by Anna Birch
“He didn’t tell me nothin’—he did ask me why his baby girl cried the whole way home. He thought I’d be the one to know.” She pauses. “You used to tell me things, Iliana Grace.”
“I found out Rhodes called in a favor for the scholarship, and I just … snapped.”
“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mom says. “I guess I can say I saw it coming after all the carrying on you’ve done with her.”
Mom doesn’t say anything else.
She doesn’t have to. I know what this silence means: Continue.
“What if I’ve been wrong about her? This whole time?”
“Who, Rhodes?” Mom looks like a dragon, with smoke pouring from her nostrils. She tilts her head to the side and blows it out the window.
“Yeah.”
“She’s been awful to you,” Mom says.
“I’ve been awful to her, too,” I say. “Like, Super-Saiyan-bitch-mode awful.”
“I don’t know what any of that means, but I think I gotcha.” Mom pauses for a moment to collect her thoughts. “There are always two sides to every story, honey.”
“I know.” I turn up the bowl to drink the sweet cereal milk and set it back on the table. “But have you ever, like … only seen your side? And then finally you realize they have a reason to hate you, too?”
“’Course. That’s being human.”
“So what did you do?” I ask.
Mom’s vision isn’t great without her glasses.
I hate it when she can see me cry, and I can only hope I’m too blurry for her to notice. I don’t know whether she’s willfully ignoring it or legitimately can’t see past the end of her own nose, but for once she doesn’t acknowledge the tears I’m catching on my cheeks with the hem of my housecoat sleeve.
She flicks the butt of her cigarette out the window with two fingers and closes the window.
“I made a promise to myself: From that moment forward, I would treat that person with the respect they deserved. Not only that, but I’d do everything in my power to make it right. Help them, push them forward, support them however they needed to get our relationship back on two feet again.”
“Did it work?”
Mom chuckles. “You ask like I only had to do that once. Most of the time it didn’t—a few times it did. The thing about it is, you gotta do it whether they forgive you or not. Do what you can, then what they do with your change of heart is up to them.”
There’s a long pause. I know this expression in front of me—Mom is sorting through a hundred different ways to say something in order to find the one version that won’t send me off into one of my usual Mom-proclaimed “Iliana moments.”
“I don’t think Rhodes is the only person you need to be worried about, honey,” she says. “Mr. Wade sent me the video from the presentation—Sarah. She isn’t okay.”
“Sarah? I mean, I think she’s probably fine now—what made you think she isn’t?”
She’s always fine. She knows how Rhodes and I are.
“Mmm.” Mom swills from her coffee mug. “Remember that time it had been raining for what felt like weeks, and the creek out back was swollen? And the two of you had decided to build every manner of boat to see which ones would actually stay on top of the water, and then which ones would actually carry things downstream?”
“I asked to use Sarah’s Barbie doll,” I said, “the one in the bathing suit.”
“The one she’d just gotten for her seventh birthday,” Mom adds. “Do you remember what happened?”
“The little boat we made carried away her doll so fast that we weren’t able to catch it. It went into the drain, and we never saw it again.”
“I remember seeing her on our back porch after,” Mom says. “She wasn’t going to tell me what you did, loyal little thing, but she was so pitiful. Her shoulders were all hunched over, and her hair hung in her face, and she was working so damned hard not to cry. I finally got it out of her—”
“And I had to use some of my leftover Christmas money to buy her a new one,” I say.
“She looked the same in that video. She was every bit of seven, crying because she just watched something she’d wanted more than anything in the world fall down a drain and disappear forever.”
Mom and I find each other’s eyes in the waning dark.
“She isn’t fine,” Mom says.
“Look,” I say, throwing up a hand. “She isn’t seven anymore, and the world is going to eat her alive if she doesn’t learn to stand up for herself.”
“That might be true, but the person who chews her up and spits her out is usually you.”
Mom stands from where she sits at the table and bends to press a kiss into my hairline.
“Cut that girl some slack, all right? Take care of her. She’s been in love with you for as long as I can remember, and you know it.”
She disappears around the corner, then the door to the master bedroom shuts behind her. For the first time since everything began, I sit quietly and give myself the space to think about what it is I really want.
* * *
Nighttime makes me sentimental. I have spent every night since the failed meet-up waxing poetic about the person Alice is, but being back in Randall’s class for makerspace only reminds me of everything Rhodes isn’t. Even if Alice was always noble and good, Rhodes is still the person who has devoted so much of her energy to making me feel small.
And yet, Alice and Rhodes are two sides of the same coin.
Knowing Alice for who she is, I have to wonder how much of Rhodes’s antagonism was something I created in my own mind because I have always been so unbelievably, unrelentingly threatened by her.
It’s such a knee-jerk reaction to hate the girl sitting across from me now, with her dark hair hanging soft around her shoulders.
I catch myself lapsing into it, and then I remember who she really is again.
The only person I have to hate right now is myself.
With absolutely zero preamble, the list for the final round of the scholarship appears in our inboxes on our first day back to school after the project proposal.
Rhodes’s name on the list is a big fat of course, of course, but Kiersten’s name makes my stomach twist.
I can’t think about her anymore without wanting to crawl into a hole.
I placed so much hope in her. She saw so much ugliness in me.
There are three others: Marianna Walters, Chelsea Leath, and, rounding out the hat trick, me.
“It’s fine.” Sarah frowns into her fingernails.
It isn’t fine.
Three Conservatory students are Capstone finalists: two art-track students and one from the theater track.
Sarah isn’t one of them.
Rhodes glances up from the giant clipboard across her knees, but she says nothing.
Our eyes meet for a fraction of a second.
My heart scatters into a thousand pieces.
Her eyes drop back to her paper, and for once in her fucking life she’s actually working.
“It’s okay to say you’re upset about the Capstone,” I say to Sarah.
My eyes re-center on the empty paper in my lap, but Sarah’s tense frame is easy to perceive in my peripheral vision. She isn’t working at all: Her paper sits empty in front of her, too, and she hasn’t even bothered to pull a pencil from the Hello Kitty pouch she keeps in her book bag.
My conversation with Mom echoes forward from the recesses of my mind:
She wasn’t going to tell me what you did, loyal little thing, but she was so pitiful. Her shoulders were all hunched over, and her hair hung in her face, and she was working so damned hard not to cry.
Also, most important:
The person who chews her up and spits her out is usually you.
“It’s fine, Iliana.” She frowns back down at her hands.
I don’t know what to say to her. Do I really bear some kind of responsibility for what happened with her presentation? Sarah knew, and I knew, that sh
e didn’t really have anything planned for the presentation, either, and was hoping when she arrived at the presentation that she’d be inspired. She doesn’t think on her feet like I do, and she doesn’t prepare like Rhodes.
She isn’t the kind of person who could cobble together a slideshow presentation in the car on the way to the project proposal itself, and yet that’s exactly what she tried to do.
Mom’s right: Sarah is loyal and forgiving to a fault.
She is also weak-spirited, and manipulative, and spent the past several weeks waiting on either Rhodes or myself to develop a project for her to present. I assumed Rhodes would help her, and there’s a solid chance that Rhodes assumed the same of me—but in the end, it was blatantly clear that she presented something neither of us would have played any role in whatsoever: a three-dimensional, low-relief installation of trash found around Birmingham, attached onto large planks of plywood and spray-painted into one of Roy Lichtenstein’s crying comic strip girls.
The idea itself could have worked if Sarah had taken any time to figure it out on her own.
It was blatantly obvious that if she didn’t know the medium well, she didn’t know her audience at all.
But if Rhodes had told her to help the Capstone judges connect by utilizing trash polluting the nearby Ocoee River, or if I had encouraged her to study the work of modern artists such as Francesca Pasquali or Tim Hobbelman before she pitched anything, she would have spent the next couple of weeks depending on us to hold her hand through actually executing it. If she somehow won the Capstone Award, it would have belonged just as much to Rhodes and myself as it would have to her.
I don’t know where Sarah’s fault ends and mine begins.
I don’t know how to apologize if I’m not even sure how much my behavior affected the situation to begin with.
My eyes drift back to Rhodes, and for the ten thousandth time I wish I knew what to say to her. Watching her now is like rereading a novel a second—or third, or fifth—time. So many plot points and fine details, all of them bringing the story into a kind of context that simply wasn’t there the first time around.
Everything about Rhodes, everything about Alice, all of it makes sense in a way it didn’t before. They aren’t two different people, two opposing forces in my life.
They’re layers of the same story.
I can’t take it anymore. I stand from my seat and edge the corner of the room to stand over Rhodes’s shoulder.
“Not today, Iliana.” Rhodes doesn’t glance up from her paper.
Her tablet is open in her lap, paused on a pair of dancers in motion. I don’t know the girl, but I recognize Griffin’s dark hair and soft eyes.
“I, um.” I lick my lips.
She’s working on her Capstone project: A single piece of deep plum paper is clipped to her board, and she’s laying down whisper-light preliminary sketches with a white pencil. Her paper features a progression: A pair of dancers, moving through some kind of complicated turn-leap in perfect unison. In the sketch on the left, they’re coiled like springs, preparing to leap. In the center frame, they’re flying. The third frame is still just a few lines that simply orient Rhodes’s use of space.
I get what she’s trying to accomplish, but I have literally zero idea how she’s going to be able to pull it off. The fact that she’s creating anything at all is monumental.
I can’t help but wonder if the problem was her focus on our comic strip all along.
What if I had been the thing that kept her away from her work?
“What?” She whirls to face me, scowling. “What, Iliana? What. What, what, what.”
“Congratulations,” I say.
Heat creeps up into my face. This was a terrible idea.
Rhodes waits, blinking.
“Can you please get whatever this is out of your system?” She twirls her pencil between two fingers.
Randall appears between us, wide-eyed, with a pack of empty detention slips already tucked in the front pocket of his blazer. “Ladies—?”
Rhodes huffs. “Iliana is—”
“The scholarship finalists were announced earlier,” I say. “I was congratulating Rhodes.”
“Oh.” Randall blinks. “Just … congratulating her?”
“Is that allowed?” I raise my brows.
I hate this man.
He smells like birthday cake–flavored vape and a lifetime of bad decisions.
“Well, I mean, yes.” Randall turns to Rhodes. “This is the part where you say ‘thank you.’”
“Thank you.” Rhodes mimics Randall’s inflections with perfect accuracy.
“Take a seat, Vrionides,” Randall says.
I take a seat. To my right, Sarah is still glaring at empty paper. I lean forward with my eyes fixed on Sarah’s face in search of eye contact, but she never rises to the occasion. Barely anything has changed since we’ve been back to school, but everything feels different.
CHAPTER 20
RHODES
Username: I-Kissed-Alice
Last online: 4d ago
Light from one of the Conservatory dance studios pours brilliant into the night.
The scent of coffee from Sylvia’s still clings to my hair and the fibers of my jacket; bacon-scented steam blooms from the bags of takeout in my arms.
My residential access card gets me into the building, then the rest of the way is a fumbling maze of dark foyers and back hallways. I can hear the music from the studio before I make it through the door: It’s an instrumental percussion—heavy with a strings section that pulls at the edges of the stuff that knits me together. Probably from the score of some fantasy movie, the kind with people from our world who fall through portals and find themselves on the other side of time.
When I step through the door, Griffin is throwing his former dance partner, Sierra, into the air like a sack of flour.
Mom and Dad don’t know he’s practicing with her like this, and I would never tell either of them. Sierra and Griffin have danced together since ever, and tonight they’re preparing for the school’s Winter Showcase—even though Griffin isn’t technically in the dance track anymore—and since he isn’t in the performing arts track anymore, our parents won’t even be present to find out it ever happened.
It’s a duet slot Sierra’s parents paid for, and the dance-track teachers are understanding enough of Griffin’s situation to let this one slide. As much as the Conservatory frustrates me at times, I would be remiss not to admit that we are surrounded by people—students and adults—who love us. I can’t imagine something like this happening anywhere else.
Sierra twirls and a breath later she’s cradled in his arms, one leg stretched high over their heads and the other tucked underneath. One bare foot hits the floor, then the other, and Sierra takes off in a series of leaps and twirls as effortless as flying.
“Dinner,” I say.
It’s all I know how to say. I wish I knew what it is to sail through the air like that.
“One more,” Griffin says.
Sierra nods, Griffin starts the music from the beginning, and I set my phone up to record.
The overhead lights scatter on Sierra’s deep brown skin, and rather than her usual bun, her natural curls fly free around her face. Griffin, on the other hand, looks like he’s been working his ass off. The studio is probably sixty-five degrees, cold enough for me to keep my jacket on, but sweat drips down his face and he’s cast off his shirt, dancing only in a pair of compression shorts.
The toll of the past year has never been more apparent to me than it is right now, watching him move.
Anyone else watching Griffin dance would think that he’s a sixteen-year-old at the top of his game: He moves like someone who’s devoted their life to it, working through choreography like it’s as easy as breathing. Strong, conditioned muscles flinch and relax through each lift, a contrast to soft hands and a relaxed face.
It’s a wonder to me that Mom and Dad aren’t prouder of him.
I
could burst with the pride I feel right now.
I’ve spent my life watching him toil at this thing, seeing him reach a kind of personal zenith his second year in the Conservatory’s dance program as a particularly prodigious tenth grader.
I’ve also witnessed how the summer paired with his first fall in the tech program has forced him to regress: There’s a pause now every time he prepares to do one of his complicated leap-turns. His hands fumble through a narrow catch that could have landed Sierra in a crumpled heap on the floor. Sierra sees the struggle, too, with the way she nods him through moments of insecurity and the kind of mistakes he would have made years ago.
Even still, they glide through the choreography with near complete ease.
I sit with my oversize sketchbook across my knees and sketch what I see with a piece of charcoal between my fingers—angles.
Angles that can be fleshed out and turned into a pair of people.
With Griffin’s and Sierra’s constant movements, I can’t stop and think too hard about what I’m doing—I can’t even look at the page, not really. It’s the closest thing to the intuitive kind of work I’ve been incapable of creating in months, and I almost don’t know what to do with it.
I just keep drawing, on and on until the music ends.
The piece is only three and a half minutes long, and it’s over as soon as it began.
Before long, we’ve arranged ourselves next to the window with our bags of food between us, Sierra and Griffin sprawled into splits and stretches with Styrofoam boxes open in front of them. They’re sweaty, mopping at their faces with discarded cover-ups and chugging water from aluminum reusable bottles, but I’m exhausted.
I haven’t drawn like this in months. The memory of earlier days, when this was something I loved and wanted, only leaves me feeling haggard.
There was a time when this would have been effortless for all of us.
I lean against the cold window and tear off a piece of syrup-loaded pancake with my fingers. My sketchbook lays off to the side, closed and out of sight.
“Did you get anything you think you can use?” Sierra asks from over the top of a patty melt.