by Lucy Keating
There are a lot of thoughts running through my head. For example, as one of the most adored girls in school, doesn’t Celeste have about a million people she could be hanging out with? I wonder if she’s doing the whole “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” thing but wipe the idea from my mind almost instantly. She’s just not that girl. Does she actually just want to be my friend? I push all those questions out of my mind, because there’s only one that’s actually on the tip of my tongue.
“What party?” I ask. Then, “Are you sure I was invited?”
Celeste laughs. “Oliver’s thing,” she says. Then she looks nervous. “Wait, aren’t you guys friends?”
I close my eyes, letting my head fall back in exhaustion. “Is it Friday already?” I ask.
“I know how you feel,” Celeste says. “But you should go! I’m making Max go, too. And then you could get to know him better, so he can prove he’s not as much of a doof as you saw this last week.” She raises her eyebrows and laughs.
I force a laugh, too, but something about this statement sends a tiny flame through my limbs. Yes, I am well aware that Max and Celeste are dating. We’ve been talking about him all afternoon. But the idea of him making a date with her, an actual prearranged time to see her, when I can practically still feel his head resting on top of mine below the Jenga tower, when the image of his stare in the hallway is still so fresh in my memory, makes me want to throw up, or break something expensive, or both.
Don’t freak out, Alice, I say to myself. You can do this. Celeste is genuinely cool, and she’s asking you to hang out, and you could use some friends. And besides, you deserve some answers.
“I’d love to,” I say, even if it is the last thing I want to do.
“This is better than Newbury Street!” Celeste exclaims for possibly the tenth time, looking around with awe. We’re camped out in the middle of Nan’s giant walk-in closet, a box of pepperoni pizza on the floor between us. “Your grandmother had impeccable taste.”
My dad wasn’t kidding when he said that Nan saved everything. We’re surrounded by clothing on three sides. And he wasn’t kidding about the color-coding either. It’s a ROYGBIV of textiles. The beautiful wool suits she wore in her older age, creams and fine tweeds and moss greens. And pieces she couldn’t have possibly worn in years, like silk strapless gowns and mod minidresses and heels she could never have managed after the age of eighty.
Celeste and I were getting ready in my room when she asked if she could borrow something “funky,” and I, too afraid to tell her I don’t own anything even remotely interesting, directed our attention here.
“What’s so great about Newbury Street?” I ask. I’d been there a few times since we moved, once to pick up some decent coffee at a French bistro when our grinder broke, and another time to buy a new pair of leather booties.
“It’s arguably the best vintage in the city,” Celeste says, getting up and rummaging through a vanity that’s built into the wall, with giant lightbulbs rimming the mirror like you’d see backstage at a Broadway theater. “By the way, this light makes your skin look flawless. Okay, what about these?” She whirls around from the mirror, waving her arm with a flourish, a series of chunky art deco bracelets extending up her arm.
“I love it!” I say, and take another bite of pizza. Whoever invented pizza, I’d like to kiss them on the mouth. “Take them.”
“Alice.” Celeste looks scandalized. “I will borrow them. I can’t take them! Don’t be ridiculous.”
I shrug. “It’s not like anyone’s going to claim them,” I say. “My mom’s not around.”
Celeste takes a seat across from me on the floor, tucking her legs underneath her body. “Is it okay to ask why?”
“She’s a primatologist,” I explain, just enough to hopefully skirt the issue. “She’s studying lemurs in Madagascar.”
But then Celeste asks the dreaded question, the question I hope most people will just let slide. “Well, when will she be back?”
“Um … she left ten years ago and hasn’t come home yet …” I shrug, then glance over at Celeste from the corner of my eye. But she doesn’t look uncomfortable at all.
“So your parents are divorced?” Celeste asks.
“Not really …” I say. I can’t believe I’m telling her all this. These are the kinds of things I only tell Sophie about. “They just sort of never dealt with it. Their marriage. But they definitely aren’t together.”
“So you have not seen your mother in ten years.”
I want to be annoyed at this statement, and at Celeste for pushing the issue, but oddly I’m not. There is judgment in her tone, but I can tell it’s not at me.
“I mean, I’ve seen her …” I stretch my legs out, knocking my feet together like a little kid who’s just been asked a tough question. “We Skype once in a while … but it’s usually too awkward. We do better in writing. I get a letter or postcard from her every couple of months, telling me about her latest adventure and any new exciting findings in her research.”
“And what do you tell her?” Celeste asks.
I pick up another slice of pizza. “She never really asks,” I explain. Then I take a huge bite so I don’t have to say any more. But Celeste doesn’t say anything, either, and I feel a need to fill the silence. “So the point is, the jewelry is up for grabs,” I say, waving my slice toward the vanity, my mouth still a bit full. “I mean, look at me—it’s not like I’m gonna wear it.” Currently I’m wearing a worn-in chambray shirt, black jeans, white Keds, and zero “funk.”
Celeste gazes at me, resting back on her hands with her head tilted to the side. “Actually,” she says, “you are going to wear it. And while we’re at it, you’re going to wear some eyeliner, too.”
I smile and wish I wasn’t growing fonder of Celeste by the second.
When Oliver told me he lived a few blocks from my house, I assumed he meant a house just like mine. Old and dusty, with so many stairs a real estate agent could advertise guaranteed glute definition in the listing. I did not assume what he actually meant was the penthouse apartment at the Taj Hotel, with suited doormen, a gracious concierge, and an elevator that moved so smoothly and soundlessly that at first I was afraid we’d gotten stuck.
When Celeste and I arrive, pushing our way through a lushly carpeted, crowded room of our schoolmates, we find Oliver alone on the balcony overlooking the Public Garden, a glass of something dark balanced perfectly in his left hand.
“Yes, that’s correct,” he says politely into his phone, as though making a dentist appointment. “I want thirty-six pizzas delivered to the Taj. Half cheese, half pepperoni and onion. Oliver Healey. You have my card on file. And what’s your name? Denise? Thank you ever so much, Denise. You’re an angel.”
Oliver hangs up the phone and turns around, his eyes lighting up at the sight of us. “Laaaadies!” he says, wrapping an arm around each of our shoulders. “Welcome to the Bat Cave. May I offer you a beverage?”
“It’s just that he’s so dreamy,” Leilani Mimoun gushes, and I can barely hear her. We—she, Celeste, and I—are wedged into a tiny corner of the kitchen counter as the party continues to grow around us, because apparently the whole world knows about it. “He knows everything. And oh my God. When he wore that Black Watch shirt and Levis on Tuesday? I thought I would faint.” Leilani fans herself with a stray oven mitt. “I love a man in good denim. I know he’s our teacher, but it’s not like he’s that much older, you know?”
“What’s Black Watch?” I ask.
“It’s a type of plaid,” Celeste explains. “Anyway, I dated a college guy when I was fifteen. Summer camp. It was no big deal.” She takes a swig of beer. Celeste is totally the girl who dated a college guy when she was fifteen and knows so much more about life than any of us ever will.
I open my mouth to say something when Max walks through the doorway to the kitchen, stopping dead when he sees me and his girlfriend shoulder to shoulder in conversation.
“You
think I’m super creepy, don’t you?” Leilani pesters when I don’t respond.
“No!” I assure her. “That’s not it at all. I totally get it. Levy is adorable.”
“Hi, babe!” Celeste coos, slinking over to kiss Max on the cheek. “You remember Alice, right? We met on the quad. I guess you know her from psychology, too. Duh.”
And the time we broke into the Louvre and had a picnic with the Mona Lisa. And the time we raced a 1960s Porsche through back roads in Italy. And the time we rode pink elephants along the Great Wall of China.
“Hey,” I say, smiling with just my mouth.
“Hey,” Max says back, smiling with even less of his, and I blink. I know things are awkward between us, but why is he being so cold? After all, he’s the one who broke my heart, and after all that, I’m the one standing here being nice to his girlfriend.
And that’s when I realize: He’s scared. When he first saw me in psych class and walked the other way. When he was cold to me on the quad. When he slammed his tray down in the cafeteria. And now, here, when he thinks I’m becoming friends with his girlfriend. Max hates uncertainty, and I make his world less certain.
And he has no idea how to handle it.
“Alice was cool enough to have me over before the party tonight to play a little dress-up,” Celeste says, brandishing her arm candy once more. “Cool, right? Oh my God, Max, you should see this house. And her grandmother’s closet. It’s like that store I love, Second Time Around, but better!”
“Nice,” Max says, raising his brows as his eyes bounce from Celeste to me, trying to look happy but still looking panicked.
“What’ll it be, Wolfe?” Oliver asks.
Max blinks. “Excuse me?” he asks Oliver.
“What do you want to drink?” Oliver replies slowly. “It’s not rocket science.”
“Oh,” Max says, swiping a hand through his hair. “I’ll just take a Coke. I have a game tomorrow.”
“Bo-ring,” Oliver says. Then he turns to a tall kid with dark brown hair who is leaning against the fridge. “Jonathan, one Coke.” He holds up a single finger, and Jonathan obediently opens it and begins rummaging inside.
“As long as it’s not diet,” Max and I say at the same time, before glancing at each other uncomfortably. Max would rather drink acid than drink Diet Coke.
Celeste laughs. “That’s so weird! How did you know Max only drinks regular?” she asks.
“I didn’t,” I say quickly. “I just want one, too.” I clear my throat. “Um, Jonathan, one more, please?” I call out, and Jonathan tosses two cans from the fridge.
Celeste pulls Max to her and wraps her arms around his waist, leaning her chin on his chest and looking up into his eyes like a baby deer. My stomach starts to churn, and I feel like I’m watching it all in slow motion, like a violent scene in a movie I just want to fast-forward through. I thought I could handle this. I thought I was angry enough at him to show up, maybe stay long enough just to make him feel awful. But Max is smiling down at Celeste, and now he is smiling with his eyes.
You’ve never been good at hiding how you feel, I hear Sophie say in the back of my mind. It shows on your face like turquoise eyeshadow.
The can of Coke is shaking in my hand, and I know I have to get out of here.
In the grand scheme of things, I would say I’d rather be almost anywhere in the world than in an elevator. The definition of claustrophobia has never made much sense to me, because that’s like saying it’s the space itself that bugs you. Small spaces don’t necessarily bug me as long as I have a way to get out of them. I would rather be in a small room with an open roof than in a stadium with the doors locked. I just don’t like to be in a spot that I have no control over getting out of. It goes against my natural composition or something. I need to run free.
So I am already preparing myself for a heart-fluttering ride back to the ground floor as the doors to Oliver’s elevator slide shut, when a hand reaches in between them. Max gets on, his eyes boring into me, as I resolve to glare straight ahead. The only problem with this plan is that the interior of the elevator is completely mirrored, so when the doors shut, a thousand versions of me just end up looking back at him anyway.
“I offered to make an ice run,” Max says, and then pauses. “Are you okay? I know how you feel about enclosed spaces.”
I ignore him.
“Alice …” he starts.
But I interrupt him. “Don’t.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.” Max sighs. “I was going to say, this is hard for me, too.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I reply. “I’m sorry it’s hard for you. But have you thought about how it actually feels for me? To watch you with her?”
“I know,” Max says.
“And what about her, by the way?” I’m starting to lose my cool, which is exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do. “Because she’s great. I genuinely like her. But what would she do if she knew that when you go to sleep at night, you’re basically just switching girlfriends?”
“I know,” Max says again. The fact that he sounds remorseful only makes me angrier.
“Do you mean to?” I ask softly. “In our dreams. Do you mean to act the way you do in our dreams, like nothing has changed, when during the day I’m barely allowed to look at you?”
“I can’t help it,” Max says quietly. He meets my eyes, this time not through the mirror but in person, tilting his head slightly to the side to gaze down at me. “I know what’s right, and what I should want, but when I’m in the dreams, I can’t control it. The way I act, it just happens. You know that as well as I do. What happens in the dreams isn’t our choice.”
I break away from his gaze and stare at a corner of the floor, where I won’t have to meet his eyes again. I know he’s basically right, but it’s also not good enough. We ride in silence for a while, before Max finally speaks.
“You look different tonight,” Max says, even though he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the elevator buttons. “You did something to your eyes. It’s pretty.”
By now the doors have opened, and we’ve reached the ground floor, and my face is burning with rage. “Just because we can’t help the way we act in the dreams doesn’t mean what happens in the dreams doesn’t matter,” I say coldly as I walk out. “Especially to me.”
“I know,” Max says one final time as the doors close again.
SEPTEMBER 23rd
It’s a gorgeous day at the flea market, and I am gazing into a cracked antique mirror, trying on a neon alpaca poncho.
“It looks great on you,” the vendor says, and when I turn, I realize it’s Kate Moss.
“Would you wear it?” I ask.
“Darling, of course,” she coos in her sexy British accent.
I pull at the yellow fringe, unsure. “I want to know what Max thinks. Do you know where he went?”
“I think I saw him heading toward the books section,” she replies, straightening some vintage lace dresses.
I wander off, still wearing the poncho. Up ahead I spot Max striding away from me among the brightly colored tents. I yell his name, but he doesn’t turn. It’s busy today, and I am dodging shoppers left and right. Eventually I lose him.
I make it to the book vendors and Max isn’t there. But Dean Hammer is.
“Have you seen Max?” I ask.
“He said he wanted to grab some ice cream,” the dean replies. “What do you think of these?” He turns to face me, wearing red, heart-shaped sunglasses.
“Love them!” I cry. And this time I don’t walk, I run. I can feel panic rising up within me. I look by the food trucks, the smell of fresh Nutella crepes following me. I sift through a wall of colorful scarves, scrambling to get to the other side. Everywhere I go, he seems to have just left.
“You just missed him,” my grandmother says in the jewelry section. She is standing at the stall next to me in a pink Chanel suit, trying on a diamond brooch with gigantic peacock feathers. Jerry
is on a leash by her side in a velvet bow tie.
“Where did he go?” I plead.
“He seemed unhappy,” Nan says. “Did you get in a fight?”
“Nanny, listen to me.” I put a hand on her small, fragile shoulder. “Where did Max go?”
“I think he said he wanted to take a swim.” Nan smiles, her mind somewhere else already.
I run out of the market and down Vanderbilt Avenue until I reach the Navy Yard, somehow knowing exactly where to go. He’s waiting for you, like he always is, I tell myself as I sprint out onto the docks. But when I reach the end, breathless, there is still no Max. Just endless water. When I turn back the way I came, I find water there too, gray and unwelcoming. There is no way back, no way forward, and, worst of all, no one here to tell me everything will be all right.
I am utterly alone.
14
We Are All Surrealists
IT’S NOT LIKE I don’t know what a bad dream is. And I know, of course, that I’ve had them before, because bad dreams are why I went to CDD in the first place. It’s just that I’ve never been able to remember any. It’s as though all that CDD did, the magical worlds they created, didn’t just give me something new and something better, they wiped away all the bad, too. Until now.
The entire day after the flea market dream I feel off, like I’m coming down with something. Like someone slipped something weird into my coffee or, worse, like someone has been slipping something in there all along, something to make me happy, and today they decided to stop. And nothing is making it better. Not the three coffees I’ve had since breakfast, not the bike ride to school in the brisk fall morning under a piercing blue sky. Not the A I got on my English paper or the fact that in Terrarium Club I actually managed to build an arrangement with nobody’s instructions. It’s not like I’m depressed or anything, I’m just not right. Which makes me all the more eager to get to CDD today and start to fix it.
“Upstairs.” Lillian just points to the ceiling when I dash through the door of CDD. I realized when I arrived at Frank after Terrarium Club clutching my newest orb that I had nothing to store it in safely, and I had to rest it carefully in Frank’s basket as I walked him the two miles from Bennett to MIT.