Josh still hasn’t texted. I’m afraid his mom might be monitoring his phone, so I only text him once more. I keep it short and non-incriminating: I love you.
A few minutes later, there’s a rapid-fire knocking. I spring from my bed and throw open the door. But it’s Hattie. The sight of her fills me with a scarlet rage. She’s wearing an oversize Hawaiian shirt that’s been buttoned up wrong. Her hair is ratted out in every direction. She has dark under-eye circles, fake bruises, and a pencil-thin moustache.
“What are you supposed to be?” I ask, as calmly as possible. Which isn’t calm at all.
She holds up a piece of cardboard. It’s been painted white, and it has black lines labelled with inches and feet. “I’m a mugshot.”
“Practising for your future?”
“Oui.” She just stands there.
“What? What do you want, Hattie?”
“I wanna apologize, jeez.”
I wait.
She waits.
“Was that it?” I ask. “That was your apology?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. I hope you feel better now. Because I sure do. I feel so much better knowing my boyfriend might be expelled because you were that impatient for a hair diffuser.”
Her stone expression falters. “I didn’t know I was gonna get you guys in trouble. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“Me, too.” I slam my door shut.
It pops open. Hattie looks at me with a startled hope until she realizes it was an accident. We scowl at each other as I slam it back shut. I push against it, hard, until I feel the click beneath my palms.
The party carries on all night. Josh never texts. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I startle awake around eight in the morning. There’s a swollen hush over the dormitory. Everyone is finally in bed. I was dreaming about the need to catch a train, but I couldn’t stop putting on make-up. I was helpless as I applied layer after sluggish layer, watching the clock tick closer and closer and closer to my departure time.
Two knocks, low on my door.
I jolt into a sitting position. That’s what woke me up. That’s his second knock. The sound is heavy and foreboding. I lurch out of bed, but I’m terrified to open the door. I press my ear against the wood.
“Josh?” I whisper.
There’s no reply.
I’m gripped by a new fear. He’s already gone. I’m hearing sounds that never existed. I tear open the door, but he’s there – of course he’s there – and he looks devastated. He falls towards the floor. I rush forward, and he collapses into my arms with a cry that’s primal. Screw the rules. Screw this school. I shut the door and lead him to my bed. I cradle his body as he slams and slams his fist against his own leg.
“It’s okay.” I have to be strong. One of us always has to be strong. “Everything will be okay.” I grab his fist and hold it between my hands. I kiss the crown of his head.
“It’s not okay.”
“You had the meeting?”
“I’m gone. She finally kicked me out.”
My bedroom spins. “And…when do you have to be gone by?”
“This is my last day. Today.”
The world goes black. There’s a loud buzzing in my ears. My eyes focus, refocus, refocus like an automatic camera that can’t get it right.
“One of the custodians took my mom to get shipping boxes. And then she’s coming back, and we’re gonna pack up all of my stuff.”
Refocus. Refocus. Refocus.
Josh pulls out his hand from mine to claw at me with all ten fingers. “But we’ll see each other soon. Thanksgiving. You’re still coming home for Thanksgiving, right?”
I nod robotically.
“And then there’s winter break. We’ll spend every day together, and on New Year’s Eve, we’ll meet at Kismet for a kiss. At midnight. Okay? And then we’ll have spring break, and then it’ll be summer again. It’ll be over.”
I swallow. “What will you do? Where will you finish high school?”
“My mom doesn’t want to talk about it until the election is over. They’re pissed. My parents are so pissed. I had to talk to my dad last night, and then my mom took away my phone. That’s why I couldn’t call or text you. I’m eighteen, and my parents took away my phone.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I can’t stop saying it. “We’ll be okay.”
There’s another knock, and Nate starts talking without preamble. “Josh, I let your mom into your room so that you and Isla could have a few minutes alone. But you need to go up there now.”
Even Nate feels sorry for us.
My lie was more severe than I realized. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is okay.
Chapter twenty
The head of school sits behind a desk as intimidating as it is large. Its mahogany is polished, and it carries the scent of musk and wealth. Two flags on indoor poles rest on each side – one American, one French. An overstuffed leather chair sits behind the desk, and two diminutive leather chairs sit before it. I am in one of the diminutive chairs.
“Your grades are slipping,” the head says.
I stare at her.
“Not by much, mind you,” she continues. “But there’s enough of a difference in the quality of your work for more than one of your professeurs to have mentioned it to me. They’re concerned. Can you guess when they noticed the change?”
I’m not actually here. I’m still in Josh’s room. Yesterday.
We packed his life into cardboard boxes. His mom was angry at him, angry at me, angry at every call. And she received a lot of calls. There was nothing I wanted more than to be away from that awful room, but I wasn’t about to waste our final hours.
Josh took down the drawings from his walls. He laid them in a box – one on top of another, on top of another. He slipped the drawings of me from the Arènes de Lutèce into a separate, protective envelope. Compared with the number of drawings that he had of his friends, there weren’t many of me yet. We’ve only been together for a month.
How has it only been a month?
“A month ago,” the head says. “That’s when you stopped giving your homework the time and attention that it takes to maintain your position at the top of your class.”
She says this as if being school valedictorian is my singular ambition, when, really, it just happened. There are only twenty-four other seniors – twenty-three – and all of them have friends to hang out with and places to go and things to do. I’ve never had anything better to do than study. But for one month…I had something better to do.
Josh slipped the envelope inside his shoulder bag. It went on the plane with him.
Everything happened so fast. In one day, his room went from chaotic, bursting with art and food and life, to barren. We were only given five minutes to say goodbye. His mother left us in that empty space, and I cried again. Josh used his favourite pen to ink four letters onto the back of my fingers: L-O-V-E.
He held my face with both hands. “I love you,” he said. “I love you. I love you.”
I could hardly see him through my tears. “I love you,” I said. “I love you. I love you.”
“Isla,” the head says. “You’re going to meet many boys on this journey. You can’t let them distract you from becoming the woman you are meant to become.”
She’s wrong. There’s only one boy.
And who am I to become without him?
I stare at my fingers. The letters are fading, but the word still burns against my flesh.
Beside his mother’s waiting car, the letters were sharp and dark. We kissed desperately. Mrs. Wasserstein opened the back door and called to him from the inside. “We’re late. Let’s go.”
His hands gripped mine. “Thanksgiving.”
I nodded.
He kissed me again, but this time, it was quick. And then he dropped my hands as if they stung, as if he physically couldn’t hold them any longer, and he rushed into the car. The windows were tinted black. I couldn’t see him, but I wa
tched his window anyway until the car disappeared from view.
The head of school clears her throat. My gaze had drifted towards her window.
“For one month of reckless behaviour? I’m giving you one month of weekday detention. I think you’ll agree that it’s a fair punishment. In addition, this gives you ample time to recommit to your classwork without any…distractions.”
“Josh wasn’t a distraction.”
The head looks me over carefully. “No,” she says, at last. “Perhaps, for you, that was the wrong word. Though I have my concerns about the other way around.”
It’s a cruel jab. How dare she suggest that I care more about Josh than he cares about me? What could she possibly know about our relationship?
I storm out of her office and into detention. For all of my time spent frequenting its threshold, I’ve never actually crossed it. But it looks like any other classroom. There’s only one other student here, a sophomore. He doesn’t look up from keying his desk. Professeur Fontaine – the computer-science teacher with the triangle-shaped head – is on detention duty. “Pick a seat, any seat,” she says. She sounds like a street magician.
I wish I knew where Josh used to sit. I try to conjure his image. A figure with rounded shoulders and a furrowed brow materializes in the back corner. He’s pencilling his life into tidy panels. I step into this shadow, wanting to believe in its reality, and take the desk. The window beside us has a view of the school’s courtyard, but everyone is gone for the day. Only the cobblestones and pigeons remain.
I never got to read those panels.
What if I’m the one who blew it? What if I can’t get into Dartmouth any more? Josh will still get into his college. All he needs is a GED. Perhaps he ruined this year, but I might have ruined our next four. If only I could hear his voice again. He made it back to New York this morning, where his mom granted him this single text: Miss you like crazy. Internet also confiscated. Don’t know when we can talk next. I LOVE YOU.
After detention, I walk straight to the Treehouse. The night air is freezing, and my coat isn’t warm enough. I remember Josh placing his own coat around my shoulders – right here on our first date – and cry for the hundredth time. I wrap myself in the blanket and place my hand on his mural. I press my palm against the house with the ivy window boxes and American flag. I press my palm against it so hard that it hurts.
Here, I think. He is here.
I try to be there, too.
“Turn that off.” Kurt barges into my room and points at my laptop. “You’re supposed to be studying. You need a perfect score on your physics test tomorrow.”
“This poll is saying Josh’s dad and Terry Robb are locked in a dead heat. It’s still too close to predict a winner.”
“Stop reading that stuff. The election isn’t for five more days.” And then he frowns. “Terry Robb. People shouldn’t have two first names.”
I’ve finally put in a request to get my door fixed. I’m tired of my privacy being violated. Our friendship is intact, technically, but an unpleasant tension cloaks every interaction. Kurt is unhappy that I’m unhappy. He wants our lives to go back to the way they were, pre-Josh. And I’m unhappy with Kurt. I know he didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but it did happen. And he could’ve stopped it.
As for Hattie, I haven’t spoken to her since she was a mugshot. She might as well be in prison, for all I care. I’ve been glued to the news. I downloaded an app that tricks my laptop into thinking I’m in America, because international restrictions were blocking too many important video feeds. Knowing what’s happening in the election, minute by minute, is the only way that I feel close to Josh. His dad has to win. And not just for the obvious reasons, but selfishly, I hope it might relax his parents enough so that they’ll give him back his phone.
“You,” Kurt says. “Physics. Study.”
“Don’t be such an assjacket.”
“Asswaffle,” he replies.
“Asspickle.”
“Asshopper.”
He looks pleased with that last one. My mouth twitches, but I’m still annoyed. To cap off this perfect week, I feel my period coming on. I close my laptop. “Fine. You win. But I’m going to the bathroom first.”
“Assroom,” I hear him say as I go down the hall. When I return, our game is over. “You missed a call from a two-one-two area code.”
“What?” I race to my phone. Someone from Manhattan has left me a voicemail. “Why didn’t you answer it?”
“Because that’s not my phone.”
“What if that was Josh?”
“Then your screen would have said ‘Josh’ instead of ‘unknown caller’.”
I barely muffle my scream of frustration. “His phone was taken away! If anyone calls when I’m not here, answer it. And if it’s Josh, tell him to wait until I can get here.”
Hey, Isla. My heart splits in two at the sound of his tired voice, which he’s attempting to raise above a jumbled commotion of shouting and ringing and clanging. It’s, uh, Thursday. I guess it’s already night in Paris? I’m calling from a volunteer’s desk at election headquarters. This is the first time that I’ve been left alone near a phone. It’s pretty bad here, but… I don’t know. None of it even matters. I miss you. I’ll try again as soon as I can. A pause. I hope you’re all right. Okay, bye. I love you.
I call back. After two rings, a woman with a nasal timbre answers. I hang up.
I listen to the voicemail again. And again. And again and again and again, and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to it before I realize that Kurt is gone.
A locksmith fixes my door. I never leave my phone.
I turn up the ringer as high as it goes before I shower, and then I keep the volume there, even in class. My paranoia grows. I can’t stop checking it – checking for messages, checking to make sure it’s charged, checking to make sure that I haven’t accidentally muted it. I want to speak with him so badly I might combust.
On Saturday before dawn, another 212 startles me awake. “Josh?”
“Ohthankgod,” he whispers, exhausted and relieved. “I’m sorry it’s so early, but I couldn’t sleep. I’m calling you from the kitchen. If my parents catch me, I’m dead. But I had to hear your voice.”
I grasp my phone harder. “I miss you so much.”
“How is it possible that it hasn’t even been a week?”
“It feels like a year.”
“How are you? What happened with the head? Were you suspended?”
“No. She gave me detention, because it’s my first offence. But it’s for the entire month.”
His voice grows heavier. “I’m sorry.”
“The suckiest part? The moment that I have detention, you don’t.”
It gets a single glum laugh. “I’d take detention over this.”
“I know.” I soften. “How is it? How are your parents?”
“Pissed off. Busy. They’re running me around everywhere with them, but they can hardly even look at me.”
“They’ll come around.”
“Maybe.”
One question is weighing on me, heavier than any other. I clutch my necklace for support. “Hey…”
“Yeah?”
“Never mind.”
“Isla. Say it.”
“I was just…did your parents know about me? I know you guys didn’t talk often, but I was wondering if you ever mentioned me. Before all of this.” My voice cracks. “I’d hate it if that was your mom’s first impression of me.”
His long pause gives me the answer before he does. “I was gonna tell them before Thanksgiving,” he finally says. “I didn’t want them asking about you.”
I cry in silence. “Were you worried that they’d think I’m not good enough for you?”
“No. No. I just wanted to keep you for myself. We were in that perfect bubble, you know? Of course they’ll like you.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“They will. They know this is my fault. And when the
election is over, I’ll tell them all about you. How smart you are, and how kind, and—”
“How ambitious? How I have no plans for my future?”
“Isla.”
“Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I should’ve told them.” There’s another pause. “Did your parents know about me?”
“Of course.”
Josh exhales.
“They were looking forward to meeting you.”
“And now they aren’t.” He gives a sad little snort. “You worry about my parents, but I’m the one who was expelled.” Suddenly, his voice grows lower. “Someone’s moving around. I gotta go I love you bye.”
I don’t even get to say “I love you” back.
On Monday after detention, I find him in the background of some photographs taken over the weekend at a Brooklyn YMCA, a last-chance campaigning effort. He’s tall and handsome and smiling. He looks almost like my boyfriend. I can tell that his smile – no doubt convincing to others – is forced. There are no dimples.
“I didn’t wake you up this time, did I?” he asks. The call arrives in the dead of night. There’s a racket of people in the background, a general buzz of stress and excitement. Headquarters again. The election is only hours away.
“No.” I hug my pillow, wishing it were him. “Getting sleepy, but I’m still reading.”
“That’s my girl. What’s the subject tonight?”
“Orchid hunting. Did you know it was a surprisingly dangerous occupation?”
“Maybe that’s your future career.” A real smile creeps into his voice. “Orchid hunter. And I’ll join you on the expeditions. We can wear those khaki hats with mosquito nets.”
“How is it over there?” I ask.
“I’d rather be hunting orchids.”
“I hope your dad wins.”
“Me, too. Otherwise he’ll be intolerable for at least six months.” The sort-of joke falls flat, and he sighs. “Speaking of. Guess who’s sending a camera crew to my polling station? Guess who’ll be on the morning news?”
“Guess who’ll be glued to CNN’s live stream, hoping to catch a glimpse?”