8
Before
I had no friends in tenth grade.
Okay, that’s dramatic. I had friends. I didn’t eat lunch alone on a toilet seat or anything. Mostly, I just didn’t eat lunch. I went to the library. I hung out on the bleachers and read. When I did go to the cafeteria, I sat with Shelby, the new hostess at the restaurant. Shelby was a junior; she’d just moved from Tucson with her mom and her twin brother, Aaron, although he’d only needed about two days in the pestilent swamp of South Florida to decide there was absolutely no way he could ever live here. He’d fled to New Hampshire to live with their dad before school had even started. Shelby had hair like a flaming neon carrot and a mouth like a merchant marine; she wore tiny silver hoops all up the side of her left ear and was dating the captain of the girls’ soccer team. I’d automatically assumed she thought I was too boring to breathe air until the day she plopped her tray right next to mine and demanded to know what was up with the food in this godforsaken place like maybe we’d been friends all our lives.
“It sucks,” I told her, blinking in grateful surprise. “That’s … basically what’s up.”
Shelby grinned, handed me half the Kit Kat she was unwrapping. “Looks that way.”
She was giving me a ride to work one afternoon, nineties girl rock blaring from the speakers in her decrepit Volvo wagon as she pulled out of the parking lot, when she snorted and gestured out the windshield with her chin. “Is that the bartender?” she asked, squinting a little. “From the restaurant?”
I followed her gaze to the side of the building, half hidden by a row of dry, browning shrubs: In the shadow cast by the overhang above the side door of the gym, Allie and Sawyer were pressed against the concrete, his palm sliding steadily up her skirt.
“Yeah,” I said slowly. For a second it felt hard to breathe, like there was something unfamiliar taking up space in my chest beside my heart and lungs. “Yeah, that’s him.”
“People gettin’ at it in broad daylight,” Shelby said brightly, pulling out into traffic. “That’s how you know the terrorists haven’t won.” Then she looked at me, her pale eyebrows knitting together. “What?” she asked. “Shit, sorry. Are you one of those people who’s really sensitive about terrorist jokes?”
That made me laugh. “I’m not particularly sensitive about anything,” I lied, glancing out the window for another half a second before tilting my head up to stare at the fat, heavy clouds.
*
The year ground on in that way—Halloween, Thanksgiving. I finally got my learner’s permit. I spent a whole lot of time with my journal. Soledad watched me carefully, cataloging the narrowing parameters of my teenage life like an anthropologist conducting a field study: school, work, home. Rinse, repeat. I didn’t tell her about Allie and Sawyer—never told her about Allie and me—but that didn’t stop her from knowing. “Do you want to talk about this?” she asked me once, Saturday night and three episodes into a Bridezillas marathon on cable.
I shrugged like I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant. “Talk about what?” I wondered blandly.
Soledad rolled her eyes.
*
I called Allie once, for the record. She didn’t pick up, and I didn’t leave a message.
Also for the record: She didn’t call me back.
The answer, I always thought, was to get out of town. I’d always liked to read about foreign places—I’d been getting National Geographic since I was ten—but that winter I was absolutely insatiable, camped out on my bed surrounded by travel books from the library, their cellophane jackets sticky with dust. I plotted. I made lists. I stayed up all night clicking through blog after blog, stories and pictures of women who spent years in Morocco and Tanzania and the South of France—then mapped my own itinerary, tracing my route with a silver Sharpie like some kind of imaginary Silk Road.
I wanted so, so badly to leave.
“Where you going tonight?” my father asked me one evening, hovering in the doorway of my bedroom, tonic and lime in his hand. He’d been playing the piano downstairs, and somewhere in my head I’d dimly registered the quiet, the way you notice the dishwasher kicking off.
“Chicago,” I told him cheerfully, looking up from the pictures of Oak Park on my laptop. He’d had a heart attack a couple of years before, my father, collapsing in the parking lot outside my eighth-grade graduation; I tried to be cheerful with him whenever I could. “Or possibly Copenhagen.”
“Chicago’s a pretty good music town,” he told me, nodding like he was thinking about it, like it was a place I might actually be headed. “You might want to lay over in the kitchen first, though. Soledad’s making pesto.”
I smiled and closed my computer, rolled myself off the bed. “Be right there.”
*
One morning that spring I got a note in homeroom saying I needed to go to Guidance by the end of the day, which left me feeling startled and uneasy. I’d never been called to the office before. I wondered if I was in trouble for something I didn’t know I’d done, or if some well-meaning Samaritan had expressed concern about my ability to cope with the tyranny of high school in general. “We’ve noticed you’re socially inept,” I pictured the counselor saying, her jowly face tilted to the side to show how well she was listening. “You stare out the window constantly. You’re obsessive, and you spend too much time in your own brain.”
“No kidding,” I imagined replying, hitching my backpack up on one shoulder and heading down the hall toward English. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
I spent all morning with a hard little knot of anxiety lodged someplace in my middle, then knocked tentatively on the door of the office at the beginning of my lunch period. The air smelled like coffee and dust. I was expecting to meet with Mrs. Ortum, the older, slightly daffy-looking counselor who’d run all our ninth-grade seminars and whose husband, apparently, had made a hundred million dollars in tech stocks, but in her place was a dark-haired young woman I’d never seen before, a little plaque printed with MS. BOWEN on the desk.
“Hi, Serena,” she said, smiling warmly. “Come on in.” I had no idea how she knew who I was, but she was pretty and smart-looking in a way that immediately made me want to please her. I found myself smiling back.
“You’re not in trouble,” she said, as soon as I was seated. The sleeves of her starchy white button-down were rolled halfway up her arms. “Everybody I’ve had in here so far keeps thinking they’re in trouble.” She picked up a file folder, tapped it against her desk for a moment. Reading upside down, I could see that it contained my transcripts. “I’m new here, so I’m just kind of going through my lists and trying to get to know everyone I can.”
She asked me how my classes were going and if I had an after-school job, taking notes on a yellow legal pad as I answered as vaguely as possible. A bright turquoise costume ring glittered on the middle finger of her left hand. There was a carafe of water on the desk beside her, the fancy kind we used at the restaurant, with round slices of lemon floating inside. It seemed weirdly glamorous for school. Most of the faculty carried plastic travel mugs with bank logos on them.
“Have you given much thought yet to college?” she asked finally, sitting back in her uncomfortable-looking chair and gazing at me shrewdly. She’d put the pen and paper back down on the desk.
“A little,” I told her, which was a lie. In fact, I thought about college constantly, of where I might go and the people I might meet there. There was, at this very moment, a course catalog from Northwestern on my desk at home so well-thumbed it was basically falling apart, the writing program bookmarked with a neon yellow Post-it. I could have recited their arts and sciences requirements from memory. “But I’m only a sophomore, so I figured I had some time.”
“Well,” Ms. Bowen said, “that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been looking at your records, Serena, and they’re really impressive. A 4.0 GPA every semester you’ve been here, straight honors track since last year. I’d like to see you participating in an extracurricular or two, but the fact is that if you stay on this track, keep taking those APs and doing well on them, you could be eligible for graduation a full year early.” She leaned forward a bit, almost conspiratorial. She looked excited for me. “Is that something you might be interested in working toward?”
It took me a minute to absorb that information. A full year early. Eligible for graduation. I stared at her for a moment, blinking; in the outer office I could hear the sounds of the copier jamming, an assistant’s frustrated dang.
Ms. Bowen took my hesitation as reluctance; she cocked her glossy head to the side, the same sympathetic pose I’d imagined earlier. “Of course, you certainly don’t have to,” she amended. “I know plenty of students who wouldn’t want to miss out on being a senior, and everything that goes with it. I just wanted to let you know that you had the opt—”
“I’d love to,” I interrupted quickly. I thought of airplanes and huge, drafty lecture halls, locks on cages springing free. “What do you need me to do?”
*
What Ms. Bowen needed me to do was pretty simple, at least for the time being: keep doing well in my classes, make a list of the schools I wanted to apply to, and get myself an SAT study book. “We’ll find you some volunteer work for the summer,” she promised, eyes shining like maybe she was just as excited about the prospect of pulling this off as I was. “Beef up your transcripts a bit.”
*
In May, two of the waitresses quit, so on top of the extra studying I worked like a demon, three nights a week and then doubles every weekend. I lived in black pants and a starchy white shirt. My father and Roger bought Antonia’s when I was a little girl and I’d been waiting tables just about that long, knew the menu and the regulars all by heart. The truth is, I’d always liked being there: the place all tin ceiling and subway tiles, white linen tablecloths like a hundred communion dresses. There was always a band set up by the bar.
The guys playing tonight were some of my favorites, a quasi-ridiculous oldies ensemble who covered a lot of Sam Cooke, and I sang along under my breath while I zipped a couple of credit cards through the computer beside the bar. Sometime during the second verse I realized I wasn’t alone: Sawyer was leaning against the hatch and watching me, a wry, secret smile on his face.
I snapped my jaw shut, blushing and surprised: Sawyer wasn’t even working tonight. He hadn’t been on the schedule. I hadn’t done anything nice to my hair. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, street clothes. He was giving off the heat from outside. “Don’t tease,” I ordered, bouncing back after a minute, trying like hell not to let on that my feelings for him hadn’t let up even a little, though he’d been dating Allie for more than seven months. “It’s not nice.”
Sawyer shrugged and just kept standing, like he had no place in the world to be other than here. “I’m not teasing,” he told me, and in truth, he didn’t actually seem to be. “‘Bring It On Home to Me’? That’s a good song.”
“That’s a great song,” I corrected, and he grinned.
“You sound like your dad.”
“Nah. He likes Otis Redding.” I tore a receipt out of the printer, smiled back. “What are you doing here?”
Sawyer tilted his head. “Looking for you.”
“Right.” I snorted, slipping the cards back into the billfolds. “Your mom was floating around earlier.” Lydia wasn’t super involved in the day-to-day running of the restaurant, though her fingerprints were everywhere if you knew where to look: the formal antique portraits affixed to the doors of the restrooms, the Edison bulbs hanging above the bar. Lydia was an artist herself, a photographer, but her family had made a fortune with a chain of successful steak houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and she probably had a better head for the food business than either Roger or my dad. She’d turn up from time to time, watchful, an expression on her face like she was working out secret sums in her mind. The busboys were all terrified of her; Shelby called her Dragon Lady behind her back. I tried to stay out of her way.
The one person Lydia never seemed to turn her cool, eagle-eyed artist’s scrutiny on was Sawyer. He was her only son, her Best Beloved: He’d had surgery when he was a baby to repair a literal hole in his heart, a fact Allie and I had always thought was enormously, unbearably romantic, and as long as I’d known Lydia she’d been ferociously protective of him. “She probably makes you have a blood test before you’re allowed to be his girlfriend,” Allie’d hypothesized at my house late one night, both of us dissolving into giggles—not that it seemed to have stopped her, in the end.
I was about to head back toward the floor when Sawyer reached out and grabbed me by the wrist. “Reena.” There was something urgent and unexpected about the way he said it, like he’d almost told me a secret and then changed his mind. “Why don’t I ever see you around anymore?”
I blinked at him, disbelieving. He was still holding on to my arm. “Maybe I’m better at hiding than you thought.”
Sawyer took just long enough to answer that I was sure he had no idea what I was talking about: It had been a long time since that night in Allie’s yard, after all, and he’d probably forgotten it immediately. I was about to back-pedal when he smiled. “Maybe,” he said, letting go but not moving away at all. “But I’m serious.”
“Yeah, well.” I felt my eyebrows arc. “Me, too.”
“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.
I cocked my head, glanced around. The band had segued into “It’s All Right.” I could see my father talking to a couple of regulars at the other end of the bar. “Working?” I said.
Sawyer rolled his eyes at me. “Thank you, princess. I mean after that.”
“Going home?”
“Come hang out.”
“With you?” I blurted, and Sawyer smirked, lazy as the Cheshire cat disappearing from the tree.
“Yeah, Reena. With me.”
In all the years I had known him—and I’d known him, more or less, since I was born—Sawyer had never once asked me to go anywhere. It took me a second to recover. Still, I shook my head like an instinct, like something I knew in my gut. I thought of the party at Allie’s, Lauren Werner and the crowds of people I didn’t know how to navigate. “Listen, Sawyer. Allie and I don’t really …” I trailed off, tried again, wondered what she’d told him. “I mean, we’re not so much … hanging out.”
Sawyer frowned, and there was that expression again, like he’d come here to tell me something specific. “I didn’t mean with Allie,” he said.
Oh.
“Oh,” I said. I looked at him for a moment, then back over at my father with his coffee and his grin. “Sawyer—”
“Come on, Reena,” he said, already slightly impatient. I got the feeling this was all the convincing he was going to try to do. “It’s just me.”
I thought of Allie and of valuables gone missing: of lip gloss slipped in pockets and crushes filched right out from under your nose. No matter how I tried to justify it, this was a capital crime of friendship. It was treason, even if she’d done it first.
“Yeah,” I said. Behind me the music was ending, one final chord and the crash of a snare. “Yeah, I can hang out.”