The Gallery of Unfinished Girls

by Lauren Karcz

  “It’s something that happened to me recently,” I say, and Gretchen seems to accept this. There’s an alternate first-period studio art today in which I stop drawing and tell her the whole story. She doesn’t believe me at first, but when I get to the part about my self-portrait and where it could end up, I dig in my pocket and show her the keys, and she gasps—“Ah!” But then the surprise slides off her face as she nods and smiles, because even Alternate Morning Gretchen knows better than I do what I should do about all of this.

  In this actual morning, Mrs. Pagonis says, “Mercedes?” and she motions to the door of the classroom, and I think I already know what this is about.

  Angela is in the nurse’s office, lying flat on her back on a cot. Temperature of 103. I sit by her while the nurse tries to get in touch with Mom. “Shit, Ange,” I whisper. “We haven’t even been here an hour.”

  “I know, I know.” Angela has both hands over her face. “I feel awful.”

  “Your mom said she can come to get you,” the nurse says.

  “No!” Angela’s hands fly out to her sides, and her eyes are wide open. “She doesn’t know where to take me. Only Mercedes does!”

  The nurse looks to me for an answer about that one. “She’s very particular about doctors. It’s a thing she has.”

  “Well, your mom’s on her way,” the nurse says. “Only she can check Angela out for the day.”

  “Can I sit with her?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  When Mom arrives, I corner her in the hall outside the nurse’s office. “Look, you can’t take her to urgent care—I mean, back to urgent care. They can’t do anything.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Mom says. “I’m sure it’s just a virus. She needs to stay at home and rest.”

  “No, it’s not that, either. She needs to go to a specific place. Can you check me out, too? I can take her.”

  “Damn it, Mercedes. Are you both on drugs? Is this what happens when I go away? Rex’s renter was a drug dealer, wasn’t she? Rex says she disappeared last night. Well, good riddance. She can wreck somebody else’s family.”

  “That’s not it. Just check me out of school. Say I have the same bug, or I’m the only one who can take care of Angela, or something like that. I know exactly what she needs.”

  “Fine,” she says, “but I’m following you. And if that girl’s there, I don’t know what I’m going to do to her.”

  There’s nothing to do but let her follow.

  I let her tail me through a McDonald’s drive-through first. I get Angela and myself hash browns and orange juice, and Mom goes through and gets something for herself, and waves at me from behind, as if she is relieved, as if this was the big secret.

  Angela sips on her orange juice. She smiles at me, but she doesn’t look any better.

  We keep going. Mom stays behind us the whole time.

  I pull into the parking lot. The green minivan is here.

  “Just get out. Just run. I’ll deal with Mom.”

  Angela leaves the rest of her breakfast behind, and she disappears into the building.

  Mom parks and gets out of her car and taps on the window of my Pontiac with a hand that is not holding an Egg McMuffin. “Did Angela go in there?”

  My throat goes dry. My whole face. My body, down to my toes. Everything is dry and cold. “I don’t think so.”

  Mom glares at me with the same look she’s had each time she’s talked about Lilia—anger at her own lack of control. Her lack of balance. “Well, I’m going to find out. Stay here.”

  There’s an alternate version of this moment playing in my head, one in which Mom walks right into the Estate, hears the sounds of Firing Squad, follows the music to where Angela is, and requests no explanation for any of this. She’d smile, bop along to the sound while finishing her breakfast, and then go back to work.

  Or Mom could go up to the glass doors and turn right back.

  Because, in reality, there’s no way for her to get in.

  She sees me watching her, and she shrugs, and she keeps walking to the other side of the parking lot, the one overlooking the beach.

  Everything gets very quiet. I roll down all the windows in the Pontiac because maybe, maybe, I’ll be able to hear Angela and Firing Squad playing from here. But no—even the waves aren’t that loud from here. This is what Victoria saw when she was here on the night of the bossa nova. Just closed doors and waves and their own kind of silence. And even though I suppose that’s not the worst alternate reality to be in, I hate that she was in it. I hate that I wasn’t able to track her down after first period today, and that she knows nothing about any of this.

  My mother returns, having finished her sandwich and, apparently, started beaming.

  “I get it,” she says, nodding. “I understand now. Angela needs the ocean to be rejuvenated, right? I swear I read about this somewhere, how the presence of salt water can cure a person.”

  I attempt a smile from behind my orange juice cup. “Well, it’s good we live here, isn’t it?”

  It’s afternoon now. Mom went back to work after taking Angela’s temperature seventeen times, looking behind her as she left the house, seemingly dazed at what happened. On our phones in the Estate parking lot, only three minutes passed before Angela appeared again, but whether the time in the Estate was the same, I never knew. We’re sitting on the floor of my bedroom doing homework, and she looks normal. But here in non-Estate time, I know she doesn’t have much longer until she descends again.

  “So, probably tonight,” Angela says, not looking up from her biology book.

  “Probably tonight what?”

  “When I’m moving in.”

  “The hell you are,” I say, and throw down my English notebook, where I eventually need to draft an outline for my paper on Slaughterhouse-Five. “You’re going to leave home at fourteen years old to play with a band that may not even exist in another year? Yeah, that’s a grand plan.”

  “Oh, you sound like Mom, when she used to tell you not to throw your life away on art,” Angela says.

  “I suspect she’s not done saying that,” I say. “But this is different. You don’t know what you’re getting into there.”

  “I will if you go, too,” Angela says. “Come on. Everyone knows that Lilia left everything there to you.”

  “Everyone? So they’re all waiting for me?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Maybe you don’t realize you did,” Angela says.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Probably to have a smoke and some orange juice.”

  Except I haven’t gotten any cigarettes from Tall Jon lately, so that’s out. I’m on the porch with a glass of orange juice, but it’s the sludgy end of the bottle. Orange-flavored motor oil.

  Rex comes out on the other side of the porch. He’s wearing a T-shirt that reads You Don’t Know Me at the top, and in small letters at the bottom, Federal Witness Protection Program. It was funny the first ten times I saw it. Now it’s comforting, because it is so Rex.

  “Hey there, Mercedes,” Rex says. “I feel like I haven’t seen you around in a while.”

  “Yeah. My days have been kind of mixed up.”

  “I’m feeling a bit off myself. You know Lilia left? No warning whatsoever from that girl. I saw her in the morning, and then in the afternoon, she and her stuff had completely cleared out.”

  “Wow.” I down some orange juice.

  “Oh, and I wanted you to know, she took that painting of yours that I had hanging up. The blue-and-orange one you sold me right after I met you.”

  I smile. “I can paint a better one for you now. Free of charge.”

  But there’s nothing I can do right now to change Angela’s mind. I pass her room and she’s putting clothes in a bag, even pulling the Wonder Woman T-shirt out of her dirty laundry.

  Angela has eve
rything timed right. Mom goes to bed at one a.m., and at one thirty, the green minivan pulls up. Seen from the living room window, Angela looks poised and confident as she heads down the driveway, but I wonder if she’s trembling on the outside or the inside. She was always too scared of the woods and other people to go to summer camp. I could count on getting an existential-sounding text or two every time she went to a slumber party in middle school. She hates having dirty clothes. She doesn’t even turn fifteen until July. But she is leaving.

  twenty-five

  IT’S QUIET ON the roads at this time on Saturday, and I am driving too fast and changing lanes all over the place. And I don’t even hit a red light until I get stuck at the longest one ever, here at Honore Avenue, about five minutes from Victoria’s house. The red seems to blink at me while I wait, daring me to blink back. I remember when I was learning to drive two years ago, and I finally figured out why people ever so slightly let up on the brake when they’re sitting at a long-ass stoplight like this one. It’s not that they think moving up seven inches is going to help them; it’s just that it’s damn hard to keep your foot mashed down on the brake for so long.

  The light changes, and I head on to Vic’s without another stop. The sky brightens from white to blue as I go. I have texted Mom, telling her that Angela and I are supposedly going to tell Victoria to break a leg before her matinee performance of the Gershwin show today. I have time. We have time. Vic and me.

  “I promise you’ll be back way before your show,” I tell her. “Please, just come with me.”

  Vic leans against the door frame, looking so much like herself today. Like someone who is going to be at the theater by noon with her hair pulled tight and her eyeliner darkened and her routines practiced. Her American Ballet Theatre T-shirt looks new, but somehow exactly like all the others. She’s got warm-up leggings. Socks. And about ten Congratulations balloons bobbing in the hallway behind her head.

  Ah, that’s exactly who she looks like. Someone who has gotten into Juilliard.

  “Really?” I point toward the helium bouquet.

  She kind of shrugs.

  Vic’s parents pop out from the kitchen and wave at me. “Mercedes!” Vic’s mom splashes coffee on the white floor as she rushes my way. “Did you hear the good news?”

  “I did! Congratulations!” I say it to the Caballinis, to the house, to the balloons. And I suppose I say it to Victoria, as long as she wants to hear it.

  She asks where we’re going, and I don’t know.

  It feels good to be in the Pontiac, which has been running like a dream ever since I traded Mom’s car for it. I like the Pontiac’s voice a lot better than the Ford’s—a low roar as opposed to the Ford’s nasal hum. Ahhhh—brake—ahhhh. It makes me want to sing along.

  Vic says, “I knew I was right to be worried. All that time you were spending at that building. I thought about finding Lilia and asking her to stop letting you in, stop messing with your life.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I tell her. “It’s all on me now.”

  “Lilia?”

  “She left.”

  For all the ways that Vic could be relieved by this news, I think it terrifies her in just as many. Lilia is gone. My heart and mind are living somewhere in the spaces between those words. Gone. It’s all up to me. Angela and the other artists and the Estate and whatever I choose to believe about the balance of secrets and the origin of beauty itself—they are in my ridiculous little paint-stained hands.

  At least I can make this Pontiac fly. Ahhhhhh.

  “Mercedes,” Vic says. “Dearie. Please, just stop.”

  Fine.

  I pull into the parking lot of a buffet restaurant. “Have you ever been here?” I ask.

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither. It’s perfect.”

  They’re serving breakfast. Even Vic, with her show in four hours, cannot resist eggs and fruit and one small pancake. The place is packed and noisy, with families and seniors everywhere, and not even enough chairs for Vic and me. We’re seated side by side in a pink padded booth in the far corner of the restaurant.

  “Remember this moment,” I tell her. “This may be the most Florida breakfast of your life.”

  Vic smiles, but her mouth is full of pancake.

  “So you’re going, huh?”

  She nods. Chews. “June,” she finally says. “I’m going to stay with my aunt and uncle until the semester starts.”

  Of course. I can already see it. She will live in a corner of their Brooklyn apartment, behind makeshift bedroom walls made of Broadway cast albums, used-up pointe shoes, and American Ballet Theatre T-shirts.

  “That’s, like, two months from now. What are we going to do?”

  “What do you mean?” Vic says. She stares at her orange juice. She has actually gotten orange juice. That’s about as weird as her wearing jeans. Orange juice is delicious but also kind of unforgiving. I should know. That glass is not going to let itself out of her sight.

  “I mean, we’ve admitted that we’re scared. We’ve accused each other of shit. We’ve gone silent. Now we’re even more scared.” I grab the orange juice and take a big gulp. “But we can’t go on like this. How long are we gonna do this, Vic? I’m supposed to come visit you and play an epic game of ‘How Many People?’ in front of The Starry Night at MoMA. You’re supposed to let me make you cocktails on grad night. We’re supposed to know each other.”

  “We do know each other.” Vic looks straight at me for the first time all morning. “I was going to say that the only thing we can do is move on, and then I was going to wonder aloud how to do that, but you’ve already done it.”

  “Really?”

  She has made a smiley face with the remaining pieces of her pancake. I don’t know if that’s something her parents used to do for her when she was little, or if that is all Vic herself, but it is ridiculously charming and I still love her.

  “Yeah,” she says. “You committed to it. To our friendship. You weren’t too scared to knock on my door this morning. I was just, like, terrified of you after a while. But, good Lord, it’s you, dearie. I had to stop myself from laughing when I saw that you’re wearing your purple sandals this morning.”

  Wait, what was I saying? Still love her? As if I had taken the matter of whether or not I loved her, hung it as a little cloud over my head, and waited to see if it would rain down on me. No. I shouldn’t assume that love is as temperamental as the weather.

  “These shoes are classic,” I tell her.

  “Indeed they are,” Victoria says.

  She eats through every bit of the smiley face, and I finish my eggs and her orange juice.

  And then she says, “I keep thinking about what you told me at the dance studio.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That when you kissed me, it was perfect.”

  It was.

  And I keep thinking about what Lilia/Abuela said about the Estate’s magic: It’s the best version of you. That’s maybe too much to live under for the rest of my life, but for a moment? Sure, yes, absolutely. The best version of me kissed Vic. I can live with that forever.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “I wish I knew . . . I wish I remembered what that was like.”

  “We’ll never re-create it.” Around us, the restaurant hums, remaking itself every few minutes as people go in and out. Coffee refills. Buffet refills. Servers taking breaks. Vic and I haven’t even been here for an hour, and I think we’re about the closest thing to a constant in this place right now.

  I lean toward her, nudge her shoulder. “But I can show you a little bit.”

  This is the most imperfect place. This is a place and a time and a motion that could wreck everything. Vic trembles, and so do I. Her rough T-shirt brushes my arm, and one of my purple sandals falls off. It’s cold in here, and there’s soft rock music pumping from the ceiling speakers. She’s not my girlfriend, and she may never be, but in this one bright moment, I am enough for her, and she is enough
for me.

  It is just one kiss. Light and breathy. I’m sure I taste like orange juice. I don’t know where to put my hands, if she’d want them in hers or on her knees, so I keep them in my lap. But it is the dot that completes a painting. Maybe not quite the signature in the right-hand corner, but close. So very close.

  We return to the Pontiac. I drop her off at home so she can finish getting ready for the Gershwin show matinee. And I know where I need to go next. But my hands sweat against the steering wheel, and I can’t bring myself to go there yet.

  “Moreno?” Tall Jon says, rubbing his eyes against the midday light hitting him through the doorway. “Everything okay?”

  “Sort of. Can I come in and hang out for a while?”

  We sit on the balcony, where he tosses me a pack of Parliament Lights and I don’t hesitate to smack it open and take one out. Maybe this is how it should be. Instead of going to school or taking over for Lilia, I could become Tall Jon’s roommate. I don’t know what kind of roommate I would be—I guess sort of the strange one who’s always at home and prompts people to wonder about her and what she does all day. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? This is a place where nothing seems to change, where I’d never have to worry about making a mistake or saying too much or too little. And there’d be no risk of running into various cute blond bartenders.

  Actually, besides the point about the bartenders, Tall Jon’s place would be a lot like the Estate, after all.

  So maybe that’s not going to work.

  I cannot be stuck in the beginnings of things. I cannot hide forever. Look what happened when I took a chance with Victoria. The result wasn’t everything I wanted, but it was more than I ever thought possible. It was more than I would have gotten if I hadn’t begun. And I haven’t been able to take it further since then. Is that okay? Will I ever? The only chance I have is to get myself out of there. To break down whatever barriers were set. And that means getting Angela out, too.

  “Hey, do you want to see something wild?” I ask Tall Jon.

  “Sure, I guess. What is it?”

  “A midday Firing Squad concert.”

  I mean, as long as he’s able to get in.