“Fine. We’re fine.” She sounded weary. I didn’t reply. If they’d been fighting, she wouldn’t have told me, anyway. And what did it change, for me to know whether they were in a peace period or a war period?
“I need to make dinner,” Mom said, her voice softening. “Bye. Talk soon, okay?”
“Yeah, I—”
Click.
I dropped my phone, my whole body heavy. At least it wasn’t ever anger with my mom—just anxiety, a nerve-shredding worry on my behalf that made me feel inadequate like nothing else could. Every time I dropped the ball, it made visible cracks in her exterior.
It felt like my parents had been gearing up their entire lives for next fall, my college application season. Last year, I’d read a one-man show for Experimental Playwriting in which a man decides over the course of forty-five minutes whether to press a button that will instantly kill somebody across the world, a random person, in exchange for ten million dollars. If you’d handed my parents that button and told them the reward was my admission to Harvard, I swear to God they would’ve pressed it without a second thought.
And if you asked them why? “Because it’s Harvard.” Conversation over.
In a way, I was lucky that they banked on name recognition. Their faith in the arts as a legitimate career path hovered around zero, so if Kensington hadn’t been nicknamed “the Harvard of the Arts” by everyone from USA Today to the New Yorker, the odds of my going here also would’ve hovered around zero, scholarship or not. I was fourteen when I convinced my parents to let me apply to Kensington, and—when I got the full ride—to come here. I’d cajoled them into it every step of the way. But they would never be happy until I was the best. Here, you were more likely to have several extra limbs than be the best at anything.
I slid off my bed and measured my breaths. Stop thinking about college—stop thinking at all—give your brain a rest. It was always busy in my skull, always noisy, a honking metropolis of detours and preoccupations.
I hunched over my desk, studying my corkboard. There hung a creased picture of my dad and me, his knees leaning crookedly in his wheelchair, one of my hands set on his shoulders. Beside it was a shot of my mother standing on our building’s crumbling stoop, stern and stately, wearing a summer dress with a red and green print. The pictures were three years old. They seemed to be from a separate lifetime. Before Kensington, before the fighting, before Michael, a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror, every layer of difference adding a degree of warp.
The corner of a stray picture glinted to the side, snagged behind a family photo. I swiveled it into sight and yanked my fingers back. The image of Michael’s face made something clench in my chest. His dark eyes peered out at me accusingly.
Why did I even have that? I could’ve sworn I’d put all those pictures in the garbage, where he belonged.
The flare of hurt withered into disgust. Three months, and I was still circling the carcass of our relationship like an obsessive buzzard. The worst thing about breakups was the narcissism that trailed after them, the absolute swallowing self-centeredness. Every movie about heartbreak had turned into my biopic. Every sentence about aloneness, every song lyric about longing, had morphed into a personal attack.
I snatched the photo down, crumpled it, and chucked it across the room at the trash can. It missed, landing beneath the open window. The dark ridges of the balled-up photo shone. Outside, a yellowing harvest moon was rising over the treetops.
I approached the window, flicked the scrap of glossy paper into place, and gazed through the glass at the moon. For a second I lost myself in the sight. For a second I could breathe clearly, the first instant of clarity since that morning.
Kensington was beautiful through everything. When I didn’t have anything else, I had this castle in the countryside, this oasis, this prize I’d snared. Some days it was a diamond, and I almost couldn’t understand how lucky I was to have stumbled upon it. And other days it was a living thing, trying desperately to free itself from me.
“What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a nunnery!” Lydia jabbed an accusatory finger at me as she approached. “How full of questions! Prithee no more, Hellena; I have told thee more than thou understand’st already.” Lydia Humphreys, my ex-roommate, had a football-helmet-shaped bob of platinum blonde hair and a voice that bounced off the amphitheater steps like a solid object.
I flashed a coy smile and sauntered backward. “The more’s my grief. I would fain know as much as you, which makes me so inquisitive. Nor is it enough to know you are a lover, when . . .” I grimaced and rewound. “To know you are a lover, when . . . shit.”
“Should I start again?” Lydia said, drifting out of character.
“I don’t think it’ll help. I’m so sorry, I should know these.”
She waved it off. “It’s a short scene. We have until Friday.”
“Yeah. I’ll get it together. Sorry.”
“Really, it’s fine,” Lydia said. I hunted her freckled face for a trace of displeasure and came up empty. She looked mild and unbothered, but then again, she always looked mild and unbothered. Lydia had grown up with her grandparents and inherited all of her grandmother’s mild, unbothered facial expressions. When she took the stage, her face full of life and outrage, she was unrecognizable.
I drifted into a sitting position on the rough stone of the amphitheater stage, eyeing the graduated rings that rippled up and out from us. Weeks at Kensington-Blaine all followed the same trajectory, a sine curve of stress that peaked on Wednesday afternoons. You got the sense, Wednesdays, that even if the Gods of Time came down from on high and magically inserted eighty-two extra hours into that evening, finishing your work would be a stretch. But I needed to find time somewhere to memorize this, get it into my muscles. If you had to think about your lines, you weren’t doing it right.
This past weekend’s audition had put a permanent twist in my focus. Since my conversation with Reese, whenever I talked, I resented my voice. What did you do with a problem you couldn’t solve?