I Kissed Alice

by Anna Birch

  Rhodes, Griffin, and Sarah left me behind, and I had the most to lose.

  I don’t like the way Sarah watches me as if I’m about to rip her face off. I don’t like this conversation, and I don’t like the fact that by not choosing, she’s making a decision every day to choose someone, the very person who hurt me.

  “She doesn’t choose you, you know.” I snatch off my apron and toss it onto the counter. My shift doesn’t end for an hour, but I can’t stand to look at her anymore. Dad’s supposed to come get me, but I think I’d rather walk home. “Do you really think her mom needed her help cleaning out the garage at 6:30 this morning? Why did Griffin come get her? Why didn’t he stay—aren’t y’all ‘besties’?”

  “You’re just jealous, okay?!” Sarah’s voice echoes off the walls, and her face goes from ghostly white to fire-engine red. “You’re jealous. You’ve always wanted to be friends with her—”

  “I’ve never wanted to be friends with her—”

  “And I honestly think it blows your mind that she’d choose me and not you.”

  “Fuck off, Sarah.” I march exactly ten paces to the ancient punch clock that hangs on the wall, snatch my card from the top, and slam it into the slot. The date and time prints across the card with a satisfying cha-chink, and I drop it back into the metal organizer that hangs by the old rotary phone I have no idea how to use. “You can fuck right off with that. I have never wanted—”

  “You know why I still choose Rhodes?” Her eyes are the brightest topaz-honey-hazel I’ve ever seen, smudged with dark eyeliner spilling over to stain her cheeks. “Because she doesn’t ask me to choose anyone.”

  “She doesn’t think she did anything wrong,” I say. I plant two hands on the counter and hoist myself over.

  “That makes two of us,” Sarah says.

  It’ll be an hour before Dad’s idling in the parking lot to pick me up from my shift.

  Hell will freeze over before I call and actually admit to him that I left work early over an argument with Sarah. I already know exactly what he would say: Vrionideses are known for their work ethic! You have to think of the name you’re making for yourself.

  Consider what you want people to think when others speak of you.

  Think of the way I’ve worked to establish a name for this family, too, and ask yourself if you’re adding to my work or taking away from it.

  I shove earbuds into my ears and crank up the music on my phone as loud as it will go, in hopes that it will drown out the guilt clawing at my subconscious.

  The boulevard that stretches in front of Sylvia’s bustles with activity in both directions; the sky overhead feels low enough to touch, with clouds threatening rain, snuffing out what’s left of the light with sunset around the corner.

  Two by two, streetlights flicker on and a cool, resin-scented breeze tosses the curls around my face. It’s going to rain soon.

  I have an hour alone—Dad thinks I’m working, and Sarah won’t have the nerve to come hunt me down for another day at least. I might as well be invisible, and the thought is delicious.

  One hour in the back of a coffee shop with Hearts and Spades is more than I could ever ask for. The one on the corner—a sedate, locally owned place that’s been around since the nineties—is perfect.

  I duck inside just before the first drops of rain hit the sidewalk.

  With a swipe and a tap of my thumb, the Slash/Spot app—and Alice—is waiting and ready.

  Before I know it, I’m pouring my heart through the screen and out into the stratosphere.

  * * *

  I-Kissed-Alice 11:22a: I posted H&S update 48 before I left for therapy this morning

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:18p: I don’t know what’s fucking wrong with me

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:18p: hello to you too

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:19p: hey. sorry.

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:19p: Every time I work with bff, it turns into an argument

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:19p: oh. uh oh. What happened

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:19p: we argued

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:19p: don’t get tart with me

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:20p: sorry.

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:20p: Just. Like. I should know by now, right? I need to just. Idk. Refuse.

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:20p: my therapist always says ~arguments are invitations, but you can decline them~.

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:20p: or something.

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:21p: idk how the saying goes, but you get my point

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:21p: how has that worked for you

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:21p: well, considering the fact that 75% of my problems with people are because I’m too afraid to piss them off to say anything at all, I don’t really think that’s my issue. But theoretically I think I understand how that could be the case.

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:22p: catharsis, and stuff.

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:22p: in the moment, that’s all there is: screaming at someone. It’s like popping a zit.

  I-Kissed-Alice 6:22p: def know about *that* life. There isn’t enough Accutane on the planet

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:23p: I should probably text dad and tell him I finished work early. Gotta go.

  Curious-in-Cheshire 6:23p: <3

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  RHODES

  Username: I-Kissed-Alice

  Last online: 2h ago

  According to Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, Sarah and Iliana’s fun didn’t begin until long after I left this morning.

  There’s proof in discreet pics of their matching blue-black DIY manicures with Sylvia’s oak-veneered wonderland in the background, and a thousand puppy-face selfies, and videos of Sarah singing along with the music playing over the restaurant speakers in the background.

  It shouldn’t matter—they’re friends in their own right, of course. I was the one who left early. But it didn’t stop me from spending the entire ride to Atlanta scrolling their feeds, witnessing a version of Sarah I’ve never met.

  It’s all beginning to feel intentional.

  It makes my bones hurt; it gives me a headache and makes me tired.

  The woman who sits across the table from me is the very epitome of a child of the seventies. Graying hair falls in waves past her shoulders, earrings fashioned from feathers hang parallel to her long neck, and a vintage Lilith Fair T-shirt peeks out from under a Very Professional (and Very Out of Character) black blazer with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She plucks at a banjo during sessions sometimes.

  I don’t tell Mom that she smells like pot, even if I hate the two-hour drive across state lines to play craft time and talk about my feelings.

  She’s the best art therapist in the Southeast—or at least that’s what her website heavily implies. This was more than enough for my mom, who wants the best of everything: cars, clothes, estheticians, and, apparently, even therapists.

  Dusk—yes, her name is literally Dusk—runs a long needle through the binding of a book in her lap, tugging purple string high up over our heads. It’s very much an extension of who she is: a hand-pressed-paper cover in plums, and cranberries, and saffrons with gold leaf sprinkled throughout to catch the light. Inside, the pages are thick, creamy white. I haven’t gotten close enough to smell it, but it’s probably pot-scented too.

  Dusk is supposed to fix me, but it’s hard to take anything she says seriously.

  She loads her needle with half a dozen iridescent seed beads and runs it through the other side.

  Irony of ironies—we’re making art journals.

  Her logic is that the creativity we pour into making them will manifest itself in the work that fills their pages.

  My logic is that creativity doesn’t work like that.

  Her experience is that creativity ebbs and flows.

  My experience is that I haven’t lived on this earth long enough to find that out for myself, and I don’t have the time to sit and wait for it to reappear on its own.

  “What did you decide about th
e Capstone thing?” Dusk asks. “That scholarship, I mean.”

  This is the third session she’s asked me about the Capstone. I stab a needle into the handmade paper in my lap hard enough to accidentally poke myself in the thigh. I don’t curse, but I want to.

  “I’m not doing Ocoee,” I say.

  “Oh?” Her brows hike up.

  She presses the needle back through the binding. Another cadre of beads.

  “I know what you’re thinking—that I’m just giving up,” I say.

  She glances at me appraisingly. “Is that what I think?”

  “I’m not giving up.” My face is hot. “I just … I don’t have anything to submit. I used everything from my junior year in the show circuit last year. The Capstone won’t let you submit something that has medaled in another competition in the last year, so I’d have to create something new.”

  Might as well ask me to open my veins and bleed gold.

  The field house wall from Sarah’s birthday stretches in front of me, empty. Just draw something—like it’s ever that effing easy.

  It’s like everyone around me thinks it’s just a matter of me deciding to do it.

  Mind over matter!

  Quit being lazy, already!

  I sling the handmade paper in my lap across the table and fold my arms.

  “Tell me what you see right now,” she says. She pushes a thick pad of white paper across the table. “Or draw it.”

  More blank paper.

  Blank everything.

  I push the pen away, too.

  “A wide, blank wall,” I say. “Last night, I celebrated my best friend’s birthday and—err—her best friend came, too, and—”

  “Sarah,” Dusk offers.

  I nod.

  “The other is”—she picks up a tablet from her left and swipes up and down, skimming her notes—“Iliana, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dusk makes a delicate face. “We talked about seeing Iliana outside of school.”

  “I couldn’t avoid it,” I say, back on task. “Anyway, Sarah wanted to moss bomb the field house where she and Iliana went to school before the Conservatory. Things were okay at first—they could definitely have been worse—but then Iliana yelled at me to ‘just draw something.’ And then it went from this ridiculous, like, prank, to … I don’t know—”

  “Emotional labor,” Dusk says. “They’re asking something from you, instead of letting you come to it on your own.”

  It sucks that Dusk was the first person to find the words for whatever this is, but—yes.

  This feels right, but giving it a name doesn’t solve anything.

  People will never stop asking for things. If I want to spend my life as an artist, I’ll spend my life creating what other people expect of me.

  Inevitability doesn’t make Dusk any less right, though.

  “I couldn’t do anything,” I say. “Iliana ended up taking over, and, well—”

  My face goes hot.

  I couldn’t identify a perfectly well-drawn clitoris, I would say, if I could find a way to say the word clitoris out loud without laughing like a fifth grader. It wasn’t long ago I found my own, much less anyone else’s.

  I don’t know how Iliana and Sarah are so effing casual about it.

  “How did you feel about it?” Dusk scribbles into her tablet with a stylus.

  “Clearly, not great,” I say. “It was so blank, like it was going to suck me in. It was screaming at me, almost. Then Iliana was screaming at me, and Sarah was giving me that look—”

  “Well, to be completely transparent—” Dusk says. She retrieves her banjo from the floor and plucks out something soft. “Your mom is paying me good money to make the Capstone happen. Extra money. A lot of money.”

  “Okay.” This doesn’t surprise me.

  The Capstone Award means the world to Mom, and sometimes it seems like Mom doesn’t even try to pretend that matters more than what I might actually need to make progress in therapy.

  Suffice to say, it’s not the first time my mom has been shady with my therapist, but Dusk has always been very open with me about it happening. I don’t really understand what Dusk hopes the outcome will be, but at least I know I can expect honesty from exactly one adult in my life.

  I hope, anyway.

  Dusk’s words are soft, and then she bends over the fretboard. Music hangs around us, mellow and plaintive, and I lean back in my chair.

  “The Capstone Award isn’t just about status, right? It’s a yearlong ride at Alabama College of Art and Design. You get a fellowship at the Birmingham Museum of Art. It’s an opportunity.”

  “Right.” Every conversation I’ve ever had with Randall hangs like a ghost over my shoulder.

  It’s an opportunity, but it isn’t the only one I have left. Yet.

  “What do you think about just … doing it? You said it yourself: You’ll be creating for other people for the rest of your life.” Dusk glances up from her finger-work. “Creating at will is a skill—you won’t be able to wait until the mood strikes forever.”

  You won’t be able to wait until the mood strikes forever.

  I understand the concept in theory, but I can’t wrap my head around it.

  Just … make something. Pull it out of my God-knows-where and smear it across a canvas for everyone to fawn over.

  It would be crap. Literal, actual crap.

  People may love it, but at the end of the day, it’s still just crap.

  “The thing I don’t understand”—I pick my journal back up from where it lies across the table and run my fingers over its half-finished cover—“is how I used to be able to do this exact thing. The world told me to jump, and I’d only ask how high they wanted me to go.”

  The cover is crafted from a copy of Alice in Wonderland that was falling apart on Dusk’s bookshelf, embroidered all over with teacups, and keyholes, and a March Hare with long, floppy ears. Alice is only a peach-hued face and half a hair bow at the moment, the rest of her a faint pencil sketch where I want her body to go.

  As per usual, this is when Dusk goes quiet.

  Her eyes follow my fingers, but I know she’s listening close.

  “That’s why I’m here, right? Because something broke in me, and even if I know the when of it, I don’t really know the why. And the why of it is what’s going to fix me, right?”

  “You can’t think about therapy in terms of ‘broken’ and ‘fixed,’” Dusk says. “It’s more of a spectrum—surviving to actually thriving, with every little benchmark a success in between.”

  But that’s not why I’m here. This is the thing that overrides my system: I need someone to fix me.

  I feel like I’m crumbling inside, and Dusk is going to sit here and tell me that being here isn’t about being fixed?

  Why the heck is she wasting our time?!

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Dusk says, smiling.

  “I just can’t believe, after everything we’ve talked about today, you’re asking me to do something. To create something. For the sake of making someone else happy.” It all jumbles out of me butt over kettle. My cheeks splotch and I swallow what’s left of my anger. “Even if you’re going to pick apart the semantics over broken and fixed and surviving and thriving, I just told you how much it hurt me when someone else did the exact same thing twenty-four hours ago.”

  “Rhodes, listen to me: I’m asking you to evaluate all of these high and lofty ideas you have about art, and I’m telling you to think about what it is you actually need right now—another chance—and whether it’s worth milking the cow one more time in the name of going on with the rest of your life.”

  We blink across the table at each other.

  I may have swallowed what was left of my anger, but it never actually left me—everything roils in my chest, wild and burning, and I honestly cannot believe this wannabe Joni Mitchell is telling me to sacrifice the very heart and soul of my work in the name of money.

  Without a word, I h
and my half-constructed journal across the table one last time.

  Dusk holds it in both of her hands as if it’s something precious.

  “Follow the White Rabbit,” it says across the bottom.

  “I’d love for you to tell me more about your Alice thing sometime,” Dusk says.

  Embarrassment comes over me suddenly—painfully—and I don’t really have the words to explain what it is exactly I’m embarrassed about.

  “I’ll explain it when I figure it out myself,” I say.

  “Well,” says Dusk, “the time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things—”

  Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, I would usually respond, of cabbages and kings.

  And then she would say: And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings—

  We do this every week, almost as if it’s some sort of religious call and response. Today, though, there is only silence.

  I stand, and so does she. Our fifty minutes are up.

  “I’ll see you in two weeks,” Dusk says. “Remember—seek out the people and things that give you joy.”

  Yeah, whatever.

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  She smiles.

  “Let’s get you back to your mom.” With her banjo strap slung across her shoulder, Dusk guides me out to the waiting room.

  * * *

  The therapy office parking lot looks more like a scene from a creepy video game—fog hangs in the trees, cutting off our line of vision to the busy I-85 below. It’s otherworldly, almost as if we could walk in any direction and plummet off the side of a cliff into the great wide nothing below.

  Mom’s chemical-peeled skin is still red and swollen; she grimaces down the barrel of the green straw that sticks out from the clear cup in her hand. Wind rattles the thinning dogwood branches that ring the parking lot, and I pull my jacket tighter.

  “So, Dusk told me you’re thinking about the Capstone Award after all,” she says, eyeing her reflection in the driver’s-side window. With a flick of a polished thumbnail, the car beeps twice and the doors all unlock at once. I start to cross over to the passenger side, but Mom hands me the keys. “You need the practice.”