Lena strode around her room, her face burning. Kostos was here. Kostos was here in her house. Kostos, in three dimensions. Living, breathing Kostos.
Was it real? Was she having a psychotic break? It wasn’t that hot, was it?
She had dreamed it. She had dreamed him. Her knees swayed with the disappointment of that idea. God, how she wanted him to be real.
He looked the same. He looked much better.
He’d seen her in her bra! Oh my.
Nobody in the world besides her mom, her sister, and her three best friends ever saw her without her clothes on. She was a modest person. She was! She didn’t even like fitting rooms unless they had doors that closed all the way. Kostos had seen her twice!
Kostos was downstairs in Lena’s house! Effie had brought him downstairs. They were in the kitchen. That is, if he really existed and this whole thing wasn’t a dream, they were in the kitchen.
He had come to see her! All this way! What did that mean?
But wait! He had a girlfriend! What did that mean?
Lena was walking in such a tight circle she was making herself dizzy. She straightened out her path and sent herself to the door.
Oh! Get dressed. Oh, yeah.
The Traveling Pants were sitting on her desk chair, waiting patiently. Did they know about this? Had they seen this coming? Lena eyed them suspiciously before she pulled them on. What exactly were those Pants up to? Were they going to make her miserable before they made her happy? Oh, please, no.
She pulled a white T-shirt over her head. She took a quick peek in the mirror. Her face was shiny with sweat. Her hair was dirty. She had a stye in her eye. Oy.
What if Kostos remembered her as beautiful and when he saw her now he thought, God, what happened? And here I traveled all this way? Her face had launched at least one ship, and now the ship was going to turn right back around.
What if he wasn’t even waiting for her in the kitchen? What if he was leaving town in a hurry, thinking, Wow, how things change. He was probably waiting for the bus at Friendship Station.
In desperation Lena drew on some lip liner. It was orange. Her hand was shaking too much to stay in the lines. It looked horrible. She ran into her bathroom and washed it off. She washed the rest of her face too, so it wasn’t so shiny. She pulled her dirty hair back into a knot.
Fine. If he thought she’d gone ugly, fine. If that was what he cared about, then too bad. Besides, he had another girlfriend!
Lena looked at herself in the mirror despondently. Grandma thought she was prettier than Kostos’s new girlfriend. What did Grandma know? Grandma thought Sophia Loren was the hottest thing going. It didn’t matter what Grandma said; Lena was certainly not prettier than Kostos’s new girlfriend!
Lena made herself stop pacing. She forced herself to take a breath, possibly her first in the last ten minutes.
Calm. Calm down. She needed to quiet her mind. Shut up! she screamed at it.
Ahhh. Okay.
Kostos was downstairs. She would walk downstairs. She would say hello. That was what she would do.
Deep breath. Okay. Calm.
Lena stumbled at the top of the stairs and grabbed the railing before she fell down the whole flight. More breaths. She walked into the kitchen.
He was sitting at the table. He looked up at her. He was even more … how he was before.
“Hi,” he said. He gave her a small, questioning smile.
Was her entire body shaking or did it just seem that way? Her bare feet were sweating profusely. What if she slipped and fell in a puddle of her own foot sweat!
He looked at her. She looked at him. She imagined a cloud of romance washing over her and embracing her in its grace and flattering light, giving her good ideas for things to say. Any moment now.
Come on! He was a boy, she was a girl. He was a boy with a different girlfriend, but still. Wasn’t fate supposed to take over sometime around now?
She stood. She stared.
Even Effie looked worried on her behalf.
“Sit down,” she ordered Lena.
Lena obeyed. She was safer off her feet.
Effie passed her a glass of water. Kostos already had one.
Lena didn’t dare touch the glass in case her hand shook.
“Kostos is working in New York for a month this summer. Isn’t that amazing?” Effie said.
Lena’s heart went out to her sister. Effie knew how to take care of her sometimes.
Lena nodded, trying to process this information. She didn’t trust her vocal cords with the job of saying anything yet.
“An old school friend of my father’s runs an advertising agency there,” Kostos said. He was answering Effie, but his eyes stayed on Lena. “He offered me this internship months ago. My grandfather’s health is much better, so I thought I’d give it a try.”
There were too many thoughts for Lena to contain in her head. She wished she had a separate head for each of the thoughts. First, there was Kostos’s father. Kostos had never spoken of him before this. He was so forthright and brave about it, it gave Lena an aching feeling.
Then there was the thing about being in New York. Why hadn’t he told her? Had he been planning it before they had broken up? Had any thought of her figured into his plans?
“I’ve always wanted to see Washington,” he went on. “I grew up on Smithsonian magazine.” He smiled more to himself than to them. “Grandma thought it would connect me to my American heritage.”
So he hadn’t come to America to see Lena, obviously. That was disappointing. He hadn’t come to Washington to see Lena. But he had come to this house to see her. He’d at least done that, hadn’t he? Or had he stumbled over their doorstep on his way to the subway? Was his girlfriend going to pop out of the pantry or anything?
“I hope it’s okay, just dropping in like this,” he said. “It turns out you live right near the place I’m staying.”
Figures, Lena thought bitterly.
“I’m sorry if I caught you at a … bad time.” He said that to Lena, and his eyes had a mischievous look. Even a sexy look, she would have thought if she hadn’t known that he didn’t care about her anymore.
“Where are you staying?” Effie asked.
“With another family friend. You know how Greeks are—a port in every storm. Do you know the Sirtises in Chevy Chase?”
“Yeah. They’re friends of our parents too,” Effie said.
“They’ve made it their mission to show me everything in D.C. and introduce me to every Greek family in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia.”
Effie nodded. “How long are you here?”
“Just till Sunday,” he said.
Lena wanted to throw a plate at his head. She felt as though she might cry. Why was he acting as if they didn’t even know each other? As if they weren’t even friends? Why hadn’t he even called her to say he was coming? Why had she stopped mattering to him?
Lena felt tears sting her eyes. They had kissed each other. Kostos had told her he loved her. She had never, ever felt about anyone, anyone, the way she felt about him.
You broke up with him, a combination Effie-Carmen voice in her head reminded her.
But that didn’t mean you were allowed to stop loving me, she felt like saying to him.
Was she so deeply forgettable?
She felt like running up to her room and pulling all his letters from their shoe bag and shoving them in his face. See? she’d shout. I’m not just nobody!
Kostos stood up. “I should get going. I’m due at the National Gallery before it closes.”
Lena realized she hadn’t yet said a word.
“Well, great to see you,” Effie said. She looked plaintively at Lena, as if to say, Just how big of a loser are you, anyway?
The two girls trailed him to the front door. “Take care,” he said. He was looking at Lena.
She looked at him in pure agony. She felt that her eyes were blinking at him from deep, deep inside her head. They’d spent months apart, lon
ging for each other, wishing fervently for a letter or a phone call or a snapshot, and now he was here, close enough for her to kiss, so heartrendingly handsome, and he was just going to go and leave and never see her again?
He turned. He walked out the door. He headed down the walk. He was really going. He looked back at her once.
She ran after him. She put her hand in his. She let her tears fall; she didn’t care if he saw. “Don’t go,” she said. “Please.”
She didn’t really do that. She ran up to her room and cried.
Please give me a second grace.
—Nick Drake
Tibby couldn’t face another hour in her room. There had been almost twenty-four unbearable ones since she’d returned from D.C. late the night before. She hated this room. She hated everything she had thought and felt and done inside it. She couldn’t make herself get into her bed. There was no safe place for her to be, least of all her own mind, where her conscience had overthrown the normal government. It ranted at her and harangued her and would not shut up no matter how cruelly she threatened it.
In desperation, she got into her car and drove to Washington. She didn’t even know specifically where she was headed until she turned up at the Giant on MacArthur Boulevard.
She found herself at midnight standing in the checkout line with a pathetic-looking fistful of orange carnations. But then her conscience shot that down too. The flowers would die, and anyway, neither of them had cared much about flowers. Then she had an inspiration. There was one thing both of them had loved.
Tibby went to the cereal aisle and found a bright yellow box of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries.
She parked at the bottom of the cemetery and scrambled up the paths and along the little sculpted hills with her Giant bag in her hand. The ground was soft and her shoes were digging into the soil. It gave her a bad feeling. She stopped to take them off. Better to tread barefoot and lightly over the grass.
Bailey’s gravestone had arrived since she’d last been there. It looked like a gravestone.
Tibby leaned the yellow cereal box against the gray marble. No, the colors looked too lurid for a graveyard. She opened the box and took the bag out. There, that looked better. She stuffed the empty box back into her plastic bag.
She was a bit worried about something as she surveyed the stone. She took a marker out of her bag and on the back of the stone, very, very small, she printed MIMI in smart, boxy letters. She didn’t want Bailey to be alone in there, or Mimi to go entirely unmarked.
She lay down on the grass. Her clothes were getting drenched, but she didn’t care. Half blades of recently mown grass coated her bare, wet feet. She turned over so her cheek was resting against the ground. “Hi,” she whispered.
Her tears were soaking into the earth. She had a feeling of wanting the rest of her to soak in along with them.
Is it any nicer up there? she wanted to ask.
How had Tibby let herself get so far away? Where had she been? Her whole life since Bailey had died now seemed to her like the distant wanderings of an amnesiac, full of confusion and forgetting.
She reached out her arm and touched the cold stone with three of her fingertips.
Remind me, she needed to ask. I don’t seem to know how to be.
Her ear was pressed to the ground along with her cheek. She listened.
“Lenny, you broke up with him,” Bee said kindly, after listening patiently through Lena’s avalanche of woe, even though it was midnight.
“But I wasn’t the one who forgot about him,” Lena moaned into the phone.
Bee was quiet for a moment. “Len,” she said as gently as she possibly could. “Breaking up with someone is kind of like forgetting about them. It’s saying you don’t want to be with them anymore.”
“But maybe I didn’t mean it that way,” Lena said tearfully.
“But maybe that’s how it sounded to him,” Bee said.
“Well, he didn’t have to go and get a new girlfriend,” Lena replied accusingly.
Bee stifled her sigh. “You broke up with him. I saw your letter. He is allowed to get a girlfriend after that. It is fair.” Her voice softened again. “I know you are so sad, and I am sad for you, but you need to think about how this might seem in his eyes.”
“What should I do?” Lena asked. She had to do something. She felt so desperate she couldn’t even stand to be in her own skin. She would rather have clubbed herself over the head with her history binder than feel the things she was feeling.
This was why she had broken up with him. So she wouldn’t have to go through this. This wishing and wanting and not having. Why had it turned out so wrong?
“Lena?”
“Yes.”
“You still there?”
“Yes.”
“You know what you need to do?”
“No,” she lied.
“Think about it for a minute.”
Lena thought. She did know. But she couldn’t admit it, because then she might actually have to do it.
“I can’t,” she said miserably.
“Okay,” said Bee.
“Mom.” Tibby touched her mother’s shoulder. “Mom?”
Alice’s eyes opened. She was disoriented. It was three o’clock in the morning. She sat up in bed.
Before Tibby’s wondering eyes, her mother instinctively put her hands on Tibby’s sad face. Alice’s eyes were full of worry that Tibby wasn’t where she was supposed to be. Alice remembered that she loved Tibby before she remembered how mad she was at her.
Roughly Tibby threw her arms around her. Her sobs were dry and quiet. Take me back, she wanted to say. Let me be your girl again.
On the night of the fight, Carmen sat for many hours in her darkened room. In one of those hours, she overheard a whispered, strained conversation from inside her mother’s room. Carmen knew Christina was talking to David. She had poured gasoline all around her mother’s tender relationship, and the missed phone call was the lit match. Carmen listened in ugly, guilty satisfaction as agonized, overextended Christina broke up with confused, resistant David. She overheard the feeling of it clearly, even without hearing all the actual words.
Later that same night, when Carmen went to get a glass of orange juice, she couldn’t help glancing into her mother’s room. Carmen looked away quickly, but she’d seen Christina’s tear-streaked face and puffy eyes.
The next day, Monday, her mother came straight home from work and roasted a chicken. She and Carmen ate in near silence.
Tuesday night Christina claimed a headache and stayed in her room. Carmen stole into the kitchen for some ice cream and noticed one of the pints of Ben & Jerry’s was already gone.
Wednesday night Carmen went over to Tibby’s, feeling guilty about leaving her mother at home all alone. When she returned, Carmen heard the laugh track of a Friends rerun through her mother’s bedroom wall.
David hadn’t called, and it seemed Christina hadn’t called him again. From everything Carmen could tell, it was really over.
Carmen had wanted to ruin it. And so she had.
Oh, Bee.
Remember last summer, how furious I was with my dad and Lydia and how my anger got so big I tried to bring the whole place down with me? Remember that?
Well, did you know there are two kinds of people in the world? There are the kind who learn from their mistakes and the kind who don’t. Guess which kind I am?
I know you are always finding ways to love me in spite of how horrible I am. I hope I haven’t run out of chances.
With love and agony,
Carmen
On Saturday, Bridget went for a run in the morning before the soccer game. She’d gotten up to four miles. Slow ones, but still. When she arrived at the field, she was sweaty and sticky, but happy in the way only running could make her happy.
She took her usual spot on the sidelines. Billy looked for her. He looked relieved to see her there. She noticed he swung close by her in the first quarter, in case she had anythin
g to say. She just waved.
By the end of the half, Burgess was down by one. Billy ambled over. “What do you think?” he said.
She was enjoying this. “I think your midfield is a disaster,” she said.
Billy looked alarmed. “Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Why?”
“If Corey can’t pass the ball, tell him to take up tennis.”
Billy disappeared for a moment and came back with Corey. He sort of shoved Corey at Bridget. “Listen to her,” Billy instructed.
“Corey.”
“Yeah.”
“Pass. Pass the ball. You handle all right, but you can’t shoot worth a damn.”
Indignation settled over Corey’s face.
Billy looked grave. “She’s right,” he pronounced.
The whistle blew, and Billy hauled Corey back into the game. She noticed right away that Corey started passing.
That was something Bridget loved about boys. They took insults well.
Burgess won it 2–1, and there was the usual cheering on the field after the final whistle. Bridget cheered and screamed right along with them. All the high school kids bunched up to go out afterward. Corey was already making out with his girlfriend by the goalpost. Billy came over to her. “You want to come out?”
Bridget considered this. It was nice that he’d asked, but he hadn’t asked in a way that made her want to go. He’d asked in a way that let her know he was grateful. Grateful and interested were a world apart. “No. Thanks, though,” she said.
Instead, she hiked out to Interstate 65. A bunch of the high school kids passed her on the road. They were clumped together in a convertible, and she walked alone on the shoulder. She knew how it looked to them and she didn’t care. Some girls couldn’t stand being alone. Bridget was different. She went to movies, restaurants, even parties by herself. She loved her three friends above all other things, but she’d rather be alone than cling to people she didn’t care about.
When she got to the Wal-Mart she bought a bunch of things, most importantly a soccer ball. She hitched a ride back, hopped out at the courthouse, and found her feet swerving her past the soccer field again. It was dark out now, but there were a few strong lights illuminating three patches of grass.