There was a time in my life, only months ago, when I felt like I was always saying goodbye to Shia. We were friends, and he was John’s friend, too, but it wasn’t like John felt a little empty when Shia would leave. Then again, John himself had been in West Point for the last three years. My friendship with Shia barely existed compared to my relationship with John, and I saw them each about the same amount of times. Often, I didn’t think anything of the small amounts of time I spent with John; I only thought about how he loved me and was much more mature than Shia. Shia and I had barely been speaking lately. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t know why.
“We’ve barely talked the last few months,” I finally said. I couldn’t let him make me crawl inside my head the way he loved to. He wasn’t the kind of guy you just talked to casually, spitting out beige words just like everyone else. He didn’t ask about the weather, he asked about your favorite type of storm. His conversations were rainbow colored, every shade. When Shia King talked to you, he climbed into your mind and took pieces out with him. He didn’t ask everyday things like How are you?
“Would you have had anything to say to me, Meg?”
Last summer, right in front of Jackson Square, he asked me, “What’s the last thing that made you cry?”
“I don’t know. But I would have liked the choice.”
We kept walking and I could see my hotel from where we were. The temperature was rising as the afternoon took over from the morning. He was being silent as he stirred my words, probably searching for an essay of an answer to make my head spin with thoughts I wasn’t ready to have.
That night in front of that park, famous for artists selling their paintings, something started to grow in the gap between us. I didn’t know much about art. I wasn’t like Jo or Shia King. However, I could name every shade of Tarte lipstick and the best type of haircut for your face shape. We all had our talents.
“How’s your dad?”
“Hasn’t called in a while,” I told him.
That sticky August night was supposed to have been a normal night of me playing Taxi, driving Beth to her friend’s house to “study” (back when she wanted to leave the house) and then dropping Jo off at work. Her last job was at a little coffee-and-crepe place right across from Jackson Square. I planned to walk around a little and maybe go to the mall, but I saw Shia standing outside the entrance and I had recognized him from Reeder’s barracks room.
I spent Jo’s entire shift telling him about a Facebook post from River. It was a meme about crazy ex-girlfriends because I was the crazy one. Riiight. He had not only spread pictures of my body that I trusted him with to half of the school, but he wouldn’t stop posting stupid quotes about exes.
By the time I had spilled half of my guts to Shia, Jo texted me to pick her up from her shift. I couldn’t believe how fast the last four hours had gone, and I couldn’t believe I had gone that much into detail about the bullshit that happened in Texas. I didn’t want that part of my life to follow me here to a new state, new life, but there I was pouring it out on the concrete.
Prior to that night, Shia and I had hung out maybe six times. Sometimes with John, sometimes with Reeder, but never at Shia’s house. Always in the barracks rooms. I didn’t even know he was a part of the Fort Cyprus royal family until Reeder let it slip one night in the field behind the Shoppette, but Shia talked his way out of further conversation about it before we even realized that’s what he was doing.
After I spilled my guts to him like cheap red wine on a white sheet, Shia and I became friends, I guess you could call it. Then we got in a fight that night I was wearing a tiara on my head. He called me princess and kissed my mouth with cherry lips and a silver tongue. Neither of us wanted that night to haunt us, and then John asked me to take our relationship to the next level. Even during that, I kept hanging out with Shia, and he would try to convince me to leave town with him. He always laughed enough at the end where I didn’t know if he was serious or not.
His silence now got the best of me and I turned quickly to him, annoyance spreading through me, and said, “John’s in the hotel room waiting for me.”
Shia’s eyes stayed on the busy sidewalk ahead of us, and the light turned for us to walk.
“Liar!” a voice yelled from the middle of the street.
When I looked, a homeless man was standing there, his hands in the air and liquid draining from his full beard. Shia gently tapped my arm for me to keep walking.
My frustration bubbled over. “If you’re going to ignore me, then get the hell away from me.”
Shia laughed and I groaned. “I’m not ignoring you. I’m thinking before I speak. You should try it.”
I rolled my eyes in the most dramatic way.
“I want to see John anyway. I’ll come with you?” Shia offered, waited for me to nod, and followed me to the hotel.
28
beth
“Aunt Hannah called,” I told my mom as soon as she walked through the door.
The wooden door shut and barely made a sound. It wasn’t like our thick mahogany door in Texas that Jo used to throw sharp-pointed ninja stars into. That thing slammed shut every time the wind blew and shook the house with it. The door in this house looked like it was made from birch and could blow away with the wind anytime.
Mom set her purse down on the floor and walked over to the fridge. I saw the lines of tension sprout across her forehead, but she kept a straight face. “What did she say?”
My aunt had called three times before I finally answered, and she sounded like she was covering the receiver. I would have told my mom this if her under-eyes weren’t the color of my jeans.
“That she needs you to call her back. She sounded stressed-out.” I paused long enough for my mom to dip her head into the fridge to avoid me. “Is everything okay?”
Mom stood up and closed the fridge, a carton of eggs in her hands. “Yeah, yeah. Everything is fine. Did you get all your class work done? Are you still behind a week?”
Classic Meredith Spring, changing the subject even better than Amy. I knew my mom twice as well as my sisters did, so that meant I knew her every move. She didn’t have many, but lately she had been cashing them all in. She was trying to distract me by asking for my homework and getting me to talk about myself.
“I caught up after Christmas break, remember?” I specifically recalled talking to her about it in the living room.
“Oh yeah.”
My mom opened the cupboard and grabbed a mixing bowl. She hadn’t been in the mood to cook lately, but I wasn’t going to bring that up. I didn’t mind cooking most of the meals around here, but I was happy taking the morning off. It was almost noon. Jo was upstairs writing in her room, and Meg was with John downtown. Amy was at the house of some girl down the street, so we were alone for the most part. I owed it to my dad to take any time I could to check in on my mom. He hadn’t called in days, and her eyes were bloodshot this morning.
My mom’s blond hair was pulled back in a claw clip. Her hair was thinning in the front, where she curled the pieces into one big curl around her hairline. Meg always begged her to let her give her a new style, but so far our mom had refused.
“How much longer do you have? I should know this.” She pulled a smile out of the pocket of her favorite T-shirt. She slept in the T-shirt, printed with my dad’s old company name over the image of a tank. It was so worn that the black fabric had turned gray and the tank had started to peel off. The decal now looked like a house or something, not a tank.
“Until May, technically, but I might be able to finish early.”
My mom popped open the carton of eggs and inspected them. “Your dad has always wondered about next year. And the school sent an email . . .” Her voice fell a little.
My dad wanted me to go to “regular” school, I knew he did, but he would never just flat out say it. “What kind of email?”
She took a few eggs in her hands and walked over to the bowl on the counter. “Just an enrollment email
for you, Amy, and Jo. Are you ready to go back to school?”
She stopped talking, and I figured that she was trying to collect her thoughts before she handed them out. She chose the weirdest stuff to treat me like a kitten about.
“Does Dad think I should go back to school?”
“That’s not what I said. I said he’s asked over the past few months if you were ready to go back.”
“Why, though? Is something wrong with what I’m doing now? I’m ahead of schedule now, and I only fell behind one time and that was over holiday. Jo bombed that math test last week.”
“It’s not about the grades.”
Mom began to crack the eggs against the side of the bowl. The eggs broke hard enough that I’m sure a few tiny shells went inside the bowl, but didn’t want to point them out. I usually did it at the end, pulling out little shards of eggshell. My mom wasn’t great at not getting shells inside, but at least she wasn’t like Jo, who refused to look at the eggs. She ate scrambled meat that wasn’t real meat and tortilla shells almost every day for breakfast. Or the occasional bagel stuffed to the brim with cream cheese.
I waited for my mom to explain why I was failing as a teenager.
“It’s that you’ll be in tenth grade. Freshman year is always tough, for sure, but you’ve had a break. Do you think it’s time to try it again? Now that Jo could get you into Yearbook with her? You’re so smart, Beth.”
This wasn’t the first time Mom had brought it up, but this time was much more direct than ever before.
“You don’t get it. It’s not about being smart, Meredith,” I said accidentally. It threw her off, I could tell. My sisters had picked up Jo’s habit of calling her by her name, but I liked to call her Mom. Sometimes I would call her Meredith out of my sister’s habit, but I tried not to. “It’s not about me being smart, it’s about the majority of the school day having nothing to do with actual school.”
“What does that mean?”
I sighed. I felt like I had explained this enough times in the last year.
“Is this about bullying? Because—”
“It’s not about bullying, Mom. It’s about no one getting that I don’t want to be around people the way that Meg and Jo and Amy and you and Dad do. I can’t learn with a room full of people. I’m sorry if it’s not normal—”
“Beth . . .” Mom paused. Her tone was unreadable and her eyes were full of guilt. I didn’t ever want her to feel guilty, I just wanted her to see that this wasn’t about her. “I wasn’t saying you have to go back to school. I was only bringing it up because of the email. You know what’s best for you, okay? I trust you to know what’s best for you, and if you want to be homeschooled until college, that’s okay.”
I knew I was lucky to have the option of staying home. Most parents would have been the opposite of mine and forced me to “work through my anxiety,” which my parents did try until I couldn’t handle it anymore and started skipping.
“Thank you.” I sighed, leaning against the counter.
I would have brought up that my college would be in home, too, but I just wanted the conversation to end.
My mom continued to make breakfast until Jo came down with her arms full of newspapers and said Laurie was going to come over later. He had been spending a lot of time with Jo, but I thought it was a good thing. She wasn’t good at making friends like Meg and Amy. She wasn’t as bad at it as I was, but still.
“What in the world?” Mom asked, gaping at Jo and her baggage.
“I’m looking for something,” Jo said, as if that explained what in the world she was doing. The smell of bacon smothered the kitchen until I added onions to my mom’s famous farmer’s breakfast. It was a mash-up of potatoes, oil, butter, salt and pepper, bacon, sausage, eggs, and cheese. Jo got her own skillet with no meat, and I ate from both.
When we had devoured our plates, Jo said, “That was so good—thanks, guys,” and went back to her stack of papers while I started washing the pans.
The phone started ringing again and I hit silence. Seconds later someone knocked on the door. Jo set down the newspaper she had in front of her face, and my mom stalled a moment before asking me to get it.
I hoped it wasn’t Aunt Hannah, but when I saw the two officers standing in the doorway, I immediately took back my wish.
29
meg
I called John twice before Shia and I came back to the Ritz. He didn’t answer, and I couldn’t just barge into the room with Shia and wake John up. So while we waited for John to come back to life, Shia and I hung out in the hotel’s Club Room, and I somehow found a way to eat more food. The room was actually three rooms, one with an extravagant lunch display set out across a huge banquet table. Meats, cheeses, little finger sandwiches made from cheeses I had never heard of. They had fruit cut into shapes and grapes on sticks.
The other two rooms were for sitting. I couldn’t count how many couches and recliners filled the space. Inside these rooms, time hadn’t moved forward in a while. I didn’t know what year the decor was supposed to be representing, but it was definitely sometime when people loved floral-print everything. Shia and I found ourselves a nice four-person table in the corner, next to a flatscreen TV that had to be at least fifty inches.
Shia moved a cracker around his plate and scooped some hummus onto it. I didn’t know anyone else who loved hummus. I smiled thinking about how Amy once called it “rich people food,” and Jo told her to shut up and google something for once in her life.
“How long are you staying here in this hotel? It’s nice, right?” Shia popped the entire cracker into his mouth. He chewed quietly; all that fancy Southern table training came in handy. I took an etiquette course on post when I was twelve, but Shia was groomed since birth to be a gentleman.
“One more night,” I said, the bottom of my throat on fire. I reached for my water and finished answering his question. “And, yeah, I would say so. Look at this space.” My eyes bounced around the room and Shia’s followed.
“You do love shiny things.”
I snapped my gaze back to him. “And what is that supposed to mean?” My annoyance barely held behind the corners of my smiling mouth.
He shrugged.
I looked around the room and focused on the hotel employee who was relining the table he had just cleaned with a fresh, crisp white tablecloth.
“Just saying. Do you not?” Shia challenged me. I saw his eyes flicker from the powder scattered across the chest of my dress.
“Not all of us want to throw away our trust funds and not go to college.” Shia’s eyes bulged and his knee hit the table before I registered that I had really said that.
Were we fighting?
I had just started a fight, I knew it, but sometimes that was the only way we communicated. What I had just said felt much more personal and a splash too harsh for our usual banter. Such banter didn’t entail fighting normally; it was mostly calling each other out on our crap, but it never felt malicious, no matter how many times I told my sisters I hated him.
“Throw away? You literally have no idea what you’re talking about. But you just stay up there on that pedestal, Meg. I had a call this morning with my friend in Cambodia, and she told me she removed two girls in one month from a whorehouse with the money we raised for her. One of the girls was twelve—the same age as Amy—and had been a sex slave for three years.”
My stomach twisted.
He continued, “What have you done? Beside paint my mom’s face on and take her dogs for walks?”
I sat there taking in every single word he said and stirred it and stirred it until my phone rang on the table between us.
I somehow found my voice. “I better get that,” I said, biting my tongue.
John’s name flashed across the screen and I swiped to answer. He told me he had just woken up, and when I mentioned Shia, John said he was going to work out in the gym, take a shower, then meet us.
When I hung up, Shia laughed, but it wasn’t snarky. “Work out
? He just doesn’t stop.”
“He’s been in a routine.” I thought he would have at least asked me to come back to the room while he showered, or to tag along with him to the gym.
“Yeah.”
Shia looked up at the TV and rolled his eyes at the screen. “Our country is—”
“Don’t start the political talk. I need more coffee.” I groaned. He was like Jo: when you got them going, they didn’t stop. I admired it most of the time, even though I wasn’t as involved as they were, but not today. My mind went to the twelve-year-old girl in Cambodia. I tried to remember if Jo’s essay was about the same place . . .
“Fine. How’s everything going with you? Did you enroll in that makeup course yet?”
I instantly wanted to press rewind. I shook my head and took another drink of water. “No. Not yet.”
“Why? It’s coming up, in what—May?”
That he remembered that blew my mind.
Of course he did, the honest part of my brain countered.
“Yeah. I’m sure it’s full now. The summer will be busy for me anyway.”
I didn’t know why I’d put off signing up for the course. I’d met an artist when he came into Sephora for the launch of a brand. He told me about a course he was going to in Los Angeles in the summer. The person teaching it was a celebrity makeup artist, and she was supposedly the master of the newest techniques. I wasn’t technically trained as an artist and the course would give me a little more credibility, but it was all the way across the country, and expensive.
“Are those reasons or excuses?” That was one of Shia’s favorite things to ask about anything, from the reason I didn’t return his calls to life choices.
“Both.”
“What’s going on, Meg?”
I fidgeted in my chair and looked around the room. It was much less crowded than when we first arrived. Only four or five people were in the room, and one was an old man who had fallen asleep sitting quite rigidly on the couch with his glasses resting on the tip of his nose.