I Kissed Alice

by Anna Birch

  Dusk is in her preferred state, rambling pseudoscience-y psychobabble to the kale since she can’t see me on-screen. Her hair hangs in silvery black waves around her face, and in lieu of her usual artistic piddling during our sessions, she’s plucking at a ukulele.

  “I can’t see you. Can you sit up, please?”

  “Nope, I’m good,” I say.

  “Okay, then.” An awkward not-quite-note twangs through the speakers. Dusk adjusts a knob and strums again. “So you think the universe is conspiring against you. Why?”

  “Because Mom has been shoving Capstone down my throat all summer—it’s such a status thing for her. And then you told me I should do it, and that Mom was paying you extra to make it happen, which is super-effing-unethical. Then Randall tells me June called to check up on me, and honestly it felt like a huge way out—”

  “But now June’s given you an option you can’t refuse.”

  “Exactly. I wanted to refuse it, too.”

  “I think…” Dusk strums again, then begins to pluck something soft, “adults think about this a little differently. We can all look at these things and pick out times in our own lives that we lost out on something because we didn’t feel like doing it.”

  I sit up to glare into the camera. Dusk visibly jolts.

  “This isn’t a matter of ‘not feeling like it,’ Dusk. It’s a matter of ‘can’t.’ You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

  “‘Can’t’ is such an arbitrary concept for you,” Dusk says. “Can’t, really? You physically can’t come up with something? Your hands won’t cooperate? Use your feet. Paint with your nose. There’s a person that uses their breasts to paint fruit, for crying out loud. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  I honestly can’t believe I’m hearing this right now.

  Griffin eyes me from over the top of my laptop screen, wary. He’s a boyish mirror image of me, blue eyes and soft face and dark hair. He’s changing, though—for the first time, his jawline is much more angular than mine. We still have the same combination of thin lips and cupid’s bows that we inherited from our paternal grandmother, and the same freckle just over our right eyebrows.

  “No. Not at all,” I say. “For someone as hippie-dippie ‘creative’ as you are, I thought you would understand the creative process better.”

  “I do understand the process—on a very personal level—and what I’m trying to explain to you is that this is an incredibly complex problem. It’s occurred to me today that the conversation doesn’t need to be ‘fix me so I can do this thing again’—we need to be asking ourselves why it is that you can’t do this thing anymore.

  “I believe wholeheartedly that it feels impossible to you right now. I see you, and I hear you on this. But I think if we understood why it is—aside from what we already know, which is that you’re depressed, and very anxious, and incredibly worried about the future—we could maybe get an idea of what your artistic purpose might be moving forward.”

  All I can do is blink at her.

  None of this is registering, not at all.

  “I think we need to shift the discussion toward the ‘Big Why’ here—is it because you are afraid of failing? Is it that your interests have shifted and you’re afraid of trying something new? You have this opportunity to get your fat out of the fire here, and if we know what the lay of the land is, maybe we can get you back on your feet again artistically—”

  It doesn’t hit me how much this hurts until concern registers on Griffin’s face. Sometimes I feel like I’m witnessing things from outside my own body. I don’t actually recognize what’s happening to me until I watch people around me react to it.

  Griffin’s face tells me to be sad.

  Just like that, I’m registering sadness.

  “It sounds a lot like you, my therapist, are telling me the very thing you call toxic in other people.”

  “No, what I’m saying is that you’re putting yourself into a box, and you need to open your mind to other artistic endeavors—”

  “I need to go. I honestly thought you’d help me figure this out.”

  Her smile is soft. “I think you thought I’d give you permission to give up on yourself.”

  My voice shakes. “I’m not giving up on myself.”

  My tone hits a funny note at the end, too, like Dusk’s ukulele. I hear it at the same time Dusk’s untamed eyebrows shoot up into her hairline.

  “Then what is it you’re giving up on, if it’s not you?”

  My finger slams onto the touch pad of my laptop and the chat disconnects, a reflexive action that happens long before my synapses fire and I comprehend what it is I’m actually doing.

  I just hung up on my therapist.

  I’ve never just … ended a session with her before.

  “Glad to see therapy’s going well,” Griffin says.

  He’s sprawled onto his stomach to type rapid-fire into a laptop of his own.

  “Don’t pick on me,” I say.

  “Oh, come on.” He rests his chin on his hands, propped up on his elbows. “Don’t take it like that, Rho.”

  “She is such a shitty therapist.” I slap my laptop shut. “Seriously, she’s so bad.”

  “She’s really not,” he says.

  “So what? You’re an expert on therapists now just because you go to therapy?”

  “I’m leaving.” Griffin pulls his knees to his chest one at a time, then pushes to stand with his laptop in his arms. “Don’t forget that you asked me to be here.”

  “What? No! Don’t leave!” I feel like crying again.

  Mom always says, “if everyone in the world is an asshole, then maybe you’re the problem,” and there’s a small part of my brain that is nodding to this little bit of mom logic playing itself out in my life right now. But even if a tiny part of my brain confirms I’m the one with the problem, the rest of me just … hurts.

  It hurts that Dusk is telling me to suck it up and deal with it.

  It hurts that Griffin seems fed up with me.

  It hurts that Mom is getting what she wants without listening to me.

  “You’re being really shitty right now!” Griffin shoves his laptop into his backpack and dusts the dirt off the back of his khakis. He looks like he’s five again, all eyes and flushed cheeks. “And if there’s anything I learned in therapy, it’s that I can’t control you being an asshole, but I can control whether I stick around to listen to it.”

  “Griffin!” I feel like I’m five again, crying at my own party.

  He pauses on his way to the ladder, tall and slender in his tech-track golf shirt and khakis, with his backpack slung over one arm.

  “Have you talked to any dance kids since we’ve been back?” I ask.

  I’ve been meaning to ask for weeks now.

  It’s a loaded question and a change of subject—one I hope pulls him back close to me.

  I need him right now, so, so badly.

  He sighs, and the blue of his eyes reflect the wide, November sky stretching over our heads. “Nobody knows what to say to me.”

  “I get that.” No one’s known what to say to me, either.

  It’s a small school. All of us studio and performing arts–track kids are lumped together despite our grade level. Having Griffin begin his junior year in the tech track—which once upon a time existed as an independent school and was absorbed into the Conservatory to escape financial ruin in the nineties—felt every much like the exile my parents intended it to be.

  “For the first three periods of our first day back, some jerk had everybody convinced I was dead—”

  “I remember you telling me about that,” I say. The tug in his voice hurts my heart. “The dance girls were literally crying into each other’s leotards until they ran into you in the cafeteria.”

  He rakes his fingers through his hair, then tucks his hands behind his head. “Then they thought I was a genius for moving out of dance and into tech, which lasted long enough for someone in the sci tech–track to dispute
that based on the fact that I’m completely over my head in Physics I.”

  He frowns at me.

  I frown at him.

  It’s so clear to me right now, how everything we’re doing—and not doing—is at the bidding of a woman who is operating more like a dictator than a parent. Neither of us are where we want to be right now, and it’s 500 percent her fault.

  “Help me…?” My voice is this thin, aching thing. “I don’t know what to do.”

  One hand rakes across his face, lingering to scratch at his eyes. “We’re all trying to help, Rho.”

  “I’m sorry I was mean to you,” I say. “Please?”

  He draws a long sigh and slips his backpack over his other arm. “Buy me dinner and we’ll figure it out.”

  * * *

  Denial works like this:

  1) Eating with Griffin at Sylvia’s Diner will be fine. It’s during the week.

  2) Iliana and Sarah have school like we do—of course they won’t be working tonight. But—

  3) Sarah’s car is in the parking lot—maybe it broke down over the weekend. Except—

  4) It’s wet on the asphalt under her car, and the hood is still hot when I park in the spot to its left.

  “Maybe it’s just Sarah.” Griffin shoves me toward the front doors of the diner. After our spat earlier, humoring him with his dinner locale choice was the least I could do.

  “Yeah, maybe it is just Sarah.” I snatch the door open first. The bells crash against the glass, and everyone inside the diner jumps in their seats. “They’ve been fighting, I think.”

  “Who has been fighting?” Iliana appears like a ghost on my left, cranky and looming with all her curly blond hair stuffed into a net. “Sit wherever you want. SARAH.”

  No answer from the back.

  “SARAH!” She turns on her heel to march back to the counter, stuffing her ticket book into the front of her apron.

  “I can’t believe you talked me into eating here.” I throw myself into one of the booths like I’m throwing myself off a bridge. “You could have had shitty patty melts back at the caf.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t know your roommate’s work schedule,” Griffin says.

  He puts a finger to his mouth and points to the kitchen. The place is so small, we can hear Iliana and Sarah bickering in the back.

  “Your friends are here. You want the table?” Iliana’s voice is predictably shrill. Unmistakable.

  “Sylvia’s got me doing inventory.” Sarah’s voice is softer.

  I have no idea what I did to upset her again. I don’t believe her, and I don’t think Iliana believes her, either. Griffin is already gathering himself to leave. I wave him back down into the booth.

  “We can’t leave now,” I hiss.

  I want to leave, though.

  The last thing I want is to have this conversation with him in front of an audience—but leaving would be giving Iliana what she wants.

  There is low-level grumbling in the office, and finally Iliana appears through the kitchen door a second time. She’s still in her clothes from school: a frilly top that clashes with the war in her eyes and the kind of tight jeans that cause both Griffin and me to glance a second, then a third, then a fourth time before we remember that she’s a harpy and her legs in denim will never fix her craptacular personality.

  Griffin and I catch each other looking. We both flush, and simultaneously become Very Interested in the Formica tabletop between us.

  The thing about being out to your family that no one ever prepares you for is the specific kind of horror that comes with having the same taste in girls as your little brother. The idea of Griffin as a sex-having person makes me want to vomit.

  The idea of him thinking about Iliana and sex in the same line of thought makes me want to vomit—because of course that’s what he was thinking about; we were both staring at the same ass.

  The fact that the thought crossed my mind … Well, I don’t really know what to do with it at all. The way she treats me has always been made worse by the fact that there was a time that I desperately wanted her. It feels like a hundred years ago, but every once in a while my body remembers.

  Iliana slaps laminated menus down under our noses.

  “Well?” She’s shifted her weight onto one hip, and she waits, poised, with the pen positioned over the pad in her hands.

  I glance at her thighs again.

  She notices, but she doesn’t blush away. Instead, a brow pops up toward her hairline and she can barely bury the wicked smile inching its way across her face.

  Great—more ammunition. One more thing to tease me about.

  “Oh, uh. Sorry.” I glance over the menu. I can’t make my eyes focus on anything. “Coffee? And, um, pancakes.”

  “It’s a dollar-twenty-five after the second cup,” Iliana says.

  “That’s a rip-off!” Griff glares up from his menu. “Everyone else does free refills on soda and coffee. It’s just, like, law.”

  “Take it up with the management.” She’s completely unperturbed. “What do you want?”

  “Coffee.” The sour expression on Griffin’s face would make me laugh if I were in a better mood. “Hash browns, scattered. Covered in cheese, with ham. And grits with cheese. And bacon, cooked crispy but not burnt. Are you getting all this? Repeat it back to me.” He throws me a conspiratorial glance. I choke down a laugh and cough into my fist instead.

  “Hash browns. Scattered, covered, oinked.” She reads through her teeth. “Side of grits with cheese and bacon. Crispy but not burnt.”

  “Okay, but be sure the grits and bacon are separate,” he says as she’s jotting it down. “It sounds like I want bacon in my grits.” He nods and shifts to pretending she isn’t standing six inches away.

  Once upon a time, he didn’t think Iliana was as vile as I do. She reminded him of the bitchy, driven girls he shared a studio with as a dance-track student, and he thought a girl with her kind of focus would be a good fit for me—either as a friend or a girlfriend. Today, he wouldn’t piss on her if she were on fire.

  After a moment, she disappears.

  Griffin settles into his seat, collects his thoughts, and picks at a button on his shirt with two fingers. “You know what everyone else is doing right now?” He says, continuing our conversation from the car.

  “What?”

  “The Nutcracker. Every single one of my friends’ lives are consumed by it right now.” He shakes his head. “Mom just doesn’t get it—the Alabama Ballet needs to actually see me if I want to get on there. I need stuff like this on my résumé if I want to audition somewhere else. I feel myself getting weaker. I’m stuck.”

  “No, she doesn’t get it at all,” I say. “She was paying Dusk to convince me to do the Capstone. Can you believe that?”

  Iliana appears again with mugs and an oversize coffee carafe. The conversation dwindles as she sets them in front of us, filling each with shaking hands.

  Her expression is unruffled, but the coffee splashed onto the tabletop says differently.

  She wipes it up with the hand towel hanging from her apron and marches away again. A part of me feels bad for Griffin’s antics.

  A very, very small part of me.

  Too small to actually say something about it.

  It’s clear he’s getting to her, though.

  “I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” Griffin says. “I talked to a lady at Dance!Alabama, and she’s going to let me come dance with the troupe starting in January, if I teach classes three days a week now. They don’t have enough upper-level boys.”

  “Oh, Griff, that’s—” It’s amazing.

  It’s also nearly impossible with his tech-track schedule—exactly the thing my parents were hoping for.

  “Be happy for me…?” It isn’t typical for him to beg.

  “Oh, I am! I just—”

  “I know; it’s a lot,”
he says. “But I have to do it. Mom and Dad said they won’t pay for it, but they didn’t say I couldn’t dance.”

  This is how Griffin is paying for that night at the art installation last school year: By being forced into doing the thing Mom and Dad wanted him to do all along.

  I always think my life was the one that was irreparably altered—I haven’t really drawn since Mom shipped us off to rehab last summer—but then I remember the way Mom and Dad clipped Griffin’s wings and forced him out of something they were merely humoring until they had the first opportunity to take it away from him.

  “You’re right. I’m happy for you.” I’ll be watching closer this time, though. “But now that you’ve got all the answers, what am I going to do?”

  “Well, what would you have done a year ago about the Capstone?”

  That is an easy answer. I spent three years dreaming about what I’d pitch for my Capstone project. Now, I can’t remotely wrap my head around the idea. It’s wild to remember a time when things actually sprung forth from my mind, tiny Athenas in full armor splayed out on paper for the world to see.

  It was only a year ago, but it feels like a lifetime.

  “Nudes, of course. A series—lighter than air, soft pastels on dark paper.” I ramble the next part off from memory, word for word: “The study would emphasize each person’s innate vulnerability while focusing on their shared humanity in spite of their physiological differences.”

  Griffin golf claps. “Lovely. And then what would you do?”

  “Well, I’d draw them. I’d email the figure-drawing professor at Montevallo, tell her I’m a Capstone candidate, and ask to sit in on a few classes.”

  The look on Griffin’s face speaks more than anything he could actually say:

  Duh.

  You have everything you need, right here in front of you.

  What’s the problem, then?

  Except ideas are never the problem. I know what I would have said, and what June and the other board members expect of me. I know what kind of brand I’ve created for myself.

  The problem, as in everything else, is the execution.