“I’m Mark.”
“My manager,” I add.
“Right,” she says. “Manager.”
“Yeah,” Mark nods. “And Katie’s my SAT tutor.”
“Interesting arrangement.”
“It is indeed,” Mark says.
“I feel like celebrating my first major art investments. Who wants sushi?”
Mark and I raise our hands.
The restaurant feels peaceful even though almost all the tables are occupied. There’s no music playing, only the murmur of voices, and the light is perfect, not too bright. The hostess appears with three menus and leads us to a corner table, Violet right behind her, Mark and I following.
“Should I disappear?” Mark whispers. “This place seems kind of romantic.”
I shake my head. “I want you here,” I say. “I need you.”
“Whoa,” he says. “I’m flattered, but you know I don’t think about you that way, right?”
I jab him in the ribs with my elbow and he yelps. Violet turns to us and raises an eyebrow.
I smile. Mark shrugs.
We take our seats. I am grateful that the table is round so we don’t have to decide who sits next to whom.
I want to sit next to her, but I’m afraid to. I want to feel her close, but I want to see her face.
Our waitress arrives with tea and fills our little cups. As soon as she turns away, Mark pulls out his phone and positions it above the table.
“Oh no,” Violet says. “You’re one of those people? You can’t just drink your tea—you have to Instagram or tweet or Facebook it?”
“No,” he says. “I just have to text it.”
“Text it to who?” I ask.
“You know who.”
“Seriously?”
“Who’s you know who?”
“Ryan,” I say. “His best friend slash sort-of boyfriend.”
“Oh!” Violet says, eyeing him. “I did not call that one. But okay. Sort-of boyfriend. Tell me about that.”
“Not even sort-of boyfriend,” Mark says. “Former sort-of boyfriend.”
“Ouch. Go on.”
He looks at me, and I’m not sure why, until I realize that the beginning to this story involves last Saturday night when I was supposed to be meeting Violet but instead found myself watching Mark dance almost naked in a bar.
“I want to apologize,” I say. “Last Saturday got … complicated for me.”
She smiles, but I can see some hurt behind it.
“Yeah,” she says. “From Shelbie’s house to the Facetime Mansion. I guess I assumed you’d have a story to tell me someday.”
“Yes,” I say. “Someday. But for now, I’ll just say that I found myself, by chance, in a bar during an underwear-only dance contest, of which our friend Mark here was crowned the winner.”
And from there the story unfolds and expands, stretching into the far past, how they met, how it felt, and the more recent past, how they kissed, how it felt—and the future Mark saw for them until Saturday night, when the sight of Ryan dancing in the bar shattered it.
“This is heartbreaking,” Violet says. “Really. I feel for you. But please, please do not send this boy a picture of tea.”
“You think it’s pathetic?” Mark asks. “I know, I know: I should be ignoring him. He’ll probably get this text and just wish it was a text from Taylor. He’ll barely look at it.” He lifts the cup and smells it. Sets it back down without sipping. “But the thing is that Ryan really likes tea. Especially green tea. And I never drink this stuff. So maybe it’ll get his attention or something.”
“Right,” I say. “Like he’ll wonder who you’re with. Or in what ways you’re changing. You’ll become mysterious.”
“Kate. Mark. Seriously. Tea is not going to make you mysterious. This is what I want you to do. Think of one sentence—just one. It has to be the truth. It has to come from your heart. Now go ahead and write it, but don’t press send yet.”
As he’s thinking, the waitress returns and we place our orders. When she leaves, Mark enters something into his phone.
“Okay,” Violet says. “There is something you should know about me. I tell stories with morals. I am going to begin one now.”
Mark and I nod our approval.
“So there was this guy I knew in the troupe. Lars. He was maybe in his thirties and he was a lion tamer. A real natural with the animals; he was never even afraid. In addition to being fearless, he was a romantic. One night he told me about this girl he once knew and loved when he was a little kid. Like a long time ago, when he was eleven or twelve. Her name was Greta, and in the beginning of spring she told their class that her family was moving away, that that was her last day there. She cried as she told everyone, and he felt overcome by his love for her. He went home and he wrote her a poem and he delivered it to her on her doorstep. He can recite the whole thing, but I only remember one line, which translates into Your silky flaxen hair glints golden. It sounds terrible, I know. He assured me it just loses its effect in the translation, but I’m not so sure. Anyway. In every town we stopped in for a circus show, somewhere close to the fairgrounds where we’d set up camp, that line would appear spray-painted on a wall somewhere. I finally asked him about it. I said, ‘What if Greta sees it one day and she remembers it, remembers you, and she wants to find you, but she can’t?’ Most of the performers didn’t use their real names, and Lars was one of them. If she tried to look him up she would have found him untraceable. And I thought, if he still thinks about this girl from his childhood so much that he’s scattered notes for her on buildings all across Europe—if he wants to reach her that badly—why wouldn’t he leave her some kind of clue so she could find him?”
“And what did he say?” Mark asks.
“He said that I was missing the point. Finding each other was not the point. What really mattered, according to Lars, was that she knew.”
I lean forward. “Knew what?”
“How much he loved her. How he still thought of her. He had this fantasy that she’d be going about her life somewhere in Berlin or Madrid or Oslo. She’d be walking her kids home from school, or buying bread, or heading home from the office and she would see that line scrawled across a brick wall, or a wood fence, or a billboard over a train track. A love letter. She would think of him. She’d remember her younger self. It might change her life. Or it might not.”
We’re quiet. Our soup arrives. Steam rises and we take our first cautious sips.
“The moral,” she says, “in case you haven’t come to it yourself, is that sometimes it’s enough just to put something out into the world.”
“So I’m supposed to send this text.”
She nods.
“You must send that text.”
He takes another sip, sets the bowl back down, and stares into it, brow furrowed.
“But Taylor,” he says. “There’s no way Ryan will ever choose me over Taylor.”
“You can imagine what might happen after you press send,” Violet says. “But you don’t get to control it. And it could surprise you.”
He looks at me, waiting.
“As your SAT tutor and your friend, I feel that I have an investment in your future,” I say. “And I think you have to gamble in order to win.”
9
MARK
It feels great for about three seconds.
Katie and Violet are excited that I’ve done it, I can tell. And that makes me happy, to have pleased them.
Then the bottom falls out.
What.
Have.
I.
Done?
If Apple really wants us to become addicted to their products, if they really want them to be the zenith of user-friendliness, why in Job’s name isn’t there an unsend button? How hard would it be to enable us to take it all back, to erase the mistake before it’s seen?
What.
Was.
I.
Thinking?
What kind of spell did Violet
cast that made me write what I just sent?
I will fight for you.
From what strange place did that rise up? How could I think, for even a moment, that this was something Ryan would want to receive?
What a Foolish Frederick I am.
Violet’s still proud of me—she’s completely unattuned to my rising panic. But Katie can tell something’s wrong.
“What is it?” she asks. “What did you say?”
I pass her my phone. She takes one look at the message and says, “Goodness.” Then she passes the phone to Violet, who reads the message and returns it to me.
“Is it true?” Violet asks.
“Is what true?”
“Would you really fight for him?”
I nod. But the nod isn’t enough, so I add, “I would fight for him.” And that’s still not enough, so I go on. “In fact, I would tear through rubble with my bare hands to get to him. I would lift cars. I would wrestle down anyone who said we shouldn’t be together. Because if you want to know the truth—if you really want to know the truth—none of that could be nearly as hard as being in love with him and not able to tell anyone about it. Including him. I have this thing inside me, and it’s angry and it’s scared and it’s uncertain and most of all it’s so completely in love with him, and it would do anything to keep him, even if it means things staying the way they are now.”
I cannot believe I am telling them this. Why am I telling them this?
Before I can stop myself, I push further.
“I can’t let him fall in love with someone else. I can’t let it happen. Not like that. I am so mad at him and I am so in love with him, and it hurts to be realizing it like this. Would I fight for him? I have been fighting for him for years. And I’m losing. No matter what I do, I’m losing. But I have to fight anyway.”
I want to laugh, because right now, sitting across from me with such matching concern, Katie and Violet look like a perfect couple. Exactly what I don’t have. Which makes me do the opposite of laugh.
“You’ve never told him,” Violet says. It’s not a question. It’s obvious.
“I tell him all the time—I just make sure it’s never when he’s listening. I say it when he’s in the other room, or when he’s asleep, or when the music’s really loud. Sometimes he asks me what I just said. And I tell him never mind. Or I make up something else, something that isn’t ‘I love you.’”
I know talking about a problem is supposed to make you feel better about it, but talking about this only manages to make it feel more present. All my words, all this talk, is balanced out by the silence of my phone.
No reply.
No reply.
No reply.
Unsend.
“You can’t keep it inside,” Violet offers.
“Or maybe I can’t keep it at all,” I tell her. “Maybe it was never really mine in the first place.”
You can be naked with someone and remain unknowable. You can be someone’s secret without ever really knowing what the full secret is. You can know he’s even more scared than you are, but that doesn’t make you any less scared yourself.
We would draw lines, and then we would cross them. Underwear was going to stay on. We were going to mess around but not have sex. We were only going to have sex once, to see what it was like. We were not going to make it a big deal. We were not going to let it affect our friendship. We were not going to tell a soul.
I don’t think he’s said a thing to anyone.
I imagine he told Taylor that I was his friend. His wingman. His best friend.
If Taylor even asked.
Katie says my name gently, draws me back. She’s looking at me carefully, while Violet watches my phone with a mix of surprise and horror at its inactivity. Maybe when she puts texts out into the universe, they come back to her quickly. Maybe she really thought her plan was going to work.
The waiter has probably been hovering for an hour, waiting for the teary gay boy with the phone problems to compose himself long enough to order more raw fish.
“Do you need anything else?” he asks.
I feel enough time has passed for my tea to get cold. But it hasn’t.
I shake my head. I’m out of words until some more appear on my phone.
“Ryan could be busy,” Katie says once the waiter’s gone. “His phone could be off.”
But my words will still be waiting for him.
And if he’s half as into Taylor as he seemed to be, his phone is going to be within reaching distance and the ringer will be set loud enough to wake the dead.
Unless he’s with Taylor right now.
Katie is reaching for my hand, but it’s Violet’s hand she should be reaching for. Here they are, together for the first time, and I’ve turned them into minor characters in my own soap opera.
“I always wonder what it would be like to meet him now, as a stranger,” I find myself saying. “This is my game within our game—to try to come up with the scenario in which it would work out better. Maybe if I met him now. Maybe if I met him in college. After college. Once he’s comfortable with who he is. But every time I do this, I feel awful. Because I’m sacrificing our history. I don’t love him for who he is now. I wouldn’t love him for who he is two years from now. I love him for all the hims he’s already been with me. I guess that’s the contradiction. I want a fresh start. I would fight for that fresh start. But I also want it to be a continuation.”
Violet smiles. Not a happy smile—a melancholy smile.
“It’s actually not a contradiction at all,” she says. “You want the continuation that feels like a start.”
At that moment, my phone vibrates on the table.
I’m afraid to look.
It’s Katie who picks it up. Who reads the screen. Who says, “Oh.”
“Is that a good ‘oh’ or a bad ‘oh’?” I ask.
She holds up the phone so I can see it.
I’m glad you have my back.
I check the time he sent his message against the time I sent mine.
There’s a six minute, forty second difference.
It took him six minutes and forty seconds to type: I’m glad you have my back.
I start to compose my next line. I’m glad you’re glad. No. Any time. No. Don’t you know what I mean when I say I’ll fight for you?
No.
“Put down the phone,” Violet insists.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“I’m serious—put down the phone. Now. I know about these things. He’s not done. He just needs to realize he’s not done. And if you respond, you will prevent him from realizing that.”
“How do you ‘know about these things’?” Katie asks.
“Songs of innocence, songs of experience,” Violet replies.
I can tell Katie is not entirely satisfied with this answer. She’s about to say something, but she’s interrupted by the phone vibrating again.
I need you, it says.
More typing. And then:
Come over?
I look at Katie and Violet. They look at me.
We all know what I’m going to do.
10
Kate
Now there are two of us at a table set for three.
And I guess the reality that Violet is here is finally settling in, after the humiliation of Brad and Audra and my paintings. After the giddy high of Violet’s purchase, and the bravery of Mark’s text, and the dreadful anticipation of Ryan’s response.
Now it’s just Violet and me, and I’m searching for something to say.
“So tell me about the trapeze. Is it scary?”
“It must be terrifying. I’ve only been on one a couple times, though, and only when it was very close to the ground.”
“Your scar, though. I thought…”
“This?” She touches her eye. “I got this by falling off a skateboard when I was eight.”
“Fucking Lehna,” I mutter.
“What?”
“Nothing. So
you weren’t actually studying the trapeze, then?”
She laughs. “No. I did a lot of watching. It’s so captivating. But it takes years to learn. Mostly, I was doing homework packets. Homeschool curriculum is … not the most stimulating unless you have parents who make it fun by, like, doing art projects and going on field trips and dissecting artichokes to discover they’re flowers—”
“Artichokes are not flowers.”
“Oh yes,” she says, pointing her chopsticks at me. “They are.” She pops an edamame bean into her mouth and grins. “I learned it from a packet.”
I grin back at her. She’s so confident, so effortlessly funny and smart.
“What about you, though? UCLA, right? So you must be into school.”
I shrug. “I guess so. Mostly, I just really like art.”
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she asks.
I cock my head.
“Finally meeting each other.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I only wish it wasn’t so late. So close to when you’ll leave, I mean.”
I don’t want to think about leaving for college. But now the thought is here, all around me, the heaviness of it, the way it pulls me under. I want to lose myself in Violet, but she’s right across the table, not in a faraway place I can only reach in daydreams.
I feel panic rising, and I need to turn away from it.
“I got your rose,” I say.
Surprise flashes across her face.
“How did you know about that?”
It feels so long ago now, even though it’s only been a couple days. I call it all back: the way it felt to hang out with Mark that first night, how I discovered a new way friendship could feel. The song “Umbrella,” my icy glass, the relief on Mark’s face when I asked him to be my friend.
“I did go back to Shelbie’s house that night. I was just too late. And Lehna told me that you had brought me a flower.”
“But, still…?”
“And June told me that you had left to see the sea lions, so Mark and I went to track you down. We thought we could catch you. We went to the pier and we walked all over, but no one was there. But then, there was a rose.”
“Amazing,” she says. “Talk about putting things out into the world.”