“Ooh,” Courtney says, laughing, “how will I ever recognize you?”
“Real change can come from the outside first,” I say. “It’s possible.”
“I hope that’s not what you’re teaching your campers,” Courtney says. “I hope you’re empowering them, because they’re girls and girls need guidance.”
I take out my notebook. Empower them, I write.
Courtney wants me to look through the guide again, at the photos of old windmills and public parks lined with blooming tulips and beer gardens and canals and a ton of things named after Van Gogh, after Rembrandt, after Anne Frank. Amsterdam is nothing like Boston, but it still gives me an idea for a story: Anne Frank lives. Like, she makes it, and goes on to lead a secret resistance against the Nazis by hiding other girls and empowering them to fight back. It’s historical fiction, or maybe creative nonfiction, which I’ve never tried, but maybe trying something new beats out writing something you know. Mr. Roush might think so, because he’s always so serious about not limiting oneself, and also only a really bad person wouldn’t be interested in an alternate history of Anne Frank’s life.
Then my eyes stop on this super-peaceful picture of the Dutch countryside, and it’s not hard for me to imagine my sister there, riding a bike or just picnicking with new Dutch friends. I always thought I’d be the only one leaving and so I’d be the one getting wiser, and I always liked that idea, but now I realize that Courtney’s better at being the Weird Philosopher and I’m better at being the Absorber, the person who takes it all in. And so maybe I’m not meant to experience but to chronicle other people’s experiences, and now I feel like I totally know how to empower the girls and also how to empower myself so I can totally obliterate the Roush Problem, 100 percent: I’ll go to Barnes & Noble and buy ten blank journals and then sneak into Dad’s office and steal a fifty-pack of Bic pens; I’ll tie pink and turquoise yarn to everything, and then I’ll be ready.
I hand Courtney back the book, and even though I know she won’t like me saying this, I say it anyway: “I don’t need some Lonely Planet guide. What a stupid name.”
“Don’t you think the planet is lonely, though?”
“I mean, space is lonely. Like, the Arctic tundra’s lonely.”
“What about Sunny Skies?” Courtney asks.
“I guess,” I say. “That can be lonely too.”
“Get out your notebook,” my sister says. “Write this down: ‘Wherever You Go, There You Are.’”
I write it down, look at it.
“It’s true, Eva. There isn’t a city you could ever travel to where you wouldn’t be. So you can’t rely on a place to change you. You have to do that yourself.”
“I know Boston’s not going to change me,” I tell Courtney. “I’m going to change for Boston.”
“By getting a trench coat and a library card?”
“Yeah.”
“What about ‘Don’t Ever Change’ or ‘Don’t Go Changing’?” Courtney says, grabbing my senior yearbook, waving it around. “A bazillion yearbooks can’t be wrong.”
“Nobody,” I say, “nobody wrote ‘Don’t Ever Change’ in my yearbook.”
Courtney flips through the signature pages. “This one says ‘Stay Cool,’” she tells me. “That’s basically the same thing.”
But it isn’t the same thing—not even a little, not at all—and I know it. What I don’t know is what we’re talking about anymore: staying or going, changing or being changed, by someplace, or someone.
16.
SECOND COURSE
“DON’T YOU EVER wish Los Angeles had a Little Italy?” I ask Michelle. It’s nine and we’re at the Grove, waiting for Steph to finish counting her register and lock up the Gap so we can all share bland Italian food at La Piazza. I’m happy to be out on a summer night and eating late, which feels so European. Even though I usually complain when meals take forever, I understand that there’s a sophistication to not rushing through the dining experience.
“The phrase ‘Little Italy’ really has a vibe to it, doesn’t it?” I ask. “Like all the pleasures of somewhere exotic made super easy and brought right to your neighborhood. Little Italy really conjures something.”
“I thought you didn’t even like Italian that much,” Michelle says distractedly, fishing through her bag. She pulls out her phone for what seems like the eighteenth time and checks for texts.
“First of all—whose text are you waiting for?” I try to glance at her cell, but she shields the screen with her palm. “I’m already here and Steph’s coming any minute.”
“Skip to second of all.”
“And second of all,” I say, “it’s a cheese thing. I’d love Italian if they didn’t put so much cheese on everything.”
“Cheeseless lasagna, you’re saying.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s lasagna. It’s like a centuries-old tradition.”
“True, but we’ve evolved into humans who basically can’t digest dairy anymore.”
“Devolved you mean,” Michelle says. Just then her phone beeps, and as her eyes scan the screen, she smiles privately. I’m about to pry for details when Steph finally arrives, wearing khaki shorts and a sleeveless denim button-up, total Gap-on-Gap—a Gap Attack. It’s less that I don’t recognize her in her work outfit, and more that I don’t recognize her as Steph, my best friend who never has a job or any reason to change out of her own Steph Uniform: velvet leggings and a baggy, boxy top.
“You look like a camp counselor,” I say. “And I would know.”
“Miranda calls it ‘the Basic Bitch,’” Steph explains.
“Who’s Miranda?”
“Miranda,” Steph says, and then Michelle says, “She told us about Miranda.”
“Why does Miranda think it’s so casual to call women bitches?” I ask.
Michelle drapes an arm around me in that bemused, Eva-just-can’t-help-herself way. “Always looking out for the females,” she says, shaking her head.
“It’s just not a helpful word,” I say. “That’s not what it means in the dictionary.”
“Miranda’s my work-friend,” Steph says.
“I don’t think you told me about her.”
“It’s not really news,” Michelle says, guiding me through the front door of the restaurant. Once inside she shuffles through her tote again and inspects her phone, scrolling through messages.
Steph’s looking around too—not in an ambient way, but purposefully, like someone should be there already. Someone good.
“Guys, what’s happening?” I ask, but abruptly we’re being led to our table, out on a fake piazza under white Christmas lights. “Wait,” I say, counting chairs and place settings and best friends, the numbers not matching up: it’s a table for five.
“Miranda’s joining us,” Steph says, and then Michelle says, “And so is Bart.”
“Bart—like from high school, Bart?”
“Yeah,” Michelle says.
“Who invited him?”
“It’ll be fun,” Steph says, opening her menu, hiding from my gaze. “Yum,” she says—a word I’ve never heard her use, ever—“yum, yum, yum.”
Miranda keeps insisting we should’ve gone to Bestia if we wanted pasta. She’s Italian—or Italian-American, I think it’s important to point out—and apparently that gives her the authority to differentiate good red sauces from bad. She lifts her fork, frowning in disapproval at the watery marinara dripping through the tines of her fork next to our mozzarella sticks. La Piazza was actually Steph’s idea, but I don’t mention that, especially not after Miranda corrects her pronunciation of secondo.
“It means ‘main entrée,’” Miranda explains, while my two best friends, plus Bart, all nod, quite impressed. But they shouldn’t be; secondo sounds and even looks like “second.” Second—aka second course, aka main entrée—makes perfect sense.
Since Miranda’s the only one old enough to drink, she’s the only one drinking. She’s on her second carafe of r
ed wine, though we still haven’t ordered our secondos.
“I think I want the linguini,” Bart says to no one in particular. Bart’s always been pretty nice, I guess, but who cares? The problem is he’s not interesting, which is way more important. Even though everyone changes after high school, it hasn’t been that long yet, so there hasn’t been enough time for him to change so much that it’s actually noticeable. “I used to order it in Rome a lot,” he continues, “piled high on top of pizza crusts.”
“When were you in Rome?” Steph asks, covering her mouth to ask, which means she’s impressed.
“A few times, actually,” Bart says, and now maybe I’m impressed. Or jealous. Or both.
“Well, have you been to Florence?” I ask, twirling my angel hair. “Do you know anything about Italian art or history or anything?”
Michelle tries to kick me under the table, but I know her too well and pivot my legs to the side, her shoe thudding against my chair.
“The Vatican is actually really sick,” Bart says, rambling. He’s so uninteresting he can’t even tell that no one cares. He can’t even tell that he’s not supposed to be here, that it’s supposed to just be me and Michelle and Steph, telling our usual jokes, being our usual selves—which means being content. “Content,” which if you look it up in the dictionary, means “happy” and “totally satisfied.”
“Cheers to the Pope, salute, cin cin!” Miranda says, raising her glass. We return her toast with our ice waters and nod. My cup’s so full it spills when we all clink glasses, because I’m not drinking any of it because I read you’re not supposed to consume liquid while you chew. It weakens the saliva.
“Miranda, you’re such a lightweight,” Steph says, like it’s some cute fact she’s learned firsthand. Then Steph leans across the table and, in an overly animated way, mouths the word “wasted.” Everyone breaks out laughing. At what? At the acknowledgment that if you drink two carafes of wine it makes you drunk? It’s so stupid the world doesn’t just feel small, it also feels spun around, flipped upside down.
“Bart spent Thanksgiving in Rome,” Michelle tells the table.
“No way, what did you eat?” Miranda asks, pink-cheeked and buzzing. It takes her a full three seconds to open her eyes after a blink.
“I had risotto and my brother had something alfredo—or eggplant? One or the other, can’t quite remember. No one there even knew it was Thanksgiving. I mean, you’d think, ‘Oh, of course they don’t know, they’re not American, so they don’t celebrate it.’ But then you could also think, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s not impossible that maybe Italians know about Thanksgiving. And maybe not just know about it, but maybe even know what day it is and that there’s special Thanksgiving foods and things like that.’ We wondered if the waiter might say something when he brought our plates out—because he spoke perfect English, even asked if we were from New York—but he didn’t mention it.”
For Bart this many sentences in a row is practically a soliloquy, straight from Shakes himself.
“That’s so annoying,” I say, killing the table’s glow. “That he assumed just because you were American you were from New York City. Ugh, I hate that New York worship, it’s such propaganda.”
No one bothers trying to kick me under the table this time.
Steph changes the subject: “I bet the linguini in Rome is better than the linguini in Florence. Because it’s an older city. They’ve had more time to perfect it.”
“How do you know it’s older?” Miranda asks, slightly slurring.
“Because,” Steph says, spearing a tortellini, “like the Roman Empire.”
“Don’t be an idiot, pasta’s from China,” I say, and this time I don’t see it coming: Michelle jabs an elbow and catches me right in the wrist, knocking over Miranda’s wine glass, which is already empty.
“Anyway,” Bart continues, oblivious to everything, “it was a pretty cool Thanksgiving. We saw the Pietà and a bunch of dope sculptures, and the Pope waved from his window, which was awesome.”
“Sounds supercool, Bart,” I say, glaring at him spreading more butter on more bread. “Better than being in generic-ass New York gobbling some big, nasty turkey at least.”
Just then Michelle pinches my arm, stands up, and says sternly, “Bathroom,” which in this context means me and her and Steph now.
I follow the two of them across the fake rustic piazza and under the fake vine-covered trellises leading to the bathrooms. Michelle shoves the door open and we all file in, even though it’s a single—one toilet, one sink, one candle, and one framed painting of a Venice canal with a little gondola bopping along the choppy water.
“Don’t look at the art,” Michelle says.
“Hey, you guys don’t get to be the mad ones here,” I say. “You both lied by omission.”
“It was a last-minute thing,” Steph says. “We didn’t know for sure they were coming.”
“Lying! You did too know, you planned it.”
“We just thought it would be fun,” Michelle says.
“It was already going to be fun, because it was going to be the three of us and we always have fun, no matter what.”
“More fun, then,” Steph says, and then Michelle says, “A different kind of fun.”
“No one say ‘fun’ again or I’m going to flip out,” I tell them.
No one does but I flip out anyway, letting loose one sad and lonely scream because I feel left out and lonely, and those are the last two things I should feel when I’m with my two best friends.
“We like Bart,” Michelle says, and she means all of us—even me.
“I’m okay with that,” I say, sighing. “I just don’t know why he has to be here.”
“Because it’s cool sometimes to have other people around, not just us.”
“No, we’re the coolest,” I say.
“Miranda’s cool too,” Steph says. “She’s a writer.”
“She doesn’t seem like one,” I say. “At all.”
“Eva, we can’t all be Eva,” Michelle says.
The toilet in the other bathroom flushes loudly through the thin walls; a man coughs. If everything inside us isn’t being dropped down a hole, then it’s being hacked up, and I don’t want to go back to the table. Not unless we’re all laughing, all forgiven, all in agreement about who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside looking in.
“Well, what does she write?” I ask.
“Really, really beautiful songs,” Steph says. “Like poetry.”
“Oh,” I say. I’d forgotten about songwriting, about even the idea of poetry.
“Even though you were rude,” Steph says, collecting herself, “we’re not mad.” She looks to Michelle for verbal agreement.
“Even though we have every right to be,” Michelle says.
“I was just giving them a pizza my mind,” I say, trying to reconnect.
“Ha-ha,” Steph says, not smiling.
“You’re the one who put cheese on it,” Michelle says to me, accusingly.
She’s the first one out the door.
17.
LONELY GETS LONELIER
I’M LYING IN bed at midnight, mentally prepping for my girls tomorrow, visualizing how to introduce the journals and the pens, but it’s so absurdly hot in my room I keep getting distracted. I flip open my phone: I’ve got one message from Shelby, wanting to hang out this weekend and not talk about boys (re: Zack), but there are no postgame amendments from Michelle or Steph, obviously. Lindsay emailed again, and it’s kind of cryptic (Comin 2 San D NETime soon? cuz lez hang), and Foster wrote saying he’s trying to figure out a way for the boy not to die.
Every summer my mother declares it the hottest summer she’s ever felt in Los Angeles, and even though she’s factually wrong, I’m still not looking forward to the year when it finally gets cooler and turns autumn right on schedule with the rest of the lonely planet. I hope LA gets hotter and hotter year after year, until one year summer lasts all the way until the next summer
, and beyond that even.
One reason I don’t mind the heat is because I can’t sweat. Not even in the areas where it should be easy: armpits, crooks of elbows, backs of knees. I wish I could, because it feels like there’s something inside me that needs to be sweated out. I close my eyes and imagine taking a bath—aye, there’s the tub—and then I imagine Sunny Skies Day Camp being scorched by sunshine. I try to will the sweat out. Maybe if I played prisoner ball. Maybe if I played prisoner ball in sweats. Maybe if I had sex. Maybe if I had the hottest sex.
That’s when Elliot calls. I pick up on the first ring, which he wasn’t expecting. I can tell he was expecting to talk to an answering machine, because what he says sounds like a speech, but because it’s a nice speech I don’t interrupt. He’s somewhere in Texas, north of Austin, on his way to Oklahoma City, then Little Rock.
“Then Nashville, then Louisville, then Baltimore, then Philly.”
“Wow,” I say.
“I’m counting off days.”
“That’s what I’d do.”
“Our LA gig is in some parking lot on Melrose outside some record store,” Elliot says. “Have you heard of it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m having an okay time”—that’s the word he uses—“are things being okay at camp?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’d say they’ve been mainly okay.”
“Sorry I haven’t called,” he says.
And then Elliot exhales in that specific way a smoker exhales, between words, so I ask if he’s smoking. He is! I never knew that he smoked—I hate that he smokes—so I launch into a tirade about tongue cancer, which to me seems even grosser than lung cancer, and about those tiny electronic boxes they put in cancer patients’ throats to help them talk.
“I only smoke when I’m stressed or when I’m having fun,” he says.
That makes no sense to me.
Then Elliot brings up how we only have, like, six or seven weeks left before I leave. But I can’t tell: is he just counting off days on a calendar, or does he mean we only have six or seven weeks—the rest of this hot, lonely summer—to do something, to know each other, or fall in love, or form some bond that’ll last into fall when I’m running through the Boston rain with a newspaper covering my head? I don’t know and I don’t ask, because I’m still mad about the smoking and I won’t change that, not for him.
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