“Fast learner. You got it, girl,” Edie says.
I finish my drink while she sits on the tall chair behind the bar and sips her own. The buzz of brilliant work, of art without an end, is everywhere around us. There are photographs on the walls of this room that I didn’t notice the last time I was here. Are they Edie’s? Are they Mary-Louise’s? Do they belong to the Estate in such a way that it doesn’t matter who took them? They are strange, close-up photographs of the faces of statues. Some are smooth, some are cracked. One shows nothing more than a big gray stone nose.
“So, okay,” I say, “when you came here, Mary-Louise helped you out and you started a project. After you finished that one, what happened?”
“Ah. I see where you are. I see it, exactly.” Edie puts her drink down and leans across the bar—toward me, sort of, but far enough away that I know there’s no possibility of us touching. “You’ll get another project. I don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll be perfect for you. Okay? It’ll be daring. You’ll love it.”
Oh, never mind. She is touching me. My fingertips and her fingertips.
“You’ll come back, right?” Edie asks.
I’m pretty sure I will.
seventeen
I TRY TO push through the morning like Edie would, if Edie had a best friend whose before-school texts were noticeably absent, and if Edie had first-period studio art, and then German and human anatomy, all before lunch. I spend part of Mrs. Pagonis’s class with my eyes closed, willing the world of the Estate to show itself to me. But there’s a lot to shatter my concentration: morning announcements, the nature sounds CD with its occasional shrieking frogs, and the other members of the Orange Table asking me if I’m okay.
I’m fine, I’ll be fine, I tell them.
Between classes, I check my phone and an email from the Savannah College of Art and Design’s admissions department pops up:
Dear Mercedes Moreno:
Your admissions status has changed.
In German, sitting at my desk not as Fr?ulein Marino but Fr?ulein Edie the Bartender, I resist checking SCAD’s website for my admissions status. Let it wait. Edie got as close as the symbolic front door of art school, then turned around and found a much more interesting door to pass through.
Edie doesn’t have a best friend lurking around corners. Crossing the school from German to human anatomy, I don’t see Vic, but I feel her. She’s so very here, in this place where we met. I imagine every place on this hall that her favorite red flats have touched, and soon enough the floor is awash with red, a red that doesn’t love me back.
Maybe the Estate was right.
Maybe I should have kept on living in the reality it gave me.
I have never seen Vic like this. Hair down, flip-flops, jeans (jeans! I forgot she owned any), and a T-shirt from a Broadway show she likes: A Little Night Music. She forgot her usual insulated bag of various raw foods at home, and so she appeared beside me in the lunch line, shooting a longing glance at the pulled pork and fries but emerging with a limp green salad drenched in orange dressing, and, in a move of great recklessness, an oatmeal raisin cookie.
Her Juilliard audition is on Saturday in Miami. She and her mom are driving down on Friday afternoon.
“Maybe I’ll save this for seventh period,” she says of the cookie as we take our usual places at the Dead Guy.
I don’t know if it’s me or Juilliard who has broken her.
“Gotta have some refreshments when heads start rolling,” I say.
“Huh?”
“Seventh period. Your European history class. All those poor folks who got beheaded.”
She has no idea what I am talking about. Because I am not talking about ballet or modern dance or audition etiquette.
I wish I had gotten a cookie. Maybe I will go back through the line and get one and leave her to her endlessly pirouetting thoughts. Also, it’s bugging me that every time I see the words on her T-shirt, I think of “No More Blues,” and then of the Firing Squad concert, which Vic knows nothing about. How do I even begin?
“It’s going to be fine, Vic.”
“Thanks.” She stabs a lettuce leaf, lets the orange dressing drip from it. “I have to confess, I don’t really know how to talk to you right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever you’ve got going on with Lilia and your project.” Vic’s voice is dry, about as far away from dearie as possible. “Like, the more I think about it, the more I get weirded out. Are you hooking up with her? Is that what all this is?”
“What? No.”
“Because you shouldn’t be afraid to tell me if—”
“I’m not. Really.” I brazenly eat a fry in front of her. “Just forget it. Forget you ever met Lilia. Forget I ever took to you to the building.”
“I’ll try.” She swishes her plastic fork around in the orange dressing.
It’s a terrible waste. All that fucking energy and time I spent worrying about how to tell her, if I could really tell her, and now I’m trying to wipe it away. It’s better this way, though—I can live in my moment with her in the Estate, and she can have her audition and her “it’s showtime, folks” and New York City all to herself.
“Vic,” I say, “you’ve been preparing your whole life for your audition. That’s what I want to talk about. You have, I don’t know, the spirit of Martha Graham behind you.”
She smiles a little while folding a lettuce leaf in two. “Oh my God, if only.”
“Too bad you don’t believe in spirits.”
“I am willing to make this one exception. Oh, Martha Graham, please bestow your gentle ghostly presence on me this weekend in Miami. I promise there will be lovely weather and good food, if you’re into that sort of thing.” She flops backward onto the grass. She is pretty freaking into this. “Martha, Martha, I need you. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for this moment. I’ve annoyed my poor friend Mercedes half to death talking on and on about you. Surely you can take a few hours to visit me in my time of crisis!”
The kids in the middle of the courtyard look over at Victoria’s performance, and I wave at them, even though they don’t know us anymore.
Nobody looks at Victoria today in the hallway. (Nobody probably knows what A Little Night Music is. Well, maybe some of the theater kids, but Vic doesn’t hang out with them very often.) I wish I could grab her hand so that we could stride together down the center of the hallway to our fifth-period classes. Anyone who had delicate feelings about such things could move off to the side, but anyone else could fall in behind us and join our confident walk. We could sing the song from The Sound of Music. You know, “Edelweiss.” No, just kidding. And anyway, to try to hold her hand now wouldn’t reek of confidence, but confusion, which is the last thing she needs going into her audition on Saturday.
I’m not messing this up. I’m not. We are steady and cheerful. We are saying hey to people we know from classes. We go into the girls’ room before fifth period, and Vic stares into the mirror, pulls her hair up and knots it around itself, and then turns away.