I almost feel like it’s Ryan here, lecturing me. Except that my problem has never been about running away. My problem has been about staying in the same place.
“Where did she go?” Katie asks Lehna. “Just tell me.”
Lehna shakes her head. “Not tonight. Not now. It’s too late.”
My phone starts to make itself known again. Once I see it’s not Ryan, I leave it alone.
“I came back to see her,” Katie says. “Don’t you see that? I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready to see her. I’m still scared, but I’m not too scared.”
Lehna offers a hand, and I think for a second that this is it, Katie’s won her over. But instead she says, “Let it go for tonight. Come in and have a drink. Shelbie’s been asking about you, and I think she’s still sober enough to register that you’ve returned. Plus, they have Tanqueray.”
Katie leaves Lehna’s hand hanging in the air.
“You’re not going to tell me where she is? You know, and you’re not going to tell me?”
Lehna pulls her hand back, wipes it against her skirt. “She moved on. She was disappointed, but she moved on. You should do the same. And we can see where we are tomorrow.”
I’m figuring if I didn’t see Katie at the club early on, odds are she wasn’t there for much time. So this Violet didn’t wait all that long before moving on, whatever that means.
Maybe Katie’s doing this math, too. Or maybe she’s feeling like I am—tired from this whole night, tired from all the drama.
“I think it’s time for me to go home,” she says. “I know I’m your ride, and I don’t want to leave you stranded. But I really want to go now.”
June and Uma both look to Lehna, to see where this is going next.
Lehna doesn’t disappoint.
“Come on, Katie—”
“Kate.”
“Okay, Katherine—don’t be like that. Don’t punish us for what you did. The night is still young and my mother is, I’m sure, too knocked out on sleeping pills to hear people come and go. We can get home at four in the morning and no one will notice. Don’t ruin our night just because you ruined yours.”
Katie pulls her keys out of her pocket and dangles them in the air.
“Are you coming?” she asks June and Uma.
June looks at Uma. Uma looks at Lehna, then shakes her head.
“We’ll find someone else to drive us,” Lehna says. “Or take a cab. I don’t care. We’re not leaving now. Candace is here, and I haven’t even begun flirting with her. And Shelbie’s brother is an awesome singer.”
Katie tosses the keys up in the air, then catches them.
“Fine,” she says. But the tremor in her voice shows she’s not fine. She tried to call Lehna’s bluff, but now she’s the one falling off the cliff.
“I really appreciate it,” I tell her. “You driving me home.”
“Yeah,” she says, looking me in the eye—trying to find something she needs in there, but I’m not sure what. “Let’s get you home.” She turns back to her friends. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Or see you Monday. Whatever.”
My phone reminds me it has messages. As Katie and I walk away, I check them.
From my mother:
Who’s driving you?
And from Ryan:
I think I’m going to fly solo tonight. Well, not exactly solo. ☺ Have fun, my friend.
I stop in my tracks. I want to give up on the whole universe. I show Katie the screen.
“Dickish,” she says. “So dickish.”
And the pathetic thing is: I want to defend him. I want to say that it’s not sarcastic this time. He does want me to have fun.
Because he’s having fun. Somewhere. With someone. And he wants me to have that fun, too. He does.
We’ve walked a couple blocks, out of range of the sounds of the party. So I’m a little surprised to hear footsteps running on the sidewalk behind us. Katie and I turn to see who’s coming.
“June?” Katie says.
June is a little out of breath and speaks too fast at first. “I’mprettysureshewenttothewharf.”
“What?” Katie asks.
June breathes in. Puts her hand on Katie’s arm.
“The sea lions,” she says. “She said she’d never seen the sea lions. So I think they’re taking her to see them.”
4
Kate
A tulip, a dahlia, a freesia, a rose.
I can’t even think about what just happened, so I am thinking about flowers instead. About what a girl like Violet would choose for a girl like me.
“Of course we’re going,” Mark is saying. “It’s not even that far out of our way. It’s to the bridge and then a little past it.”
“Thirty-nine piers past it,” I say.
“Still,” he says. “You need to do it. There’s someone you think you might love who thinks she might love you in return. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t make you go after that?”
I am still not ready. Especially not now, after I screwed it up, slammed a door, made it so that our meeting will begin with an apology instead of a hello.
Lehna was right, though, when she told me I have to go right through it. Even I can see that. There are so many people in the world who are unlucky in love. I might be one of them, but that hasn’t been determined yet. What if Violet turns out to be exactly who I want her to be? Or what if she is different, unexpected, in a way that’s even better?
What if she really could change my life?
It would be a crime against love to not take this chance, so I send a silent thank-you to June and sail past the on-ramp to the bridge. Mark actually lets out a whoop as we pass it, like I just made some great play at one of his baseball games.
A daisy, a zinnia, a lilac, an aster.
As I list them to myself, I see a new series of paintings. Individual flowers against cobalt-blue backgrounds. If I paint them right, they’ll look like more than pretty flowers. They’ll look like the possibility of love.
The Embarcadero is dark and still. Parking, for once, is easy to find.
I turn off the engine and we get out. I can hear the sea lions barking, but nothing else. The quiet throws me off because I was expecting to find the pier crowded with tourists carrying souvenirs, their bellies full of clam chowder and sourdough bread.
But it’s late and everything is closed. Mark must feel my worry, because he says, “She wasn’t here to shop. She was here for the sea lions. Let’s walk toward the water.”
With each step, I feel a little hope escaping.
“What does she look like?” Mark asks, as if there’s anyone here to distinguish her from.
I play along.
“She has short dark hair. In the pictures I’ve seen, it’s usually falling into her eyes. In a perfect way.”
He smiles.
“And she has really great cheekbones, and a tiny scar by her eye from a circus accident.”
“A what?”
I laugh. I feel like he should already know everything; I forgot that he barely knows me.
So I tell him everything about her, which feels like telling him about myself, because when you think about something so intensely for so long, it kind of has a way of taking over everything else. I tell him about the circus and Mathilde, about the words Violet uses in the letters she writes. I tell him about a photograph I’ve stared at for hours, of her standing in front of a collapsing circus tent, with gold paint on her face and bangles on her wrist, her hand through her messy hair, the curve of her collarbone so gorgeous it hurts. I keep telling him about all of it even as we come to the end of the pier and the last traces of hope disappear.
I keep talking so that I won’t cry.
And then I’ve said all that I know about her.
We sit on a bench overlooking the sea lions sleeping in heaps, the bay to one side of us, the city with its empty, towering buildings to the other. All of the photos of her, all of the stories, all of the facts spin in a loop in my head, but I spare him a s
econd round of the monologue. I look toward the bay, but all I’m seeing is that photograph of Violet. The tent is billowing in the wind, the fiercest red. She’s looking straight at me, wondering what I’ll do next.
Mark and I must have been destined for each other, because what two-hour-old friendship can endure such a deep silence? Eventually, his phone vibrates.
“Your mom again?” I ask.
He grimaces.
“We can go.”
“I’ll try to make the last train. You might still be able to find her.”
“No,” I say. “We should spare me from subsequent chances to let myself down.”
He nods, and then he leans forward and puts his head in his hands.
“I’m sure you aren’t in that much trouble,” I say.
“It isn’t that.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
“I keep seeing him with those guys. I keep wondering what he’s doing. Who he’s doing it with. And, as far as he knows, I should be home by now. I can’t believe he hasn’t even texted to see what kind of heinous punishment my mother is inflicting on me.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, Tattoo Boy has nothing on you. Pretty much every guy in that bar shared my opinion.”
“Unfortunately, there’s only one opinion I really care about at the moment.” He peers up at me. “Sorry,” he says.
“No, I get it,” I say. “And what will happen next? He’ll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it and you’ll have to act happy for him? Or will it be more like he calls you and talks about the weather and, like, his plans for the literary journal next year?”
“I don’t even know. This is uncharted territory for us.” He looks across the water, to the bridge looming above us. “But what if he does want to swap stories? What if he tells me all about his awesome night with the college guys and all the college hipster parties he went to after the bar, where they drank beers out of mason jars and spun records or something? Then he’ll ask me what I did and I’ll say that I ruined your night and made you drive me home and then got lectured by my mother before going to sleep.”
“That’s bleak,” I say.
I run through a similar scenario in my head. Lehna and June and Uma telling me all about how wild the party got, where they went afterwards.
There has been an undercurrent of trouble between Lehna and me for a while—the way I’ve been wondering about our friendship, the way small things that I do annoy her. But what just happened was entirely above the surface, and we’re not used to that. The number of real fights we’ve gotten into before this night is a perfect zero. I always took for granted that someday we’d be these bickering old ladies drinking iced tea on a porch somewhere, bragging about our grandkids. I’d think mine were cuter than hers and she’d still sound snarky every time she said my name.
What just happened between us was serious, and the fact that I left makes it so much worse. They count on me to be there. I’m never the difficult one who vetoes the restaurant choice or doesn’t want to go to the movie because I’ve seen it already. There is always something to like on a menu, some new meaning to glean in a film. Maybe the fact that I’m easy is the reason I’m their friend. Now that I’ve let them down, they’ll probably get a ride home with someone who will become Lehna’s new best friend. She’ll be this fearless girl whom Lehna will never have to lecture, who will never disappoint her.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s bleak and it’s unacceptable. We’re going home, but we’re also going to have the time of our lives.”
“How?”
“We’re going to make up an excellent story to tell in the morning.”
He laughs.
“What kind of story?”
“Well, we know what Shelbie’s party is like. And we have a pretty clear idea of what Ryan is up to. So we just have to top those. We can vouch for each other.”
He shoots me a skeptical glance, but I can see he’s considering it.
“All right,” he says. “Fuck it. At this point I’d do just about anything to avoid further humiliation.”
“We need to come up with a scenario that is basically their dream, and then fill in the details,” I say. “Like Lehna loves her San Francisco connections. She’s into the status of it, the fact that Shelbie lives in a Victorian near Dolores Park. That she goes to a private school and spends the summer in France. Like somehow Lehna is more sophisticated by association. So we should make it about something superclassy. Like a party in a mansion in Pacific Heights.”
“Wow.” Mark laughs. “We’re really going for this. Okay, let me think.”
We stand up and make our way past the dark touristy restaurants and the souvenir kiosks, their metal roller doors pulled down for the night.
“Ryan really likes art,” Mark says. And even though he should be pissed off, he sounds so earnest, like he’s just telling me about this boy he loves instead of planning a lie that will make him jealous. “I mean, The Arts. So if this party were to include, like, artists and writers and people like that, he’d probably feel like he missed out.”
“Perfect. So we went to a Pride party in a mansion owned by a couple of superrich, artistic guys. And they had a foyer full of sculptures that were so obscure they were almost impossible to look at. But then the sculptor himself was a guest at the party and he explained them all to us and now we understand everything there is to understand about art.”
In all the minutes we’ve been here, there hasn’t been a trace of any other person. I’m beginning to wonder if Violet even made it here. Maybe she got sidetracked by a better plan, or went to see the sea lions at a different pier even though this is the one famous for them.
And then Mark says, “Oh, fuck.”
“What?”
He’s stopped walking, is looking at something on a bench where the pier ends and the sidewalk begins.
It looks like a flower.
Slowly, we approach it, side by side.
A rose.
Of course.
Bright red. Like the circus tent in the photograph, like the lipstick I was told to reapply for her. I reach carefully and pick it up between two fingers. She removed all the thorns. I could hold it tight in my fist if I wanted to.
“What does it mean?” I whisper. “That she would leave it here? Was she throwing it away?”
“She might have been,” Mark whispers back. “But maybe not. Maybe it was an act of hope, like when you make a wish, send it out into the world.”
“You hope it finds its way back to you,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“If she wanted to throw it away, she would have put it in the trash or dropped it on the ground, not set it here where it wouldn’t get stepped on.”
I say it with a certainty that I wish I could feel, but as I speak the words, they make sense. So I hold the rose’s thornless stem tightly. We climb into the Jeep and I set it on my lap because I am a cautious driver who keeps both hands on the wheel, but I want to keep this flower close to me. To part with it feels like bad luck.
And now we are on the on-ramp and officially leaving the city. Unlike our drive here, nothing about being on the bridge fills me with awe. There is nothing beautiful about it. We’re on the lower deck, surrounded by no one because it is only midnight and no respectable party would be even remotely close to over. I keep thinking, How could we have missed her?
“But how did we end up at this party?” Mark asks, bringing me back to our plan. “Maybe some painting connection of yours? Like, have you ever had any cool art teachers or something?”
I shake my head. It’s true—how would Mark and I ever end up at a party like that? This was a bad idea. No one will believe us, and the more we plan, the more distance we cover, the farther we get from the city, from Ryan, from Violet, from all my friends who might not even be my friends anymore, from the electric current of the night and the possibility that my life might change.
“Actually,” Mark says. “I totally know how we cou
ld have ended up at a party like that.”
And then he pulls a business card out of his wallet and tells me about this world-famous photographer who just happened to ask him if he modeled and also took his picture and gave him his card.
“How on earth was this not the first thing you told me tonight?”
“Everything was such a blur,” he says. “And, you know, I’ve been kind of preoccupied. But I should text this guy and find out if he really is at a party, because it would suck if we used him as an excuse and it turned out Ryan saw him somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Good call.”
Mark sends him the world’s longest text, reintroducing himself, providing some distinguishing characteristics to remind the guy in case he’s taken pictures of quite a few could-be models tonight, saying that the night has stalled out, and asking if there’s anything cool going on.
“If he writes back I’ll just say that we’ll try to make it. And then I can tell him that it didn’t work out.”
“Good plan,” I say, but as I say it I glide over two lanes and slow to take the narrow, curving exit onto Treasure Island.
“Where are we going?” Mark asks me, and the truth is that I don’t know. But it isn’t home. Not yet. As I pull onto the side of the road, the awe is officially back. The city glows so close in front of us. I can almost hear the voices of hundreds of thousands of celebrating people.
“Hand me the phone,” I say.
He doesn’t ask me why; he just does it.
I find his recent calls and tap Home.
“What’s your mom’s name?”
“Becca,” he says. “But, to be honest, I don’t think—”
“Becca!” I say to the voice that answers. “This is Kate Cleary. I’m a senior in Mark’s Calc class, and I also happen to be his chaperone this evening. I’m calling to touch base with you about our plans.”
“Are you the person who is supposed to be driving him home right now?” Becca asks me. Her voice is so familiar even though I’ve never heard it. It’s the stern but kind voice of a TV mom. I don’t yet know her, but I know her. And so I carry on.
“Yes,” I say. “And, in fact, we are in the car now, and we will absolutely keep driving home if that’s what you need. But I have to say that the night is young, Becca, and we are, too.”