TODAY I DON’T know what to do with myself. I check if Lindsay’s online, but she’s not. I call Foster, but he doesn’t pick up. I heard Steph’s in Waikiki, but I almost don’t believe it. It’s ninety-five outside, so the air conditioner’s on in every room.
I can’t help wondering who my girls are with right now and what they’re doing—and if it’s more fun than what they did with me.
I need company, so I text Shelby even though I know it’s not my best idea. She always replies faster when I ask her nicely if she’ll trim my bangs. A half hour later she’s at the door, with haircutting scissors, hair clips, a smock, but no smile.
“So, how’d you get fired?” Shelby asks, hungry for gossip. “And don’t give me some Eva Answer.”
“How’s this for an Eva Answer: I wanted to make a little girl happy, and everyone else wanted to make her sad.”
“Perfect. No one gets fired from being a camp counselor,” Shelby says. “Unless they did something seriously messed up.”
“I may have referred to my boss as a Nazi.”
“Or that,” she says.
“Foster hasn’t called or texted since it happened, though. I think I really let him down. Or maybe he’s not that mad, I don’t know. But if he never calls again, I’ll just assume he hates me now.”
“So you’re back where you started.”
“Shelby, you’re supposed to be cheering me up,” I tell her.
“No, I’m not.”
After she finishes blow-drying my hair, we go outside and play checkers on the patio. I’m black and she’s red. I don’t say much except “King me, king me, king me,” because I’m on a roll and winning every game. It’s really effective at helping me not think about Alyssa or Jessica or Zoe. If I keep winning at checkers, eventually I’ll be fired up enough to drive my ass to Sunny Skies and demand my job back. That’s one strategy at least.
Then, out of nowhere, Shelby says, “I know you made out with Zack.”
“I didn’t, though.”
“You kissed.”
“No, Shel, I’m telling you.”
“Fine, say exactly what happened—exactly.”
What did happen? Not much. But, yes, something. Definitely something.
“Never mind,” she says, homing in on me. “I’d rather you answer this: Why even do it? Why even call Zack, or pick up when he calls you? Why go out with him wherever you went, and do with him whatever you did? Like, what’s even the point? What is there to gain from seeing Zack? I’m just curious what the hell the point is.”
“There’s no point,” I tell her, looking down at my lap. “There’s nothing to gain, literally. Only something to lose.”
“What did you think you were doing?” she asks, and I’m pained by how genuinely she wants to know.
“I guess—and I know this sounds kind of psycho, I know—I just wanted to see if I could. I wanted to see if the option was even there. I think I wanted his attention, but then got it and realized I didn’t actually want it.” I try and beam this truth out as clearly as I can, so she can sense the purity of it. “I do like Zack, but I like him for you. And you for him.”
Shelby doesn’t look at me in disbelief; she looks at me in utter belief. The Eva Answer she was expecting was the Eva Answer she got. “You’re selfish,” she says.
“And you’re Shel-fish.”
She looks sick of me. “You’re always . . . quipping.”
“I’m well e-quipped,” I say, playing the smarmy bitch Shelby’s cast me as.
“You had sex with Zack—admit it.”
I almost wish I could admit it, because then I could confess it, have it out, be forgiven, and move on. But now we’re stuck: I’ll keep denying it and she’ll keep not believing me. How do I explain to her that for one night I almost experienced what it was like being Shelby? And now I’m seeing what it’s like to be Zack—broken up with, gotten over.
“You’re making me sad,” I say.
“I’m the sad one, not you. It’s my relationship, not yours.”
“I know, I swear. Trust me, I felt it.”
There’s a pause, and she leans in. “Know what your problem is?”
There’s never any satisfactory answer to that question, so I ignore it, refocusing on the checkerboard. It’s my turn. I pick up my piece and double-jump.
“Your problem is you were there to do a job,” she says, cycling back, “to do something different from what you normally do, to act a way you don’t normally act—and you just couldn’t do it.”
I look at her numbly but apologetically, and shrug.
Shelby hops a checker, shakes her head, and laughs an incredulous laugh. “It’s the same with your glasses,” she says. “You just don’t want to see.” She makes an expression like she’s amused.
“I see what I want.”
“You have to think about the entire story, Eva, not just what you feel like writing,” Shelby says. “You say that you think of yourself as one of your characters—well, then your arc’s moving backward.”
“My arc’s fine.”
“Is it?” she spits, snatching a piece from my hand and holding it out of reach. “What’s your personal journey, or whatever? How are you going to resolve it all?”
“I won’t know until it ends,” I say, and then flip the checkerboard, spilling pieces everywhere, because that’s something her character thinks my character would do.
57.
MUDDY WISDOM
AFTER SHELBY LEAVES I go inside, rattled, and find Courtney in my room, in the dark, in her underwear, staring at my laptop screen.
“I just wanted to look something up,” she says. She’s clearly been crying. And eating. There are crumbs all over her bra.
I look at what she’s looking at. It’s a Gchat conversation with Lindsay.
“I needed advice,” she says.
“What’d Lindsay say you should do?”
Courtney points to the screen, but there’s a lot to read. I scroll up and down, trying to find something that reads like advice, or makes sense:
me: right now it just feels good to be home.
Lindsay: i get that, totes.
me: maybe there’s more of this country for me to see, do you know what i mean?
Lindsay: listen. when I wuz in Japan last yr I totally couldnt handle my feelings of like displacement, u know? Evn in Tokyo, where there’s like millions of ppl, it wuz still so . . .
Lindsay: lonely
Lindsay: n then when I came back, eating burgers, fries, drinking coke with ice—the best! 2 miss smthng as dumb as ice! I mean, wow, u know?
Lindsay: Tkyo Dizney just felt, like off or smthng. like how there’s Mickey but he’s not OUR Mickey. I dunno, it wuz weird. like I shldn’t have felt this way, Mickey shld belong to evry1, but I kept thinkin Mickey belongs to us! he’s such a symbol.
Lindsay: n whut he symbolizes is . . . home. u know, america.
Lindsay: I mean, don’t u feel like being abroad makes u question yr whole idea of identity on like a personal n national level???
Lindsay: n don’t u sorta feel like now u’ll know more bout whut it means 2 b american or whtevr than u ever did? or maybe, tragically, even less?????
Lindsay: i mean, srsly, doesn’t it feel like the world’s just so small???
“It’s not a particularly insightful thing to say,” I tell Courtney.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
It isn’t! And that makes me want to say something a thousand times more insightful, because if someone’s going to blow Courtney’s mind with clichés and stupid Disneyland truisms, like It’s a Small, Small World, then I want it to be me. If my sister’s currently a mess and therefore more of a receptacle for thrift-store wisdom, then it should be my lazy knowledge lifting her up, not Lindsay’s. Not Lindsay’s Wisdumb.
“You know how they say, ‘This too shall pass’?” I ask.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Well, what they’re really s
aying is ‘Everything passes.’ But I think the saying should really go, ‘This all shall pass, even this moment, and this moment, and yes, even this moment, right now, that we’re living through right now, even if it’s a wonderful moment, doesn’t matter, it’s just got to pass. There it goes, and there that goes, and there this moment goes too.’”
Courtney stares at me.
“Gone,” I whisper, and blow invisible dust from my hand.
“I love you,” my sister says, kind of sadly, and she pats me on the head.
“Are you going to Amsterdam?” I ask.
“Are you going to San Diego?”
“For what?”
“Lindsay’s play,” she says.
I forgot about Lindsay’s play.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to see her acting like someone else before I’ve even seen her acting like herself.”
Courtney nods, typing something on the laptop.
“How about meeting her at a bookstore?” She types a few more words. “Tomorrow.”
“I’m busy,” I say. “I have to work on getting my job back pretty much all afternoon.”
“I thought everything passes.”
“Okay, well, everything does pass. I just want it to pass my way.”
“If only they had a saying for that,” she says, mock-wistfully. Then she gives me a little kiss on the cheek and pinches my arm.
“Fine. So do I have to drive to a bookstore in San Diego tomorrow?”
Courtney skims the screen. “No, she was planning to come to LA, actually. She wants to see the La Brea Tar Pits.”
“Doesn’t she know it’s just some stinky pond off Wilshire?”
“Actually, she doesn’t,” Courtney says, snapping the laptop closed. “And you’re not going to tell her.”
58.
UPON MEETING LINDSAY
AT ONE, I’M at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove, waiting to meet Lindsay, trying to remember the last time I was in a bookstore, which makes me realize I haven’t read one book since I graduated. Emerson sent me a summer reading list at some point, but I never got around to looking at it. Why not?
I scan some book jackets, flip through a few chapters, killing time.
It feels unusual to be out in the real world in the middle of the day, among adults, rather than at camp surrounded by kids. But instead of bonding with family or old friends, instead of Frenching Foster for what would be the third, and most likely, final time, I’m idly combing through magazines, waiting for someone I’ve never met, who I’m about to spend every day of my life with. Is this the end or the beginning? I can’t tell.
Today I’ve got my glasses on. I found them in the top drawer of my desk, the single unpacked item left rattling around, appearing very much like a symbol in some Fitzgerald novel about flappers and car crashes. In the end, it’s about what a character does as much as what she doesn’t do—what she sees and, maybe more importantly, what she’s seen as. Dorothy Parker may have been right, but who cares, she was so sad, and I want to be a Great Woman Writer but not one who’s as sad as she is clever.
Anyway, with my glasses on I look like the Old Me and, because it’s been so long since I’ve worn them, like a New Me too.
I wander back to the corner of the store, near the sale stuff, hiding, I guess. It’s not so much hiding from Lindsay—that’s just delaying the inevitable—it’s more just generally hiding. I people-watch, playing the game where I imagine different people from high school that I would or wouldn’t want to unexpectedly bump into. I’m picturing Kerry Ward, standing next to a Mara sister, scowling at me, and that’s why I don’t notice Lindsay, even as I stare directly at her, at her waving, at her whole body approaching me down the aisle.
Now I’m wishing I’d seen her in that play.
Although all first meetings are sort of like a play. Lindsay will definitely be doing some acting, so I should probably work on the writing. I’ll establish a few contextual details first, before I get into the dialogue.
Lindsay’s walk can be described as confident, self-possessed. Every few steps she seems to grow slightly taller, and more confident, as if every book she passes gets instantly absorbed into her, the words spiraling off their pages and into her spine. Maybe Lindsay does have wisdom. Maybe, like Courtney, she’s actually read a lot of these books, has digested the knowledge and drawn interesting conclusions about them. The closer she gets, the more ridiculous I feel at having been found hiding in a bookstore, imagining showdowns with enemies and archenemies from high school, faking that I’ve even read a book this summer.
Lindsay looks tan—a better word would be “honeyed”—but the more general impression she gives off is that she looks healthy. I realize that’s kind of a clinical term, like you’re describing a purebred puppy or blood cells under a microscope, but I don’t mean it like just physically, I mean it of the mind and the spirit too. Lindsay’s giving off really good vibes, as my sister would say. A very positive energy.
“Eva?” she says, and, even when she’s right in front of me, she waves and waves. “Eva! Eva!”
Then she’s hugging me and I’m hugging her, and then she pulls back, smiling the fullest smile, with her lips and her eyes. It’s not the fake smile I throw out dozens of times a day when I’m annoyed or bored or don’t care, wide and meaningless, the one I use for strangers, neighbors, friends I don’t really know, counselors whose names I’ve never learned. Lindsay gives me the real thing.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses!” she says, really looking me over.
“I didn’t either,” I say. I notice a La Brea Tar Pits key chain dangling from her keys. “How was it?”
“The Tar Pits are awesome,” she says. “Just awesome.”
“I haven’t been since I was a kid.”
“You should’ve told me! I could’ve met you there instead,” Lindsay says.
“It’s not really my thing.”
“No way, you’ve got to go again! I mean, you have to go before we leave for school.”
“I don’t need to go to the shitty Tar Pits,” I say.
“Oh, okay.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“I get it,” she says. “You’ve been a hundred times. You’re tired of the Tar Pits. Makes sense.”
“No, you’re right. I really should revisit some of the places I used to go, all the old spots.”
“Soon there’ll only be new ones,” Lindsay says, already positive again.
“Totally,” I say.
Lindsay turns to her left, noticing a particular book, and strokes its spine absently, like she’s petting a kitten.
“Know something crazy? Like a month ago I made this decision to stop reading new books. And not just new books, but also books that are new to me. I kind of felt like, if there’s something I haven’t read by now, I should probably just keep it that way until college, because once I’m there I’ll find out about all the right books I should read,” she says, glancing at me, to see if I agree. “But the problem was the only books left are, like, Harry Potter and the stuff I read in high school. I mean, at first it was fun, digging into a bunch of my kid books I’d forgotten about, but then it’s like, come on! So after a while I just stopped reading. Period. It’s kind of sad.”
“Lindsay,” I say, stunned, “we’re so alike.”
We talk about some other topics—San Diego, the Sea World there, driving on the freeway and how weird it’ll be to not drive in Boston—while Lindsay idly touches an atlas someone left on the shelf next to us. Soon I’ll know more about her than I do about anyone else. I’ll watch her talk on the phone to her parents, type emails at two in the morning, do her homework or ignore it. Whatever she’s interested in that I don’t care about—geography, history, current events—will rub off on me, because she’ll be so close. I don’t know if she’s a Star Student, but I can already tell she probably gets passable grades and knows some interesti
ng stuff, like details about how certain celebrities died and which tampon brand is best. She’ll be my first college friend. Maybe she already is.
“Hey, this one looks pretty good,” she says of some generic-looking book on our aisle. “I think I’m going to buy it.” She winks at me.
She changed her mind. I’m impressed.
We go up toward the cashiers but don’t get in line. We both realize that a purchase means the completion of the bookstore experience, and the conclusion to our meeting, so both of us just stand there, not really knowing what else to do.
“Well,” Lindsay says.
I’ve learned from listening to a lifetime of my mother’s phone conversations that the word “well” is the beginning of every ending.
“Anyway,” she continues.
I’ve also learned that an “anyway” followed by a sigh means that a talk is over, that it’s time to leave. So I don’t bother Lindsay with what the rest of her LA plans are, if she’s seeing other sights or if she’s just getting back in her car with her generic book and tourist key chain and driving home to San Diego. I don’t try to extend the hangout, even though I’d like to, since I have nowhere to go and nothing to do until my flight to Boston leaves.
I don’t tell Lindsay to call me or Gchat me because what’s the point, we’re about to be together basically forever, but I do hug her because right now she’s as new as she’ll ever be, and in a week or so, when we get to the dorms, she’ll already seem familiar. I hold her for a minute, burying my face in her soft hair. But when I feel her start to pull away, I also feel a tug on my earring and realize that we’re attached—my hoop to her hair.
I rub my head against her, trying to loosen my earring from whatever strands it’s knotted in, but she doesn’t understand that I’m caught, that a part of me is attached to her and if she pulls away she’ll rip my earlobe and I’ll scream.
“Sorry,” I say.
Lindsay thinks I’m having a moment, that I’m overwhelmed by our meeting, by college looming so close, the separation anxiety. So she strokes my back, staying still, letting other customers slip past to make their purchases.
Don't Ever Change Page 20