“Ew.” I had no idea what apple-flavored vodka tasted like, but it could not have tasted like actual apples.
“Yeah. Get this: They were trying to conjugate Spanish verbs, and everyone who messed up had to take a shot. But they kept getting them right, so eventually they just started taking shots.”
“That’s the most TGS thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Yo soy, tú eres,” Ginny agreed.
The TV blasted a commercial for insulation. Ginny wormed her sock-feet farther into the inner edge of the couch, like she always did, either not realizing or not caring that doing so pushed me farther to the edge. She put her hands under her head like a pillow and sighed.
“I don’t want to go to college.”
“What?”
“I mean, no, I do. I don’t know.” Ginny flung an arm over her head. “I just wish it were . . . I don’t know. I wish I didn’t have to get something out of it. I wish I didn’t have to prove anything.”
“You’re smart,” I said. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Am I?” she said. “All my friends are smart and accomplished and have the excellent legacy breeding that’ll open doors for them everywhere. And I’m what?”
I gave her a look that said, You have been brilliant since you were two years old, and the whole world knows it because there is written proof, Ginny.
“They should’ve wait-listed me instead of Charlotte,” Ginny went on. “That’s the only sensible thing to do.”
“She’ll get picked for somewhere,” I said, which was more charitable than I generally felt toward Charlotte.
“They should have picked Charlotte,” Ginny said. “She does advanced math and leads the Women in STEM club and really, really wants it. I’m just some idiot who wrote a sorta-good essay and has an obscure claim to relevance through my dead father. Oh, and I have no money.”
She nestled deeper in the couch and turned her head to Home and Garden Television, where a blond woman was clomping her thousand-dollar boots around the ruins of her new fixer-upper, a displeased crinkle in her forehead.
“God,” Ginny said. “That’s what I want.”
“You want a pile of boards and a dry-rot problem?” I said. Ginny kicked me with the toe of her foot.
“No. I just want a house like that. And a sledgehammer for the walls. You know when you want to kick something down, just to see if you can do it? Like see how far you could punch into a wall?”
“No,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Like when you just want to . . . I don’t know, be moving all the time, and never having to sit somewhere and think so much, and your job is just doing things, and you’re actually useful to people in some actual, concrete way. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t, not really.
“No, Ginny.”
“Well, it’s what I want.” She turned back toward the screen. “Sometimes. It’s what I think about wanting. A physical thing to do. Day in, day out.”
I hugged my knees to my chest. “You’d be bored out of your skull, Ginny.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I’d be free.”
The following afternoon, I arrived at Tate’s house to find him already at the countertop, his books piled together in a small clearing of holiday paraphernalia. That day he was wearing some kind of loose gray jogging pants and a sweatshirt with a big red-and-blue P on it. It was as though, when at home, he never wore anything that could not be comfortably slept in. I, of course, had outfitted myself to look as professional as possible, meaning in a pair of corduroys that did not have worn patches on the knees and a garnet-colored cable-knit sweater that I thought set off the color of my braid nicely.
My mom, he mouthed as he got up to open the back door. He jerked his head over his shoulder just as his mother rushed in, shoulder pressing her phone to her ear.
“I know,” she was saying. “Well, what am I supposed to do? It’s”—she shook her wristwatch into place—“four thirty. I can’t just—”
“Mom, do you have any cash?” Tate interrupted, and nodded at me. “She’s here.”
I felt a small clench in my stomach, embarrassed that technically, yes, I was paid to do this—an employee, or a subcontractor of sorts, a hired gun. But forty dollars two times a week was $320 a month, and that was not nothing.
His mom widened her eyes at him, smiled apologetically at me, and tucked her head back into her phone.
“I have to call you back. See what you can do, okay?” She set down her phone and pulled over a big black purse from under a floppy red bow. She was wearing a dark green dress with long sleeves and, curiously, only one pearl earring.
“Here you go,” she said, handing me the forty dollars. “I’m sorry everything’s so . . .” She waved her hands around.
“Thank you,” I said, then added politely, “I think you’re missing an earring.”
She put a hand to her ear. “Oh. You’re right. Thank you.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry for interrupting. Just a last-minute fund-raiser crisis, as usual!” She laughed a laugh of very little mirth.
“What, like you ran out of those little quiches?” Tate said.
“Very funny.” His mom had picked up her phone again. “No. The jazz quartet we hired for the historical society holiday party got stuck in New York, so now I have an empty piano and no music.” She smiled grimly. “You don’t happen to be a classically trained pianist, do you, dear?”
My heart fluttered. “No, but . . . well, I know one.”
Tate’s mom stopped bustling. “You do?”
“Our tenant,” I said. “He lives in the carriage house. He’s a pianist. A doctor of music. Well, almost. But he’s been playing all month—holiday things.” I breathed out.
“Really?” Tate’s mom said. “You mean he’s just down the street? Oh, that’d be— We can pay him, of course. And he wouldn’t be too busy to play in, well”—she glanced at her watch again—“more or less two hours?”
“I would honestly be surprised,” I said. “I could give you his number, if you want.”
I took out my phone, and Tate’s mom tapped Almost-Doctor Andrews’s number into hers.
“Thank you, dear. Calling him right now.” She grabbed a box of bows and clicked back down the hallway.
Tate swiveled back to me. “Well, I got out the books.”
“A good start,” I said. “Have you read them?”
“Sure,” Tate said.
“So you feel in command of the material ahead of the midterm.”
“Sure,” Tate said again. He was silent a moment. “Man, I wish this were fourth grade again.”
My heart plunged to my stomach. He didn’t remember—did he? Surely reading my stupid, infantile notebook aloud on the playground was one in a long, unrecorded succession of mundane cruelties he’d committed that year.
“What do you mean?” I said, with commendable steadiness.
“Those tests were just like, Why did the mouse start riding the motorcycle?” He pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Easy stuff.”
“Reading comprehension.”
“Yeah,” Tate said. “Here’s the thing. You want to know what I can’t do?”
“Okay. Sure.”
“I can’t . . . you know when we sit down to write the essays, and we’re supposed to say something about the book’s themes, or whatever, and use quotes from the book?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s how writing an essay works.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t get it. It’s a story. It’s just about stuff that happens. So what am I supposed to write?”
To be honest, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to answer Tate specifically, but I also really had no idea how to answer that question, period. Writing, it turns out, is frustratingly difficult to justify with words.
“You’ll figure it out,” I said. “I mean, you might not know until you’re through writing it, but it’s important that you just start.”
�
�Yeah, but I don’t know how to start.”
“No one ever knows how to start,” I said. “Maybe start with the words.”
Tate looked blank.
“I mean, don’t focus so much on the events of the story as on how the author chooses to write about it.”
“Uh-huh.” Tate pressed his lips together, nodding slowly. I didn’t seem to be getting through.
“Symbolism,” I said. “Linguistic devices.”
“Yeah, see, what are those?” Tate said. “Peach, you’re talking like you’re talking to a teacher. I need this stuff dumbed down.”
An idea nipped at the back of my mind, urgently enough that I neglected to be annoyed at the nickname.
“Okay.” I folded my hands on the counter. “Try this. Tell me a story.”
“What, like make one up?”
“No, no,” I said. “A story about something that happened to you. Recently. For example, tell me what you did last night.”
Tate’s eyebrows went up. “Okay.” He exhaled and shifted forward in his seat. “Last night. Well, I basically dicked around for a couple of hours watching TV, then I nuked some tacos, then remembered my mom had been busting my ass about laundry, so I threw some stuff in the wash and passed out on the couch.”
“Now tell it like you would tell it to your mom.”
Tate glanced back at the hallway. “Seriously?”
“Just try it.”
“Okay.” He tipped his head to the side. “Last night I watched a little sports, had dinner, and did my laundry. I went to bed at around midnight. What’s your point, Peach?”
“You changed what you said,” I said. “Even though the same things happened. You used different words.”
“Yeah, duh,” Tate said. “I’m not going to say busting my ass in front of my mom.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’d bust my ass about it.”
He smiled, and I smiled.
“Meaning it would sound more disrespectful,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So the words you use change the effect of the story,” I said. “Even if the same things happen. The way you present things . . . it tells as much about the story as the story does. It tells you how to understand it. Or who it’s supposed to be for.”
Tate drummed a pencil on the table. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess. So I’m supposed to look at every individual word and figure out what it all means. But not, like, mean means, but what it, like . . . implies.”
“That’s it,” I said. “More or less.”
“Huh,” Tate said—not a confused huh, necessarily. He rubbed the back of his neck and set his hand back on the counter, those broad hands, with long fingers. This was the sort of thing you began to notice when you spent a lot of time in close quarters with Tate Kurokawa.
I cast around for a tangible example. “Maybe it’s that . . . words are like beads. They have to be together to mean something. And the kind of bead you pick matters. String together a bunch of pearls and it looks one way, or a bunch of rocks and it looks another way.”
“Or a bunch of Froot Loops,” Tate said. “And then you can eat it.”
“I . . . guess so,” I said. “I mean, you’re not wrong.” He wasn’t misunderstanding the metaphor, at least.
“I’m not wrong,” Tate repeated. He nodded. “Yeah, I like that. Beads. Did you just make that up?”
Now I stared intently at the counter. “Yes.”
“Cool,” Tate said. “Yeah. It’s stuff like that. I just don’t get how people get that. Like you just come up with this stuff to say about the book and you don’t even have to try.”
“Well . . .” I almost said It’s obvious, but retracted, seeing as that would not be the most sensitive governessing strategy. “It just sort of . . . comes to you, I guess. Good writing is . . . extrasensory,” I said. “No, supernatural. Or maybe it’s more paranormal. It’s hard to find the right word.”
“You’re telling me.”
“I mean . . .” My neck felt hot under my sweater. “Just . . . when you read, you see things without seeing. You sense them without sensing that you’re sensing them. It doesn’t tell you what to feel but maybe just how to feel. If that makes sense.”
Tate smirked, then went straight-faced, and looked right in my eyes.
“Peach, you’re like, a genius.”
My stomach flipped. “I’m not.”
“Seems like it to me,” Tate said. “This shit’s crazy.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “It’s just how it works. I’m not making it up. Here.” I smoothed out a notebook page. “Pick a sentence you like and write it here. Then we can talk about why it’s good.”
“I don’t like any sentences,” Tate said. “That’s the core problem here.”
“Well, pick one you hate, then,” I said. “And we can figure out why it sucks.”
“We can?”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re allowed to say a book isn’t good. You just have to prove it.”
Convinced—or at least intrigued—Tate set to flipping through pages, and over the next forty-five minutes we conducted multiple, actual instances of close reading, which proved surprisingly productive despite my need to remind Tate what the word adverb meant.
“So that’s it,” Tate said. “Huh.”
“Not . . . exactly,” I said. “There’s more to it than just talking about words. Maybe try writing an essay before next time?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Tuesday the . . . whatever it is?”
“Yes,” I said. “And then we can talk about it.”
Tate agreed, and I departed.
The whole thing made me quite proud, proud that I had actually taught something. It is a bone-deep, satisfying feeling, when you have articulated something so instinctual, so interwoven to your own daily operation, that you cannot help but be pleased with your own insight. You have to know things to teach them, I think. Even if you don’t fully understand them until you’re through with them.
Too soon, it became New Year’s Eve. The end of winter break, which I had no plans to celebrate beyond an evening with Mom and the dogs and a bottle of champagne—for her, not for me or the dogs—to watch Dick Clark (which Mom insisted on calling the New Year’s Eve program even though Dick Clark was long dead and replaced by some male personality with highlighted hair I did not care to know the name of). Ginny, meanwhile, had some plans that involved a spangly shirt and Charlotte. At the moment, they were crammed together by the mirror over the kitchen counter (since the kitchen was the only warm room in the house), attacking their faces with makeup. I was huddled on the kitchen couch, with a swiftly cooling mug of tea and Frankenstein, reading and incidentally visually eavesdropping over the top of the pages.
“Ugh,” Charlotte said. “My service is crapping out.” She held her phone aloft as if it were the torch and she were the Statue of Liberty.
“You have to go by the window,” Ginny said. “The walls are too thick.”
“Ugh,” Charlotte said again, but tromped over to the sink and leaned over, phone proffered toward the glass. A tinny ding signaled her success. “Thank God. Gin, look.”
Charlotte swept back over to Ginny, who read the screen and shrugged, her tank top throwing pinpricks of light like a disco ball.
“Oh, come on,” Charlotte groaned.
“I just don’t care,” Ginny said. “Is it okay if I don’t care?”
Charlotte stuck her phone back in her pocket. “Maybe you’d be less uptight if you did smoke.”
“Eh.” Ginny squashed her eyelashes upward in a gruesome-looking silver curler. “Remember two years ago when they found all those seniors with weed on the Spanish trip and told their colleges?”
Charlotte stood up straighter.
“I don’t think you should be kicked out for smoking weed,” she said, her voice clear and definitive as if she were delivering an oral presentation. “Everyone smokes.”
Ginny rolled her eyes and kept swiping makeup. C
harlotte picked up one of the borderline-stale chocolate chip cookies left over from Christmas and chewed. Then she made a face, stomped on the trash can pedal, and dropped it in. Then she turned to me.
“Do you want to come, Plum?”
“Me?” I said.
“Yeah, you!” Charlotte smiled. “To Benji’s. I think some kids from your class are going to be there. You wouldn’t be alone. It’ll be fun.”
“Plum hates the kids in her class,” Ginny said, clicking her makeup case shut. “Right?”
I thought of bagel-smelling Jeremy Beard and his Dungeons and Dragons. Then, of all people, I thought of Tate.
“I . . . yes,” I agreed.
“And I for one can’t blame her.”
Charlotte’s face briefly flashed its bad-smell expression. “I mean, I think they’re fine.”
“You want to smoke weed with a bunch of sixteen-year-olds, be my guest.” Ginny flounced over to the couch and threw her arms around my neck.
“Save me, Plummy,” she whispered. “This is going to be an ordeal.”
“‘Tonight, tonight, there’s a party tonight!’” I said, in my Field Mousiest voice. Ginny tried not to crack up.
“‘And they all had scones and little sausages on sticks,’” she squeaked back.
I giggled, very softly.
“Text me if you get bored.”
“Absolument.”
Mom fell asleep by nine, as was her wont, and I switched the TV to the local public broadcast, which was cannily showing a marathon of costume dramas for those, like me, who had no particular investment in the pageantry of modern New Year’s Eve–ism. I wondered what it would be like to live in the past, and tried to imagine Ginny and her friends pulling on gloves and stuffing feathers in their hair to attend a ball, where there would be sherry to drink and pianos to play and gentlemen to woo. It seemed as much a waste of time as it did now. I decided I would have been the one hiding in the library with a copy of Ivanhoe.
At about 11:58, Kit Marlowe stalked in, the usual fiendish gleam in his eyes. He regarded me coolly but did not immediately turn his tail and stalk back out. I folded my arms above my many layers of blanket.
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