by Anne Heltzel
This one isn’t wild like Lena. She’s guarded, vulnerable. You’ve got a sixth sense about people. They always say it: the teachers, the therapists, even your mom when she talks around that cigarette. Your dad doesn’t say it because—where is he? Bangalore, Abu Dhabi, Shihezi . . . and you’re in London, Paris, Bombay, wherever the closest and best international boarding school is. And your dad’s off being a diplomat and making other families but not necessarily taking care of them, and your mom’s just smoking that cigarette, telling you you’ve got a sixth sense.
“Let me help you,” you tell the girl, just as a sweaty guy wearing a wife-beater that doesn’t cover his gut bumps hard into her shoulder. All these people, these commuters—they walk around her like they’re a creek and she’s a rock in the middle of it. She looks at you with hesitation, so you flash her the charming smile that’s seen results. She’s got two suitcases and for the whole thirty seconds you’ve been watching her, she’s been yanking them up the subway stairs. The wheels of one suitcase catch on an old, wadded-up napkin and drag it up with her. Drag, lift, bump. Drag, lift, bump. It’s dumb because there are, like, thirty stairs and at this rate it’ll take her thirty minutes and then people will really get pissed. As she leans to the left to leverage her weight, her shoulder brushes against the grimy, tiled walls. New York City subway stations aren’t places where you want to touch anything, not even the things specifically meant for touching, like wooden benches and elevator buttons.
“Okay,” she says a little reluctantly, and she hands you the bigger one.
“You sure you’ve got the little one?” You want to be certain she knows you’re a gentleman, the kind of guy who gives a shit. She smiles and nods and heaves the smaller load the rest of the way without much trouble. You walk behind her so you can check out her ass.
Lena, Lena, Lena, you remind yourself, biting your cheek hard, like it’s some kind of mortal sin to check out another girl. (It is.)
Then you get it. It sweeps across you, this tidal wave of revelation:
If you don’t say Lena’s name, she’s imaginary. When you’re not with her, does she exist? She may as well not, except in your imagination. The brain, Adam always said, likes to play tricks. All this right now could be an illusion. Lena could be a fantasy, Aubrey could be 110-degree heat making watermarks on asphalt. You get me.
You’re nineteen when you meet Aubrey. She’s seventeen; it’s the summer after her junior year. You’re getting a few extra college credits at NYU. She’s moving a bunch of stuff out of a boyfriend’s dorm room.
A whole existence passes between the bottom of the 6 train landing (at Bleecker) and the top. When you emerge into daylight, there’s an intersection with a gas station and the thrum of steady SoHo traffic sweeping across Lafayette. You decide to kiss her, just not right then. You bide your time.
“What do you have in here?” you ask her. You’re a little out of breath and trying not to sound like it. She brushes her short, wavy black hair out of her eyes. It’s glossy, like the fabric of your dad’s ties. Silk. Her eyes are blue and her skin is so pale you can make out the veins beneath her lids. Her lips are red and chapped. She bites the bottom one.
“Clothes, books, some shoes,” she says. She reaches for the handle but you act like you don’t see. Now that you’ve got her, you’re not letting her walk away.
“Visiting the city?” (You don’t know yet that she’s moving her shit out of her boyfriend’s place.)
“Wouldn’t that be nicer than reality,” she says back. You like her right away because she says what’s on her mind. She’s wearing a white T-shirt that’s just a little see-through. You can make out the sunburn on her chest and the faint gray of her bra. Her shirt’s tucked into a black skirt with a tight waistband. The black skirt is long, all the way to her calves, like she’s Amish or Hasidic. But then she’s wearing these cute little red shoes on her feet and you know she’s just weird in the broader sense. Her left hand has four gold rings on it. She sees you staring and puts it in her pocket. Then she sighs a little, and you have to stop yourself from moving closer to breathe her air.
“Look, I’m obviously not wanting to talk about it,” she says.
“I don’t know about that. Otherwise you would have left already. But it’s cool. I understand.” Beads of sweat appear on her lip and she blinks. “My apartment’s just there.” You beckon vaguely in the direction of Prince Street. “If you want some water.”
“The bodega’s just there,” she goes. She waves in the opposite direction, toward a green-and-white-striped awning down the block off Houston, where the quieter streets wind away from the chaos of Broadway-Lafayette house boutiques and cafés and stores. Sassy.
“But my water doesn’t cost four dollars.”
“You’re not some creep, are you?”
“Nope. Just a guy with free water who has a quick break in between Comparative Lit and Nichomachean Ethics,” you say. You know that’ll get her, the school thing. You know it’ll make you sound safe. (Because you’re not.) You shake your head hard.
“You okay?” she wants to know.
“Let’s go,” you say. “Where else do you have to be?”
“I was going to get a cab,” she says. “To nowhere. I’m moving my stuff out of my boyfriend’s dorm. I was living with him all summer. We just broke up.”
“You have nowhere to go?”
“I have nowhere to go. Nowhere to be, either.”
“Good thing I found you, then.” You grab the other suitcase and start walking. You don’t look back because you can feel her behind you. You feel like, This is it. This is the new reality. And a surge of ecstasy goes through you, just because it’s even possible to create a new reality in the space of a set of stairs.
Turns out Aubrey’s parents have no idea she was living with the boyfriend. He’s a freshman at NYU and she normally lives in Illinois, but she got an unpaid internship in New York City to be with him. She’s about to start her senior year in high school. The ex-boyfriend was from high school, a year ahead. He threw her cell phone at the wall when he broke up with her, approximately forty-seven minutes before you offered to help with her bags. Her parents think she’s been living at her friend Rae’s, but she can’t even go there because Rae has a boyfriend, a little sister in town, and a dog Aubrey’s allergic to.
She tells you all this while you’re sitting in your studio. (You have an East Village studio because your parents still wipe your ass for you.) You keep your studio blank, like a canvas, aside from some furniture that was there when you moved in. You do it on purpose because who knows who you’ll feel like being when you wake up? Say you wake up to a poster of the Knicks and you just fucking hate the New York Knicks that day? So you keep it all blank, zen. Plus you’re in town for, like, six weeks. It’s just not enough time to commit.
“You can stay in my bed and I can stay on my blowup mattress,” you tell her. “Till you get a place.” You’re not going to kiss her yet. She’s not that kind of girl. You want to be the kind of guy that’s right for her kind of girl.
“No way,” she says. “I don’t do spontaneity.” She means it, you can tell. She pokes her pinky through the handle of the yellow coffee mug you’ve given her, filled to the brim with iced coffee, the Stumptown brand they sell in glass bottles at the bodega. She pokes her finger in, she pokes it out. You wonder if she’s teasing you. (She’s not; you’re just being an asshole.) You want to kiss her. Her eyelashes are so long, they rest against her cheeks even when she’s just looking down. She’s thinking.
“I think I’ll probably just go home,” she says. “The internship was at Condé Nast, and I wasn’t getting paid anyway. It was just a front for getting out here. It’s not like I want to get into publishing. I was only out here for Kevin.”
“Well then,” you say. She’s not wholly at ease and won’t be until she’s convinced you’re a good guy. “Why don’t you at least use my wifi”—you say it “wee-fee,” because that’s how they s
ay it in Paris and you forget; she smiles, and it’s an accidental mark in your favor—“for booking flights or whatever? And you can borrow my cell to call your parents. Seriously. Take your time.” Without waiting for her reply, you stand up from the table and grab a book from the shelf that was already there and stocked when you moved in. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s the right book; you know it by the way her eyes light up. You knew she’d be a book girl, a Kundera girl. You’ve known other girls like her. Still, she doesn’t say anything. She’s not giving in so easily.
An hour goes by and she types on your computer and breathes into your phone and you pretend to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Finally when you’re so bored and hungry you think you’re going out of your mind—images of cheese naan and chicken korma are playing dodge ball through your head—she gets up from the table and sits near you on the foldout futon you’re using as a bed. Just perches on the edge like she doesn’t want to get too close. Clasps her hands in her lap, even.
“Thank you,” she says in a sweet, quiet voice. She still can’t look you in the eye.
“It’s no big deal,” you say.
“No, really.” She lifts her head and you see her wet, shiny eyes. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t have any plan. I wish I could take you out to dinner or something. My flight doesn’t leave until nine. But I’m flat broke. I’m so embarrassed.”
“So I’ll take you out to dinner,” you tell her. “My parents still give me an allowance. You can thank me next time.” She wiggles an eyebrow at you.
“When’s next time?” she wants to know, all disbelieving.
“When you visit me. Now that we’re dating.” You crack a cocky, mischievous grin so she knows you’re messing with her and not crazy (you are crazy); and in that second you know you’ve got her. Then you two go out for the best Indian food you’ve had outside of Bombay. Halfway through the meal, your phone lights up. It says, Lena. And for a second you’re shocked because you really believed, for the space of maybe an hour, that you had made Lena up. Digital technology says you didn’t.
Guilt rolls over you. It’s so strong it activates your gag reflex. But then you put everything back in order in your brain. Lena on one side—she’s not in front of you, so she must be a fantasy—and Aubrey on the other. Aubrey’s in front of you, so she’s real. (At least for right now.) You don’t know what’ll happen when she gets on that plane tonight and disappears. All of a sudden you’re deeply afraid. You put down your fork and watch the piece of chicken you speared slide back into its creamy, almond-flavored sauce.
7
Lena
The club’s bumping; it’s hard for me not to wiggle my hips like I’m here just to party. Rushmore and Cid Rim are tag teaming, spinning a good mix. I feel that old familiar thrill when I take Z’s arm and he leads us downstairs, through the hidden entrance, past all the girls waiting and glaring. We’re prettier, more powerful, we know someone. It never gets old. I just want to dance, dance, dance, and the feeling’s shooting through every part of my body, until I’m filled up with sensation.
But that’s not why we’re here. One look at Aubrey reminds me of that. The girl is practically a depressant in and of herself, like I could roll her up into a little white pill and pop her and pass out. I need her anyway—I need her for answers, I need her for unraveling this messy Charlie nest.
She looks like she’s never been to a club in her life, and for a second I pity her a little. Aubrey’s sheltered like no one I’ve met before. More sheltered than that girl Rachel from Iowa City, who came out to summer enrichment and couldn’t hack it. She went home on the earliest flight, her face all screwed up in a snotty red mess, when they caught us smoking weed. It was her first time. We all laughed and she cried, and then she was gone, and the rest of us stuck it out all summer and got our precollege credits. Aubrey, though, she makes me cry. I’d never tell her this but sometimes when I look her way, it’s all I can do to fight against the tears welling up behind my eyelids. I don’t even know why. It’s messed up.
Z’s my favorite of the guys Charlie partied with. He’s sweet and caring—a total nice boy, totally googly-eyed over me—except that he’s a pothead and basically houses a pharmacy in the apartment he shares with his brother in the East End. Not that that makes him any different from every other guy I know. The different part is sweet and caring. Z, he looked out for Charlie. Anytime something went down with Cash or Spencer, Z had Charlie’s back. That’s why I knew he’d be the first one I’d talk to in London. If someone here knows what Charlie was doing before he went off the grid, it’s Z. And if Z knows, he’ll tell me.
I need to find out what really went down before it chokes me. Like with Aubrey—that’s why I wanted her with me. She knows the most besides me, even if she knows nothing about the day he disappeared. If she and I put our heads together, we’ll figure out what he was up to. I’ve been thinking, if everyone who knew Charlie got together and sewed up our ideas into one big piece of fabric, the fabric would turn into this totally massive, useful quilt with me and Aubrey as the stitches. That’s why we’re here. I pull out a cigarette and take a deep drag, my smoke mingling with everyone else’s in this thick-aired and pulsating room. Figuring out Charlie means living Charlie, inhabiting Charlie, being Charlie.
In method acting, that’s what we did. And that’s what I’m doing now as I shrug off my leather and check it in with the sequined, red-lipped girl. Z grabs my wrist and yanks me in, he’s in a party mood too and I wonder if he’s already moved on to something harder than weed, before I think to look back for Bree. That’s what I’m calling her; I decide it right now. It makes her sound a little less wet noodle, a little more chill.
“Hey, hey.” I skip back to where she’s standing by the coat-check girl. “Let’s do this!” I have to scream over the thrum thrum of the bass. It’s in my blood and up my throat and pouring out my mouth. “Come on.” Through the strobe her eyes are dark, inscrutable. She gets like that, like a switch turns off when she’s not nervous. I’ve known her for two days, and I already know that.
“What are we doing here?” It’s a hiss: whatarewedoinghere. All one word. Hisssss. I’d only be half surprised if her tongue were forked.
“Um, feeling out Z,” I tell her. “May as well start with him.”
“Right,” she says all incredulously. “Just as long as you’re not here to party.”
“Don’t you get it?” I lean forward like I’m gonna tell her some kind of massive secret. I laugh when she cringes but my heart sinks; I can’t lose her. “We’re being Charlie. That’s how we figure it out.”
“Oh, so that’s how we find him.” I know it’s a taunt.
“Right,” I counter. “Unless you have better ideas.” Aubrey presses her lips together in a disapproving little squeeze that I can almost picture on a fifty-year-old version of her, like I know right then what her mom looks like, and I sure as hell don’t want to meet her. Aubrey’s pretty, but man is she tough. Charlie must’ve wanted a challenge.
“You guys coming or what?” Z’s back. I open my mouth but Bree pipes up.
“We’re coming.” She squares her shoulders and walks off toward the dance floor, straight ahead. There’s a bar to our right and a smoking room just behind it, even though everyone’s smoking on the dance floor anyway. I inhale the gray haze deeply as Aubrey coughs and brings a palm to her mouth. I catch the glance of the bartender and we lock eyes. He smiles and gives me a wink—he saw Aubrey’s coughing fit too. The door to the smoking room pushes open, and I make out a couple of blob-shaped heads, their features indiscernible through the haze of thick fog.
Aubrey’s awkward but oddly unselfconscious on the dance floor. It’s all I can do not to laugh outright as she writhes and flails in that gold dress of mine, her short black hair bouncing around her face and neck—her movements are not at all in sync with the music. Everything happens in slow mo: We’re in the middle of the floor and some trance music comes
on. People are sweating to my left and right and it’s packed; but still she finds a way to wiggle her hips all over the place and wave her hands over her head. In another setting it might look like a sacrificial tribal dance. She’s in her own trance-world, like all it took was putting one foot on the dance floor to fall all the way down the rabbit hole and into the music. Her misplaced confidence might be endearing if she were anyone else.
We stay like this for a little bit, Bree moving in her world, me just doing my thing while Z moves in my orbit. At one point I notice a guy stumble into Aubrey, crushing her foot. If it were me, I would have shoved him off with a few choice words; but Bree just smiles this sweet little smile and laughs it off, then closes her eyes and lets herself get wrapped back up in the music. I’m not a great dancer, but Bree’s horrific. And yet . . . it almost makes her cute, the way she throws her entire self into it. After I get done being totally shocked, I grab Z and move back toward the bar. Bree’s fine there, having more fun than she wants to admit. I can’t help the fiery feeling moving through me. She acts like such a wide-eyed green thing, but there she is, letting herself forget why we’re here and having a good time. I don’t know why I feel deceived.
“I have to ask you some stuff,” I tell Z. “When’s the last time you talked to Charlie?” I try not to act like this isn’t the whole point of being here.
“Charlie?” Z’s brow furrows. He lifts one hand for the bartender, like he’s been doing it all his life. He’s twenty, though, so he’s been doing it for at least two years—one of the major perks of being back in Europe. “I don’t know, three or four months ago? Yeah, we met up in Mumbai. I was there with my family. He was nostalgic, I guess, asked if he could come crash with me. Why? You’re not still with him, are you?”