I hesitated a moment, maybe longer, before considering the hour and the darkness and that steady feeling of fear that had slowly begun to encroach upon me before he had appeared, my savior, or so it seemed. And so I followed him, out of my circle of light—of safety, I could not help but think—wondering what it was that I had traded in the process, one unknown for the other. But then, only several feet away, stood the promised group of friends, huddled around a taxi. Packing in together, our bodies pressed tightly against one another, with one of the girls forced to sit on the lap of one of the boys, I listened as they laughed and joked with one another, this group of friends that I had been so hesitant to join at first. There was Sally, an art history major at a college in New York, who was planning to spend the summer in Venice, and Andrew, who wanted to follow his father’s footsteps and become an English professor. There was another girl whose name I couldn’t remember but who was all smiles and laughter, mainly aimed in Andrew’s direction.
And then there was the boy I had met first, and whose name was Thomas, Tom for short, and who was the most reserved now, in his circle of friends, though he smiled and listened to them as they spoke. I felt a sudden ache as we pulled away from the station, watching the friendship that existed among those in the group, evident in the easy, casual way they had with one another. It was so different from my own strange little twosome that I had formed with Lucy, which all at once seemed odd and lonely in comparison.
I had found our closeness thrilling at first, but as the years had begun to pass, I had come to feel that for everything I told Lucy, she somehow managed to absorb the information without ever giving back any of her own. Initially I had put it down to shyness, convinced that she, like me, was simply unused to living so closely with another person. Confidences would come eventually, I told myself, in the beginning. I would only have to be patient. But then, it was the holidays, and we were off for home and then back again, and away once more for the summer, and still, I had learned so little about the girl who was closer to me than anyone else I had ever known, who knew all my secrets: each and every little one.
But then, no, I corrected myself: girl wasn’t the right word. Lucy was a woman—she dressed liked one, acted like one, she even walked like one. Secretly, I had always believed it was down to the loss of one’s virginity, as if the act of copulation would somehow bestow upon one a sudden sense of maturity, as if that one act had the power to dispel the insecurities and worries that plagued most girls from the start of puberty. It was nonsense, of course. I was convinced that Lucy had never so much as kissed another human being, and yet she dressed, acted like, and walked the way I wanted to—with confidence, with control, as if she were entirely certain of who she was.
Covet. It was a peculiar word. One I tended to associate with long, dull lectures on Hawthorne and other early American writers from the Puritan age. I had to look it up once, as part of an essay I had been forced to write in school. What I found was: to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others. There were other definitions. More words, different words, although all of them meant the same thing. But it was that first part that had stayed with me: to desire wrongfully.
It struck me as strangely beautiful and yet frighteningly accurate.
The feelings I felt toward Lucy, I often thought, were something like this—something sharper than a normal friendship, something that I felt threatened to overwhelm and, quite possibly, destroy. There were moments when I had thought that I did not so much want her as wanted to be her. The two feelings were so strong and so opposite, yet they continued to merge and mingle until I was no longer able to tell one from the other. I coveted the easy way she had, and I desired that: her way of being. I wanted it for my own. And there were days when I almost felt it—when, emboldened by her nonchalance at the world that, already, even in my young years, seemed so cruel, I was able to withstand the shadows, the anxiety that so often plagued me. And so there were days when I never wanted to part from her, when I felt that my whole being depended upon my close connection with her. And there were days when I hated her, resenting myself, resenting her, for this reliance, this symbiotic relationship that we had formed—though on the darkest days I wondered whether it really was, whether there was anything that I had to offer her, and whether what she offered me wasn’t more a crutch than a benefit. Lately I had struggled more with the strangeness of our relationship, as I was never able to explain it fully, not even to myself, and sitting in the back of that taxi, surrounded by this easy, carefree group of friends, I was struck once more by the need to be able to, to understand it all before it threatened to overwhelm me, totally and completely.
PILED INTO THE PROMISED CAR, Tom’s friends reluctant to abandon him to the back roads of Vermont, we made the final leg of the journey in silence.
Once at Bennington, it was with something near regret that I eventually left them, dismayed to find that the thought of returning to my room, to Lucy, had since grown terribly dim.
“Wait.”
I turned and found the boy with the leather elbow patches, Tom, I reminded myself, running toward me. He leaned over, taking the suitcase from my grasp. “Let me carry it for you.” And so he walked me back to my room, made sure that I was able to get in safely, setting my suitcase beside my bed as he gazed around the space. I wondered what it was that he saw reflected there: in the hopelessly childish duvet that adorned my bed, a ghastly shade of pink and white that my aunt had purchased in a misguided attempt to welcome her new ward into an adult home, at the embarrassing effort that I had made to decorate my side of the room, various sketches tacked to the wall. He paused at the map on Lucy’s side of the room, studying, or so it seemed, the numerous pins that we had once placed there. A silly game we played with some intensity our first year, when the newness of our relationship had made anything seem possible.
And then he moved to the row of photographs that I had taped above my dresser.
I had signed up for a design class on a lark that fall, and the instructor, a working photographer who spent a few days out of the week in Vermont and the rest in New York City, had been encouraged by several photography enthusiasts in the class to erect a makeshift darkroom on campus. My mother’s old camera had been among the few things I had brought with me to Vermont, though I had never really thought to learn how to use the thing. Soon, however, I began spending hours in the darkroom, happy to lose myself in the process of developing and printing, feeling as though I had found something of my own at last. Something separate and distinct from the Alice I was with Lucy. It was a strange experience, one that began to unfurl within the folds of my stomach, so that there were days when I felt filled up by it, as if this new knowledge—of what I might be capable of—was nourishment enough.
I felt my heart beat faster, waiting for him to speak—but then the door opened and Lucy rushed in. “You’re home.” She breathed. “I was worried, I just checked the bus and it said—” She stopped then, and turned.
Tom smiled, nodded his head.
“Lucy,” I began, “this is Tom. He was my knight in shining armor today,” I said, before relaying the whole tale for her, anxiously, nervously, so that both of them looked slightly embarrassed, slightly aghast by the time I had run out of breath. A frown had crept across Lucy’s face at the story, and she remained silent once I had finished.
We stood there, the three of us, the knowledge that something had changed, that something had shifted, coursing through the room. But then, later, I wondered whether Tom had even noticed, or whether it wasn’t something that Lucy and I had felt alone, another example of our strange duo that defied explanation, that defied normalcy.
And one that I, for the first time, felt myself suddenly anxious to shed.
SUDDENLY, IT WAS NO LONGER Lucy and me.