My laptop eked out a shriek of complaint as I bent the screen back, getting rid of the glare. “Hush,” I told it, and double-tapped Skype.
As it loaded, I glanced out my dorm room window. Dusk had fallen. Ropy icicles drooled down behind the glass, and beyond them stretched the tree line, stripes of black wood on white snow. Kensington over breaks looked twice as beautiful as when everyone was here. Burgess fell silent as a cemetery, nobody padding down the hall outside my door or chattering by the water fountain.
The application loaded, revealing an empty contacts list. My parents hadn’t gotten online yet. I carried my laptop to my bed, flopped down, and waited.
The retreat already felt like it had happened years ago, although Isaac had driven us back to Kensington only this afternoon. I should have stuck with Trav’s car, tight-knuckled steering and all. Mama hadn’t been kidding about Isaac’s driving: He drove with his knees guiding the wheel, mostly, his right hand occasionally drifting up to adjust the car’s trajectory. He sat with a generous lean against the driver’s door, peering out the windshield with piercing eyes, as if he were hunting the empty roads for a victim to slam into. I spent most of the ride digging my fingernails into my thighs, doing breathing exercises.
When I wasn’t praying for my continued survival, I was meticulously dissecting every second of last night. With Erik in the backseat finishing the Bourne movies, Isaac and I barely spoke. The words we did manage felt hopelessly shallow in the wake of everything we’d let loose a handful of hours before. I couldn’t look at him without a reaction fizzling under my surface, a mixture of heat and panic that might have been fear, paranoia, or something significantly worse.
This morning, I’d slipped into sleep halfway through one of his sentences. I woke up on my side to a dawn that was bright and shocking, so close to him that—for a moment—I couldn’t breathe. In sleep, we’d fallen toward each other. He looked soft and calm. His serious eyebrows shadowed the slope of his nose. Seeing him so still was like seeing a river stop in its bed, the mess of churning water held perfectly motionless for a minute, the constant rush silenced.
The entire ride back to Kensington, I couldn’t stop remembering that image. Staring through the passenger window at the blurring wall of trees along the highway, I saw it. Every time he hummed to a song on the radio or messed compulsively with his hair or drummed his fingers on the wheel, I saw it. It was an indelible film over my eyes.
It was bad news. I set about destroying it at once.
We got back around 8:00 p.m.—intact, miraculously—and the eight of us had dinner at the pizza place in town, at which point Jon Cox attempted to fold a whole pizza slice into a cube to eat in one bite. In penance for being the grossest person alive, he picked up the tab, thank God. I’d agonized the whole time about the best way to ask one of the guys if they could spot me.
Afterward, the other Sharps packed up for the rest of break and got back on the road—one car to Watertown, for the airport, and the other back to New York City, for Isaac, Marcus, and Trav. They’d be driving all night.
Meanwhile, I returned to my dorm, pinned my break residency permit on my door, and shut myself in.
My parents had badgered me all afternoon to Skype them. I donned my wig, rolled on some lipstick, and lined my eyes. If I ever Skyped my parents without makeup, they asked if I was getting enough sleep. Are you sick? You look tired. Maybe they’d just forgotten what I looked like without it on.
Mom’s Skype contact popped up in the list. I clicked it. One big plus of everyone leaving campus: Internet speeds quadrupled overnight. Otherwise, streaming video on this laptop would’ve been like trying to stream video through two tin cans strung together with dental floss.
My parents, in our kitchen, showed up on the screen in glorious 240-pixel resolution. We had a computer back home. It was from 2005.
Mom was craning over Dad’s shoulder. Their blurry smiles settled me. I waved.
“Hi,” Mom said. “How is everything going?”
My smile froze into a rictus. Even with the tinny audio, I heard the undercurrent in her voice. Bad news.
“I’ve just been catching up on reading,” I said. Restful. Calm. I’d made it my business being unreadable, but inside, panic bells started to clang. Idiot, I told myself. Of course this had meant bad news. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they have left the call until Thanksgiving, as usual?
“What’s going on? What did you want to talk about?” I said. They looked at each other, then back at me. Whatever this was, it was big enough to have bridged the divide between them. I felt the acute dread of somebody standing in place, watching a cannonball fly toward them.
Dad’s voice was uncharacteristically calm. It unnerved me. “Jordan,” he said, “the landlord told us today that rent’s hiking.”
My hands curled up beneath my laptop.
“So we made a decision,” Mom said, “and you’re not going to like it, but we don’t have many options.”
A glut of protest built in my chest. Since middle school, they’d talked about moving every time things got tight. If they thought we could dodge the rent escalation by burrowing deeper into Chinatown, then by the time I got to college—assuming I got the scholarship money to afford college—they’d be living in one of those Single-Resident Occupancy rooms, eight-by-ten-foot cubbyholes that whole families sometimes operated from. If we’d been able to afford the relocation costs—if my parents had ever had job prospects somewhere else, if we’d had a car—we would have abandoned San Francisco and its heinous prices, but you couldn’t pay for a move with hypotheticals.
If we moved, that was another blow against my already-destabilizing friendships. During the year, the girls slid along like beads down a thread, all together, on a different track than mine. When we met back up, I had to work to dissolve the buffer Kensington created between us, the distance of perfectionist culture and college-prep focus.
I could imagine it. We would move out of our neighborhood, the one I’d always shared with them, a block down from Jenna, three streets over from Shanice and Maria. Our friendship would turn into something made out of old habits. When that turned irrelevant, we would fall out of touch entirely.
My mother’s voice interrupted the spiral: “We’re pulling you out of Kensington.”
Everything stopped.
As her threat processed, the world began to swing horribly, a trapdoor plummeting on a huge hinge. It dangled. I clung to the edge.
Something had gone wrong in my vision. Keep control. Keep control—
“Um,” I whispered. “What do you mean?”
“We can’t manage those costs anymore.” Mom sighed. The camera image focused for a second, and in that instant, her expression was a diagram that explained exhaustion. Stress filled her every wrinkle. More lines had drawn themselves in since last time I’d seen her, encircling her lower eyelids, linking the corners of her nose to her jaw. “And at home,” she said, “maybe you can work somewhere.”
“But—but isn’t it cheaper for me to be here? You don’t have to pay for my meals, there’s no—”
“Xiao Ming,” Dad said, my childhood nickname sounding more like a stiff rebuke. “It doesn’t come close to breaking even.”
A childish tantrum erupted in my head. I stamped it down, trying to think rationally. I had to be mature. I had to be logical.
Flights, I thought vaguely. Each year was four or five hundred dollars’ worth of flights, what with Winter Break, the only holiday when the Campus Residency Office couldn’t let me stay on campus. Storage, too—it cost seventy-five dollars to hide my things away in some closet here over the summer so I didn’t have to ship them home. And textbooks . . . I had the crumpled receipts somewhere: $335 this semester, $290 last semester, a staggering $415 the semester before that. Not to mention supplies, everything from my stupidly expensive graphing calculator to pens and paper. There had to be other costs, too—costs I was forgetting, or costs I didn’t want to admit.
I didn’t want them to be right, but if they were, I had to find a fix.
“There’s no guarantee I could work at home,” I blurted. “Maria looked for a part-time job all last year and she never—”
“Xiao Ming.” Mom’s voice cracked.
I held back, but my mouth threatened to overflow. Words clawed for space, pushing at my tongue. I was finally old enough to apply for the student-worker program, but they wouldn’t be hiring until next year, and that was nine months out before I would make a cent. Maybe I could try to find someone to stay with over winter break so flights weren’t on the table. The thought of begging for someone’s charity made me taste bitterness, but I had to stay here. I was so close.
“Please, let me ask the school about it,” I said, keeping my voice low. “If I transfer, their withdrawal rate goes up. They want me to stay. They want me to apply to college, they want me to do well—”
Mom snapped. “Then why they never put you in a show, huh?”
I drew back from my laptop.
She sighed. “You went to that place to do something. If they don’t let you do it, you should come back home. That’s all there is to say.” Mom rubbed her forehead and glanced at Dad. “Well?”
Dad lifted his head. The crease between his eyebrows had begun to sag into an immovable frown. “It’s not a question,” he said. “We’re telling you so you can get ready. You’re there until Christmas Break. Then you’re coming home.”
I called Nihal. He didn’t pick up. He must have been flying back to Newark. I called the girls one right after the other, but nothing from them, either. I bet they were out together, laughing, talking, normal.
Normal had evaporated. Normal had skidded headlong off a cliff.
Isaac, I thought, and pulled up his contact page, but something kept me from hitting the call button. In retrospect, last night looked like a hallucination, or a dream. I didn’t want to ruin it with reality.
I yanked my wig off, bundled up, and tromped out into the snow. No soft, drifting flakes tonight—tiny beads of snow swirled in gray tornadoes, fast and loud. The winter air clamped around me, and wind brutalized my skin, chapping my lips the second I stretched them in a grimace.
A hand of wind slammed the door behind me. Amid the whitish stir, I made for the road and shuffled down toward Arthur’s Arch.
I paused between Wingate and Ewing for a moment and peered up at the dorms, glazed and dripping with ice, water stains rimming their peaked windows. Streaks of snow ran along the turreted details at their roofs. My first memories of Kensington had me driving up this street, under those crows pecking at the wrought-iron arch, up to these two dorms. They’d towered over the cab, blocking the sun, cutting swaths out of the deep blue sky, and when we’d emerged from their shadows at the intersection of Main and August, the sky had opened up again, like unfolded origami. I’d never seen a sky like that before, flat and uninterrupted, miles of what instantly became my favorite sort of blue. Our colors were black and carnelian, but when I thought of Kensington, I thought the blue of the glazed-over lake past North Campus. The blue of Lydia’s eyes, the first day of freshman year. The blue of that sky.
The sky was an umbrella of black-gray now, thick with bluster. I shunted my way through the wind and down the sidewalk, a mess of slush and corrosive greenish salt, until I reached Arthur’s Arch. Red rust glared out at me from the hinges. Slender icicles dangling from the apex of the A trembled with the wind. Everything looked ancient and worn out. I wanted to cling to it, gather it all to my chest. Even the cruel winter.
My eyes stung. I hurried down the drive, hat on and my head bowed, keeping my eyes fixed on the closest lights: the Carrie Café. The sweet orange light of the lantern outside bobbed, rising and falling like a candle on a ship’s prow. As I approached, the lantern’s iron whine mewled into life over the wind.
I shouldered my way in. The door banged hard into its frame, and I wiped my cheeks free of the wet. The café was as quiet as always, the only music a tinkling piano nocturne.
An island occupied the center of the coffeehouse. Rickety tables edged the five walls: The glass front wall looked out on the street, while the other four were white clapboard, covered in framed photographs of a thousand shades, sepia, black-and-white, blue- and gold-framed. Tiny lanterns dangled over every table, making the silvery chairs shine. Every single chair stood empty.
“I’ll be damned. Jordan Sun?” called Carrie from the register. “That you?”
I felt a twinge of guilt. I hadn’t been here since last spring. Walking through the door without Michael felt like walking in naked.
“Hi, Carrie.” I stamped the snow onto the mat in front of the door. It squelched under my feet.
“Really wanted a coffee in the snowstorm, huh? Love the haircut, by the way.”
“Thanks,” I said, injecting life into my voice. “How’s it going?”
“Always fine. Beans. Roasting. You know the drill.” Carrie drummed her fingers on the counter. She was a round, dowdy woman with a carrot-orange braid trailing down her back. She always had the same uniform: army boots and a floral dress. Sometimes with an apron, sometimes with thick woolen leggings, sometimes with a quilted winter coat, but the boots and the dress never budged. Super lesbian, said some of the Kensington kids knowingly, which was funny, since Carrie was married to the guy who worked every other weekend. Not that they actually cared enough to find out. With so many queer kids at Kensington, people sometimes got weirdly comfortable, like they had a free pass to say anything they wanted about sexuality. I guess it was tempting to stick a rainbow-colored “Ally” pin on your backpack and call it a day, as if that were the endpoint, not the starting line.
“What can I make you?” Carrie asked. “How about a Thanksgiving Special?”
“What’s that?”
“Turkey-flavored coffee.”
“Um. What?”
“Messing with you.” She flashed me her bright, yellowing smile. “Hot cider with cinnamon, cube of chocolate on the side. Sound good?”
It sounded like it would have been heaven, if I had a few bucks to spare. “I actually . . . just came in to get out of the wind.”
“Let me make you one anyway.” She winked. “On me.”
I managed a smile, finally approaching the counter. The scales of cold started to fall away from my cheeks and neck. “Thanks, Carrie.”
Carrie rummaged under the counter for a mug, but her shrewd eyes stayed on me. “I haven’t seen you here all year. The second Mike graduates, you ditch me, huh?” She set the mug on the lip of a machine and pulled a silver knob. A line of golden syrup glided down into the porcelain. “Tell him I ain’t impressed, young lady.”
“We, um, we actually broke up. Start of summer.”
Carrie went still. She released the knob and set the mug on the counter. “You did not.”
“Yep.” I couldn’t meet her eyes. I didn’t want advice. I didn’t want sympathy. I’d moved past those phases.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing. We just . . .” I shrugged.
“You don’t shrug off a two-year gig. What happened? Between us.”
I chewed the words. After a long second, Carrie picked up the mug and went back to the ingredient counter. “Forget I said anything. Of course you don’t have to say,” she said gruffly. “Didn’t mean to push you.”
I said it in my head a few times, preparing for the acrid taste the words would leave on my tongue.
“He cheated on me.”
Her movements slowed. “Oh, honey.”
“For three months, with this girl Alaina. They’re both from Seattle. She’s this dancer girl who looks like a model, and she got into Yale, and she’s on the Kensington website now, and her face is just staring out at me every time I need to use Moodle.” The confession poured out of me like hot lead. Staring at the weathered counter, I felt it go cool and dark in the air.
Behind me, the door creaked open, letting in the howl of the wind. It slammed again, but I didn’t flinch. I kept staring at the counter, remembering the sheer number of times we’d stood here side by side. Michael, big as a bear, his hand at the small of my back. Small talk over the register.
With the next customer’s footsteps padding up behind me, I pulled myself together. Carrie had seen me through the insecure hell of freshman year. I would’ve shared anything with her. But I didn’t want to bare my soul in front of some stranger.
Carrie slid a wooden drawer out beneath the counter, unwrapped a cube of chocolate from rose-colored foil, and set it on a saucer. She nestled the mug in the saucer and slid it toward me. When I reached for it, she put her hand on mine. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you are well shot of that. You are too good for that. Hear me?”
I felt a pang, examining the ceiling. “Yeah, well. I’ve got a life to deal with. So forget him.”
“Julian?” said a small, musical voice behind me. “Is everything okay?”
I froze, my lipstick suddenly burning on my mouth. That voice—it couldn’t be her. She was supposed to be back in Boston.
I steeled myself, turned around, and Victoria Taylor’s eyes went wide. Her freckled face was nestled in a thick scarf, and a black-and-carnelian Kensington hat fit low over her straight eyebrows. They drew together as she stared.
“Oh my God,” she breathed.
“Hey, Victoria,” I said, with the charisma of a dead anchovy. “Why are you. Um. Not home?”
“This storm was in Boston on Saturday, so a bunch of flights got cancelled,” she said, eyes fixed unblinkingly on my face. “My new flight’s tomorrow morning. Are you—what is—how—”
I picked up my drink. “Let’s talk. I’ll be over here.”
I headed for the nearest table, steeling myself.
“You know, this is almost a relief, from a 100-percent selfish standpoint.” Victoria stirred her hot chocolate, examining me with bright, curious eyes. “After the dance, I was like, wow, nobody’s ever been that viscerally not into me.”
“I mean.” I cleared my throat. “Not that I wasn’t. Into it. But um. Complications.”
“Right.” She flashed me her cheeky grin. “Alter egos.”
“Yeah. I figured it’d be weird if we, and . . . assuming you’re not into girls . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to seem too curious.
Victoria took a sip of her drink. “Mm, this is good.” She placed the cup on the scratched wood of the table. “Yeah, no,” she said, with a bit of hesitation, “as far as I know, I’m the Measures’ token straight girl.”
Something quieted in me. A lock flicked shut in my chest. I remembered the way my mind had opened wide when she kissed me—all fantasy and imagination and jumping twenty steps ahead. My heart alive, all of a sudden, remembering how to want someone. Not that any of that mattered, when I had less than three weeks left.
I gave her a tired smile. “Well,” I said. “Good to know.”
“So, why are you still on campus?” she asked, a little too brightly. “Are—hang on, are you an international student? Am I making that up?”
“Nah, I’m from San Francisco. My parents are . . .” I trailed off. It would be so easy to make something up. A casual fib, thoughtless. My parents aren’t in the city right now, or I have this project I needed the library to work on. On and on.
“I can’t afford flights back,” I finished. “Or much of anything else, at this point.”
Her composure slipped for a second, showing a glimpse of surprise.
“Sorry,” I said at once. “I just—sorry.”
“Hey. No, it’s okay. Why are you apologizing?”
“I don’t know.” Old habits die hard. I looked down at the table, my throat tight. My heart was beating too hard. I curled my nails into my palms, trying to force out the tension. Get it together.
Victoria examined me as if I were a science fair experiment.
My mouth skewed in a grimace. A strangled sound worked its way out of my throat. I couldn’t get it together. Not this time. Something had cracked deep inside my body, and if I held it in anymore, its edges would shred my insides open.
“It must be hard not to see your family on Thanksgiving,” Victoria said. She sounded uncertain, and it made her younger somehow, hopeful and anxious, a girl I could recognize from her television show. The Family Channel had scripted twelve-year-old Vicky T into a heroine anyone could get behind, all sharp humor when a middle-school bully needed a dose of snark, but warm in her softer moments. I found myself stupidly glad that this version of her hadn’t been fiction.
“It’s not that,” I managed. “They’re making me go.”
I circled my hands over my cheeks, kneaded my temples with my index fingers. God, I could see it. Meeting after meeting. I’d sit in a thousand stiff leather chairs in a thousand tastefully decorated offices of a thousand well-meaning grown-ups, and they would all try to convince me to stay, and I’d have to smile in a chagrined sort of way, saying, “I’ve got to do what’s best for my family.” None of them would know I was fighting back a voice in my head that screamed, I don’t want to go. Don’t make me go. I need this.
Then I’d get on a plane. December 14th, the day after the competition, that useless competition I’d gambled everything on. And I’d never come back.
A hand lit on my shoulder. “Hey,” said Victoria. “Hey. Are you okay? What do you mean, they’re making—”
“I’m not coming back next semester.” I lowered my hands and looked at her. I probably looked like a train wreck. “I have to stay in San Francisco.”
Her hand dropped away. “But what about your spring concert and stuff?”
I gave a hollow laugh. “If my parents say it’s not happening, it’s not happening.”
“And they don’t know about . . .”
“Any of this. No. Course not.”
I cupped my cider mug, letting my hands grow uncomfortably hot. “Victoria?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
She sat still, looking torn.
“Please,” I said, low, intent. “The guys can’t find out. It’s three more weeks. Singing with them is the one thing since June that’s made me feel like—I don’t know. Like I’m going somewhere. Like this wasn’t all for nothing.” This whole process. Class after class, audition after audition, fight after fight with my parents just to stay.
“It’s not for nothing,” Victoria said. “What happens if the Sharps win the competition?”
The question didn’t even feel like it mattered. The whole thing had been a ridiculous dream. I shook my head, studying my hands at the edge of the table.
“You could still do it,” she said quietly. “They pay for the whole thing.”
“I mean, yeah. But then I’ll have to tell my parents.”
“So tell your parents.” Her voice gained strength. “You would have had to anyway. What do you have to lose?”
I met Victoria’s gaze. She didn’t look away, didn’t back down. I saw myself in there, all stubborn conviction, hungry ambition, eyes on the prize.
Tell my parents I’d been posing as a guy in every spare hour since September. Gamble on the chance that they’d let me travel with a group of high school and early-twenties guys. Gamble on our winning the competition in the first place.
When was I going to run out of bets to make?