“Well, I’ll be gone next week,” I said tightly. “So I guess you can’t use that excuse anymore.”
“I know.” Caroline sighed. “Totally sucks.”
Yes—for me. Because I am the one who is MOVING CONTINENTS.
We turned right at an intersection of the cemetery’s paths, and Caroline grabbed my arm. “Oh my God!” she squealed, startling a black bird out of a nearby tree. “You’ll never guess what David told me last night.” She didn’t even pause for breath. “About the movie?”
“What movie?” I adjusted my bag on my shoulder, pulling loose of her grasp.
“A Century Divided! He told me Jamie was in A Century Divided!”
I fidgeted with my watch, unstrapping and restrapping the Velcro band. “Oh?”
Caroline leaned down to me. “Did you know about this?”
I shrugged.
“Oh my God! What is with you and David? You both act like it’s no big deal. Your minds should be blown! We know someone who was in A Century Divided! A Century freaking Divided! It’s only on all the lists of Best Movies Ever.”
I shrugged again. Caroline was turning me into a highly proficient shrugger. “He was only in it for, like, a minute.”
“But it’s the most emotional minute of the whole movie! I’ve seen it at least ten times, and that minute always makes me cry. Always.”
I yanked open a gate, and we walked out of the cemetery. Across the street, I could see the T-Cad’s massive building peeking out from behind a metal fence, and a blue uniformed guard sitting in his windowed booth.
“That was another reason I went home early,” Caroline said. “I had to tell my parents about it. And my sisters. They totally freaked! Do you think it would be weird if I asked Jamie for an autograph? Oh! Do you think he went to the Oscars? The next time I see him, I’m going to make him tell me everything.”
“Good luck with that.” I checked my watch even though I knew exactly what time it was.
Caroline and I showed our ID cards and went through the main gate. The T-Cad always made me think of a secret government organization. It was a compound of buildings, like a military base, secured by a metal fence topped with sharp-eyed security cameras and a guard booth manned twenty-four hours a day.
Caroline had to park her bike, so I was spared further dissection of Jamie’s former acting career as I walked through the parking lot. The T-Cad is made up of three schools—elementary, middle, and high—all built around a central courtyard. As I approached the entrance to the high school, I saw the school’s motto emblazoned over the door: TRAINING GLOBAL CITIZENS TO ENCOUNTER THE WORLD!
“It’s vaguely threatening, isn’t it?” Jamie had said to me once. “It’s like, ‘You will be trained, and then you will encounter the world, and you will DESTROY IT!’”
I shook off the memory and opened a door into a waiting room full of blue couches and coffee tables scattered with college brochures. At the back of the room, another door led to a hallway of school counselors’ offices. I worked in the waiting room, at a computer next to a shelf of SAT-prep books, updating the school website for a few hours a week—changing over semester calendars, uploading pictures of sports games and class trips to Mount Fuji.
It was easy, and the counselors were all really nice to me. Probably because I wasn’t one of the T-Cad rich kids. (We were easy to tell apart. The rich kids had important parents and good haircuts and expensive backpacks. The rest of us wore fake Converse and bought most of our clothes at discount stores.)
I logged in to my computer and got to work on a job-evaluation form.
But I couldn’t concentrate. My thoughts dragged me back to Mika’s kitchen last night, to the light splashed across Jamie’s face as he’d talked about David. Pain bloomed in my chest, the vortex of embarrassment finally sucking me in. It was like I was fourteen again and staring at that awful text for the first time. And even though I’d told him to fuck off, confusion gnawed at me just the way it had back then. (Why did he say that? Didn’t we used to be friends?) The hurt was fresh and brutal. A scar slashed open.
After he’d gone to boarding school, I’d spent a cloud of painful days obsessively checking my e-mail, hoping he’d write to explain everything. To tell me it had all been a big, comical misunderstanding. But he never wrote. And I tried to tell myself it was for the best. That I didn’t actually care about what he’d have to say.
That I’d never care.
Caroline texted to say her day was already boring, and I texted back a smiley-face emoji. I started an e-mail to Dad but quit because I wasn’t sure when he’d get it. (He was on vacation in the south of France with Sylvie and the babies. Whenever he was away, though, I missed hearing about life in Paris—about sitting at my favorite patisserie prepping for his high school physics class or going to Hitchcock movie marathons at the theater near his house.) A new kid came into the waiting room for a school tour and sat on one of the couches, talking on his smartphone in a language I couldn’t understand. Possibly something Scandinavian? Although he must have spoken English as well. T-Cadders were a mixed bunch, but we all had to speak English in class.
The new kid turned to the side, and his profile almost reminded me of Jamie’s…
God. I’d only been working for fifteen minutes, but I already needed air. I went to buy a can of iced coffee from one of the many vending machines in the courtyard. The heat was a blanket weighed down with the croaking of cicadas. I clicked on my countdown and stared at it, imagining each second was something I could grab and flick away. Something I had control over.
When I came back inside, Jamie was in the waiting room, leaning heavily against one of the walls.
I backed into the hallway.
“Sophia?” he said, pushing himself off the wall to walk toward me.