throwback Gucci watch. It was from the ’70s. As long as you changed the battery, it still worked. I checked my watch once. Then he moved to the other side of my neck. When he wasn’t looking, I checked my watch again. I was flabbergasted! Only two minutes had gone by. It felt like we’d been at it for 20 minutes. I’d had enough.
“Baby, I have to stop by my locker and see my counselor,” I said. It was true. I needed to talk to my counselor about starting my college applications and I needed to stop by my locker to get my books.
“Okay.” He kissed me on the lips. He walked me to my locker.
When we arrived at my locker, Cara was standing next to it. I checked my watch. It was 10 minutes to the bell. Was she staking out the place? “Hi there, doll face. You forgot this at lunch.” She handed me the bracelet she bought.
“Thanks,” I showed it to Merek and smiled. He put it on my arm. She was staring at us the whole time. “Bye,” I kissed Merek on the cheek. He left. I opened my locker to get some books out. When I closed it, she was still there, staring.
“So where’s your locker?” I asked.
“Right here.” She pointed to the locker right next to mine.
“The whole row was taken this morning,” I said in disbelief.
“I have connections,” she said.
My eyes widened and I took a deep breath. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you later,” I said.
“Bye-bye.” She gave me two air kisses. I headed to my counselor’s office.
I thought about Cara the whole way to my counselor’s office and even during the next period’s calculus class. I had never been scared and yet intrigued at the same time before. I didn’t know what she wanted from me, but every time I looked up, she was there.
There was this thing about being popular—you had to be exclusive. I didn’t have many friends outside the usual suspects: Sierra, Cece, and Frenchy. I needed to know more about Cara. She knew too much about me. Like what the hell was the deal with those bracelets to match the necklaces we had? I was a private person. Or at least I wanted to be. I had asked Cece about Cara. Her hand quivered. She had asked me if I was serious. She said she didn’t know, and she told me to act like I didn’t want to know. When I asked her more questions about it, she changed the subject. I couldn’t ask Sierra because she would tell Frenchy. Even though they didn’t get along, somehow Frenchy always ended up getting information out of her. Sierra always had to prove she wasn’t hiding stuff from Frenchy.
I had one hope. Winter. We had been friends since junior high. We started high school together, but when her parents divorced she moved with her mom to Miami. It seemed kind of ridiculous to ask her, but I knew she knew about three or four girls at the school. So I texted her after sixth period: “Hey, Winter, can you get me the rap sheet on this girl at my school? Her name is Cara. Keep it quiet, though. Guard secret with your life.”
It seemed like Cara had committed some misdemeanors before. I just didn’t want to be one of them. I was a lover, not a fighter, for the record.
Chapter 11 Waiting for Answers
It was a quarter to midnight. I was becoming impatient. Cara had spent the entire evening at our house with Dimitri. I was suffocating. I caught her hovering over my plate of food before dinner. I had excused myself to the restroom to wash my hands. When I came back, she was alone in the kitchen, standing over my food. How convenient. Dimitri left her with my food. He took his plate to the dining room. I didn’t eat with them anyway. My chicken did taste rather odd, though. I couldn’t tell if she’d put something on it or not.
Mama always said, “The heart never lies.” I remembered so clearly breaking the news to Mama about skating.
I remember as if it happened yesterday. I had decided I didn’t want to take figure skating anymore. I was only 12 and Mama used to come watch me at the rink every Saturday. Daddy used to come to my competitions if he was in New York. I didn’t want to let my parents down, but I wanted to join the book club that Winter and some of the other girls at school had started. After one Saturday afternoon at the Pier, I came out of the locker room, carrying my skates and bag. I looked Mama squarely in the eyes and lay down the news.
“Why?” she asked.
“I want to join this book club my friends are in,” I signed.
“Milan, you know that their book club may not be forever. What if they decide not to read any more books?”
“I can join another at the library or the bookstore,” I signed.
“Okay. If it is in your heart. Baby, do what’s in your heart always. The heart never lies. That’s how I chose the college I went to. That’s how I knew your Dad was the one. That’s how I picked our apartment out. That’s even how I picked out your name. If you tell me that you feel something in your heart, I will always be okay with it,” Mama said.
If Mama were here, I would ask her: “If the heart never lies, then what truth is my heart telling me?”
I sat there staring out my bedroom window at Park Avenue, feeling like I didn’t really understand the world. I hoped somehow that if I didn’t sleep, it would make Winter text me sooner—kind of how you don’t want to sleep on Christmas Eve when you’re a kid in hopes that Christmas will come sooner. In all actuality, the opposite was true. If you slept, then it seemed like Christmas Day arrived much sooner because you didn’t have to acknowledge every hour that passed. I thought about doing something drastic like cleaning the cobwebs off my hearing aid and calling Winter! But I refused to become the old me. Not even for this. The suspense was building up into a series of “what if” scenarios in my mind.
This wasn’t my first sleepless night that week, though. I’d had insomnia since the Connecticut debacle. I felt the Sandman coming on soon.
Trying to distract myself, I thought about my day. During Biology class earlier, Cece asked me if I wanted to volunteer at a butterfly conservation center in the Park. I was actually looking forward to it. Her mom was on the board so she could add my name to the volunteer list. After speaking with my counselor, I realized I needed some extracurricular activities. Or I was going to
have to try to wish my way into college.
Wishing was such a lost cause. I lost Mama to a wish. I lost Noel to a wish. Yet secretly, I wished I were falling asleep next to him.
It was then I remembered the first year I started school with Noel. All I had now were memories. I was starting ninth. Noel walked me to the dean’s office that morning. I had to meet my translator. Mama insisted I get help. She said, “High school can be overwhelming.”
“I’ll watch out for Milan. Make sure she finds her classes and everything,” Noel said.
“I know, you’re such a good one. I just need her to get the work down. She had a translator at all her other schools and she will have one here,” Mama said.
“If I sit in the front row, I will be able to get by just fine,” I said.
“Well, let us see about that, baby,” Mama said. She rode with us to school that day. That was the first and last time we all went to school together: Noel, Dimitri, and me. I can’t say I miss it.
I left that school long ago. Inside of two weeks, the kids were making jokes about me in the hallway by my locker and at lunch. Dimitri punched one boy in the face because he said people like me should be exterminated just so that the population didn’t have to deal with us. Whew … It’s been a while since I thought about that one. The more I was an ordinary girl, the further away the pain. Noel, he stayed with me all the time. It was sort of sweet. He was my 24/7. No matter what anyone said, he was like my armor. Always saying how beautiful I looked and how smart I was. When the dean told Mama what Dimitri had done, I remember her swearing I would change schools right after the semester started.
Her wish didn’t come true until I was in eleventh grade. I spent the second half of the tenth grade without my armor. Mama was gone, and Daddy sent Noel away. It was time I made my own luck. I started modeling and told Lisa and Daddy that my new school would be best with flexing my schedule. I had finally escaped the asylum and moved into the lion’s den. There was no pressure to be cool junior year. Yet the more work I did, the more popular people seemed to think I was. Modeling was my ticket to normalcy—though it was high maintenance every step of the way.
I rested my eyes while I let go of the memories. Soon I fell asleep.
Chapter 12 Flutter By Butterfly
I noticed my nails were in dire need of a new French manicure when we stepped out of the car. We walked over to the zoo. “I haven’t been here since my mother passed away.” I took a deep breath. I felt like I hadn’t mentioned that in while. Saying it always caught me off guard. But it was true.
“I’m sorry, Milan. I heard about your mom.” Hadn’t everybody?
“No worries. This town is full of places that remind me of her,” I said.
Cece stared at me. I tried to brush it off. It was the kind of stare you want to avoid—empathy laced with discomfort. It was like the stare I had seen so many times before when people found out I was deaf. They felt sorry, yet uncomfortable, as they imagined their life as mine. I guess if I still had my mom, I would feel uncomfortable imagining life without her. Honestly, I felt uncomfortable many mornings when I woke up and realized she was really gone.
“Look!” I said. Cece turned her head left, then right. “There,” I continued. Her eyes followed my finger. “Monarchs are my favorite. Do you know that they migrate south every year? Millions of them flock to Mexico and come back when it gets warmer. I saw it on a documentary.”
“You watch docs?” she asked.
I laughed. “I’m a little bit of a nerd. I think the images I see when I watch wildlife documentaries and nature shows are just breathtaking. Sometimes I feel like I’m away on vacation when I watch them. And I haven’t even left my room.”
“You know what?” Cece paused.
The meeting room was a little more than a hike from the main entrance, I thought.
“You’re right. Every nature show I’ve ever watched has been beautiful. Even if they’re showing something gross, like sharks stalking prey. I still feel like it’s beautiful because it’s something I wouldn’t ordinarily be privy to,” Cece continued.
“‘Privy’? I like that.” There was something cool about Cece. Maybe it was because we didn’t have to gossip all the time. Maybe it was like … her confidence.
“You know, it’s funny. I saw a monarch the other day. My mom and I were having breakfast on the terrace and I noticed one.”
“OMG! You have a terrace! What is your view of?”
“The Park.”
My mouth dropped. “Okay. This may sound silly, but I have a crush on the Park. I mean, my mom used to say, ‘Let’s go to the backyard,’ then she’d take me to the Park. I just love it. Any time I can, I ask Daddy’s driver to drive past the Park on the way home.”
“I never thought of it like my backyard,” Cece said.
We finally arrived at the meeting room. It was kind of empty and surprisingly small. There were no windows, not that I’m claustrophobic. Just a couple of tables, a coffee machine, and a dry erase board. The desks were like the ones in Bio lab class. They were very high, with stools to sit on. It was odd. My legs didn’t even fit under the desk.
Cece and I grabbed seats in the front. I neatly arranged my skirt on the seat. Cece plopped down on the seat next to me. One side of her skirt was rising high on her leg. Her knee highs weren’t on evenly. “Pull down your skirt,” I told her. She looked a little mortified. “Don’t worry. Sometimes that happens to me too.” I smiled.
“Good afternoon, girls,” an older woman said to us. She was taller than me. She stood up very tall, with her shoulders back. Her neck was long and beautiful. I always noticed photographers talking about long necks—the longer, the better. One photographer joked with a girl on set: He said an ostrich must have given birth to her. Her neck was very long and elegant. Later, when we wrapped, that girl and I took a car home together. She told me she thought he was crazy. If crazy takes pics for Elle, I can deal for a day, I said. She agreed.
The lady running the meeting was dressed in a soft summer peach shirt, a white pencil skirt, and pretty hot deep-pink kitten-heel slingbacks. Her pearl earrings reminded me of my mother. Come to think of it, she reminded me of my mother’s mother very much. I hadn’t seen her since shortly after the accident. It was her salt-and-pepper ponytail, and the fine freckles around her eyes that looked like my grandmother. “We’re getting started soon,” she said.
“Great!” I said. She smelled like Chanel No. 5. Chanel and I had another run-in, apparently. I couldn’t help but think back to the last Chanel No. 5 bottle my mother ever touched. The last night I saw her, she was getting dressed to go Daddy’s firm’s holiday fundraiser. Before she put on her dress, she sprayed one spritz on each side of her neck, then one spritz on her wrist, and rubbed them together.
“Come here,” she’d signed to me. I was playing in her closet all the way in the back. I was dressed in her black flapper hat and black blazer. “Smell this,” she signed. I held her wrist tightly and took a sniff. I hadn’t smelled anything like it before.
“I want to wear this perfume when I grow up,” I signed.
“Take this. Put it inside your dresser. But don’t let Daddy see. He won’t like you wearing this. He may say you are too young. Save it until you get older.” She gave me the bottle and kissed my forehead. I carried that bottle with me the morning of the funeral in this old Prada bag she used to wear. I remember her wearing it when she picked me up from figure skating. The first winter when I really missed her in the beginning, I would sleep with the perfume and my pearls under my pillow at night. I’d somehow been able to stop doing that. I didn’t believe it would bring her back to me anymore, I guess. But I certainly hadn’t stopped missing her.
Cece took off her glasses to wipe her eyes. I had never seen her without them before. She was very pretty. Not that I hadn’t thought so before. She just looked so different when you saw her eyes clearly. Models were pretty in pictures. On shoots, most arrived looking pretty bummy, myself in
cluded. Hoodies, ragged jeans, scuffed boots, hobo bags, dark circles hidden by oversize sunglasses. I never had dark circles. I mean it was really all lights, lashes, and lipstick. Most of my friends were prettier than the girls that I worked with. It could’ve been because they were nicer. Some of the girls acted like they really didn’t want to talk to me at the shoots. One girl said to me, “I don’t need to be friends with the competition.” For all I knew, she could have been shouting at me when she said that. She seemed to be pretty angry. The look in her eyes was contemptuous. I thought of her every time I went to an Undercover Starlet shoot. That bad attitude wouldn’t get you very far. One thing the brand director said to me was that they chose me because of my positive attitude and beauty. She said I was effortlessly optimistic. I wasn’t sure I knew what that meant, but I always felt like positive energy won. Another tidbit from my therapist. I was beginning to think I should’ve gone back. Spending the afternoon talking about my mother’s death was really uplifting.
“Cece, why did you get glasses?” I said.
“I have contacts. I had wanted to wear contacts only. I didn’t like glasses. My doctor suggested I get a pair of glasses to rest my eyes at home sometimes. Then when I went to pick out the frames, my mom said I should get a pair to wear to school. She said it would give me some character,” Cece said.
“What’s character?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think she means I shouldn’t try to be like everyone else.”
“Even without glasses, you don’t look like everyone else,” I said.
“You think so?” she asked.
“Yeah!”
“Thanks.”
“Sometimes I try to think of my mom’s style. Like … I don’t know. I wonder what she would think of my style. I wear these pearls she brought me on my 11th birthday when I want to think of her. I kind of hope she’s with me when I’m wearing them.”
“I think your mom would be proud of you. Heck, my mom was impressed when I told her about you. She said it was good to see a nice girl with a good head on her shoulders.”
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