I was folding a charcoal-colored blouse into my weekend bag when I heard Luke’s key in the door.
“Hi, babe,” he called.
“Hi,” I said, not loud enough that he could hear me.
“You in there?” Luke’s Ferragamo shoes clicked closer, and soon his frame filled the open doorway. He was wearing a spectacular navy suit, narrow pants sewn from a fabric so rich it shone. He put his hands on either side of the frame and leaned forward, his chest expanding.
“Nice loot,” Luke said, nodding to the pile on the bed.
“I didn’t have to pay for it, don’t worry.”
“No, that wasn’t what I meant.”
Luke watched me transfer piles of clothes from the bed into the gaping hole of the bag.
“How are you feeling about this?”
“Good,” I said. “I feel like I look good. I feel good.”
“You always look good, babe.” Luke grinned.
I wasn’t in the mood to joke. “I wish you could come with me,” I sighed.
Luke nodded sympathetically. “I know. Me too. But I just feel bad because I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to see John again.” Luke had been all set to go with me this weekend, but a few weeks ago he’d found out his friend John, who’s been feeding orphans in India or some shit that makes me feel like a plastic bitch for what I do, was coming to New York. He would be here only two days and then he was back in India for another year. He couldn’t even come to our wedding. He was bringing his fiancée, another volunteer named Emma, who was twenty-five. I was instantly wounded by her beautiful name and her perfect age. I still couldn’t believe I was going to be thirty in two years. “Twenty-five?” I’d snorted to Luke. “What is she, a mail-order child bride?”
“Twenty-five’s not that young,” he’d shot back. He’d heard himself and added, “I mean, to get married.”
I understood how important John was to Luke. Even though things were chilly between Nell and me right now, if she moved across the world and came back to New York for two nights, I would drop everything to see her too. That didn’t bother me. What did was Luke’s palpable relief that he was off the hook. That was a pain I couldn’t lie away. I e-mailed Mr. Larson, thinking, You drove me to this. “Want to get that lunch on the Main Line?”
“I love you though,” Luke said. It came out like a question: “I love you though?” “You’re going to do so great, babe. Just tell the truth.” He laughed, suddenly. “The truth shall set you free! Man, I haven’t seen that movie in so long. Whatever happened to Jim Carrey anyway?”
I wanted to tell him that’s a line from the Bible, not Liar Liar. To just take this fucking seriously for once. I was going into the lion’s den with nothing to protect me but a few old green carats on my finger. How could that possibly be enough? Instead, I said, “He did that Burt Wonderstone movie. It was actually pretty funny.”
When I’d asked the director, Aaron, what hotel he’d booked me, his eyebrows had jumped halfway up his forehead in surprise. “We just assumed you would stay with your family.”
“They live pretty far out,” I’d said. “It would probably be more convenient if you got me a hotel in the area. The Radnor Hotel is pretty reasonable, I think.”
“I’ll have to check to see if that’s in our budget,” he’d said. But I knew it would be. No one had said this to me, but I suspected my story was the pin holding this whole thing together. There was no new light to shed on the incident without my version of events. Also helpful was my chest, which Aaron’s eyes seemed to flick to involuntarily.
I hadn’t slept in my childhood bedroom since college, and even then it was only sporadically. I interned every summer, in Boston the summer of my freshman year, and then in New York after that. I tried to spend the holidays with Nell’s family as much as possible. My sleep was heavenly at Nell’s house.
It was an entirely different experience at my parents’ place, where I would oftentimes lie awake almost all night, gripping a silly tabloid magazine in terror. I didn’t have a TV in my room, and this was before colleges dealt out laptops like free condoms at the health center, and the only way I knew how to distract myself from the galloping anxiety, from the disgust that this room, this house, dredged up from the shadowy mine of the past, was to read about the Jennifer Aniston–Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie love triangle. For me, the only worthy competitor of bleak, starless memory is superficial fluff. The two are successfully and mutually exclusive.
As I got older, and as I made more money, it was like an epiphany—I can actually afford to get a hotel. It was easy to blame on the fact that, when I came home, I brought Luke, and my parents wouldn’t allow us to sleep in the same room. Not even now that we’re engaged. “I just don’t feel comfortable with the two of you sleeping in the same bed under my roof until you are married,” Mom said, demurely, narrowing her eyes at me when I laughed.
I didn’t tell my parents that Luke had backed out of the trip until the very last minute. And over Mom’s hollow insistence that I stay at home, I calmly explained that the production company had already paid for the Deluxe Guest Room at the Radnor Hotel, and it was more convenient for me anyway since it put me only five minutes from Bradley.
“It’s more like ten,” Mom pointed out.
“It’s better than forty,” I snapped. Then felt bad. “Why don’t we go out to dinner on Saturday night? Luke’s treat. He’s sorry about canceling.”
“That is so sweet of him,” Mom gushed. “Why don’t you pick the place?” Then she added, “I do love Yangming though.”
And so I tucked my withering body into Luke’s Jeep (our Jeep, he keeps correcting me) on Thursday evening. Proud of the New York plate. Proud of my New York license. The streetlights caught the bauble on my hand every time I spun the wheel, the collision creating a burst of jade light so sharp it could blind. “Philadelphia. Just a hop, skip, a cab, a Metroliner, and another cab away” from New York City, Carrie Bradshaw said once. It felt so much farther than that. Like another dimension, like a life of someone else who I felt sorry for now. She had been so naive and unprepared for what was to come, it hadn’t just been sad. It had been dangerous.
“So what we’ll have you do first is state your name, age, and how old you were at the time of the”—Aaron fumbled for a word—“the, uh, incident. Let’s refer to it as the date it happened, maybe. So how old you were on November twelfth, 2001.”
“Do I need more powder?” I fretted. “I get really shiny on my nose.”
The makeup artist approached and scrutinized the stage layer of foundation. “You’re good.”
I was sitting on a black stool. The wall behind me was black too. Friday was the day we filmed in the studio, a cavernous room above a Starbucks in Media, PA. The whole place smelled like the burnt, overpriced fuel of diabetic Americans. I would tell my story here, and on Saturday morning, when the students were sleeping off the previous night’s antics, we’d get some shots of me around the outskirts of Bradley. Aaron said he wanted me to point out “places of interest.” The navigational points at which my life became an average before and rarefied after were places of interest now, I supposed.
“Just pretend like it’s you and I, having a conversation,” Aaron said. He wanted to get this all in one take. I should keep going, from start to finish, without any break. “The emotional continuity of the story is important. If you feel yourself getting teary eyed, that’s okay. Just keep going. I may jump in here and there to keep you on track if I feel like you’re digressing. But we want you to just go.”
I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t get teary eyed, but I might get sick. Heaving clear syrupy bile into the toilet, my hand, out the car window had been my way of coping for a long time. (“It’s normal and nothing to be concerned about,” the grief counselor had assured my parents.) I took a deep breath. The buttons pulled on my silk blouse as my chest expanded and retracted.
“So we’re just starting with the basics, like I said.” Aaron pressed th
e bud in his ear and said in a low voice, “Can I get quiet on the set?” He looked at me. “We’re just doing a thirty-second sound check. Don’t say anything.”
The crew—about twelve of them—fell silent as Aaron counted on his watch. I noticed for the first time he was wearing a wedding ring. A gold one. Much too thick. Did his wife have a flat chest and that was why he couldn’t keep his eyes off mine?
“We get it?” Aaron asked, and one of the sound guys nodded.
“Awesome.” Aaron clapped his hands together and backed out of the shot. “Okay, Ani, when we say, ‘Take,’ I want you to state those three things—your name, your age—oh! And this is important. It should be the age you will be when this airs in eight months—”
“We do that in magazines too,” I babbled nervously. “Use the age someone will be when the issue hits the newsstands.”
“Exactly!” Aaron said. “And then don’t forget to add how old you were on November twelfth, 2001.” He gave me a thumbs-up.
In eight months I would be twenty-nine. I could hardly take it. I realized something that made me brighten. “My name will be different in eight months too,” I said. “Should I go by that?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Aaron said. “Good catch. We’d have to film that all over again if we didn’t get it right.” He backed away from me and gave me another thumbs-up. “You’re going to do great. You look gorgeous.”
Like I was there to shoot a fucking morning talk show.
Aaron nodded to one of the crew members. The room was solemn as he said, “Take one.” He cracked the clapboard, and Aaron pointed his finger at me and mouthed, “Go.”
“Hi, my name is Ani Harrison. I’m twenty-nine years old. And on November twelfth, 2001, I was fourteen years old.”
“Cut!” Aaron shouted. Softening his voice, he said, “So you don’t need to say ‘Hi.’ Just ‘I’m Ani Harrison.’”
“Oh, right.” I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that sounds stupid. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize!” Aaron said, much too forgivingly. “You’re doing great.” I swear I caught one of the crew members roll her eyes. The woman had a bouquet of frizzy curls framing her narrow face, the cheekbones probably more pronounced in adulthood, the way Olivia’s might have been.
When they yelled cut this time, I got it right. “I’m Ani Harrison. I’m twenty-nine years old. On November twelfth, 2001, I was fourteen years old.”
Cut. Aaron falling all over himself to tell me what a great job I did. That woman definitely rolling her eyes.
“Let’s do a few where you just state your name, okay?”
I nodded. Quiet on the set, Aaron pointing at me to go.
“I’m Ani Harrison.”
Aaron counting on his fingers to five, pointing at me to do it again.
“I’m Ani Harrison.”
Cut.
“You feel good?” Aaron asked, and I nodded. “Great. Great.” He was all fired up. “So now you’re just going to talk. Just tell us what happened. Better yet, tell me what happened. You don’t have to look directly into the camera either. Just pretend like I’m your friend and you’re telling me this story about your life.”
“Got it.” I fought hard for the smile I gave him.
Quiet on the set. The clapboard came down like a guillotine. Nothing left to do but to tell.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
If it hadn’t been for the Swedish fish, I wouldn’t have been there, right in the blue-red, palpitating heart of it. I didn’t even like Swedish fish before I came to Bradley, but they were among the only things Olivia ate, and she was skinny. Rationally, I understood Olivia was skinny not because Swedish fish were an addition to her diet but because they were her diet. It didn’t matter. The urge for that chew, that tang stinging the corners of my mouth, sent me through the cafeteria a second, sometimes third time. Nothing could deter me. Not the table of my former friends located precariously close to the cash registers, not my pants now so tight that I’d taken to using a large clothespin as a button. (It gave me another inch or two.)
I made my way through the food atrium. Passed the deli line, the hot meal of the day, the salad bar, and the fountain soda station—Teddy there, cursing about how the ice machine was always broken—and got in line to pay. Just like at a pharmacy, candy and chocolate and gum were available by the cash register. There were two lines, and there was an awkward moment when I almost ran into Dean, when we both stepped forward to try to get into the shorter line. I gave it to him without a fight—it was the one closest to his table, the one I tried to avoid anyway. I watched Dean shuffle to the front, dragging his feet like the wait was annoying him. There is something about seeing someone from behind, something about the way people walk away, that I’ve always found unnervingly intimate. Maybe it’s because the back of the body isn’t on guard the way the front is—the slouch of the shoulders and the flex in the back muscles¸ that’s the most honest you’ll ever see a person.
The quad drove the high noon sun in from the left; tendrils coiled around the woolly patches of hair on Dean’s neck. I was thinking, how strange that it’s blond, baby thin, when the hair everywhere else was coarse and dark, when Dean went sideways in the air.
Why is Dean jumping? It was the first thing I thought, continued to think even as a dense smoke charged the new part of the cafeteria, the part where I was no longer welcome, my excommunication my saving grace, really.
I was on the ground, my bad wrist irate. I howled as someone rushed past and stomped on my finger. Physically, I had the sensation that I was screaming. I felt the ragged edges of my throat, but I couldn’t hear anything. Someone seized my gimpy wrist and pulled me to my feet, and I felt the pressure of a scream in my chest again, but the release was cut short as my lungs hitched on the smoke. I was racked with a wicked cough, that feeling like you’ll never get a good breath again.
It was Teddy who had my wrist. I followed him in reverse of the way I’d just come, exiting by the entrance into the old part of the cafeteria, where the deli line started for the first lunch shift at 11:51 A.M. I felt something warm and gooey in my palm and I looked down, expecting to see blood, but it was just the bag of Swedish fish, still secure in my hand.
The cafeteria bulged with black smoke. We couldn’t get out the way we usually came in, and Teddy and I pivoted in unison, like we were rehearsing a dance for the talent show. We stumbled up the flight of stairs behind us toward the Brenner Baulkin Room, where I had only been once, to take my entrance exam.
When I recall this moment now, it’s a silent memory. In reality the fire alarm was piercing an unbearably high note overhead, and there was screaming, moaning. Later I was told that the husky voice Hilary took such pains to curate fell away, and she was just a little girl, whimpering, “Mom, Mom,” as she shuddered on the floor, broken glass glinting like diamonds in her pale, parched hair. Her left foot, still in its Steve Madden clog, was no longer a part of her body.
Olivia lay next to her, not asking for anyone. Olivia was dead.
Teddy flung the door open. Beneath the important oak table, where Headmaster Mah hosted steak dinners for the parents who donated at the platinum level, were others. The Shark, Peyton, Liam, and Ansilee Chase, a senior who overacted in every school play she starred in. This random representation of year and social standing, this was it. This was the awful tie that would always bind us.
My first memory of sound is Ansilee panting, the way she sputtered, “Oh my God, oh my God,” as he came into the room not thirty seconds after we did, the gun dangling playfully at his side exactly at our eye level. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was holding an Intratec TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun. It looked like a scaled-down submachine gun. We silently pleaded with Ansilee to shut up, holding our trembling fingers to our mouths. He would have found us anyway. It was hardly a great hiding spot.
“Boo!” His face appeared between the chair’s elegant claw legs. A tiny, pale face, garnished with fluffy black hair that lo
oked as soft and new as an infant’s.
Ansilee broke, blubbering and crawling away from him, knocking a chair over as she wiggled out from underneath the table and shot to her feet. His face disappeared and then all we saw were his legs from the knees down. He was wearing shorts, even though it was November, and his calves were white and shockingly smooth. I’d like to say one of us went after her, tried to save her—she’d been accepted early decision to Harvard, she couldn’t die—but instead, here is where I always say, “We were in shock! It all happened so fast!”
The sound the gun made was nothing compared to the sound of Ansilee’s body hitting the floor. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Liam gasped. He was next to me, and he grabbed my hand, looked at me like he loved me. The hardwood floor was covered with a large Oriental carpet, but by the sickening crack Ansilee’s head made when it connected with the ground, it wasn’t nearly as thick and lush as it appeared.
The Shark clutched me to her chest, and I felt her large bosom heaving like on the cover of a romance novel. His face appeared between the chair legs again.
“Hi.” He smiled. It was a smile totally unconnected to all the things in life that bring us joy: a spectacular spring day after a bleak winter, the first time the groom sees his bride, her excited face buoyed by layers of white. He aimed the gun at us, swinging his arm from right to left so, for a moment, it was trained on each of us, and a low groan rippled through the group. I stared at the ground when it was my turn, willing myself not to shake, not to be the most obviously scared, which I somehow understood would make me the most interesting to him.
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