It was early afternoon, the white sun slipping down from its peak, when Trav said, “Music off. We’re here.”
I punched the power button and leaned forward, peering out the windshield. The view made a welcome break from the phone in my lap. I kept checking it, wondering if Isaac would reply to my message. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I hoped, a little, if only for the human contact. I’d spent the car ride in crushing silence, with Erik in the backseat watching the entire Bourne trilogy on his phone, while to my left, Trav operated the wheel with the acute focus of a brain surgeon mid-procedure.
My mind kept circling back to Connor Caskey’s conversation with his father. Dr. Caskey had fit so many terrible sentences into such a short period of time that it was like he’d been trying to horrify me specifically. For weeks, Nihal’s frustration had mounted as their secret grew heavier, but I hadn’t understood before yesterday how much of a disaster it would be for Connor if word got out.
The seatbelt locked tight against my chest as Trav braked too quickly. In the back, Erik made an irritated noise. We crunched onto the spread of snow before Jon Cox’s mountain house, a three-story confection of honey-colored beams. It stood in the Adirondacks at the bottom of a sweeping slope, stands of powdered pines peeking over its snow-dusted roof. Panels of windows high on the front face of the house gazed down on a frozen river, which pooled in the crease of the valley. Crisp, untouched snow stood all around in thick drifts and layers.
Trav had barely put Victoria’s Lexus into park before Jon Cox came vaulting across the hood with a whoop. His jean-clad ass wiped off the thin crust of snow that had accumulated over the four-hour drive. Trav went rigid in the driver’s seat. Jon Cox squeaked off, making the car bounce, and landed with a crunch on the iced-over gravel.
“Watch it,” Erik said, scrambling out of the backseat. “If there’s one scratch on this thing when we get back, Victoria’s gonna murder me.”
I slid out and shut the passenger door behind me. “Rest in peace.”
“What took you so long?” Jon Cox asked, loping after me as I headed to the trunk. “We’ve been here for, like, fifteen minutes.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Trav still sat in the driver’s seat, extracting the keys with the slowness of your average sloth. “Trav drives with one hand on the horn, if that tells you anything.”
“Jesus,” Jon Cox said.
“I know.” I hoisted my fraying suitcase out of the trunk. “But whatever,” I said, yanking Jon Cox’s hat down over his eyes with my other hand. “We got here alive, didn’t we?”
“Being alive is important,” Mama boomed, walking up with a huge duffel slung diagonally across his back. “C’mon, let’s get inside. It’s freezing.”
Once Trav had locked the car, backing away from it as if it might explode, we all trudged up the side steps, two flights of damp, rickety wood, to a sliding-glass door.
“Honey, I’m hoo-ooome,” Jon Cox sang, as he flung the glass door wide. Hearing Jon Cox sing always came with a bit of a shock—he had an operatic baritone, solemn and controlled, like a fifty-year-old’s.
The seven of us trailed into a gleaming kitchen. I tried not to stare and failed spectacularly. A sheen of dust softened marble countertops. Slim windows hugged the pine-beam ceiling. A beaten copper ventilator rose above four shining burners, facing a row of polished cabinets, and the refrigerator looked big enough for about half a dozen people to fit inside, if they got creative.
“Dibs on the master bed,” Mama called, kicking off his shoes. He slid in his socks over the hardwood toward the darkened great room. We trailed after him, and when he hit the lights, my mouth drooped open. Cherry columns propped up a ceiling twenty feet high. Tasseled rugs lay beneath long sofas and chairs whose dark leather was faded under translucent dustcovers. Beneath the dappled stone chimney, the wide fireplace’s iron grate was swept clean.
As the other guys went for the steps to the second floor, I looked down at my beat-up suitcase and felt minuscule. On some level, I felt like I should’ve been seething with envy, but this place was so far removed from everything I’d ever lived that I couldn’t even feel jealous. All I had was a numbing awe: that real families had houses like this, that one of the Sharps had spent his whole childhood in rooms where even the color of the treated floorboards screamed money.
Nihal stopped next to me. “He’s an investment banker,” he said quietly. “Jon Cox’s dad.”
“Got it. Forget theater. Investment banking is my new plan.”
Nihal chuckled. “If you want to never see your kids, go for it.” He followed the others upstairs.
I mulled over the words, chewing on the inside of my cheek. The subtext wasn’t subtle: the huge house Jon’s family didn’t even live in, his beautiful car, everything—it couldn’t substitute for an absent father. I felt like I’d heard this story a thousand times.
Still, I would’ve taken this option any day. Back in San Francisco, I hadn’t exactly been drowning in family time either. Dad worked night shifts as a gas-station cashier, leaving for work before I got home from school and not getting back until I was already asleep. I had years of memories of myself—nine, ten, eleven years old—walking around the back of our apartment building, digging the spare key out of a gravel-filled flowerpot, and letting myself in after school. Mom came home from her part-time job around six, in time to cook up beans or powdery mashed potatoes.
The older I got, the less I saw of her, too. She took more hours. I took care of myself. Rich kids with millionaire dads weren’t the only ones raising themselves.
I never felt like a poor-little-poor-girl, though, some tragic character out of a story—it was mundane. Everything in my life was sketched in the same bland shade of disrepair. Clothes, apartment, furniture: fray and decay. Bulk tins and stained utensils. So normal to me.
Looking around this mansion of a mountain home, I wondered—did Jon Cox think this was normal, too?
“Hey,” said a voice. I startled. Jon had come up from behind me.
“Hi,” I said. After a second, I waved around. “This place is . . .”
Jon Cox shook his head. “Yeah, don’t . . . I don’t know. It is what it is.”
He looked embarrassed. I wanted to cringe, or say, Don’t be embarrassed that your life is a fantasy. But I stayed quiet, my thoughts chasing each other’s tails. After all, if he’d looked smug or satisfied, I would’ve thought, arrogant. Maybe there was no right answer to being born filthy rich, like there was no right answer to being born dirt poor. Maybe everyone was just looking for reasons to think everyone else was ungrateful.
It was so stupid, too, because what were we supposed to do about the Very Wealthy Elephant in the Room, me or Jon Cox? We still had people telling us when to turn out our lights. We still had to ask permission to use the bathroom. Yeah, this boy drove around all ostentatious in his flashy car, with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and his Brooks Brothers jackets, looking like a grade-A assclown. But he’d also bought us that fancy whiskey that night in the field. He was always buying people food, giving rides, self-consciously generous with his time and money. Now we were all here together, living under his roof. Did all that equal out to my vacuum-silence when it came to my family’s situation?
I wanted to talk about it all, but I didn’t know what to say, or whether it would do any good, anyway. Did anyone else even want to talk about it? Why was it such a slippery subject, wriggling its way out of everyone’s grasp?
Maybe I’d figure it out in ten years, or maybe when I was my parents’ age, when I knew what it felt like to lose jobs, skip meals for my kid, scrape the barrel so hard the splinters tore up my fingertips. Maybe then I’d know how to talk about money without feeling like, somehow, the whole thing was imaginary—something human beings had pulled out of thin air without an instruction manual for how to do it all right.
In the uncomfortable silence, Jon Cox took off his glasses, which had fogged up around the edges, and wiped them on his knit sweater. “Do you want to check out the attic?” he said. “It’s, um, it has a view . . .”
“Lead on,” I said, taking the handle of my suitcase.
The attic had its pros and cons. Pro: the king-size bed and the huge circular window that overlooked the frozen river. Con: over the bed, on the bare wooden walls, hung a giant deer head that looked so freshly dead I expected it to blink. Strong pro: I had the room to myself, so setting an alarm in the middle of the night to shower wouldn’t be conspicuous. Strong con: The bathroom was down the stairs and two hallways, past the rooms where four of the guys would be sleeping. More sneaking than I’d hoped for.
I’ll make it work, I told myself, leaving my suitcase by the bed. I jogged downstairs. In the great room, Trav and Mama were lifting a coffee table, clearing the center of the room. From the kitchen, the scent of sizzling hot dogs flavored the air, flooding my mouth with saliva.
Trav set down his end of the table. “Lunch,” he called, “then choreo.”
“I can’t dance,” Marcus said beside me. “At all.”
“Everyone can dance,” I said.
Half an hour later, Marcus was doing his very best to prove me wrong. Mama demonstrated for about the fifth time how to turn over the left shoulder. Marcus spun the wrong way for the fifth time, looking green.
“Here,” I said, stepping in. “Right foot over left, okay?”
“I’m the worst,” Marcus mumbled.
“No, you’re not. You just gotta learn it. Then it’s done.”
“How do you know how to do pivots and stuff?”
“Theater. I’ve taken a dance class every year since I’ve been here.” I didn’t want to tell him that this hardly qualified as actual choreography. Mama had referred to it as “choralography,” which sounded about right. A lot of walking on-rhythm into different formations, dramatic lifting of arms, and quick shoulder movements. Nothing that would interrupt our breath support.
I settled for saying, “You can get this. It’ll look so simple by the end, you won’t even remember how you had trouble with it.”
Marcus planted his right foot over his left and spun so enthusiastically, he wheeled off-balance into Nihal, who let out an undignified splutter.
Mama sighed, coming to a halt beside me with his hands in his pockets. For a moment, we watched the others practicing the steps. “I wanted to stick in some hip-hop,” Mama muttered, “but Trav vetoed it.”
“Put it in anyway,” I muttered back. “Make him do it.”
We exchanged grins, watching Trav. He moved like a robot that hadn’t been greased for a couple decades.
We worked straight through the afternoon. This was tough for Marcus, but tougher for me. While he could gripe about his lack of coordination, I couldn’t say a word about my issue: a vicious set of period cramps that—over the hours—escalated slowly from “mild abdominal discomfort” to “my entire uterus is getting extracted with a spoon and sacrificed over a violet flame to the unholy uterine gods who are placated by naught but pain.” I escaped a few times to knock back Advil like a seven-year-old popping Skittles.
By the time we finished choreographing the first two songs, the sunset was glowering, and sweat made my T-shirt cling to the small of my back. We collapsed before the fireplace, slices of gooey instant pizza making our fingers drip with grease, and ate until the spread of windows that flanked the chimney held a grayish dusk.
Jon Cox went about building a fire in the hearth, striking a long, thick match that hissed as it flared. When the fire was popping merrily up the chimney, Mama slid a video game into a thin black console and a dim logo glowed into life on the screen above the mantel. I settled back into the sofa as Trav navigated through a hellish horror game, complete with oozing monsters lurching out of the dark.
Trav’s reflexes with that arsenal of weapons were frighteningly fast. I averted my eyes from the screen as he took a meat cleaver to a monster’s arm with a messy-sounding squelch. A fitting soundtrack to the carnage I’d endured all afternoon.
Nestled in the sofa, I rubbed my stomach ruefully. If life had taught me one invaluable lesson, it was that being aware of the walls of your internal organs is universally a bad thing. Right now, if you’d given me a Sharpie, I could have traced a perfect outline of my uterus onto my abdomen. Like using translucent parchment paper to trace an image beneath, if that image was of a war-torn battlefield or a sun exploding or three hundred simultaneous shark attacks.
Nihal had his sketchpad in his lap next to me. I glanced over and got a jolt—my own face was staring back from a line of facial sketches. The seven of us who were here. Isaac’s face was conspicuously missing.
“I texted him,” I muttered.
Nihal’s pen slowed against the page. “Yeah? He say anything?”
“Nope.”
Nihal shook his head and outlined one of Erik’s arched eyebrows.
My phone lit up, blaring my ringtone. Isaac, I thought. That was some timing.
I grabbed my phone and stood, but when I glanced down, my grip went rigid. The number on the screen didn’t have a contact associated with it—just a string of digits. Of course I recognized that number, though, even if it’d been half a year since I’d deleted it.
The last time Michael and I had talked, he’d been considering a gap year. I resented my curiosity. Had he ended up at NYU after all, or was he auditioning for Broadway shows instead? Had he gotten that union card and started racking up Equity points? Why was he calling—was he okay, was he safe?
The urge to pick up was so strong that I wondered for a moment if I was still in love with him. These days, Michael-related thoughts had faded from omnipresent to sporadic—more in the lower single digits per day than in the upper doubles, less of browsing the Internet and wanting to send him everything that made me laugh or think.
These days, the only ways he lingered were the ways he’d changed me. I knuckled my forehead in late-night exhaustion like he always had, sitting by the Burgess fireside. I highlighted my scripts in two colors, the darker shade reserved for beat shifts; he’d told me I should try it sometime. Really, it helped him memorize, helped him pick what to care about the most. Love was a sea of red ink, and once you folded under the waves, there was no solvent that could scrub it out of your skin. You could only wait to discover what you were when you wandered out of the shallows: something rose, or crimson, or carnelian.
I hit the Decline button and sat back down on the sofa, exhaustion sinking into me like heat. Even my cramps had suddenly subsided, as if they’d decided that I had enough to deal with at the moment. I couldn’t believe I still wanted to talk to him. You’d think I would have gotten sick of hurting.
“Who was that?” Nihal said.
“Ex,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Ah.” He raised one eyebrow. “Recent?”
“June.”
“Not a good ex, I’m assuming.”
From my other side, Jon Cox grunted, “Good exes are a conspiracy theory.”
Mama nodded. “Laura,” he said, with significance.
I glanced around, not liking the looks the others had, as if this was going to turn into an actual discussion. How weird would that be, talking about Michael with the Sharps?
“I’m just surprised we get reception out here,” I said loudly. Everyone got the hint. Even Trav went back to slaughtering monsters with renewed vigor.
It was strange, though. As I cracked open the book I’d brought to read, I felt almost disappointed that not one of them had pushed it. Shanice and Jenna would have been happy to let it drop, but Maria would have been all over me, badgering me to vent out every tiny bit of feeling, making sure I didn’t need tea or chocolate or a ranting session. Talk it out, talk it out, she always said, clapping her hands like a coach. Let’s go. Tell me everything. Businesslike in her empathy.
After a couple minutes, Nihal cleared his throat gently.
I glanced over at his sketchpad. A caricature stared back: a guy-face with greasy-looking bangs, a lopsided nose, and a sleazy leer. Below it, Nihal had written, Julian’s Ex. Arrows pointing to the picture added helpful taglines like Obviously an idiot, Has definitely been miserable since June, and Julian can do way better.
I laughed. Delighted, I reached for the sketchpad, but Nihal was already turning the page, a secret smile hinting at his eyes.