“Yeah, he really was. He had protection and everything.”
“Like he planned it? That’s weird,” said Reagan, the nonromantic.
“I’m sure he didn’t plan it, Reagan,” Vati shot back. There was still some friend-yuck there.
“I’m just saying. Why else would he have condoms?”
I had not thought of that, but I thought it was good that we didn’t have unprotected sex, the very thing I had been forbidden from doing since I was nine and my mother told Oliver and me in the greatest detail about how babies were made, puberty, homosexuality, sexting, and anything else she wanted to be the first one to tell us. (“I would much rather have my morals, ideals, and values get in your brains first before some dingbat kid in your school tells you masturbating will make you go blind.”)
“Doesn’t every senior guy have condoms?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Farah-the-sex-expert chimed in. She also broke out the sun nut butter, took a spoon, scooped it, and then sucked it off with no bread or anything.
“Anyway, he was really sweet and he…” This was harder to say out loud than the sex part. I could have easily said it if it had just been Vati. “… said he loved me.”
“He did?” all of them said in unison. I just nodded. “I said I loved him too!”
“Oh, Wren, that is so great,” Reagan said, sort of surprisingly.
“It is! Oh my gosh, Wren, it’s all happening,” Vati said.
“Well, whatever, I just wanted to tell you guys.” I felt bashful, maybe because I was talking about sex, not in the abstract, but for real.
“Did it hurt?” Vati asked.
“No, it didn’t, which I guess is weird?”
“No, it’s a myth that it hurts and that you bleed all over the place,” said Farah.
“I bled,” said Reagan.
“When did you lose your virginity?” I said, and looked at the other girls to see if they knew.
“Oh god, I don’t know, not so long ago. It was with someone I met over the summer, when my mom and I went to visit her friends in Maine.”
“How could you not tell us?” Vati said.
“I just didn’t. It wasn’t a big deal. I never even saw the guy again.”
“That’s sort of sad, Reagan,” I said.
“It didn’t feel sad,” she said, and opened a can of seltzer.
“I think Oliver and I will wait,” Vati said. “I just want to be sure that it’s all real.”
“It’s real, Vats,” I said. “He’s nuts about you.”
“Isn’t that weird? It’s like Reagan brought you two together,” Farah said to a flabbergasted audience. “Oh come on. If Reagan hadn’t kissed Oliver at the museum, Vati would still be having a huge crush on him from afar, like way afar.”
“Vati.” Reagan stepped up. “I am sorry about that. It was just a thing. It was kind of an accident.”
“I know. It’s okay, I don’t think you could have really known how much I actually liked him. After all these years, it may have seemed unreal.”
“No, I knew how you felt about him. I—I just wasn’t thinking it through. Thoughtless is the wrong word, it was more like stupidity.”
“Oliver told me he was flirting with you pretty hard,” Vati said. “We’re talking about what happened so we can get past it.” I knew Vati loved that she was having “relationship talk” with Oliver.
“Well, we were both being stupid,” Reagan said.
And then Vats and Reagan gave each other a girl hug where you kind of laugh and get weepy at the same time.
“Whew,” I said. “That was like, a really weird month, with you two on the outs. It was weird, right?” I started making a sun nut butter and raspberry jam sandwich.
“Farah, what is up with you?” Reagan said, pulling away from Vats.
“Well … I’m in love too.”
“With Cy Dowd?” I flipped up the knife and jam flew onto the kitchen floor.
“Yes of course. Who else?”
“Well, I don’t know, Farah, you just met him.” I went to the sink, ripped off a piece of paper towel (even though we are supposed to clean up spills with a sponge so as not to waste paper), and bent over to wipe up the blop of jam.
“You just met Nolan,” she shot back.
“Yeah, I know, but we’re teenagers. He’s a senior, not a senior citizen.”
Vati laughed. I hadn’t even meant to make a joke.
“Oh my god, that is so judgmental,” Farah said.
“Sorry. I just thought you … that it was a mistake, like Reagan and Oliver,” I said.
“You can’t help who you love, Wren,” Farah said.
“I can’t believe you are saying you love him. Does he love you?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know, but I would say yes. We don’t talk about it. We just hang out.”
“What does that mean, you just hang out? Where? How come everyone is suddenly talking about love?” Reagan walked to the yellow sofa and fell onto it, making her big boobs bounce up and down.
“Oh my god, Reagan, you guys, forget it, I shouldn’t have said anything.” Farah tossed her spoon in the porcelain farm sink, making a loud clatter. She winced at the sound of it.
“No, you should, you should tell us,” I said.
“Well, don’t tell anyone—like your parents, Wren.” She looked at me, and I have to say it was my first instinct, to tell my parents. I wanted to blab the entire story the second they got home. Once my father told Oliver and me that if we ever found ourselves over our heads, say if there were drugs at a party or if someone was vomiting from drinking too much, we had to call them. Those circumstances would get us a free pass from getting in trouble. He said that he and Mom could be relied on to be a “safe haven” and we could count on them to get us out of a bad situation that was beyond us. Free. Of. Trouble. This felt like that. This felt like a bad situation, and my parents felt like a safe haven from it. Where was Farah’s mother anyway?
“Just don’t, okay?” she said, looking at me doubtfully. “Cy said it would be a shit show if people found out.”
“How do you even see him?” Vati said.
“He texts me and then sends a car, and I go to his loft. I tell my mom I’m with you guys or at the movies or whatever.”
“Just be careful, Farah,” I said.
“You too, Wrenny,” she shot back.
Vati took a bite of my sandwich that I hadn’t eaten.
“I don’t think I have to be careful, Farah,” I said quietly.
Later that afternoon when everyone was gone, the doorbell rang. I was still in the kitchen attempting to read my Lit homework, a good book called The Outsiders, but even with its pretty engrossing plot, I was drifting. I popped up, went to the door, and asked who it was. Nothing. I went to the window and tried to see if anyone was standing on the steps. No one. I opened the first door to the vestibule and felt the cold through my sweater.
“Who is it?” I said again. Nothing. I opened the front door carefully because we are not supposed to open the door if we don’t know who it is, and there on the top step was a small pot of paperwhites. Paperwhites are tiny white flowers with long bright green stems that only come at Christmastime. They were wrapped in brown kraft paper and tied with a red satin ribbon. The note said,
I really can’t stop thinking about you. It hurts.
Love, Nolan
I took the little plant up to my room and put it on my windowsill. The white flowers looked like stars. Was he giving me the stars? I took out my drawing pad and started sketching the flowers, which stood up proudly in front of the Upper West Side rooftops extending behind them. I became extremely focused—my brain was a microscope. I could feel myself zoom in, scrutinizing the tiny, winding pale gray veins embedded in the silken petals. My pencil recorded photographic replicas of each flower as if I were an architect drafting the plans for a building. It was as if I needed my brain to have an imprint of them so I would be able to go back to them for years and years.
And then, maybe from exhaustion or just because of the way my brain works with its ADD, I let go of the intense focus and I drew from another place, a fuzzier place, a place where I am closer to my soul. I let the flowers turn into the stars I wanted them to be. I drew the story of Nolan and me spinning and rolling through the night sky together—dancing in the Milky Way, soaring on a moonbeam.
43
It was astounding to get paperwhites on my front steps—even my mother said, “Now that is nice.” And it does feel great to believe that a boy really loves you. But I didn’t see Nolan that much, so I questioned whether the afternoon in his room, or the flowers, or even my feelings, were real. There was a declaration of love and then no path to follow. What does one do after saying “I love you”?
Nolan did come pick me up from school again. It was getting closer to Christmas; the city was starting to put on its sparkle. The fir trees on the oblong islands that run down the middle of Park Avenue were all lit up. The story goes that years ago, in 1945, a few wealthy families that lived on Park Avenue got money together to wrap the trees that stand on the islands in white lights to honor those who died in World War II. The trees are still lit up every winter. Since my school is on the East Side and I have to cross Park Avenue on most afternoons, those pretty illuminated trees mean the start of the holiday season. You can’t imagine how fairy-tale-like it is to stand on a corner and look downtown for blocks and blocks of twinkling trees. Anyway, one afternoon that week when Nolan picked me up after school and we went to get milk shakes at the coffee shop on Madison Avenue where we got french fries that one time, the trees were twinkling.
“I think I am going to take a year off before college,” Nolan said, holding my hands across a little table-for-two next to the window.
“Oh yeah?” His hair was in a loose ponytail and he hadn’t taken his scarf off. Sometimes he looked like this actor Olivier Martinez, who was in this old movie called Unfaithful that my mother inappropriately let me see when I was still a little kid. The movie was scary. It’s about a woman who has an affair with this hot guy, played by Martinez, and then her nice husband finds out and gets so jealous and enraged that he sort of accidentally kills the lover with a snow globe! Once Mom realized what I was watching she almost made me turn it off, but it was too late and I begged her and she spent the rest of the movie anxiously explaining everything she thought was too mature for me. Anyway, Nolan looked like that hot, straight-nosed French actor and I was proud to be sitting with him.
“Yeah, if it all comes through, we are going to tour with this band Triumph—they are out of Atlanta and sort of sound like the Black Crowes.” We had ordered fries too. He let go of my hand to take a fry and swiped it in ketchup.
“I think I know who they are. Do they sing that song that goes…” and then I had to sing, which was mortifying. “‘Dooonnn’t stay … something, something, back me up, back me up,’ something like that?”
“Yes! Oh my lord, you are so cute! Yes! That is their song! How did you hear that?”
“Oliver plays it constantly.”
“Oh yeah, I gave him the CD. They are coming to New York soon, and we are going to open for them at the Palladium, and if it goes how we think it will, it’s going to happen, and we’ll travel all over America with them starting next year when their album is released.”
“That is amazing!” I really thought it was amazing.
“So.” He took a sip of his milk shake and looked at me kind of skeptically. “Are you still all gung ho about going to France? To that program?”
“Yeah, I mean, I am so up a creek because I haven’t finished my application yet, but yeah.” I dipped a fry in the milk shake and ate it.
“It sounds fantastic and you should finish—you will get in. You totally should.” I didn’t at all think he was going where he ended up going. I nodded, and swallowed.
“But.” He took another a sip of milk shake. “What if you didn’t go?” I looked at him like he was speaking Icelandic. “I know, but just listen. I was going to go to college, right? But now I’m not going to go, until the next year. I was freaked out about that because, well, it’s a good thing to go to college and I totally want to go to college, but the thing is, I don’t have to go right away, you know? Like, we don’t have to do everything in the exact way we think we are supposed to.”
“Uh-huh.” He kept going. I was following, but I sort of do try to do everything in the way that you are supposed to, so I felt muddled.
“I’m going to be in New York all summer until November. If you go away, you will go for the fall, right?”
“Yeah, it’d be from September through December.”
“Right. We will miss each other. I’ll be gone when you get back.”
“So what are you saying?” Suddenly I felt really stupid in what seemed to be a pretty important conversation, with a huge, foaming chocolate milk shake in front of me.
“I’m saying, isn’t there some amazing art program in New York that you could do?”
“And not apply to Saint-Rémy?”
“I guess, yeah, don’t apply. I want you to stay here.” He was asking me to be with him all the way until the following year. This was not just a flimsy tenth-grade romance, this was real. My heart rate went up dramatically.
“I don’t know … I have wanted to go to Saint-Rémy for so long. It’s been a dream of mine for—ever, and, well, I have a plan with Mrs. Rousseau and my parents and everyone.”
“I know. This is stupid. I am being totally selfish and crazy, actually. If this is meant to be, you and me, which I think it is…” He smiled in his easygoing, confident, friendly way. “It doesn’t matter where we are. I’m just saying that sometimes life can change our paths, and that’s okay. I think that is part of the deal.”
I was speechless.
“Hey, you know what?” he said cheerfully.
“What?”
“I was Googling that Cy Dowd. He seems like a creep.”
“Yeah?” I felt my body relax at the change of subject, and I took a long drink of my milk shake like you see people take long drinks of a scotch in a movie. “I think you’re right. But what do you mean specifically?”
“I mean, he’s definitely a genius and everything, but he’s blatantly with a different model every night all over Page Six and the blogs. Is Farah still messing around with him?”
“Yeah, I think so, and you know, I’m kind of freaked out by it. Really freaked out.”
“You should be. It’s sick that he is taking advantage of her.” Right! I thought. He was taking advantage of her in his creepy, genius art loft with his tiny pig running around, and she was clueless about it. Nolan’s assessment made me crazy in love with him. His protective instinct reminded me of my father.
“I want to tell my dad.” I pointed at him with another french fry.
“Oh, I don’t think you should do that.”
“No?”
“No, no. Just wait. If you involve parents, it could get out of hand. What he is doing is illegal.”
“But Dad will help her, and if it’s illegal—which I know it is, by the way—then it should be stopped.” I pictured telling Dad at the kitchen island. I pictured his face turning red and him rushing to the closet to get his Barbour coat to go find Cy Dowd. “Or he will challenge him to a duel and kill him.”
“That’s hilarious. Your dad would totally wield a sword instead of beating the daylights out of the guy. He’s so civilized.”
“Maybe he would call the police!” I was getting excited.
“Maybe.” He thought for a moment. “But perhaps, instead of totally ruining the life of a mack-daddy artist, we should talk to Farah and get her to stop. No harm, no foul,” Nolan said earnestly.
“I don’t think she would listen to me,” I said, and sucked more sweet comforting milk shake into my mouth.
“She would listen to all of us.”
All of us. I loved that Nolan felt like he was included in “all of us.” Like he
was a Turtle, or the boyfriend of a Turtle.
“I wonder if there are any good after-school art programs in New York?” he said, looking at me with a half smile. “I mean, I don’t know, but I wonder.” He put his hand up between us in the air, with his elbow still on the table. I put my hand up on his, like we were seeing whose fingers were longer. I thought to myself that if I didn’t have to apply to Saint-Rémy, if I didn’t have to draw that self-portrait, I would feel the weight of a thousand stones tumble off my shoulders.
“You have big hands for a girl.” I clenched my hand into a tight fist of embarrassment. Like one of those sea creatures that are all open and flowing, but then something scares them and they retract into a little ball.
“No, stop!” He pried open my fingers and pressed them back onto each of his fingers.
“That is terrible, I don’t want to have big hands!” I was laughing, but dying the curse-of-the-tall-girl death inside.
“No, nooo, it’s badass. It’s strong.” I could feel the heat in my face as I eased up on my hand, letting our fingers touch lightly and then collapse and intertwine and be together.
44
“Oh my god. You look so pretty right now,” Reagan said, looking up from her math homework on my bed. It was the Wednesday before the December 15 deadline and I was attempting to draw myself. Reagan said she would keep me company and finish a bunch of corrected math assignments she had piled up. (In Math C, which Reagan and I both take, our teachers make us take the problems we get wrong home to “rework.” It’s such a pain in the butt to do homework not once, but twice. However, “We learn from our mistakes,” Mrs. Hotchkiss loves to remind us.)
“Eww, no I don’t—I’m totally Wilma Flintstone. I have charcoal everywhere.”
“No, you have that I-don’t-know-I-look-pretty-but-I-do thing going on. You look pretty when you draw.”
“That’s whack,” I said, and went back to fixing the curve of my ear on the smudgy paper.
“You do,” she said. “I remember thinking it in sixth grade when we had art together. You concentrate when you draw in a way that makes you look like you’re thirty.”