The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  “I know. She never asked where he came from or anything. She was just like, ‘Yeah, a Dishwasher Lemur. Of course a Dishwasher Lemur.’”

  “Well, it couldn’t be a dishwasher meerkat.”

  “No! God, no.”

  “Let’s draw him,” Angela says, hopping up from the bed. “It’ll be something to send to Abuela.”

  I bring in my supply toolbox and my sketch pad and some nice microfiber paper and some cardboard. Angela looks excited by all the choices I’ve given her, like she’s just entered the notebook aisle at Target the week before the beginning of the school year. She’s probably debating whether to ask my permission about using this or that, but I don’t even want to start that discussion. Yes—take the oil paints and the watercolors and the drawing pencils. Take them all. I grab a sheet of the fancy paper and a couple of markers. Purple, blue, yellow, and orange. Oh, this lemur will be festive. Oh yes, he will.

  My phone bleeps. Tall Jon says I should come over and there’ll be some other friends and it will be “a thing.”

  “How’s this?” Angela holds up the sketch pad. She has an outline of a lemur-ish creature and our dishwasher. The lemur stands next to the dishwasher, back up against the cabinets, trapped by his overwhelming desire to get to the clean dishes. It’s pretty great.

  “It’s cool. Keep it up,” I say.

  Mine is a little more abstract. Everything is square-based: the lemur himself, the dishwasher, the dishes the lemur has stolen, et cetera. It’s kind of like Picasso’s cubist period if he had studied Warhol and then had a little sister who was afraid of opening the dishwasher.

  The phone again. Victoria. She’s leaving dance class, and after she showers and eats, she will be “up for anything.”

  I text back and tell her about the thing that Tall Jon is having.

  She is actually up for that.

  “Angela, how do you feel about parties and things?”

  “I’m drawing a lemur picture right now and am therefore ignoring any and all of your bizarre ideas.”

  “It’s not a bizarre idea. It’s a party. I thought we should both go.”

  “Look.” Angela drops her colored pencil, and it lands on the lemur’s face. “I know you don’t think I know what a party is, beyond, like, some rich girl’s country-club quince or a third-grade sleepover. But I get it, okay? You want to go and hang out with people and smoke. I get that.”

  “Hey. Okay. I get that you get that. And that’s not even what I’m going to be doing. It’s just an excuse to hang out with Tall Jon, and Victoria, and maybe even you.”

  Angela looks away for a minute, perhaps seeing if Justice Sotomayor is going to indicate whether I’m serious.

  “I mean it,” I tell her (or maybe them). “I just don’t want to be here tonight.”

  “Yeah, me either,” Angela says, “but I think I’m going to call Hannah and see what she’s doing.”

  We are off. I leave a message on Rex’s phone telling him not to worry, we’re staying with our best friends. I will drop off my sister at Hannah’s house and wait, like our mom always does, until she has gone inside and shut the door. Angela has a backpack and I have my trusty purple tote bag, and we say farewell to the piano and our half of the house as though we are going away for a long time.

  twelve

  EVERYONE’S HERE. PEOPLE from the University of South Florida and Ringling, people who’ve been in bands for five minutes, people who Tall Jon probably met in the parking lot outside his apartment complex, because people see Tall Jon and want to know him. And there are a few others I recognize from Sarasota Central High here, but they are mostly this year’s smoking-corner residents. And then there’s me. And Victoria.

  Victoria can’t hear the word party without thinking of some fancy event that likely includes a sit-down dinner and a live jazz trio. Or at least something that doesn’t take place on grungy carpet. I would never turn down the opportunity to see her in a satiny, short gray-blue dress, though (but anything she wears that’s satiny is probably actually satin). Her heels are tall and silver and impressive, but they’re silent as she walks across the living room to say hello to Tall Jon and . . . Bill. Shit.

  I step outside on the balcony to smoke, but about twelve people have already had the same idea, and there’s not enough room for us all. The threshold between the balcony and the living room is a good enough place to wait for the inevitable reunion.

  Tall Jon wanders up. “Hey, Moreno. Sorry. It’s just that I didn’t know he was coming when I invited you, and then he said he was coming and then I didn’t want to disinvite you or him. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bought you some extra smokes to make up for the discomfort.”

  “I’m sure I’ll need most of them.”

  “Vic looks good.”

  “Doesn’t she?”

  I sort of hate it when he winks at me. He’s so bloody sincere about it.

  “I’ll make you ladies some cocktails.”

  “She doesn’t drink.”

  “Oh, right.”

  A couple of people push between us to leave the balcony, and we slide into their spots. Tall Jon produces two cigarettes and lights one off the other. Smoking doesn’t seem as appealing as it did a minute ago, but I take the cigarette and hold it by my side.

  “You should talk to Bill, though. You know he’s in a new band, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, he is. And they’re busting up the place. They’re playing in, like, Tallahassee and Jacksonville later this month. They might even have a gig up in Atlanta. I saw the show last week. It’s something.”

  “It really fucking is,” says one of the girls behind Tall Jon.

  “It ends with this hugely loud metal-cabaret cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz,’” Tall Jon says, to the balcony citizens in general. “It is the most unexpected, and yet also grandest damn thing you’ve ever seen. It will burst your eardrums while making you wish you had dressed up like you were going to the opera.”

  “That’s so true,” says the girl, who is fumbling with her lighter so much that she is coming close to setting her hair on fire.

  “Here.” I snatch Tall Jon’s lighter from his hand, ignite the girl’s smoke, toss the lighter back to Tall Jon with a ballet-like swoop, and leave the balcony.

  I take to the sad little half bathroom off the living room to flush my cigarette. Tall Jon still hasn’t bothered to hang toilet paper or a towel in here. The lights are four bare bulbs stuck horizontally in some fixture above the mirror. It all gives me a brutal look, like one of those high-contrast photo filters, my eyes so dark as to be opaque.

  “Mercedes, are you in there?”

  It’s Vic.

  “Yeah. Just a second.”

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  I poke my head out of the bathroom. Vic’s face is right there, like she was leaned up against the door a second ago. Like we missed each other by an inch.

  “Bill was wondering where you were.” Vic takes a step backward and fiddles with one of her silver barrettes. “He wanted to say hey.”

  Bill is in the kitchen, having a beer and hovering over a plate of mismatched snacks. Fries and cheese slices and potato chips. His T-shirt is partially obscured by a gray jacket, but it’s not worth looking at because I’m sure it’s a cheeky reference to some movie or old cartoon that he would have to explain to me. His jeans I recognize—the rip on the right-side pocket.

  “Well, well, Mercedes.” Bill cracks a smile through about a week-old beard. “I thought you were a myth these days. Every time I’m here, Jon’s like, oh, I’m seeing Mercedes Moreno tomorrow, or, Moreno was here yesterday and we ate hot dogs and sang the blues together, or something.” He puts a hand on my head. “You’re larger than life.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” I take one of the fries. It’s cold and shiny. “I heard about your band. What are you guys called now?”

  “We’re Self Saint Rage,” Bil
l says.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means whatever you want it to mean.” Bill smirks. “But our bassist got the idea when he drove by a self-storage place.”

  “Oh. Clever.”

  “Are you still doing art about salmonella?”

  “Sort of.”

  He takes a swig of his beer. “I’ve learned an important lesson this year. About, you know, the philosophy of creation.” He waits for me to ask him what this is. “I’ve learned that if you have hope, you can make anything happen.”

  “What?”

  “I know, you think I sound weird, but I’m being one hundred percent sincere here. It’s important to visualize exactly what you want.”

  “I do that, you know. It’s one of the few things I’m good at.”

  “Well, then, if you don’t have what you want, then you’re not visualizing hard enough.”

  “That’s ridiculous, and I have an example for you. My grandmother, you know, my abuela Dolores, is unconscious in a hospital in San Juan. She had a stroke.”

  “I’m sorry, Mercedes.”

  “Well, it’s been a few weeks. I’m getting used to it. But seriously, how in the hell am I supposed to visualize her out of her current state? That has nothing to do with how hard I think about her, and everything to do with her own body and how she responds to treatment.”

  “But you’re thinking about her, right?”

  “Oh my God.” I take a few more fries. These are even colder, and they worm around my mouth as Bill stares me down, as though he is visualizing me visualizing Abuela. “Imagine a time machine, Bill. Visualize that thing really, really hard. Okay? See if you can make it happen. And if you can, let me know so I can take it back to last year and never go out with you.”

  The party is migrating. Expanding to the apartment below, and out to the parking lot. Contracting here in Tall Jon’s place, in the rooms I’ve felt so comfortable in. Tall Jon moved out of his dad’s house the second he turned eighteen: signed a lease, amassed a collection of free furniture, covered the walls with band posters and old maps and framed album covers and photos of his mom. This one he’s placed in the hallway, next to the light switch to the unflattering and perpetually paper-free bathroom, has always haunted me. Tall Jon’s mother is beautiful. Was. She’s standing next to Tall Jon on the beach, and Tall Jon is middle school age but already taller than his mom. And both of them are staring straight at the camera, and their eyes are smiling, and I never understand when I see her how she doesn’t exist in this world anymore. I know she wasn’t saintly or anything; even if she’d lived, I think Tall Jon still might have moved out on his eighteenth birthday.

  “Ah, here’s your latest hiding place,” Vic says from behind me.

  I sit on the carpet beneath the photo, and Victoria fumbles herself into a sitting position across from me, slipping out of her silver heels as she does. She kicks them aside, braving the old carpet on her bare legs and feet.

  “What’s up?” she says. “Why did we switch social roles at this party?”

  “I can’t deal with these people. They’re all good at things. Even stupid Bill.” I glance at her face to see if she knows what I’m talking about. “How in the hell did he do it?”

  “Probably just practice, you know?”

  “You and him, I swear. Both of you serve up these easy answers for these things that to me are huge and impossible.”

  “I don’t mean to make it sound easy. It’s just that it’s not that mystical for me. By the time I got old enough to think too much about why and how I dance, I had already been doing it for years.”

  “Because your nanny locked you in a room.”

  “See, I never should have told you about that.”

  Vic crosses her ankles and doesn’t seem to realize she is putting her poor, wrecked feet on display. I guess she has been dancing in pointe shoes for about six years now? But her feet are like that of, well, if not an old lady, then at least a Mom-aged one. But they are small and tough and have created lovely things and have been around the world.

  Maybe the problem is that I can’t imagine Bill or Gretchen Grayson or sometimes even Victoria doing the work. I experience every second of my own work, and then I ponder on those seconds and chew them up and relive them too many times—why did I decide to create a painting called Food Poisoning #1? (Oh, right, because I was grumbling about Bill’s musings.) Once I started it, how did I know I wanted to stick with it? Why did I choose purple and yellow and newspaper? Why did I add a tiny pink flamingo in the top right corner? Why did I decide it was done? A hundred little choices, each of them so critical.

  I suppose Vic has made those choices, too.

  “Anyway!” Vic sounds too bright for having danced most of the day away. “You know what I was just remembering? That time Bill said he had a surprise day trip for all of us, and it turned out to be—”

  “Disney World! Except that the pass that was supposed to get us in turned out to be, what, someone’s expired family pass?”

  “Something like that,” Vic says. “Let us concentrate briefly on the symbolism of being locked out of Disney World, staring at the gates.”

  “Bill was so pissed. I thought he was going to try to find a Mickey to kick in the balls or something.”

  “Oh, come on, dearie. That was all for show.”

  “You think?”

  “Absolutely. He knew all along that pass wouldn’t work. But once he got it in his head that taking you on an impromptu trip to Orlando would be the greatest thing in the world, he couldn’t shake that idea.”

  “I guess I can buy that. But how did you fit into this plan?”

  “I’m an excellent travel companion.” Vic slouches, and she looks at me seriously. “How much did you like him, really?”

  “I liked him.” I did, even though he occupies a fuzzy place in my brain now. When I think of him, the images come at me fast and jumbled, like a movie trailer. He sees me at the Smoking Corner and smiles and rolls his eyes. Cut. I watch him badly play bad music with his bad band (and Victoria is there in the background, out of focus but empathetic). Cut. A close-up of his face: blue eyes and that indented scar on his upper lip. Cut. Obligatory sexy shot of him unbuttoning my jeans. Quick cutaway!

  “He was . . . exactly the kind of person I thought I’d hook up with, or go out with, or whatever,” I tell Vic.

  “Yup,” Vic says.

  “Oh, you knew, did you?” I grin at her and try to kick her bare foot aside. “Did you know I was going to dump him? Did you have visions of the breakup?”

  “Hmm, sort of. I mean, Tall Jon and I could see it coming a mile away. A hundred miles away. We just didn’t anticipate the reason.”

  “I’m full of surprises.”

  “Indeed.” She eyes me, as though she expects me to make some sort of grand, truthful pronouncement about how that moment was a victory for my whole identity. “Ugh, I cringe when I think about it. I didn’t know what I was going to tell him, and I almost texted him instead of talking to him. Telling him about girls was an afterthought. Like, I was almost walking away when I said it.”

  It was a half-truth, anyway. I didn’t break up with him because of all girls but because of Victoria. Still, it was new information for Bill. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he left it lying there, flopping around. Or maybe I didn’t sense that he picked it up and threw it back at me, Oh, and I like girls attaching itself to me in the form of wings on the backs of my feet, sometimes propelling me forward and other times catching under the weight of air and stopping me in my tracks.

  Like right now. And any other moment I’m with Vic.

  “Were you with him when you realized that?” Vic asks.

  “No. It wasn’t a realization all at once.” It was something that was always there, but was quiet in letting me know. “And I didn’t realize it because of Bill, though I remember this one day, I was leaving his house, and for some reason, I whispered to myself that I was bisexual, and it f
elt right.” Like putting on a shirt that fits. Like saying my full name.

  Someone slams out of the apartment, and there’s the hollow clamor of empty beer cans falling to the floor. It’s possible the Drama phase of the party is happening now. I’m glad we’re out of its immediate orbit.

  “Well, fine,” Vic says. “All I know is what I see or hear. I should never think I knew what was going on in Bill’s head. Or in yours, for that matter.”

  I smile. “It is a bizarre and frightening place.”

  Her foot touches mine again. On purpose. I think.

  I leave my wall and scoot over to the other side of the hallway. Next to her. As if this is less dangerous.

  The apartment door opens again. “Jon, where’d you go?”

  “That’s Bill,” I whisper, my lips about two inches from Victoria’s ear. I can see her very attractive ear veins.

  “Hide!” Vic jumps up and opens the bathroom door, leaving her shoes in the hallway. I rush in after her and shut us inside, in the dark, our backs against the wall. I snort-laugh.

  “No!” Vic whispers. “There is a delicate art to staying hidden. We need to be quiet and still.”

  “Like the shoes you left outside the door?”

  “Totally part of the strategy.”

  I don’t know why we’re in the dark bathroom, but I do know this is the Victoria I like best. Victoria when she’s come out from under her superhuman sense of self-control. When she’s about as far away from a performance as you can get. She vibrates differently—her voice, the way she moves, the way her hair is down and sort of frizzy and brushing against my shoulder in the dark.

  This really happened.

  It flashes quickly, in the mirror. It’s the only light in the room.

  “Did you see that?” I ask.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Vic says.

  And they’re back, those same three words, lit a wavering orange, hovering in the mirror in front of me.

  Vic says nothing.

  I take two steps away from Victoria’s hair and reach toward the mirror. This really happened. The words flicker, but their color stays bright.