by Alex Flinn
I said I’d never heard of being unsophisticated framed as a good thing.
“It is,” he said, “because you want to know things. I’d like to take you places, maybe even Europe or Asia someday, so I can see the excitement in your eyes.”
Then I remembered what Phoebe had said about him just trying to get me into bed. Was he really saying those things just because he wanted something from me? I’m used to people wanting things from me, but I didn’t want to believe it.
I asked Jarvis if he’d come here as a kid. He said yes, his mother had taught him to ride a bike there, and they’d gone to the zoo. Then he asked about my family.
And I told him.
Not everything. Not about my mother or her creepy boyfriends or the foster homes. But I told him we were poor and a benefactor was paying my way to school, and that I’d never known my father and didn’t see much of my mother anymore either. I didn’t tell him that she’s in prison. I’m too ashamed. “You’re the only one I’ve told all this to.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Not Daisy? I thought you were best friends.”
“We are, but . . .” I looked away. “I don’t know. Her life seems so great. I don’t want her to feel any sorrier for me than she already does.”
“But you don’t think that about me?” He looked pleasantly surprised, and I realized everyone probably treated him like a spoiled rich kid. I admitted Phoebe had told me about his mother dying.
“That must have been hard for you,” I said.
He nodded and didn’t speak for a moment, brushing a stray snowflake from my coat sleeve while I tried to think of a way to change the subject. But finally he said, “She wasn’t sick long, not that they told me anyway. Maybe they knew earlier, but I didn’t. She had cancer when I was very little, and she got better. And then she became sick again, and there was nothing they could do. She died right after my twelfth birthday. Now, I think that maybe she was trying to fit everything into a few years, since she knew she didn’t have that many.”
I asked him what he meant, and he said that sometimes, she’d come and pick him up from school for no reason and they’d have a picnic. Or once they drove up to the Catskills on a random morning in October, just to climb a mountain. She taught him to dance when he was 9 or 10 because she told him he might take a girl to the prom someday, and one year, instead of sending out cards, they made Christmas ornaments for everyone they knew out of Sculpey clay. “I rolled it out,” he recalled, “shapes like snowflakes and candy canes, and she put them together and we baked them in the oven.”
I could picture the little boy he’d been then, the one who’d had to grow up too quickly, like I had. “She sounds great,” I said.
He explained how she taught him to be compassionate too. They’d make sandwiches to give out to people who looked hungry. That made me think of what he’d said to Phoebe about not everyone having what they had.
But then he said, “And one day, she went into the hospital, and then she died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I never talked about her. My friends don’t bring her up. Everyone already knows.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, feeling stupid.
He squeezed my hand, hard. “I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to talk about her.”
It’s funny because when I see what I’ve written, he sounds all dark and brooding, but in real life he was just open-faced, sunny Jarvis in a bright blue knit cap with his cheeks all flushed from the cold. I jumped down from the bench and put my arms around him. We’re both damaged, I realized. We both have scars we’re trying to hide.
I felt guilty about not telling him about my family. But, of course, having some saintly, dead-from-cancer mother isn’t like having one in prison. So I kept my mouth shut.
Then he kissed me in that beautiful gazebo, surrounded by falling snow. Oh, how I loved that moment! He said we had to come back so I could see it in springtime. I liked all the promises he was making, even though they seemed too good to be true.
We walked around the park for a while, looking at every statue and sign, admiring poodles and flinging snowballs at each other until finally I said I was cold.
“Do you want to try the Statue of Liberty again?” he asked. “Fog’s probably cleared.”
I shivered, thinking about it. I guess I’m still a Florida girl at heart! I asked if there was anything closer. And indoors.
He mentioned the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History, both things I do want to visit. But I said, “You know, you don’t have to keep taking me places and buying me things. We can just hang out. You know, inside.”
He smiled and said (tentatively) that we could go back to his apartment to warm up. Actually, what he said was, “I . . . uh . . . I’m really suggesting that we go . . . um . . . watch TV and make hot chocolate or something. I wasn’t . . . um . . . I mean, ah, the maid will be there, and . . .”
That’s a direct quote. It was adorable.
To put him out of his misery, I said that sounded fine. I was dying to see his apartment!
And the apartment didn’t disappoint. First of all, I didn’t think an apartment could ever be bigger than Phoebe’s. But it is higher, bigger, better in every way. And yet, it was eerily clean and sterile, like a law firm on a television show. There were fresh flowers in the entryway, which added to the law firm look. Jarvis definitely needs a dog! As we walked in, I heard a vacuum cleaner, but it was so many rooms away it wouldn’t drown out conversation. That may be my dream, to live in a house so big you can vacuum and no one will be disturbed.
Jarvis took me down about three halls to introduce me to the maid, Milena, who smiled broadly and shook my hand. Jarvis told her we were going to make hot chocolate and sit in the family room. He took me to a room off the kitchen, the only room that wasn’t like a law firm, with rugs and handcrafted objects. On one wall was a giant black-and-white photo of a younger Jarvis with both parents. They all were laughing, as if someone had caught them in a joke.
And when I looked over at him, he looked exactly as happy, staring at me.
We decided to watch Elf. Jarvis brought cocoa (Godiva from his perfect gourmet kitchen) and a blanket. I thought maybe he wanted to get under it with me, and it all felt more serious. But instead, he flopped down next to me, close but not intrusively so.
“Milena seemed excited to meet you,” he said. “I don’t usually bring girls home.” I told him I was surprised, considering random girls were trying to take their picture with him at restaurants.
He shrugged. “I had a girlfriend for a while. She was the type of girl everyone thought I should be with—pretty, smart, rich . . .”
As he said this, I started feeling crazy jealous of this perfect girl I’d never met. I remembered Phoebe’s friends mentioning he’d broken up with someone named Chaya, which sounded elegant. I pictured someone like a younger Amal Clooney, and smart like that too.
But Jarvis said, “I think she liked the idea of me more than she liked the actual me.”
I asked him what he meant, and he shrugged. “Just too many times she thought what I liked was weird. My taste in music, the movies I like, computer science, which I’m planning to study in college—she thought I should study business instead. She thought diners were weird. Or not wanting to get trashed at a party. Or that I like to read biographies. The list went on. She’d act like she was joking, but she wasn’t.”
He started the movie, and we sat there watching Buddy the elf screw up everything he tried to do. I leaned against Jarvis. After a moment, I said, “But you are weird, you know?”
He frowned. “I prefer to think of myself as eccentric.”
“Which means weird,” I said. “Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are weird.”
Mr. Smith, for a second he didn’t react, and I thought I’d insulted him. Then he let out a huge laugh that Milena probably heard over the vacuum.
“True,” he finally said.
“I like
that you’re eccentric,” I said. “It makes me feel less weird.” I snuggled closer. A moment later, he put his arm around my shoulder. He smelled of fresh air and snow, and something else I couldn’t identify, but something good. They say smell is the sense most associated with memory. I wonder if that’s true. Maybe someday, I’ll be 80 years old and smell the snow and think of today. I wanted to bury my nose in his sweater, to remember that moment.
So I did it. I tried to be surreptitious, but he said, “Are you . . . sniffing me?”
I said yeah. “Is that weird?” Of course it was. We aren’t dogs.
He grinned and said, “Totally. But carry on. As long as you’re not saying I stink.”
I told him about memory and about how he smelled like snow.
“Petrichor,” he said. “It was a vocabulary word. It means the smell of rain in the air.”
I buried my nose in his shoulder again. “Mmmm, petrichor.”
He buried his in my hair. “You too.” He nuzzled the top of my head as on TV Buddy arrived in New York City. We sat that way for a long time.
Then he said, “You ever feel like you want to do the right thing, but you don’t know what the right thing is?”
“Sure. All the time.” I wondered what made him think of that. I’d been debating telling him about my past, my mother. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I wasn’t sure if someone like him would even talk to someone like me if he knew. On the other hand, he’s eccentric, so maybe.
“So what do you do?” he asked, and I felt him holding his breath.
He felt so warm, next to me. I said, “If it’s not something that will hurt someone, I wouldn’t say anything.”
He exhaled. “I can’t believe you’re here. Like on my sofa instead of on the phone.”
“Same.” I turned toward him, and we kissed. A few times. It wasn’t much more than kissing, but suddenly someone said, “Jarvis!” We both jumped.
It was a man, tall with sandy hair specked with gray. John Jarvis Pendleton Jr.!
Jarvis stood. “Dad!” He gestured toward me. “This is Jac . . . Jac . . .”
I stood too, my heart beating fast. I introduced myself, as if seeing a gazillionaire in his palace of an apartment was perfectly normal.
Mr. Pendleton took my hand but looked at Jarvis. “This is her? The girl?”
I wondered what he’d said about me, but Jarvis said, “Yeah, Jackie. Phoebe’s friend. She’s staying with Phoebe.”
Mr. Pendleton nodded. “Oh, I forgot to tell Caroline we won’t be there Christmas Eve.”
“We won’t?” Jarvis’s chin jutted out. “Why not?”
Mr. Pendleton’s eyes flickered to me, and he said they’d discuss it at another time. Then he left to go to some other room in the apartment, half a block away.
We went back to watching Elf then, Jarvis muttering something under his breath about Christmas with clients, and we sat a few feet apart. At the end of the movie, I said I should probably go back to Phoebe’s. It seemed like Jarvis’s dad wanted to talk to him. Jarvis nodded and suggested we walk back. “I want it to take longer,” he said. I agreed, even though it was getting dark and colder, and I was weighed down with about ten books Jarvis had loaned me.
On the way back, we talked about what kind of dog breed we’d get (after I told him I thought he needed a dog, so his apartment would seem less lonely—I said a corgi, Jarvis wanted a Great Dane), our favorite holiday (we both like Halloween), and what extreme sport we’d do. I said definitely BASE jumping.
“Really?” he said.
“No, not really.”
He said he’d done some free-climbing. He was serious, though.
When we reached Phoebe’s building, Jarvis said, “Sorry. My dad’s kind of a douche.”
I wanted to ask him what his father had meant by “the girl.” Like, had they discussed me? But instead, I said the expected thing about being sure his dad wasn’t that bad.
Jarvis said, “No. It’s public knowledge. I’m pretty sure if you found his Wikipedia page, it would say, ‘John Jarvis Pendleton, Jr., entrepreneur and a bit of a douche.’ If not, I’ll add it.”
He said he wanted to see me again while I was here. I thought we definitely could.
But I’m NOT looking forward to some fancy Christmas party at the Hodgkinses’ without him! I’m hoping his dad changes his mind.
Love, Jacaranda
To: [email protected]
Date: December 22, 6:14 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Subject: Girls get crafty
Dear Mr. Smith,
Today, I spent the entire day shopping and making decorations for the Hodgkinses’ Christmas Eve party. I had to talk them into it. The Hodgkinses don’t DIY, they buy. But after the twentieth time Mrs. Hodgkins sighed loudly about undelivered greenery from Maine, I spoke up. I figured it would solve three problems:
1.Make Mrs. H. less stressed out
2.Make Phoebe less stressed out
3.Give me and Phoebe something to do that doesn’t involve shopping and spending money
Oh, and I’m going to add:
4.Get me to stop thinking about what, exactly, Jarvis Junior meant when he said, “This is her? The girl?” Like, do they DISCUSS me? And what do they say?
Anyway . . . you can see how I’m overthinking this.
When I said we should just make decorations, Phoebe looked at me like I’d suggested we form a metal band. Mrs. Hodgkins looked like I’d suggested we form a metal band and perform at her party.
“It’ll be fun,” I told Phoebe. Then I remembered the beautiful card she’d made, and I added, “You’re the artistic one.” She looked down and blushed, very un-Phoebe-like.
“What kind of decorations?” Mrs. Hodgkins asked.
Ah! There was the problem. Since I’m a Miami girl, they assumed I’d suggest flamingos in Santa hats or maybe a life-sized animated nativity scene in the living room. So I took out my phone and showed them the photos of everything Daisy and I made over Thanksgiving break. I figured that that would do the trick. Phoebe’s hella competitive, so if I crafted at Daisy’s, then they had to have BETTER crafts, CITY crafts, at her place.
I wasn’t wrong. Half an hour on Pinterest later, we were out buying 6 Christmas trees, which we had delivered (I could get used to this whole “money is no object” thing), six stands, twenty pillar candles, and every string of lights and can of spray snow available in three Duane Reades. We sent Phoebe’s brother, Fitz, out to buy white and silver spray paint since you have to be 21 to do that. Then we went to Central Park to gather twigs and pinecones to make centerpieces and giant wreaths for the walls.
“I feel like a vagrant,” Phoebe said as she gathered twigs. “Or a bird.” But she giggled and, with her face flushed pink in the cold and the sound of street Christmas music in our ears, she looked the happiest I’d seen her.
“Admit it, it’s fun.” We were throwing sticks into a Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag because Phoebe refused to consider trash bags.
Phoebe nodded. “Abigail and I—when she was going to be my roommate—we talked about decorating our room a theme, like stencil stuff on the walls to look like Paris. But that didn’t happen.”
I started to say that Daisy and I would help her decorate, if she wanted. But I knew that wasn’t her point. Instead, I asked her what had happened to Abigail. (But tentatively, because Phoebe is like this cat that used to sit outside our apartment when I was little. He’d purr when you petted him, then turn and scratch you a minute later.)
Phoebe got real interested in gathering sticks then. She picked up five. Six. Seven. Finally, she said, “When you were freaking out about juries, I thought about her.”
I waited.
“She bombed her juries last year. I guess I should have seen it coming. She wasn’t . . .” She stopped and thought about how to put it. “She wasn’t at the same level as other people at MAA. She worked hard, and it wasn’t fair. But they recommended she not return. She lost her scholarship, whi
ch she needed to stay at school.”
I remember David saying a girl had gotten cut last year. Had I replaced her? Was that why Phoebe had hated me? “But was she coming back? Her name was on the door.”
Phoebe said the school told her she could come back and do tech, and Phoebe thought her family had scraped together the money. “It’s so unfair. I have a talent-based scholarship, and I certainly don’t need the money.” Normally this would be bragging for Phoebe, but her voice sounded strained and weak.
As the beginning of school got closer, Phoebe didn’t hear from her. After Abigail didn’t show up, Phoebe called her parents, and they said she’d been too depressed to send away. They’d spoken twice since then, but Phoebe felt bad because she was still at MAA, and Abigail wasn’t.
“God, I can’t imagine having to leave and go back to regular school,” I said.
“I might never see her again,” Phoebe said. “She lives in Kansas. I’ll never go there.”
“She could come to New York,” I said.
“Yeah, everyone comes to New York.” Phoebe examined a stick then rejected it. “But it won’t be the same. Before, we were two people with the same dreams. We talked about college, maybe getting an apartment together someday. Now, it would be all weird.”
I nodded. But, at the same time, I appreciated that Phoebe was saying she thought of me as an equal, someone with the same ambitions and similar talent. When I’d said I was worried about juries, Phoebe could have freaked me out by telling me her friend bombed them, but instead she’d said it wouldn’t be a big deal for me.
“She was my only friend at school,” Phoebe said. “I know no one likes me. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know how long you had to think about even coming here?” She looked away.
I said that wasn’t true. I liked her. Daisy liked her. And, you know the funny thing? I wasn’t lying. When I first met Phoebe, she scared the crap out of me. She was all the scary things—talented, beautiful, and rich. She knew she belonged. But now, I see she’s as messed up as anyone. Except she has the added burden of having to pretend she isn’t.