by Anna Birch
It’s Sarah and Kiersten.
They’re duplicates of each other, their arms crossed in defense against the cold, backs ramrod straight.
“Did Sylvia need something?” I ask.
Kiersten raises her brows to Sarah. She nods once, a gesture of solidarity.
Sarah sets her jaw and stands a little straighter.
“You need to tell Rhodes who you are.” Sarah cuts her eyes to Kiersten, who nods her on. “I bombed my project presentation because of you, and now you need to get what you deserve with her. I needed that scholarship, too, Iliana.”
“You told Kiersten?!” My voice ricochets off the side of the building and echoes into the parking lot. “Sarah! You’re my best friend—when I tell you things, I expect you to keep them to yourself.”
“Really? She’s your best friend.” Kiersten snorts. Sarah snorts. “What’s going on in her life right now, Iliana? Why is she afraid? Why is she lonely? Do you even give a shit about her, or do you expect her to follow you around because you’re a God-forsaken narcissist, and narcissists cease to exist when they don’t have a sycophant telling them how wonderful they are?”
I’m disoriented—like I’ve been slapped.
My vision crackles around the edges.
I dig my heels into the pavement as if I’m going to fall over. I wish Kiersten had just slapped me instead; this hurts worse.
I loathe the day I ever set eyes on Kiersten, and I loathe Sarah for being the kind of person who absorbs the worst qualities of the people around her—and I wonder which parts of her I used to love were actually ugly reflections of what other people see in me.
I could blast off at Kiersten about how she doesn’t know the lifetime of history Sarah and I share, or everything we’ve been through together, or how she really doesn’t understand how complicated things have become between Rhodes, Sarah, and myself.
I could blast off at Sarah for breaking the one sacred thing we had together—trust—and giving away a fifteen-year friendship because someone new is providing her with the constant attention she so desperately craves.
My conversation with Mom over a week ago hangs over my head, an entire childhood of Sarah standing too close to the blast zone while I pack dynamite into the crevices of each wall that has stood in the way of getting what I want.
She has always been in the position to lose something where I’ve stood to gain.
My face burns, but there’s no going back now.
“Are you not going to say anything to this?” Sarah is a tearful, choking mess.
I’m supposed to say “I’m sorry” right now, but I want Sarah to apologize for breaking my trust, for putting me in the position for all of this to be so much fucking worse. Every bone in my body aches with loss—losing Alice, losing Rhodes, and losing Sarah.
I don’t know how to apologize, how to take responsibility for my role in what happened to Sarah without taking responsibility for the entire rotten mess.
“You know what? This is the worst. You’re the worst.” Kiersten throws off her apron and shoves it into my chest. “I’m leaving. Iliana, if you don’t tell Rhodes, we will.”
“Why the hell do you care about Rhodes, anyway?” My voice leaves me so fragile.
I’ve never heard it like this before.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so desperately fractured in my life.
Kiersten sneers.
“I don’t care about Rhodes. But Sarah does.”
“You deserve for this to blow up in your face,” Sarah says. “She loves whoever she thinks you are, this online person you pretend to be with her, and she needs to know what she’s really dealing with.”
The meanness in her face, the cross of her arms, her voice—none of it is remotely recognizable to me. I know every square inch of her face. I’ve seen her earn every single scar and pockmark on her body, and yet this person is a complete stranger.
I miss my friend.
“So that’s what this is—you lost something, and now you want me to lose something too?”
“Yeeeep.” Kiersten wears her awfulness like a badge of honor. “I think you should be thanking us for giving you time to figure it out on your own first, though.”
Kiersten’s self-ascribed role as judge, jury, and executioner would throw me into a fury if I had any fire left.
Finish me.
“I’m outta here,” Kiersten finally says. She stares at me like I’m some kind of beast she’s never laid eyes on before. “Sorry, Sarah. Iliana, I’m serious: You have forty-eight hours.”
My stomach feels like it’s going to fall out of my ass.
I need time.
Weeks.
Months.
It takes knowing I’ve lost Rhodes forever to realize she’s what I want. I will never, ever, ever make this happen in forty-eight hours.
“How will you know?” I ask.
Sarah’s eyes drop to the sidewalk under our feet, and Kiersten nudges her with one elbow.
“We all have our way of finding things out,” Kiersten says. She walks past Sarah and me without another word, a girl who struck a match and doesn’t wait around to watch the entire world catch fire.
Sarah doesn’t hang around, either.
She takes Kiersten’s apron in her hands and turns to step back inside the diner.
Sarah is gone. Alice is gone.
For the first time in my entire life, I’m alone, and I absolutely did this to myself.
CHAPTER 22
RHODES
Username: n/a
Dusk’s connection is terrible; half her face is pixelated.
Still, her office is easy to make out behind her: walls covered in concert posters, bookshelves, and paintings from her clients with the signatures masked over for confidentiality purposes. She sits back in her chair, distancing herself from her laptop camera.
“Why did you let my mom pay you off if you told me what she was doing?” I’m not pulling punches anymore.
“I applied it to your balance,” she says. “Your mom keeps me on a retainer, so she didn’t notice until she called to ream me out for telling you after our last face-to-face meeting.”
“That still doesn’t tell me why,” I say.
The second-floor gallery gardens are freezing this morning. The vegetation has been pulled out for the winter: Gone are the brown, very, very dead vestiges of what used to be plots and plots and plots of verdant green. Everything is stark, barren until spring sends another round of sci-tech students up to try Mendel’s theories for themselves. Still, it’s the best place to hide for impromptu web conference therapy sessions.
“Because—” Dusk clears her throat. “Permission to be frank?”
I nod.
“You spend a lot of time in flux between the adults in your life—your mother. Me. Your faculty advisor. This odious June woman. I wanted you to be aware that this was something your mother was doing, because I wanted to be here to support you in exploring how it makes you feel—exploring your options. You won’t be in your mother’s shelter forever, you know? Either you can take the steps to solve this problem now, with people around you that support you, or it can be something you deal with when you have no safety net and a mother that is very much used to manipulating everyone around you with her money.”
“You let her think you were doing it, though,” I say.
Dusk shrugs. “You’re my client, but she’s my customer.”
I frown. “I think you should be honest with both of us from now on.”
“Aaaaaand there it is.” Dusk jots something into her notebook. “Good work, Rhodes. Now, I want you to take what just happened with me and apply it to the other areas of your life, too.”
I nod. An email blinks at the top of my phone screen: It’s from Bootsie Prudhomme.
I’ve been waiting for this.
For the first time in God even knows how long, motivation is the wind in my sails. I have something I want, and I’m ready to do what I need to get it.
I consider telling Dusk this, but the email from Bootsie is time-sensitive, and I can’t spend the next thirty minutes picking apart the how or why behind why I actually feel like accomplishing something. Or why that something is circumventing my mother.
“Hey—thanks for meeting with me. I need to answer this email. Can I text you later?”
“Of course. Keep me posted on how things go with your art and this Cheshire girl, okay?”
“It’s not,” I say. My voice tugs. “She never DMed me again after we didn’t meet, so I deleted my account.”
“Good on you. Bye, dear.”
I don’t want to hear that it’s good, or that I made the right choice, or that I’m better off without her. I don’t want to think about it at all.
The line disconnects, and I flip over to my email app.
—
From: b.prudhomme@ocoeeartsfes …
To: [email protected] …
Subject: Meeting with Valerie Ingram
Rhodes,
Mrs. Prudhomme agreed that 4pm would be fine. Please inform your mother of the change in meeting time.
Best Wishes,
Everly Eames
Executive Assistant, Prudhomme Estate
—
I take a breath.
Dusk told me to take what happened with her and apply it to every other area of my life, and I’m going to start here.
It’s eleven forty now. In four hours, I’ll make my way to the Conservatory conference rooms, and Bootsie will be waiting for me.
Except I don’t call my mother.
I want to have this conversation by myself, without her throwing wads of cash at someone to get what she wants.
I pocket my phone and prepare to face down Bootsie Prudhomme alone.
* * *
Bootsie is early.
She must have left her house as soon as she got the email. She might have even been here waiting on me when I was emailing her assistant, or even when I was talking to Dusk on the gallery roof. Her tall, thin shape is easy to make out through the frosted-glass conference walls. Her ever-present fire-engine-red heels are visible, too, even if the rest of her is just a darkened blur.
This will be the first time anyone from Ocoee has ever seen me like this: with my hair up in a snarled knot and dark rings under my eyes. My leggings have a hole in one knee, and my hoodie will probably horrify her most of all: a silhouette of the white house, framed by the Alice in Wonderland quote that started it all—“Curiouser & Curiouser”—in oversize, whimsical lettering.
I could have made Bootsie wait another fifteen minutes and run upstairs to change my clothes and throw on a little makeup—but no.
I’m tired of playing dress up.
I don’t want to be a version of myself I don’t recognize in order to make everyone else happy.
Instead, I straighten my spine and pull the door to the conference room open.
Sure enough, Bootsie is in full-blown Southern Grandma Costume: pearls, and red lipstick, and curled hair, and giant door-knocker earrings that hearken back to the nineties, and a chunky white sweater bearing three different antique brooches, and two-hundred-dollar jeans in an unflattering cut.
She takes one look at me, from head to toe, and sniffs behind two fingers as if she can smell me. “Miss Ingram.”
A self-conscious sniff-check tells me I showered and applied deodorant this morning.
“Ms. Prudhomme.” I hide my nose behind my fingers, too.
I can definitely smell her—Chanel No. 5, and entirely too much of it.
We frown across the room at each other.
“I suppose you heard about June,” she says. “Unfortunate.”
“I did.” I drop my bag onto the floor and take a seat. “I heard my mother played a role in it.”
“Well, er—” Bootsie adjusts her glasses. “To put it indelicately, yes. ‘A role’ would be an understatement.”
“I’d like you to know that I didn’t know money changed hands.” My pulse rings in my ears. There’s a part of me that still wants this. But there’s a bigger part that knows this is no longer my path. That part of me knows that my mother’s way of fixing problems would only make this worse.
Another long pause hangs in the air.
“Even if that’s the case, honey, we have the integrity of the scholarship—the entire art festival—to consider. We can’t do this with dirty hands, you understand.” Bootsie is careful to stare into the massive diamond on her left hand rather than look at me. “We have to disqualify you.”
My pride pops and withers like a deflated balloon.
Bootsie did not come to negotiate.
“I appreciate you meeting me here today,” Bootsie says. “I did not look forward to the dilemma of turning away your mother’s checkbook.”
“My mother is exhausting when she isn’t getting what she wants,” I say.
“I see no reason to dawdle.” Bootsie stands. “I hate that this happened, sweetheart. I always enjoyed your work.”
I stand too. Bootsie crosses the table, and she presses her fingertips to her nose again.
Bootsie’s tall, but so am I. I stand a little straighter and meet her eye-to-eye.
“Tell me one thing,” I say. “A finalist told you, didn’t they?”
Bootsie brushes past me.
She throws the strap of her pocketbook over her shoulder and grabs for the door. “Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“You know I’m not gonna tell you that,” she says. “I don’t want somebody finding that poor girl in a ditch.”
“Nobody’s killing anybody,” I say.
Bootsie doesn’t respond. Instead, she holds the door for me, and I follow her out into the foyer. Without a word, she leaves for the parking lot.
I make out Iliana’s dad’s beat-up Honda just behind Bootsie’s massive Cadillac and march my way up to the only place she could be: the art wing for open studio.
I may not be killing anyone in literal terms, but somebody is about to figuratively scrape Iliana off the Studio B floor.
CHAPTER 23
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 2d ago
The Conservatory is a graveyard on the weekends.
Most of the residential students crash on a local’s couch as soon as the last bell rings on Fridays, and with only a few days left in the semester, everyone would rather be curled up next to warm hearths rather than in drafty cinder-block dorms. The sky is gray, the wind is cold, and when I pulled in, the parking lot was empty, save for a thirty-year-old Cadillac parked with one tire hiked up onto the front curb.
The chill that’s settled into my bones has nothing to do with the weather.
Kiersten and Sarah. Cheshire.
Three people, three problems.
The numbers don’t multiply, though—they divide against each other, three separate girls and three separate problems.
One Big Fucking Crisis.
Somehow, Kiersten and Sarah have bonded over their mutual hatred of me—a given, since I can’t imagine what else they have in common—Kiersten looks like the kind of jewel-studded artsy-fartsy dream girl a creative writing–track boy in a fedora hallucinates into existence for his characters to objectify. I only know three things about her: she loves glitter, being angry, and enjoying her privilege.
Meanwhile, Sarah is malleable. She reminds me of Harry Potter’s boggarts: No one knows her true form, because she takes a different shape with everyone she meets. She was still in her performing arts school form the last time I saw her at Sylvia’s, flannels and ancient band shirts and frayed denim shorts worn over patterned tights in thirty-two-degree weather.
So much of the same, but the BeDazzled cassette player is the first step in what I predict will be an abrupt change.
It’s such a small change, but I feel like I already don’t know her anymore.
Everything is escalated to stage-3 fucking crisis by Rhod
es—Alice—deleting her Slash/Spot account. I have no way to make this right. It will never happen with Rhodes, never. Kiersten and Sarah have given me forty-eight hours, but at this moment Rhodes hates me, so it’s practically over before it even starts.
The only grace I have going for me is my Capstone project. I haven’t touched it in days, but the knowledge that it’s in my work locker waiting for me is the only thing I have left.
I’m loaded down for a long night in the studio: I have bags over one shoulder, loaded with Tupperware full of whatever Mom packed because I can’t afford to order in tonight. Bags over the other shoulder loaded with everything from a first aid kit (X-Acto knives are sharp), to changes of clothes (studios are messy, and sometimes too hot, and sometimes too cold, and never predictable), to every kind of technology I could cram into a backpack: laptops, and drawing tablets, and chargers, and external batteries, and point-and-shoot digital cameras, and a handful of cords from the junk drawer in the kitchen because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The hallways are eerie in their silence. A fluorescent light flickers over my head in the east stairwell, and hard, deliberate footsteps from deep within the school make my hair stand on end. If my life were a movie, this would be the precise moment Kiersten (or Sarah, or Kiersten and Sarah) would show up behind me to take a hatchet to the back of my skull.
But Studio B is bright, and warm, and empty. The gray skies are giving way to rain through the expansive windows on the south and east walls, and the residual scent of rubber cement in the air feels like a welcome home. My stuff takes up an entire table in the back of the room, but it doesn’t matter because I’m alone.
It’s not scary anymore, with the door shut behind me.
It’s tempting to go straight to the work lockers in the back of the studio, to pull out my work and throw myself in headfirst. After everything with Kiersten and Sarah, though, I need to center myself.
My tarot cards are in the front of my messenger bag, where they always are.
Their silk bag feels like a comfort blanket. The way they curve to fit my hands when I shuffle, the cards are familiar, like an old friend.