When You Were Everything

by Ashley Woodfolk

  I frown even though I kinda want to smile. “You’re weird, you know that?” I say, and I start walking again even though I don’t know where we’re going.

  “No weirder than you,” he says as he follows me. “But you were right. I do like cars and rap music.”

  I laugh.

  “Where’s your Gigi now?” he asks a second later.

  “She died a couple of years ago.”

  “Oh. My bad.”

  “It’s okay.”

  We’re quiet for the next few minutes. It’s not exactly uncomfortable, but it’s strange to walk and only hear the sounds of the city. Barking dogs and distant sirens; car horns and wind-rustled leaves. Plastic bags and crumpled paper blow along the sidewalks like tumbleweed does in old westerns; two kids run past us squealing. I haven’t taken a walk with anyone since Layla and I stopped speaking, and between that and talking about Gigi, I feel the sadness descending again. But when I glance over at Dom, he has a look on his face that isn’t quite a frown but may be the beginnings of one.

  “So should I call them Mr. and Mrs. Grey?” I ask to lighten the mood again. “Or do I get to go with the endearing ‘Lolly and Pop’ too?”

  “Oh, Lolly and Pop, without a doubt,” Dom says. He points to a tall brownstone just ahead of us with an ornate stone stoop. There’s a pretty gray cat sitting on the center stair and it doesn’t run away. When we get close enough, Dom bends down and scratches it under its neck. The cat closes its pearly-blue eyes.

  Instead of watching the slow movements of Dom’s fingers in the cat’s thick gray fur, I look up at the pretty building.

  “This is home,” he says.

  THE GREYSTONE

  “Pop’s still at the diner. But you’re going to love my Lolly,” Dom tells me as he pushes open the front door of the brownstone. The cat strides in like she owns the place. “That’s Stormy Skye, by the way,” he says, pointing to her. “You can call her Miss Skye. Or Stormy, but only if she says it’s okay.”

  Dom’s house, is, well, a house. There is a small foyer, and tall windows with lacy curtains, and stairs that lead not to more apartments but to more of his house. The long hallway directly in front of us leads to the kitchen, which is brightly lit and colorful. It’s so warm that my glasses fog up right away, and the whole place smells like spun sugar and butter.

  Even though we’ve had a whole conversation about his names for his grandparents, hearing Dom say “my Lolly” out loud still makes me want to squee. The cat, which seems to follow his every move, doesn’t help. As my glasses clear, I watch Dom shrug off his backpack and leave it and his coat on the floor, then kick off his boots. A small, broad-shouldered woman with very brown skin and extremely white hair meets us in the entryway.

  She immediately walks over and hugs me, though I’ve never seen her before in my life, and the scent of her skin reminds me of Gigi—something sweet mixed with something essential.

  “Well, ain’t you a cutie,” she says. “Where’d you get all them freckles?” She moves a few of the braids that are hanging over my eyes and tucks them behind my ear, and while the gesture feels like a “correction” whenever my mom does it, with Dolly it feels a little like love. She doesn’t exactly study my face, but it kind of looks like she’s committing something about me to memory. I can tell she’s old, but everything about her is sturdy and straight.

  After Dom leans down to kiss her cheek, she raises her eyebrows in his direction and says, “Dominic. Manners, baby. Who is your friend, here?”

  “This is Cleo Baker. We’re in a bunch of classes together at school and she’s gonna help me with my Macbeth paper.”

  Miss Dolly touches my shoulder. “Well, Cleo, it’s lovely to meet you. Welcome to the Greystone. You make yourself right at home.”

  I grin because I already feel like I belong here. “The Greystone?” I ask, and Dom laughs a little.

  “Oh yeah. When I was little, I thought the individual brownstones were supposed to be named after the people who lived there. Our neighbors’ last name was Brown, so I thought that’s why their house was a brownstone. Ours is Grey, so…”

  Miss Dolly pats Dom on the cheek and I smile. “That’s so adorable I can’t even stand it. And sorry, I meant to say it’s nice to meet you too, Miss Dolly. Is it okay for me to call you that?”

  She pretends to fluff her hair and she flutters her eyelashes. Those are white, too.

  “No one’s called me that in years, Sweet Pea. You make me feel like a young woman again.”

  “Well, if you’ve still got it…,” I say, looking her up and down. She’s wearing a floral apron over jeans and a black sweater, and she’s surprisingly slender. She has the kind of face you can tell was drop-dead gorgeous thirty years ago. She’s still pretty now.

  She laughs loudly. “I like her,” she says to Dom a little conspiratorially. And when I look over at him, he’s studying me in the slow way his grandmother was just a few minutes earlier.

  “I think the feeling’s mutual, Lolly.”

  “Why don’t y’all get set up in the den?” Miss Dolly suggests, and at almost the same time Dom says, “What you bakin’?”

  “Smells like sugar cookies,” I say.

  “Well, ain’t you somethin’?” Miss Dolly almost sings. “That’s exactly right.”

  AMBITION

  Dom leads me into a small, cozy room with a bricked-over fireplace; a mantel full of tall, dusty candlestick holders; and one whole wall covered with shelves full of books. Without thinking, I walk straight to the bookshelf, pull a heavy volume down at random, and flip through the pages. I inhale the familiar scent of old paper as it splashes over my face with each turning page. When I open my eyes, Dom is right in front of me, only inches away, staring.

  I drop the book, but Dom catches it. “Jesus,” I breathe. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” he says. When I look at his hands, I see that the book is a really old edition of a Shakespeare-quotation dictionary—a sign if ever there was one.

  “You got a thing for books, then?” Dom asks, grinning.

  “Oh, shut up,” I say, only a little embarrassed. “But yeah, I guess. I kind of miss having a ton of books in my apartment.” Dom looks a little confused, and I realize he knows nothing about the history of me. “My parents separated in December,” I explain. “When my dad left, he took most of his books with him.”

  “Oh,” Dom says. He doesn’t look away from me the way some people do when you share sad or awkward information. “Your dad’s cool. Sucks he doesn’t live with you anymore. That’s shitty.”

  I shrug. “Yeah, it is. But I guess it was fate, or whatever.”

  Stormy walks into the room and jumps up on the arm of the couch. Dom frowns a little. “Fate?” he asks skeptically. But before I can answer, Miss Dolly comes in with a plate of sugar cookies. She sets it on the coffee table beside the book of quotations.

  “Getting started on that project already, huh?” she asks. “I like a girl who doesn’t waste time.” She smiles, displaying the deepest set of dimples I’ve ever seen.

  “Thanks, Lolly.” Dom shoves a whole cookie into his mouth immediately. Then he opens the book, flips to a page, and runs his finger along the columns of text a little too studiously. I grin.

  “Well, let me know if you need anything else. Cleo, honey, you thirsty?”

  I nod. “Do you have any tea?”

  She smiles. “Of course. Do you take it with milk and sugar?”

  “Just lots of milk,” I say.

  “You got it, hun.” She nods. “I’ll bring some water in for you both too,” she says before disappearing again.

  For a second, Dom and I just watch each other. I wonder if he’s going to ask me more about my parents, and I silently hope that he won’t. But he just kicks his feet up. He’s still holding the massive book, so he looks pretty
silly.

  “I didn’t know you were funny,” I say. I head over to sit beside him on the couch, and I scratch Stormy between her shoulder blades. Then I reach for a cookie. It’s gooey and warm, and the crystals of sugar sprinkled on top melt against my tongue.

  Dom lowers the book a little, so all I can see are his dark eyes. Even so, I can still tell he’s smiling. “You don’t know most things about me, Cleopatra,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  We relocate to Dom’s bedroom, which is on the second level of his grandparents’ beautiful house. Dom tells me that his grandmother always tries to get him to “entertain” in the den, but the room kind of gives him the creeps and he’s more comfortable upstairs. He tells his grandmother there’s better lighting, “which isn’t exactly a lie,” he assures me.

  His walls are exposed brick and mostly bare, save for a few framed black-and-white photographs. All of his furniture is large and old, but stacked with things like comic books and half-finished Lego structures, film cameras and goofy oversized sunglasses. There are books everywhere. I walk over to look through his window.

  “I think I wanna write about ambition,” Dom says. He sits down backward in a spinning desk chair and wraps his arms around the backrest like it’s a pillow.

  I sit down in his window seat, which is piled with soft, sun-faded pillows. I don’t want to be caught staring at Dom’s biceps, so I make sure to look straight at his serious, brown eyes.

  “Ambition,” I repeat as I reach for another one of the cookies we brought upstairs with us.

  He nods. “I think Macbeth’s ambition is the main reason his life went so horribly wrong. It’s his fatal flaw.”

  “But what about the prophecy?” I say, challenging him. “Maybe his fate was already sealed, so it didn’t matter that he was ambitious. It didn’t matter what he wanted. Regardless of the choices he made, maybe things would have ended up precisely the same way.”

  I think about the party where Layla and I met Sloane and how, when I look back, it feels like that day set our unraveling in motion. The signs were all there. Our fate was sealed the second Sloane heard Layla sing.

  “I don’t think so,” he says, slowly.

  “But what about the stars?” I say. “What about how they ‘govern our conditions’?”

  “What about our destinies not being in the stars, but in ourselves?” Dom asks, raising his eyebrows, and I don’t think I’ve ever before been out-Shakespeared by anyone but my dad. For a moment, I’m shocked to silence. Dom stands up and lights an incense stick, and a thin, fragrant wisp of smoke spins into the air. He sits down on his bed without looking away from the falling ash.

  “Stars are just random balls of hydrogen and helium collapsing because of gravity. Most stars are dead by the time we see them anyway. It’s almost like looking at the past,” Dom says, turning to glance at me for a second. “Not the future. You’re staring at something that doesn’t even exist anymore. And all those people making wishes? It’s like they’re making a wish on a lie.”

  I lean closer to the window, looking out and up into the sky. “They’re pretty little lies, though,” I say, thinking he’ll like the turn of phrase. I look back at him and smirk.

  He gets up and walks over to open a door in the corner of his room that I assumed was a closet. He flips a switch, and a stairwell that leads farther up fills with honey-colored light.

  “If you wanted to see stars,” Dom says a little devilishly, “you should have said so.”

  PRETTY LITTLE LIES

  Dom’s secret stairwell leads to a small rooftop deck strung with firefly lights and furnished with cute café tables and chairs like the ones in the diner. From up here, I can see what looks like miles of rooftops, plus the ever-darkening sky and Manhattan skyline. There’s ivy crawling up the brick walls that box us in and block the wind, so I feel warmer up here than I did on our walk home.

  “I feel like I should suggest we work on your paper,” I say. I’m nervous he’ll say something about not really needing my help, that he’ll say something that reveals why he really asked me here tonight, but he doesn’t. I pull the sweatshirt he let me borrow a little tighter around my body. I look back at him. “You bring all the girls up here, don’t you?” I ask him.

  Dom shrugs, but I see that he’s smiling. He takes a few steps away from me and walks over to the railing, and I can’t help but think about the party at Valeria’s where I first met him. We were on a roof then too. He looks out over the city, and I wish he’d take down the hood he flipped over his head before he pushed the door open. I want to see his profile. I want to see the newest design shaved into his bristly black hair.

  “We can still talk about Macbeth outside, Cleo,” he says, and I think this might be the first time he’s ever said my name. I like the way it sounds in his voice. He turns around and pulls out a café chair. He motions for me to sit down, so I do and he follows.

  “If you’re going to write about Macbeth’s ambition,” I say, “you have to mention the catalyst. I don’t think you can say he was a murderous madman driven only by ambition. I think you have to start with the fact that it was prophesied. You have to start where things started for him: with the witches.”

  “I will,” Dom says. He nibbles his lip like he’s thinking, and I look up at the sky so he doesn’t feel rushed. “But do you really think the prophecy would have come true either way?” I nod, without turning to face him right away.

  “Here’s what I think,” I say. “Maybe his actions were influenced by his ambition, but don’t you think fate takes our character into consideration? I mean, he was a soldier. If anything, he should have had more respect for life and duty and honor than the average guy. But he didn’t. And if he could be driven to do something so morally wrong so easily, the universe knew he had it in him all along.” I realize too late that it feels like a description of me and the stuff I did to Layla. I feel a sudden ache at the back of my throat, but I swallow hard and try to ignore it.

  “I think Macbeth would have realized he wanted to be king. He would have told his cray-cray wife, and one way or another, the two of them would have figured out a way to make it happen.” I turn to face Dom, and he’s leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching me. “It was destined to end the way that it did.”

  “But Macbeth still made certain choices that led to that end, right? I mean, he had the power to change if not what happened, at least the way it did. There’s no way you think that free will is nonexistent and that the universe dictates everything, like we’re puppets.”

  I shrug. “All I know is there are signs littered throughout the text that makes it read as if fate is running the show, not Macbeth. So.” I flip open the notebook we brought up with us. “I think you should start by arguing that—”

  I feel my phone buzz, and I reach into the pocket of Dom’s sweatshirt to grab it. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s probably my mom.”

  I ignore her call. Then I ignore the next one. By the third time it starts to vibrate, I realize she won’t stop unless I answer, but I try silencing it one last time. Dom gets curious. He leans over and tries to look at my screen. “Excuse you,” I say to him. I push the phone back into the pocket of the sweatshirt.

  “Something important?” Dom asks. And I shake my head. I swallow and look back at the notebook, but I’ve forgotten what we were talking about or why I’m even holding the pen. I know I’ll have a fight waiting for me when I get home because I’m technically still “grounded.” Dom scoots his café chair forward, and the noise of it scraping the floor slices through the silence. When I look up he’s much closer to the table. Much closer to me. The scents of soap and incense are stronger.

  “I read somewhere that for every lie someone tells they get a freckle,” he says, and I know he’s teasing, trying to make me laugh, but I still reach up and cover my speckled face
with my hands.

  “Shut up,” I say. “You know you’ve never heard that before.” I peek at him through my fingers. He’s grinning, and I want to forget about my mom’s calls. I want to forget about this stupid Shakespeare paper and just talk to Dom for the rest of the night about anything we want. But then my phone starts buzzing again.

  When I pick up, my Mom says, “Where are you, Cleo?”

  I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to know that I’m on a chilly rooftop with a nearly perfect boy, who is smart and funny and who likes to cook and read. I don’t want to tell her that tonight is the first time I’ve felt genuinely happy in weeks.

  “I’m on my way home now,” I say, instead of a single word of truth. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  I hang up and look at Dom. I jot down a few quick notes based on what we talked about, and then I thrust the notebook at him. “Sorry, I have to go. Text me if you have questions, though, okay?”

  I start walking toward the door that leads back into the house.

  “You were wrong about the stars,” he calls after me. I look back at him, even though my mother is waiting. I don’t want to go home, so it isn’t difficult for me to let Dom’s voice hold me in place.

  “I get it,” I say. “Our will governs our fate. Macbeth’s ambition ruined him, not the prophecy, right? We’ll have to agree to disagree. But I want to read your paper when it’s done. I hope you don’t have to stay up all night.” I turn to leave again.

  “Nah, Cleo. I’m not talking about that.” He stands up and takes a few steps forward, closing the space between us. He reaches out and touches the tips of his fingers to a few random places on my face: above my left eyebrow, atop my right cheekbone, just below my bottom lip. I know he’s pointing to some of my darkest freckles. I slap his hand away, and he laughs.