I’m at my desk finishing up the studies for Mom’s sculpture, really working for a likeness. I’m going to show them to Guillermo tomorrow. Noah’s sleeping it off. Oscar’s long gone. I’m certain the magic seashell—his most beloved possession, he’d said!—around my neck radiates joy. I thought about calling Fish from school, dying to tell someone—someone among the living, for a change—about the seashell, about the photographs and sticky notes too, about everything that’s going on, but then I remembered it’s winter break and the dorms are closed (I’m one of a few people who don’t board), it’s the middle of the night, and we’re not really friends. But maybe we should be, I’m thinking. Maybe I need an alive friend badly. Sorry, Grandma. Someone to discuss how when Oscar and I were outside on the front step, just now, the two of us breathing and pulsing inches from each other, I thought for sure he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t, and I don’t know why. He didn’t even come in, which I guess is good, because he probably would’ve figured out that I’m still in high school. He was surprised I lived at home. He said, “Oh, I assumed you lived on campus. Did you stay to take care of your little brother after your mother died?”
I changed the subject. But I know I have to tell him and I will. About overhearing some of the fight with Guillermo too. Very shortly, I will be a girl without any secrets.
Feeling okay about the sketches, I close the pad and sit down at the sewing table. There’s no way I can sleep, not after everything that happened today and tonight, with Oscar, with Noah, with Zephyr, with the ghosts, and anyway, I want to get started on the smock I’m going to make for Guillermo out of floating dress scraps. I rummage through my bag for the old smock of his I swiped to use for a pattern. I start blocking it out on the table, and as I do, I feel something in the front pocket. I reach in and pull out a couple notepads. I leaf through one. Just notes and lists in Spanish, sketches, the usual. Nothing in English, nothing for Dearest. I flip through the second, much of the same, except then, in English and most definitely for Dearest, three drafts of the same note, each with slight variations, like he was intent on getting it right. Maybe he was going to send it as an email? Or in a card? Or with a black velvet box with a ring inside it.
The one with the least cross-outs:
I can no longer do this. I need to know an answer. I cannot live without you. I am half a man, with half a body, half a heart, half a mind, half a soul. There is only one answer, you know this. You must know this by now. How can you not know? Marry me, my love. Say yes.
I fall into my chair. She said no. Or maybe he never asked her. Either way, poor Guillermo. What did he say today? What is bad for the heart is good for art. Clearly, this was very bad for his heart and very good for his art. Well, I’m going to make him the most beautiful smock to make his art in. I sort through my bag of scraps for reds, oranges, purples, heart colors.
I start sewing the pieces together.
I have no idea how long the knocking’s been going on when it dawns on me that the noise I’m hearing isn’t coming from my sewing machine acting up but from someone at the window. Oscar? Did he take a risk on the only lit-up window in the house? It has to be him. A second later, I’m at the mirror, shaking my head a little to wake up my hair, then a lot to make it wild. I reach into the top drawer of my dresser and grab the reddest lipstick I have. Yes, I want to. I also want to take one of the prize dresses off the wall and put it on—The Gravity Dress maybe?—and then, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
“One sec,” I holler at the window.
I hear Oscar say, “Rightio.”
Rightio!
I’m standing before the full-length mirror in The Gravity Dress, my response to The Floating Dress. It’s a coral-colored, tight-fitting mermaid shape that flares and ruffles at the bottom. No one has ever seen me in it or in any of the dresses I’ve made over the last couple years. Including me. I make them all to fit my form but envision them for another girl, always thinking if someone opened my closet, they’d be certain there were two of us living in this room and they’d want to be friends with the other one.
There you are, I think, and it hits me. So she’s the one I’ve been designing for all along without realizing it. If I ever have a line of dresses like Grandma, I’m calling it: That Girl.
I cross the room, part the curtains, and slide open the window.
He does a double take. “Oh my God,” he exclaims. “Look at you. Bloody look at you. You’re stunning. And this is how you dress when you’re all alone in the middle of the night? And in potato sacks when you’re out in broad daylight?” He smiles his haywire smile. “I think you might very well be the most eccentric person I’ve ever met.” He puts his hands on the windowsill. “But that’s not what I’ve come to say. I was halfway home and I remembered something very important I needed to tell you.”
He gestures with his index finger for me to come closer. I bend down and lean out the window into the night. I feel the soft breeze in my hair.
His face has grown serious.
“What is it?” I ask.
“This.” So quickly I don’t see it coming he reaches both his hands around my head and kisses me.
I pull back for a moment, wondering if I can trust him, because I’d be crazy to. But what if I do? What if I just do? And you know, if he exhales me to kingdom come, so be it—
This is when it happens. Perhaps it’s the moonlight spilling down, alighting his features from above that does it, or maybe it’s the glow of my bedroom light on his face just so, or maybe it’s that I’m finally ready to see it, what’s been eluding me since the moment we first met.
He modeled for Noah.
Oscar’s the guy in the portrait.
He’s him.
And this is exactly like I always imagined it.
I lean back out again into the night. “I gave up practically the whole world for you,” I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. “The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you.”
Bafflement crosses his face, quickly followed by delight. Quickly followed by both of my hands reaching for him, pulling him to me, because he’s him, and all the years of not noticing and not doing and not living are breaking through the dam of the moment until I’m kissing him hungrily, wanting my hands on his body, and I’m reaching for him, and he me, and his fingers are knotting in my hair and before I know it I’m all the way out the window and toppling him to the ground.
“Man overboard,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms and we’re laughing and then the laughing dies out because who knew kissing could be like this, could so alter the landscape within, tipping over oceans, sending rivers up mountains, unpouring the rain.
He rolls us over so his body is pressing into mine, the weight of him, the weight of that other day, and Zephyr begins elbowing his way between us. My muscles tense. I open my eyes, afraid of the unseeing stranger I’ll find this time, but I don’t find a stranger. It’s Oscar, present, so present, with love in his face. That’s how come I trust him. You can see love. It looks like this face. To me, it has always looked like this crazy mismatched face.
He touches my cheek with his thumb, says, “It’s okay.” Like he somehow knows what happened.
“You sure?”
Around us the trees rustle softly.
“One hundred percent sure.” He gently tugs at the seashell. “Promise.”
The night’s warm, shy, barely touching our skin. It envelops us, entwines us. He kisses me slowly, tenderly, so that my heart creaks open, so that all those moments on the beach from that horrid, horrid day wash away, so that, just like that, the boycott comes to an end.