But that year, our fourth at Bennington, something changed. Alice began to spend less time in our room, always making her way to and from the photography lab, or into town, arranging to see Tom whenever she had the opportunity. I would often catch sight of her as she bounded across the open lawn and toward the parking lot, headed to the warm interior of Tom’s waiting Skylark. It was easy to spot. A deep red that gleamed in the sun, its outline shimmering against the pale, more conservative cars of the faculty. It was a wonder that anyone as young as Tom could afford such an indulgent vehicle, since most auto shops were still clinging to wartime rules, requiring several months’ down payment before anything could be driven off the lot. I felt the resentment begin to prickle, hot and sharp.
Tom Stowell. He was, I soon learned, from an old family in Maine—not the side filled with fishermen and carpenters, but the one full of Colonial houses and lobster bakes every summer Sunday evening. One built on old money, which meant that what little of it still existed was tied up in the house, or whatever they could borrow based on their last name. As a legacy, he had received a full scholarship at Williams College—without it, there was no hope of the Stowell name being represented within the walls of any respected educational system in New England.
Some of this information I had gleaned from Alice herself—though she was surprisingly secretive when it came to Tom—and I’d gathered the rest in various ways, including from other students at Bennington. It turned out that the girls knew everything about the boys at the next college over—had made it their business to know their future husbands. For although the girls majored in literature and mathematics, a few even claiming premed, the vast majority of them, it seemed, had already realized their only profession was destined to be wife and mother.
It became my business to know everything there was about Tom Stowell—what classes he took, the other boys he counted as friends. I received such information eagerly, as if I were dying of thirst, as if their whispers and rumors were the only water in the world that would quench it. The car, I soon learned, had been a sixteenth birthday present from his grandfather, the stoic patriarch. My studies began to suffer, but I didn’t mind. Tom was my major now—and my life, my happiness, depended on knowing everything about him.
In the absence of Alice, I retreated to my old haunts, spending afternoons in the library, convinced that she would soon tire of him, that one day she would simply return, walking through the hardwood doors, smiling, her arms stacked with books. The previous months would fall away then, dissipating as if they had never happened. I watched and I waited, patiently, knowing that Tom’s time was running out.
And when, at the end of each day, she failed to appear, I would head home, shivering, winter falling fast and quick, wondering if I would ever feel warm again.
To keep her near, I began to borrow pieces of her wardrobe. A scarf, a pair of stockings. Each and every one of them seemed to carry something of her scent, a mix of spice and floral, as distinctive as any perfume. I had once pulled on one of her outfits, the fabric stretching and straining, refusing to be malleable, to my initial disappointment. I reminded myself, then, that Alice and I were not the same. We were each of us separate and distinct, only whole when placed together. Dressed in her clothing, her scent reminded me of this, and worked to still my mind, if only for a brief moment.
But then she had walked in.
I’d felt my cheeks burn with shame, so that I had hastily clawed at the dress, feeling the seams as they pulled and gave way. And on her face, I could see the astonishment—and something else, horror, I realized—at finding me like that, dressed in her clothing. And though she reassured me that it was fine, that I could borrow them anytime I wanted, I only sagged beneath her words. She had not understood, had carelessly attributed my actions to vanity alone, not thinking, not realizing that it was all only in order to be closer to her. Afterward, I had felt the need to be cruel, to punish her, consumed by the desire for her to know what it was like to be lower, inferior, to be held at the whim of others. She had done it to me time and again without so much as a second thought, and I wanted, in that moment, for her to know what it felt like.
And then one day Alice reappeared in our room, held out her hand to me, and everything else fell away. A small rose gold band with a minuscule diamond gleamed back. I looked up at her and asked, “So, it’s all been decided then?” My voice distant, so that I was convinced that I could hear it echoing throughout the room.
“Almost,” she said, smiling. “There’s nothing official yet, but we plan to have the ceremony sometime after graduation. After that, Tom’s going to take me abroad.”
There would be no Paris, no Budapest, no Cairo.
Not for us.
I had shaken my head then, had told myself no, I would not be made to go back, to return to my dull little life, a life of obscurity, of mediocrity. She was the one who had dragged me forth from the shadows of the library, from my own mind, and I, in turn, had helped her to dispel the shadows, helped her to move on from the anxiety that had gripped her since the death of her parents. It was all so plainly obvious, but somehow her vision was obscured. She could not see that Tom Stowell could not care for her as I would, that he did not understand her. She needed, I realized then, to be reminded.
And so, I smiled and offered my congratulations.
And I started to plan.
I PRESSED MY LIPS AGAINST ALICE’S OWN, the movement so familiar from the hours I had spent thinking of it—at times convinced that it would never come—and I waited: for a response, for an indication, for anything that told me what she was thinking, feeling. And then—yes, I was certain—I felt Alice respond, felt her body shift and her lips open just slightly. Closing my eyes tighter, I worked to put everything into that one gesture—all the longing and dreaming that I had done in the years since we had first met, the pain of our year-long separation, and the hope I now had for the future.
Later, in our bedroom, I turned to her and smiled. “It’s fate, don’t you see? After everything we’ve been through together,” I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. “That night with Tom and the accident—” I saw her flinch, but I pressed on, knowing that this too was something she could no longer ignore. “I thought you would never survive, not when the brakes had been cut, and then I saw you and I was certain that you were dead, I was sure of it—but then you weren’t and—” I stopped, noticing her face. She had gone pale, her eyes boring into my own. I watched her, waiting for her to speak, but she only remained silent. I glanced at the window, the traces of humidity obscuring most of what was once there. I could no longer see Alice reflected back, only my own strange face as it peered at itself.
Nine
Alice
SHE HAD NEARLY FOOLED ME.
In her presence, I had allowed myself to forget about the horrible past, the tedium of the present, and the depressing future that any fortune-teller worth a grain of salt would be able to read in my sad, shattered palm. I had closed my eyes in the back of that beaten-up taxi, allowing my body to be flung one way and then another as we bounded over the dips and around the curves of Morocco, letting the wind and the sand whip across our faces and forgetting that it all existed. I worked my way back to that place, before everything had gone so spectacularly wrong, when all I had felt was determination and hope and the knowledge that the future would be whatever I made out of it.