by Norah Olson
I know it seems like even then I was becoming obsessed with him. That I was paying too much attention to him, like Declan said. Now I only wish I had paid more attention. Those cool blue eyes were used to looking at people a certain way. Used to being looked at like he was the black sheep. And he was smart. My only hope, now that time is running out, is that he was never—even at his best—smarter than me.
I told Sydney about the calls at work and she made her usual snide comments. She told me that it definitely wasn’t some cell tower problem and that probably someone was stalking me and that I should have told Mrs. Porter. It’s a little hard to take her ideas seriously sometimes. She can get paranoid and see the worst in everything. I told her I’d tell Ginny Porter if it happened again but that I wasn’t going to jump to any conclusions about anything or take advice from someone dressed head to toe in black. “Can you get out the sugar?” I asked her. I was reading a new scone recipe.
“You’re ignoring me!” she shouted.
“I think I’ll put walnuts in these,” I told her, and she groaned and slapped her forehead dramatically.
“Listen to me, Ally,” she said. “Has anything like that ever happened at work before?”
“Not that I remember,” I said, cutting the butter into small squares and pouring a cup of sugar into the bowl.
Syd was overreacting as usual and I think this time it was because she was jealous. The fact is Syd can be jealous of my job. It’s probably the only thing she is jealous of. I don’t think there’s anything else she pays attention to. She’s jealous of my job because she’s unemployable. She interviewed for positions at other B and Bs in town and did not get them. Too busy hanging out skating with Becky and Declan to really make an effort to get dressed up and submit a résumé and look like she was interested in the places. And I think people could tell by looking at her that she was a little wild.
She said, “Whatever, Ally. Suit yourself. I’m going over to Declan’s!” That was her solution to everything. She barely spent any time at home anymore. And if you said something that made her upset or contradicted her, she went over to Declan’s.
I like Becky and Declan fine. Even though they act like I don’t exist. I remember the first time Declan came over and Syd brought him to our room. He looked at her posters and he looked at mine—looked at the stuff on my side of the room—and he laughed really hard. Right in front of me. He said, “You’re a master of irony.” I walked out of the room. I’m sure they needed their privacy anyway.
Becky, I actually like a lot. I mean she and Syd have been friends since they were little kids. And we used to play together sometimes. My friends, of course, don’t want to spend time around Syd at all. So I stopped introducing her to them. I generally see them at school or at work. The few times I tried to hang out with her and one of my friends she was really rude. We were baking a quiche together and she wouldn’t help with anything or clean up. She just sat on the counter, swinging her feet, acting bored, and kinda making fun of us. She kept saying, “So who’s your boyfriend?” It was really awkward. Or, “Have you ever even made out with a boy?” Not very classy.
I think the only friend we really had in common was Graham. In fact he may be the only person we really spent time with as sisters—Graham brought us together. At last. But not for very long, obviously. Things went really fast once Graham moved next door. Life changed in the blink of an eye.
Since Graham moved in it seemed that all he did was mess around with his car. He would keep the garage door open and I had a pretty good view of him from the screened-in porch on the west side of our house. So I would sit out there sometimes and watch him. I didn’t feel bad doing this. I knew he watched us too and I knew he was really interested in Allyson.
A lot of the time he would go into the garage with a cup of coffee in his hand, wearing his jeans and a ratty V-neck T-shirt. Sometimes he would stand there looking at the car not doing anything for about half an hour. Other times he’d be bent over the engine.
Something about the way he moved really got to me. I couldn’t decide if I liked it or thought he was a creep. His body was more relaxed than Declan’s. He seemed lithe like a puppy, but sleepy. He moved slowly. And I could see the muscles in his back when he was leaning over the hood of the car.
Also he was a superrich kid doing manual labor, which seemed like a contradiction somehow. Most of the preppy boys I knew sailed or snowboarded or did other things like that for hobbies. No one rebuilt cars, or fixed things. I liked that he was different, but there was something that seemed dangerous about him. Even by himself—not talking to anyone and tinkering around all alone, he seemed moody. I watched him throw a wrench across the garage because he was frustrated. And another time I watched him sit in the car staring straight ahead—lost in thought, it looked like he was wiping tears out of his eyes.
There was something wrong with Graham. And I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know what made him the way he was, to be his friend, to talk to him and hang out, to go driving with him. I wanted to know his secrets.
I wanted to make him disappear.
1:42—Yacht club
5:37—Best Buy
7:00—Woods
18:54—Roof
Dear Lined Piece of Paper,
I have to figure out a way to talk to her. If I had more confidence—just normal confidence—I’d have asked for her digits. I’d have gotten her email at least. I’d have said, “Are you on Facebook?” I would have done whatever regular people do when they meet someone.
What is that anyway? I guess the kind of stuff I used to do with Eric. I’d have taken her for a ride in the Austin, I’d have shown her the screening room in my house or Kim’s paintings. And maybe some of the things I didn’t do with Eric. But of course I didn’t think of any of these things at the time. I thought about kissing her. Right there in the driveway. I thought how nice it would be to just reach out and hold her hand. She was standing so close I don’t know how I could have thought of anything else. And I think she must have felt the same way. I’m hoping she did. The way she joked. The way she looked right at me when she talked.
Thanks to Dr. Adams, though, I can fix this shyness. I thought I was taking enough to make me feel a little better in these social situations, but apparently I am not. I mean, I’m fine talking to strangers now and that kind of thing, but being around her made me feel so nervous. The way I used to feel going to school or talking to other kids. So you know what? I’m just going to take more. What can they do about it? Nothing. And besides, I know that taking more makes me feel better. I can’t spend my time stammering at the end of a telephone or hanging up or just looking at her out of my window.
I’ll never get her to be in my movies if I can’t talk to her. Or take her for a ride or go to the beach or anything. I want so badly to just drive. To just drive around with her.
The thing is we all have a choice now about who we want to be. We don’t have to be how we were born. If there’s a problem, if you don’t do something right, you can fix it. That’s why these drugs exist in the first place. Imagine what the world was like without them.
Becky grabbed me after biology class just as I was headed outside to the unofficial smoking lounge—the benches under the big maple just two feet off school property. She had a distant, goofy grin on her face and she was carrying a pile of books.
“Okay. He is actually super freaking HOT!” she said. “Your description did not do him justice—he’s like actually interesting looking, not just some pretty boy. I don’t think there’s anything bad about him at all.”
“Hello? And you are talking about who? A little context here, please . . .”
“Okay. So, this morning I am walking to school and Graham drives by in like this James Bond car or something—but you know, like a James Bond car from the seventies—like Sean Connery James Bond . . . or the one right after him. Who was the one after him?”
I rolled my eyes. “Not that much context.”
&
nbsp; Becky laughed. “And so I just watch him cruise by,” she said. “I think, okay, he’s cute. But THEN when I got to school I went around back and was sneaking a smoke out by that one corner where they don’t have their freaking spy cameras set up and he’s STILL sitting in his car.
“C’mon.” She pulled me by the arm and started walking back behind the school.
I dragged my feet following her and felt again like this kid had some kind of weird power. My sister, now my best friend—who was next, Declan? Was I the only one who thought there was something weird going on? Was Declan going to be best buds with this kid? But I only had to worry about that one for a second.
“I don’t know why you and Declan don’t like him,” Becky went on, stopping to light her cigarette. “Declan called him a drug addict, which I thought was hilarious. He said his eyes look funny and he seemed too skinny. I was like, YOU? You are calling someone a drug addict? You are saying someone is skinny and has red eyes or whatever? YOU, Declan Wells? Okay, whatever.”
We rounded the corner of the school and sure enough his car was still parked there. “Oh, sh sh sh,” Becky said, as if I had been the one loudly talking about him being a drug addict.
I had rarely seen Becky like this. She could be flighty, but generally she was too cool to get all hung up on some dude. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Look at his car. Is he like the richest person in the world or what? It looks like his clothes are manufactured by magic fairies to fit his body perfectly.”
“Jesus, Beck, can you stay focused for like two minutes?”
Graham saw us walking toward the car and waved. We waved back.
“Howdy, neighbor,” I said sarcastically when we reached the car. He was sitting there, clearly staring at Becky. Instead of saying hello he just said:
“Can I film you, Becky? I just want some footage of you smoking.”
Becky paused like some starstruck twelve-year-old. She exhaled a cloud of smoke into the crisp fall air and laughed shyly.
“Why do you want to film her?” I asked.
“I’m making this movie. It’s not a documentary or anything. It’s an art film, but it’s got real people talking about themselves in it.”
“Yeah, sure,” Becky said.
And then he took out the tiniest camera I’ve ever seen and filmed her face really close up, then asked her to say her name and exhale the smoke. He didn’t even get out of his car.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Perfect.” He was completely relaxed and confident in a way I’d never seen him. And Declan was right—his eyes were messed up—not like ours got, bloodshot, but weirder. The pupils were hugely dilated. Sometimes when I saw him they were constricted like little pinpoints but now they were wide, a black void surrounded by a pretty pale-blue ring of iris. But there was no denying he was handsome.
He filmed her for a few more moments. “What’s your address?” he asked, and she replied, smiling at him, pushing her hair behind her ears. “Where do you go to school? Do you like it here?” She answered all his questions and then he took a little notebook from the glove compartment and wrote something down.
“So what are you going to do with all this?” Becky asked when he was done.
“I’m going to use it as part of a feature-length movie,” he said. “An experimental movie. And hopefully bring it to London with me when I go again with my stepmom. She has some artwork at an auction house there and there’s a film festival I want to enter some of my stuff in.”
It was interesting, but I don’t know if I believed him entirely. I thought he might be lying to impress us, or to get Becky to go out with him.
“Well, thanks, ladies,” he said, then put his car in gear. “Bye, Becky.” He waved. “See you at home, Tate.” Then he drove away. He clearly wasn’t planning on going to school that day.
“Uh . . . don’t you think that was a little weird?” I asked Becky.
“No, I think it’s freaking awesome! He seems like a real artist. Oh, and I found out he’s taking studio art, so I’ll see him in there while the rest of you brainiacs are sitting stoned off your ass in Beecher’s bullshit chemistry lab. Ha!”
“If he ever shows up,” I said.
“Oh, he’ll show up, he’s FINE. What the hell is it with you? He does all the things you normally like. If I didn’t know better I’d say you had a crush on him and you just don’t know how to deal. You’re acting like a third-grade boy. C’mon, Tate! This is the coolest kid who’s moved to town in the history of Rockland and he lives right next DOOR to you. You should be psyched!”
“Maybe,” I said. “There’s more to people than their cool cars and their pretty clothes.”
“Right,” said Becky. “There’s their cool artwork and cool ideas and awesome bodies. And if he’s on drugs, he’s on something better than what we’ve got. We should check that out, no?”
I sighed and shrugged. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I did have a crush on him. So little went on in Rockland it was easy to fixate on anything new that came along. And she was right in a way, Graham was cool. It would be something to know how to build a car or make movies. The things we did most were skateboard, talk about how we hated school while actually taking all the best classes and competing for class rank, listening to music and getting high, and wandering around the sleepy harbor town at night.
Graham had had some other, deeper life. It showed on his skin. I didn’t know what it was that drew me to him and made me resist the very idea of hanging out with him at the same time.
Becky tossed her cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with her toe and then she put her arm around me and we started walking back in to our next classes.
She said, “C’mon, lovebug. I think things are really looking up!”
My mother told me not to marry an older man who had a child. Too big a restoration project, she said. But I never believed her. The truth is I fell in love with both of them. David brought Graham to an opening I had in Washington, DC. David was, of course, charming as usual, impeccably dressed. Tall, thin, handsome. He was a scientist and worked for the government, but he seemed so sweet, so human. It was wonderful to watch him with Graham.
I could see right away what a smart little boy Graham was, and creative. I knew that I could give him something he was missing—not just a mother, but maybe a way of looking at the world. I bought him his first camera when he was seven, and he took pictures of other kids. He took pictures of me and David. And later we got him the video camera. Made sure he had something to occupy himself, help him understand the world around him and make use of it.
My work began selling well and I had money coming in and was able to get a bigger studio. I had work bought by the National Gallery, in London. It was right around then that David asked me to marry him, and that’s when my mother said, Don’t do it. You’ve got your career, you don’t need anybody to look after you. But that was precisely why I did marry David! Unlike her generation, I was getting married by choice. I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do whatever I wanted, and I wanted a family—one that I didn’t need to start from scratch. I didn’t want to take time out of my career to be pregnant and have a baby, and here was a child I could help out, because he needed a mom.
Later, when we would go to my mother’s house in Connecticut for Thanksgiving, she fell in love with little Graham too. That’s the way it was. He wasn’t shy then. He was my little protégé, learning everything there was about how film worked and the visual world. And he was his father’s son—learning everything about battles and strategies and looking at the world from a scientific distance. David worked for BAE Systems as a military aerospace strategist, based just outside of Washington in Virginia. But he was a simple man at heart, with good taste. He still loved to set up the telescope in the yard, and we would all lie out there together looking at the stars. Graham loved that most of all. He would ask millions of questions about how far away the planets were, was there life out there, how did light travel. It was only natu
ral that he became who he was. Mechanically inclined, an artist, a boy who looked at the stars. Someone who thought about war and life and death.
I wish he’d never had to think so deeply about these things. We thought he was in good hands with Dr. Adams and on the new prescription. We thought the art helped his healing. The work he made . . . beautiful stuff, I have to say—even though I’m biased. The lawyer for the other family wanted to have his camera taken away permanently as part of the conditions of his probation, but of course, that was absurd. There was no way that was going to happen, I mean, I really put my foot down on that, and we had the lawyers to make sure he got out of there without some humiliating damaging sentence. He was a child! Sixteen is still a child! People don’t know what they’re doing at sixteen. If anything, the fact that he was trying to make art from a bad situation—I mean, that his initial response was to turn something terrible into something he could understand—was the most human thing that came from all of it.
Anyway, this new work had a maturity to it I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a young artist. Especially the work he did in Rockland. Scenes from bridges, long camera shots with the telephoto lens. Things you can barely make out but that seem intimately familiar. Interviews with people intercut with digital feedback. It’s all very exciting.
I think Graham had been a lonely kid this past year and he needed to process and understand what he went through. I think that was true the last year in Virginia too. I won’t have people saying it was the art—that it was the art that caused all our sorrow. The truth is some of his art is the only consolation. It’s the only thing that still remains.
I saw her waiting as usual in her black jeans, that alert, funny, “I’m about to be in trouble” look on her face. “Tate!” I called to her, and she looked up and grinned sheepishly, walked in, and sat down as I shut the door. This was becoming a pretty common ritual with Ms. Tate.