29
meg
I called John twice before Shia and I came back to the Ritz. He didn’t answer, and I couldn’t just barge into the room with Shia and wake John up. So while we waited for John to come back to life, Shia and I hung out in the hotel’s Club Room, and I somehow found a way to eat more food. The room was actually three rooms, one with an extravagant lunch display set out across a huge banquet table. Meats, cheeses, little finger sandwiches made from cheeses I had never heard of. They had fruit cut into shapes and grapes on sticks.
The other two rooms were for sitting. I couldn’t count how many couches and recliners filled the space. Inside these rooms, time hadn’t moved forward in a while. I didn’t know what year the decor was supposed to be representing, but it was definitely sometime when people loved floral-print everything. Shia and I found ourselves a nice four-person table in the corner, next to a flatscreen TV that had to be at least fifty inches.
Shia moved a cracker around his plate and scooped some hummus onto it. I didn’t know anyone else who loved hummus. I smiled thinking about how Amy once called it “rich people food,” and Jo told her to shut up and google something for once in her life.
“How long are you staying here in this hotel? It’s nice, right?” Shia popped the entire cracker into his mouth. He chewed quietly; all that fancy Southern table training came in handy. I took an etiquette course on post when I was twelve, but Shia was groomed since birth to be a gentleman.
“One more night,” I said, the bottom of my throat on fire. I reached for my water and finished answering his question. “And, yeah, I would say so. Look at this space.” My eyes bounced around the room and Shia’s followed.
“You do love shiny things.”
I snapped my gaze back to him. “And what is that supposed to mean?” My annoyance barely held behind the corners of my smiling mouth.
He shrugged.
I looked around the room and focused on the hotel employee who was relining the table he had just cleaned with a fresh, crisp white tablecloth.
“Just saying. Do you not?” Shia challenged me. I saw his eyes flicker from the powder scattered across the chest of my dress.
“Not all of us want to throw away our trust funds and not go to college.” Shia’s eyes bulged and his knee hit the table before I registered that I had really said that.
Were we fighting?
I had just started a fight, I knew it, but sometimes that was the only way we communicated. What I had just said felt much more personal and a splash too harsh for our usual banter. Such banter didn’t entail fighting normally; it was mostly calling each other out on our crap, but it never felt malicious, no matter how many times I told my sisters I hated him.
“Throw away? You literally have no idea what you’re talking about. But you just stay up there on that pedestal, Meg. I had a call this morning with my friend in Cambodia, and she told me she removed two girls in one month from a whorehouse with the money we raised for her. One of the girls was twelve—the same age as Amy—and had been a sex slave for three years.”
My stomach twisted.
He continued, “What have you done? Beside paint my mom’s face on and take her dogs for walks?”
I sat there taking in every single word he said and stirred it and stirred it until my phone rang on the table between us.
I somehow found my voice. “I better get that,” I said, biting my tongue.
John’s name flashed across the screen and I swiped to answer. He told me he had just woken up, and when I mentioned Shia, John said he was going to work out in the gym, take a shower, then meet us.
When I hung up, Shia laughed, but it wasn’t snarky. “Work out? He just doesn’t stop.”
“He’s been in a routine.” I thought he would have at least asked me to come back to the room while he showered, or to tag along with him to the gym.
“Yeah.”
Shia looked up at the TV and rolled his eyes at the screen. “Our country is—”
“Don’t start the political talk. I need more coffee.” I groaned. He was like Jo: when you got them going, they didn’t stop. I admired it most of the time, even though I wasn’t as involved as they were, but not today. My mind went to the twelve-year-old girl in Cambodia. I tried to remember if Jo’s essay was about the same place . . .
“Fine. How’s everything going with you? Did you enroll in that makeup course yet?”
I instantly wanted to press rewind. I shook my head and took another drink of water. “No. Not yet.”
“Why? It’s coming up, in what—May?”
That he remembered that blew my mind.
Of course he did, the honest part of my brain countered.
“Yeah. I’m sure it’s full now. The summer will be busy for me anyway.”
I didn’t know why I’d put off signing up for the course. I’d met an artist when he came into Sephora for the launch of a brand. He told me about a course he was going to in Los Angeles in the summer. The person teaching it was a celebrity makeup artist, and she was supposedly the master of the newest techniques. I wasn’t technically trained as an artist and the course would give me a little more credibility, but it was all the way across the country, and expensive.
“Are those reasons or excuses?” That was one of Shia’s favorite things to ask about anything, from the reason I didn’t return his calls to life choices.
“Both.”
“What’s going on, Meg?”
I fidgeted in my chair and looked around the room. It was much less crowded than when we first arrived. Only four or five people were in the room, and one was an old man who had fallen asleep sitting quite rigidly on the couch with his glasses resting on the tip of his nose.
“With what? It’s just a makeup course.” I shrugged and drank the last little bit of my water.
Shia had stopped eating, and a server came by to clear our plates. I held on to the crostini on my plate, but Shia had them take his away. He tipped her, too, and I wondered how many people I was supposed to tip but didn’t since we arrived. The bellman? The valet? The concierge when they drop off John’s clean uniform in the morning?
“In life. You’re not taking the course you talked about for weeks. And you’re working for my mom, of all people?” Shia dragged out the sentence like he needed me to really listen to what he was saying.
“She pays me well. More than my other job.”
He had a different relationship with Mrs. King than I did, and no matter how intimidating she was to me, I could only hope to be like her one day. She was everything I wanted to be.
“And you’re doing what for her? Long term? Where is that going to get you?”
I didn’t respond, so he kept going. He did soften his voice so it didn’t escalate the way it could have. “My mom said you’re trying to marry John. Is that true?”
“She said that?” The burning in my throat spread up to my ears and cheeks.
“Not literally. But she hinted. She was saying how we could throw you a big engagement party.”
He paused, but I didn’t think he was done talking. I interrupted him anyway. “Like your engagement party?”
He sighed and lifted the bottom of his T-shirt up to wipe his face. A line of his skin peeked out and I looked at my plate. I wanted to look at him, but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“A little like mine. But more romantic, more real, I think.”
“Mm-hmm.” I sat back against the cushioned back of my chair. I didn’t know how romantic my engagement party would be or why Shia was hinting that his wasn’t real, but I didn’t want to play this game. A different woman came by with a pitcher of water and filled my drink.
I swished an ice cube around in my mouth, and he sat forward.
“So that’s it? We’re just going to pretend like we have nothing to talk about?”
“You mean your engagement?”
He shook his head. “No. I meant you. What happened to you having to get the hell out of here?”
“I’m still planning on leaving.”
He licked his lips. “When?”
“Soon. I don’t know. My dad’s gone, and Jo hasn’t even graduated yet. I can’t just leave them. I’m working and saving my money.”
The sleeping old man from the couch was now up and moving, searching through a basket of potato-chip bags on the counter under the TV closest to us.
“Soon, huh?” Shia asked.
I was so annoyed that I felt like my anger was going to stain the upholstered chair under me with blotchy black streaks. “What’s your problem? Why are you starting shit with me?”
“I’m not. I’m just wondering why you’ve changed your whole plan around, and now what? You’re looking at whatever base John’s gonna be stationed at?”
His response reminded me of his speech right before I was supposed to meet him last fall. Winter had come since and now we were on the verge of spring.
“Seriously, Meg. You’re nineteen. You have so much time to do your own thing before you become a—”
“Stop.” I held my hand up. “Don’t try to lecture me. You’re engaged, Shia.”
“Why do you keep repeating that? Does that have something to do with you, Meg? I thought I was delusional and made us all up in my head? So if that’s true, why do you keep bringing my engagement up?”
He had me there. I didn’t want to talk about the day we blew up whatever scraps of a relationship we had and now had this awkward, barely speaking faux-ship going on that scratched at my skin. I didn’t want things to be so muddled between us. Arguing with Shia usually made me bloom with laughter and feel a little spark on the tip of my tongue, but as I sat here in the fancy Club Room in the luxurious Ritz-Carlton in the famous French Quarter in New Orleans, it felt like wading through a thick vat of maple syrup.
“Oh, don’t hold your tongue now,” he said after we stared at each other for a minute.
The old man walked away with three bags of salt-and-pepper chips and a bottle of Coke tucked under his arm.
I told a little seed of truth: “I didn’t say you were delusional.”
He laughed without a sound. “Yes, you did. You told Reeder a really, really not-true story about us. You’ve been telling yourself that same story?” he asked, but he wasn’t asking.
“What was I supposed to say? I don’t want any drama in our group. You shouldn’t either. So I said what I needed to say to clear myself.”
“It’s always about you, isn’t it—and who’s ‘our group’? No one talks to me while I’m gone. No one talks to John either, except me, and even that’s not often. There doesn’t have to be drama. I’m not River.”
My pulse shot through the roof of the Club Room.
Shia kept going. “I wouldn’t have been pissed at you for not coming with me. That’s your choice and your life. But it would have been nice if you could have just told me you weren’t coming to the airport. I would have understood if you would have just told me. Been honest with me.” He cupped his hands together and moved them slowly.
“I thought I was being honest. I thought I could be like Jo for once and just jump on a plane and leave without a plan.”
In a flat voice he said, “We had a plan. It was literally a planned trip with my dad’s foundation.”
“You know what I mean.” His sarcastic semantics weren’t going to get us anywhere. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you”—I remembered just how hard I left him hanging—“until you landed.”
“I’m not ma—”
“Well, well, well, look who it is!” John suddenly exclaimed by our side, patting Shia on the back. His hair was wet, so he must have showered, but he couldn’t have worked out so fast.
And just like that, they were bros and hugging and their smiles were so big and so fake, I could spot the insincerity a mile away.