by Mandy Berman
When she returned to school in the spring of sophomore year she was thinner. She’d gained the freshman fifteen her first year but lost all of it, and then some, during the semester away. Buchanan was a small college, but plenty of people didn’t know why she’d been gone, so she got some compliments on her appearance, and more attention at parties. Though she’d never been a heavy drinker, she soon discovered how convenient and effective alcohol was as a salve. It was everywhere, and drinking heavily at a party was simply what you did. It was magic how alcohol eased her rapid-fire heartbeat and opened the fist in her stomach, and allowed her to flirt more easily, and made it easier to sleep at night. Soon she began going home with guys she’d only met that night, to have mediocre sex. And every morning after, even though the guy was far less special—sometimes downright unattractive—in the daylight, she would feel good. Hungover, but good, like she was finally living a life worth mentioning. A life full of mistakes and blurred recollections and laughing with friends over greasy breakfast sandwiches the next day about the mistakes, about the things that were forgotten. She often thought of how Helen would never get the chance to get drunk at a party and sleep with a stranger. As grimy as those experiences were, they felt like living, like growing up. They provided the interesting stories that built your adult self. They were the things you had to do now because at some point, you’d never be able to do them again.
No one questioned her behavior at first. It didn’t seem like a coping mechanism at all; in fact, quite the opposite. It was joining the fray.
* * *
—
Fiona’s feet were numb now, past the point of pain. Finally, she turned onto her street, though she was still many blocks away from her house. She passed several bodegas, closed on Sundays, toothpaste and Café Bustelo on display in their darkened windows, before coming to a more residential area—two-family townhouses with aluminum siding, abutting each other, their front stoops in desperate need of sweeping. As she got closer to campus, she saw a senior she recognized walking her dog, who regarded Fiona with a quick, shifty glance. Passing Bagel King, she made accidental eye contact with an overweight boy who was sitting in the window, chewing.
She arrived at their home, half of a three-story two-family townhouse. The house was painted a light lavender with cornflower-blue trim, colors that had drawn them to it in the first place. When they moved in, fall of junior year, Liv had tried to make the outside porch nice, with a little patio bench and several potted plants surrounding it. Only a few weeks later, they awoke to find the terra-cotta pots smashed, soil spilled on the wooden porch, the succulents and rosemary and basil horizontal amid the refuse. “Why would someone do that?” Liv had asked, on the verge of tears. Now they never sat on the bench out there; instead they came straight inside and locked the door behind them. Liv repotted the plants, roots still intact, and placed them on the windowsill in the kitchen.
Fiona unlocked the front door and went inside. She took her shoes off and let out a deeply satisfied groan, curling her toes, lifting one foot to massage the ball with her thumb. Downstairs was the foyer, where they hung their coats and left their shoes, and a living room they rarely used: a leather couch Lula’s father had donated, and a flat-screen TV he had donated, too, which Marley’s father had expressed jealousy over as he mounted it on the wall. They rarely watched TV, though; the house was tall and skinny, and they mostly lived their lives on the top two floors.
Fiona climbed the carpeted steps and felt blood circulating through her feet again. On the second floor, the kitchen, with its laminate floors and speckled brown countertops, was empty. This was their usual gathering place. The natural light was strong enough that during most daytime hours the kitchen was cast in a butter-yellow hue, and it made the place feel nicer than it was. Because of the light—they had windows facing south and east and west—Liv’s succulents and herbs that had been moved indoors still thrived. They lined the windowsill above the sink, where Fiona now went to pour herself a glass of water.
The light in the kitchen also unfortunately drew attention to the corners of the room, under the fridge or beside the rarely used oven, spaces heaped with roach corpses and grime. The laminate floor was caked from months of trailed-in dirt from the sidewalk on North Abbott or from the muddy quad. The wooden table where they ate, in the carpeted area where the laminate flooring ended, had not been dusted in months, nor had the bookshelf that lined one of the walls. Liv had once tried to start a chore chart, sick of doing all the work herself, but Lula quickly vetoed that, rolling her eyes and saying, “I think we’re all adults here.” Liv eventually gave up on the common spaces, keeping only her own bedroom particularly tidy. Fiona was personally charmed by the dust and the grime: they were signs of life to her, as was the lace underwear Lula was hanging to dry over the arm of the reading chair by the bookshelf, as were the waterlogged Anthropologie catalogs and New Yorker magazines accumulating on the table. Theirs were interesting, stylish young lives, at that.
Lula’s and Marley’s bedrooms were on this floor, opposite the kitchen; Lula’s door was closed, and Marley’s was open. Fiona peeked in to find Marley’s bed made and no one inside. She must have slept at the Sigma house with that Billy guy. Or was it Bobby?
Fiona continued up to the top floor, which had a narrow hallway with a slanted ceiling, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, hers and Liv’s. Liv’s bedroom door was also closed, and Fiona felt relief that she would have to talk to no one.
She went into her room, the bed still unmade from the previous day’s nap. She plugged her phone into the charger in the wall, dropped her bag and her clothes on the floor, and crawled, naked, under the covers.
In the moments before falling asleep, it dawned on her that Gabriel had felt different than the other one-night stands. The night was blurry, but as she tried to excavate the details, the net feeling coming up was less of pride than of shame. There were those few moments, in the middle-of-the-night interlude, when he wasn’t wearing a condom, when he thrust a few too many times for it to be accidental. And then her staring at the dark ceiling, waiting for it to be over. In a stabbing moment of realization, it was clear to her that she hadn’t wanted it. Not like that.
But out of self-preservation, or perhaps exhaustion, Fiona pushed the memory back into a place she’d be unlikely to reach again, and fell asleep soon afterward.
2.
SHE AWOKE TO a knock on her door. It opened a crack before she could croak out a response.
“Hi?” One eye squinted open at the light streaming into the room. It took a moment for her to register that her head was pounding.
“Hi.” Liv handed her a glass of water. Fiona sat up and took it, swallowing it all down in one gulp.
“Thank you.” She exhaled and handed the glass back. Liv placed it on the bedside table, then sat down on the foot of the bed.
“You hanging in there?” They knew the outlines of each other’s hangovers as well as they knew their own; Fiona’s manifested generally in thirst and pounding headaches, while Liv’s were more nausea-based. It was less regular this semester, though, that Liv would check in on Fiona during her hours of recovery.
“What time is it?”
“It’s two,” Liv said.
“Two P.M.?”
“That’s the one.”
“That’s embarrassing.”
Liv was dressed in skinny jeans and a thin cotton blouse, and her face was made up. She looked as if she’d been waiting for hours for Fiona to awake.
“You spent the night with that guy, right? Was everything okay?”
“It was fine.” Fiona shrugged. “We had fun.” She allowed a little smile to creep in, to imply an element of mischief.
“I don’t mean to say that I don’t trust you,” Liv said.
Liv didn’t trust Fiona’s judgment, though—wasn’t that the point? And even though Fiona did feel a certain vague unease, the detail
s of the night were hazy, and she didn’t want to corroborate Liv’s suspicions in any way. She wanted to prove that she was capable of making a good decision; even worse than something bad happening with Gabriel Benoit would have been Liv predicting that outcome. Fiona couldn’t help that she felt resentful of Liv’s sudden holier-than-thou attitude, which had come, it seemed, when she started dating Brandon. Fiona swore it—Liv hadn’t always been like this.
“I want to make sure you’re okay,” Liv said. “Gabriel’s reputation…it’s not great.”
“I’m fine,” Fiona said, affecting lightness. “Totally fine.”
“I’m glad,” Liv said, sitting up straighter on the bed. “There’s one other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“You were sort of rude to me last night.”
“I was?”
Liv looked down at her feet, which were planted firmly on the ikat rug. “Yeah.”
“I don’t remember,” Fiona said.
“I know you don’t. That’s the problem.” Liv took a deep breath. “Fee, I’m worried about you.”
Fiona felt a mix of shame and indignation. How dare anyone be worried about her? She felt like a hormonal teenager whose mom was scolding her.
“I’ve tried so hard with you. To be empathetic. I mean, what you’ve been through, I can’t even begin to imagine. And I’ve been trying to give you space to let you grieve in your own way. But it’s been two years, and it’s gotten to the point where I’m not sure your way of grieving is so healthy anymore.”
Fiona’s head was so heavy, and she tried to wade through Liv’s words. Parts of it rang true, but parts of it not at all. Liv’s perspective was unnaturally linear. There was no space for backstepping. No space for air.
“I know how long it’s been since my sister died.”
Liv deflated, right there on the edge of the bed. Only a monster could argue with that.
“Right. Of course you do.”
“I know you care,” Fiona said. “But I just woke up. I’m hungover. This is the last thing I want to talk about right now.”
If not now, then when? she knew Liv was thinking. It wasn’t like Fiona was so detached from reality that she was unaware that she’d become a mess. But it was always easier to put it off, to put it all off, and so she did, while she still could.
“We okay?” Fiona asked.
Liv nodded, and that was that.
* * *
—
Liv and Fiona had met during the spring of their freshman year, months before Helen died, in a seminar called Le Monde Francophone. Their professor was an animated thirty-something woman from Côte d’Ivoire who spoke with intense enthusiasm about everything they studied: The Adventures of Tintin, which Professor Djedje dissected for its white French ethnocentrism and racist caricatures, or La haine, a black-and-white film about racial struggles during the nineties in the banlieues of Paris. (At the tragic end of it, Fiona spotted the professor wiping away a tear.) The subject matter was a far cry from that of the old-school French-born white men whom she had studied in AP French in high school, owners of all those names with the same-sounding endings: Voltaire, Molière, Baudelaire.
In middle school, Fiona chose French over Spanish because Amy, her mother, had promised that if Fiona studied French, as Amy herself had, she would take Fiona to Paris when she was fourteen. Helen, six years younger than Fiona, had mostly taken over their mother’s attention by then, so there was no question as to which language Fiona would choose.
The trip was disorienting and magical, her first visit to another country, and Amy had loved flexing her college French in cafés and restaurants. Fiona remembered her mother smoking outside a café, the wicker-backed seats facing the sidewalk for optimal people-watching, Amy making Fiona promise to keep her pack of Camels a secret. Fiona never told anyone, not even her brother, Liam. The last night of the trip, they bought dried sausages, a wheel of brie, and a baguette from the little grocery store on the corner. They ate on their hotel bed, smearing the cheese on the bread, getting crumbs on the covers, while they watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer dubbed in French.
As Fiona learned about other French-speaking parts of the world, and as Professor Djedje delivered impassioned lectures on Islamophobia and sexism and anti-Semitism in France, Fiona realized how sheltered her visit to that tiny, tourist-laden part of Paris had been, how much inequality existed around her that she hadn’t even noticed.
Liv sat at the front of the classroom, and for several weeks, Fiona would enter five minutes before the class started to find her already there: notebook open, pen in hand, reading glasses on, silky black hair over one shoulder. She was pretty, and she spoke excellent French, her hand often shooting up first whenever Professor Djedje posed a question. Her accent was so good that Fiona suspected French was Liv’s native language. It became clear some weeks into the semester that the professor grew weary of Liv’s overenthusiasm, and encouraged other students to speak more. Fiona loved to read in French then, loved the satisfaction of decoding foreign sentences, their syntax backward from that of English, and of excavating meaning from them. And she was good at grammar, too: the rules were inconsistent, but she’d memorized them all years ago, knew which verbs were irregular and which were reflexive and which used être for the past tense instead of avoir.
Speaking French aloud was harder. She knew the rules there, too—not to pronounce a consonant at the end of a word; the subtle differences between un and une and between le and la and les—but the words still came out clunky and American-sounding, missing all those lilts and all that melody one heard when French was spoken properly, the way Professor Djedje spoke it, or the way Liv spoke it. No matter how hard she tried, Fiona couldn’t get the “r” to sound right.
“Rrrrrrevenir,” Professor Djedje would correct her, when she was called upon in class.
“Revenir,” Fiona repeated, but the professor shook her head, then made a hacking sound in the back of her throat.
“Hhhhhhrevenir,” Professor Djedje said again, punctuating that guttural “r” a few extra times for emphasis.
“Revenir,” Fiona tried once more, but it sounded like phlegm was coming out of her throat, followed by a rounded, English “r.” Professor Djedje sighed and moved on.
For their final project, Fiona and Liv were paired. Fiona was certain that the professor had paired them because she hoped Liv’s pronunciation would rub off on Fiona (though she realized afterward that it was likely alphabetical: Langley and Larkin). The assignment was straightforward: to give a presentation about a non-European francophone country, providing historical and cultural demographics, specifically the country’s relationship with France; each student would also choose a piece of literature or film produced by a citizen of that country, which she would present and then analyze at length in a corresponding paper.
Fiona suggested that she and Liv meet to discuss the country Professor Djedje had assigned them—Algeria—on the second floor of the on-campus coffee shop. It was Fiona’s favorite place to work, and it seemed that not many other students had discovered it. She was often alone among the sun-baked leather couches and reading chairs, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the main thoroughfare for students walking to and from class. Fiona liked the din of students chatting and cappuccino machines hissing downstairs; she worked better in places with background noise. She liked to be reminded that she was not alone, unlike in the partitioned-off carrels in the silent library, which often sent her into an isolated spiral of despair.
When Fiona suggested the meeting place over email, Liv had replied, “You study there, too?” Now Fiona arrived to find Liv already reading on a couch, a fat novel open in her lap. She looked up as Fiona sat next to her.
“Hey!” Liv said.
“What are you reading?”
Liv held up the cover: Vaste est la prison, b
y Assia Djebar. “For the project,” she said. “It’s amazing.”
“Oh.” Fiona immediately felt like an underachiever for not having started her book. In fact, she was planning to simply review L’Étranger, which she’d already read in high school. They hadn’t even discussed their author choices with each other. “You’re really far already.”
“I’m sorry. I got ahead of myself. It’s just so good. Do you know her?”
Fiona shook her head.
“She’s cool. Really anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial and all that.”
“I was thinking of doing Camus,” Fiona said, suddenly ashamed by the obviousness of her choice, the most famous Algerian writer there was—and one who’d spent most of his life in France, anyway.
“That’s a great choice,” Liv said. Fiona couldn’t tell if her enthusiasm was genuine or put-on. “I really like this class,” she added, leaning in, as if it were a secret. “My French classes in high school were so boring. I went to this prep school where everything was just so. You know, all the early white men. Voltaire and Molière and all of that. Now I realize we were reading the colonists, not the colonized.”
Fiona didn’t think Voltaire and Molière were actually colonists, but she understood what Liv meant.
“You know, Voltaire was all about religious freedom, but he actually was a huge anti-Semite and Islamophobe,” Fiona said, parroting a more politically active girl than herself from her AP French class.
“I believe it,” Liv said.
Up close, Fiona could see how striking Liv was, with her dewy olive skin and big, dark eyes, the lashes slanted dramatically and diagonally toward the outside corner of each eye, as if they’d been drawn on. Despite her teacher’s-pet persona, Liv was actually quite sexy, Fiona realized now, in her formfitting black turtleneck, schoolgirl skirt, and knee-high boots. Being somewhat average-looking herself, Fiona often thought about the intoxicating effect that beautiful women had on her. She knew this made her an internal misogynist or whatever, but she was doubly impressed when a beautiful woman was also smart and hardworking and didn’t rely on her looks the way Fiona was sure she might have if she’d had them herself. In this way, the thing that drew her immediately to Liv was quite shallow. Fiona wondered, then, what circumstances went into making Liv as industrious as she was.