by Julia Drake
Orion was still looking at me as though I were a complicated painting he was trying to figure out. There was nothing complicated about us, though. Sam imploded, and I exploded. We could have been a traveling circus act: the Fabulous Siblings Concave and Convex.
“You look better now,” Orion said finally. “I mean, you didn’t look bad before. Or now.” I watched him flounder, and my heart squeezed. “You just look like you now. With this.”
There was static. The romance channel. Searching.
“Don’t let Boris hear you talk like that. He’ll get jealous.”
Orion laughed and the static was gone.
“So do I have your permission to talk to Liv?”
“Why do you even want to?”
“Good question,” I said. “Um…”
I thought. I wanted to give him a real answer. It wasn’t just about me being behind the scenes. It was about them. Liv’s hand, Orion’s harmonica. They were like two halves of the same whole, it seemed.
“You two make sense,” I said finally.
“Yeah. That’s how I feel, too.” Orion sighed. “All right. I still don’t think it’s a great idea, but you can talk to her. Just be cool, okay?”
“Subzero,” I promised.
He smiled again, showing that gap-toothed smile of which I was becoming problematically fond.
The whole truth of why I wanted to set them up didn’t occur to me till later that night, when I was sorting through puzzle pieces with Toby, helping him build the border. It was true that Orion and Liv made sense to me. But I also just wanted to be near them, bask in their bug-slapping closeness. Their friendship seemed so deep that I could pencil drop inside and never hit the bottom—just float along between them, weightless and held.
ELEMENTS: INVOKED
Toby left the oven on Friday night. By morning, the house reeked of gas.
“Why are you baking in the house? At night? You own a freaking bakery! What are Liv and I supposed to do now?”
“Just show her the beach! Sometimes, Violet, a man just wants to midnight bake. And, PS, you’re lucky I’m letting this social event take place. Only because you made such great progress on the puzzle yesterday. Well, also because I know the Stones, and there’s no way they’d let their daughter rage at Club Tentacle.” Toby threw open the kitchen windows and the screen door, then handed me a key lime bar. “How’s that taste?”
Even through the gas smell, the bar was tangy and creamy, graham cracker crust spreading across my tongue like yummy Florida sand.
“It’s very good,” I said begrudgingly. “But we’re supposed to be doing research. In the house.”
“So to be clear, this isn’t a hot date, then?”
“No. Literally, her friends call her Professor Stone. We’re looking into Fidelia and Ransome’s backstory.”
“Sounds pretty sexy, if you ask me,” Toby said, waggling his eyebrows.
“Never mind.”
I took a second bar and trudged outside to wait in the driveway. What had kept him up so late, driven him toward midnight sugar and key limes? I wondered if he was lonely here in this big house, if he missed Maude the raccoon. I ate the second bar whole.
The day was off to a bad start. If I’d had Professor Stone’s number, I would’ve flaked with one easy text. Instead, I just felt bonkers nervous, oversugared. I had no idea where we’d start looking for info on Ransome and Fidelia, even if we could go into the house, plus I had no idea what to say about Orion. Not to mention the whole hand-on-heart episode.
Liv arrived wearing the exact same outfit she’d been wearing both times I’d seen her: black sack dress, black sneakers, black Sea Dogs hat. Scarecrow braids. Big purple rock. Like me, she was a fan of the uniform.
“You didn’t have to, like, wait for me,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, and explained about the gas. “We can just go down to the beach until the place airs out a bit.”
She looked skeptical. “How much walking will be involved?”
“Not much.”
“Great,” she said, “as long as I can smoke down there.”
“Certainly preferable to smoking in the house with a gas leak.”
Despite her coastal upbringing, Liv wasn’t a natural outdoorswoman. She lagged behind me, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, slower even than I’d been as a kid. I did my best not to giggle, but this Liv was so different from the Professor Stone I’d met. I had to admit it was refreshing to see her this way: she was less intimidating when she stumbled all over the place.
I heard a clattering behind me, and Liv swore.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said.
She fished her yellow lighter from a tide pool, shaking off the water. At least she couldn’t smoke now, I thought, but then she rubbed the lighter dry with the hem of her dress, turned it upside down, and cranked it across a rock a few times. She checked for a flame and found one. I’d never seen anyone do that. It seemed like magic, but she pocketed it like it was no big deal.
“Let’s just keep going, shall we?”
I gave up on talking then. In the quiet noise of ocean and birdcalls, I brainstormed nice things to say about Orion: He played a mean harmonica, and an even meaner trumpet, supposedly. He communicated with lobsters. He had good creaturely hands and that battered carabiner. This carabiner/key combo, for some reason, seemed crucial. Like he was adult and earnest and responsible. Boyfriend material.
“You want to park here?” I asked, pausing on the edge of a pool, the deepest one on this stretch of beach. It had been Sam’s and my favorite for that very reason.
“Yes,” she said. She settled onto a perch on the tide pool’s lip and fumbled to light a cigarette in the breeze, tucking one leg over the other and regaining her regal posture.
I dipped my hand into the pool and pried loose a snail that clung to the lichen. The water was cold. Yards away, seagulls shattered mussels open by flying up high and dropping them for maximum impact. Liv exhaled downwind.
“Why do you wear that hat all the time?” I asked her.
“Why’d you shave your head?” she fired back.
“No reason.”
“Me neither.”
A plastic bag was being dragged in and out with the tide. In the training manual, I’d read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a modern-day Charybdis, a trash-filled gyre twice the size of Texas. Consider that a metaphor for this research date, I thought. We should have just rescheduled. Toby was right—I had actually been making good progress on the puzzle.
“Violet.”
“Liv.”
“Are we going to talk about our run-in the other night?” she asked.
“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”
“You looked wasted,” she said. At least she didn’t mince words.
“I’m fine. Or I wasn’t, but I’m fine now.” I squirmed under her gaze and tried to reaffix the snail to the wall of the tide pool, but he wouldn’t stick. “It’s not a big deal. I’m not going to do it again.”
“I’m not judging you.” She paused. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Thanks,” I said. I put the snail beside me. I hoped I hadn’t killed him.
“Seriously. Are you okay?” Liv asked.
I shrugged. “I have a lot of stuff going on. Family stuff. My parents…they sort of sent me here to chill out. What you saw the other night, that was like…a past life.”
“I see Felix has already brainwashed you, too.” Liv stubbed out her cigarette and tucked the butt into her dress pocket like she’d done the other night. “The hat was my brother’s,” she said finally. “I know Orion told you that he died.”
“That’s…” I wanted to say I understood, but I didn’t. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but that seemed so feeble.
“That’s really, really sad.” It wasn’t much, but it was the truest thing I had.
“It was,” she agreed. “It is.”
“My brother—is�
��uh. He’s…he’s in a clinic. Treatment facility. For, like, troubled kids. He’s got issues with depression. And food. Not like anorexia but, like, kind of? Sort of an OCD thing. I don’t know. Right when school let out, he tried…”
I couldn’t finish my sentence.
“Family stuff?” Liv filled in.
“So much family stuff I shaved my head.”
Liv looked at the water. In profile, I saw she had a single red dot of a birthmark on her left ear, right by her temple and acne on her cheek that looked painful.
“You know, our names are practically anagrams,” she said.
“Almost the same person,” I said. Except her brother was dead, and mine wasn’t.
“Are you and your brother friends?” she asked.
“Sure.” I thought of the drafts of my letters to Sam, sitting on my desk. I had a brother, and she didn’t. I had a brother, and she didn’t. I had a brother, and—
“Yo, so what’s the deal with you and Orion?” I asked.
To my surprise, she let out a guttural half scream.
“Sorry! Should I not have asked?”
Instead of answering me, she yanked off her sneakers, hitched her dress into a high knot across her thighs, and hopped in the tide pool. Before her legs disappeared in the water, I glimpsed a strong line of muscle down her thigh. Her hamstring curved like a comma. I had a fleeting thought, one I’d have trouble forgetting, that it was a nice line.
That I wished my legs looked like hers.
“Sorry,” I said again. “We don’t have to talk about him.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just bizarre having to, like, tell someone from the beginning. It’s so tiresome. Mariah and Felix know better than to ask.”
The pool was deep, especially for her, lapping at the knot of her dress. She gave the impression of being taller than she was. She trailed her fingers across the surface, leaving behind ripples. She looked like a naiad.
“We can go back to our brother issues if that’s preferable,” I said.
“Ha! Pass.”
“Maybe it’ll be nice to tell everything to an objective observer,” I said. Objective was a stretch. The more time I spent with Orion, the more he told me about electric sea scallops and moon snails and Faye the dog, the more subjective I felt.
“Objective observer?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“Objective. Swear to you.”
She squinted, and I wished she’d take her hat off. Her face was hard to read. I touched the snail shell for luck.
“I’ll give you the SparkNotes version,” she said finally. “My brother died when I was fourteen. Orion and I kissed for about a month after.”
“Grief sex.”
“Grief second base,” she said, and she blushed so furiously, so red, that I felt the heat on my own face.
“Now Orion wants to date. I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Why do I need a reason? I don’t. Isn’t that enough?” she said. “I mean—sometimes I think I should, that’s where the confusion comes in. Our relationship is pretty nebulous. There’s a lot of history there. My brother, obviously. And my parents love him. ‘He’s a fine young man,’ or whatever. They like basically have my dowry prepared.”
“Really?”
“No, no, they’re not that bad. Sometimes they are. I don’t know. Sometimes I think they actually want Orion and me to get married and have babies. But we’re in high school! He’s going to college next year! Babies are repellent! Nothing serious could happen between us, even if I wanted it to. No one’s being realistic about this. In spite of what everyone thinks—him, my mom, whoever—and in spite of what we might look like—Orion and I aren’t a love story. We’re friends. That’s it.”
“I love the way you talk,” I said. The words erupted from me like a frog’s tongue. “I just mean—you have a really good vocabulary. Nebulous.”
She cocked her head. “Thanks. Look, Orion’s truly one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. When he was little, he used to ask that people make donations to Save the Whales instead of giving him birthday presents. I was asking for blow-up chairs and feather boas, and he was developing an ecological conscience.”
“You wanted a feather boa?”
“A pink feather boa. With glitter. Talk about bad for the environment.”
“It would’ve gone well with the cigarettes,” I said.
“Those came later,” Liv said. “Though I did think a cigarette holder was the epitome of glamour.”
I imagined eight-year-old Liv wrapped in a silky feather boa and puffing away on a lacquered cigarette holder. Focus. Wooing. Orion.
“Orion buys the rays sushi-grade tuna, from what I can tell,” I said.
“Exactly. He’s almost too nice.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“I think so. Don’t you? People need, like, edges.”
I didn’t know if I agreed. I was almost all edge, and it was a problem.
“Besides,” she went on, “I’m not even thinking about boys right now. I have this idea that a project—a discovery—will help me get into Oxford. I want to study history there. And if I can make a contribution to the field, get published, they’d want me more, maybe give me a scholarship. Not like I could afford it otherwise.”
“I’m fucked for college,” I said. “My English teacher says I was ‘squandering my radical potential,’ which basically means no one sucks more than I do. And I got suspended this spring. Bit of a blemish on the old transcript.”
“Oh, whatever. Your sophomore year? Doesn’t matter. Just write your essay about that and how you’ve grown tremendously. You’ll still get in anywhere, probably.”
“My parents don’t see it that way.” That was a lie: they told me they didn’t care where I went to college. But sometimes, in secret, and even though I hadn’t been in plays in years, I read about schools with good drama programs. The best ones wanted good grades, and, I suspected, no suspensions.
“What were you suspended for?” Liv asked, playing with the surface of the water.
“Cutting class and smoking weed.”
“Ouch. How’d you get caught?”
I bit my lip. This part was super embarrassing. “I went back to class.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I know, I know. It was so stupid. But I had chemistry and my teacher was kind of cool, always doing these weird demonstrations where he, like, turned sugar into living black ooze and made the whole room smell like caramel.”
“Dehydration reaction,” Liv said.
“What?”
She pulled a braid over her mouth, like she’d said too much. “Sulfuric acid makes carbohydrates break down into carbon and water and acid. Don’t look at me like that, I just liked balancing equations. I’m sorry you got suspended. Can’t your parents, like, donate a library somewhere?”
“We’re not that rich.”
“Yeah, but your mom grew up in Fancy Lyric. Your brother gets to have his breakdown in Vermont! Sorry, that was a dick thing to say. I really, really hope he’s doing well. Sorry. Violet, that was really mean of me. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I think it is actually pretty swank.”
“I hope he has, like, masseuses and a private chef. And let’s be clear, I live in Fancy Lyric, too. Though we don’t have a beach. Will you need loans for college?”
I’d never asked, which was my answer. “I don’t think so.”
“That must be nice,” Liv said, but she didn’t sound mean. She just…sounded like she thought it’d be nice. It was nice. She was nice.
Focus. Wooing. Orion.
“So, Orion told me you went through a Goth phase.”
“Orion again!” She slapped the water in frustration, splashing us both, then brought her wet hands to her hips. She’d been in that tide pool awhile now. I wondered if she was getting cold, if her thighs were smarting, red.
“Did he put you up to this?” she asked.
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“Objective observer, remember?” I said. I sounded so casual. I used to be an actress, for crying out loud. I could pull off objective. “It just sounds like he’s really into you. I don’t know the ins and outs of what he’s done to, like, win you over. But if I were him…”
She snorted. “This’ll be good.”
Challenge accepted, Liv Stone.
Acting is hubris. You not only attempt to faithfully represent someone else’s experience, but you do so in front of a (hopefully) full auditorium. What makes you worthy of being watched and listened to? How do you convince an audience to stay, rather than waltz out the door and hit the nearest bar? Forget a full auditorium: how do you convince one measly person that you’re more interesting than whatever is happening on her phone? And if you can distract them long enough to do that, how do you overcome the seemingly insurmountable challenge of winning a complete stranger’s affection?
Back when I acted, I decided that the answers might be found not in the words themselves but in the gaps around them. I thought a lot about punctuation, and in my head I even gave them personalities, like the colon was kind of dramatic, the dash even more so. A period could be stiff, but it could also be a pushover. I’d run two lines together, maybe, or hold a pause just a beat too long.
Those pauses were my favorites, when I knew people were watching. I thought of this pause as gathering the audience: as though every single person were part of a crop, or a wildflower, and I’d stretch the silence until I sensed another set of eyes, another, another, and then I’d wait another second because I could. This pause announced: I am here, but I will speak when I am good and ready. You, audience, will endure this pause—in fact, you will enjoy it—because I am just that good. I’d hold the bundle of them in my hands, an expectant bouquet, leaving them waiting, anticipating—nay, longing—for what I was about to say.
In that pause, they fell in love with me. They knew they’d come to the right place.
“This’ll be good,” Liv Stone said.
I stood up on the edge of the tide pool. I cleared my throat and gazed down on Liv. I remembered every speech I’d given onstage; every song I’d sung. I channeled Annie Oakley and Julie Andrews, Judy Garland and Eliza Doolittle. I remembered cadence, diction, controlling the diaphragm. Thesis, antithesis, emphasis. Strong stance. Clear voice. Eye contact. Projection, escalation. Feet planted, shoulders back. Act with your voice, not your hands. I straightened myself up to my full six feet and one half inch.