Everything Between Us (5 page)

“Truce,” she says. “Just for today. I’m tired anyway.”

She sinks further into her chair, all crumpled up, her boney ankles and bare feet sticking out of the frayed legs of her pants. I open my sketchpad and grab my pencil from the table. Usually, at this moment, she turns away. She knows what I’m doing, and she hates it, and she tries to hide. But today, she stares right at me. She’s still got her legs bent in front of her like a shield. She’s hugging them to her chest like she’s terrified to show her soft underbelly… but she’s watching me while I watch her.

My breath quickens, my heart thumping a little harder. I didn’t expect her scrutiny to have this effect, but as I sketch, my muscles wind a bit tighter. I feel her gaze in the pit of my stomach. My eyes stroke across her cheeks, the slope of her jaw, her hairline, and it feels like she’s surrendering something to me, whether she’s doing it intentionally or not. She’s letting me have the sight of her, and it’s exactly what I need to settle me down.

When my phone chirps that it’s eleven, both of us flinch. We’ve been locked in this little private …
I have no idea what
… for an hour, and it felt like a minute. I look down at my sketchpad. Her face looks up at me from the page. She doesn’t look afraid. In fact, she looks bold. The Stella of the past hour is nakedly curious. She’s unapologetic. She’s …

Beautiful.
Shit.

I let out a shaky breath and get to my feet. With unsteady hands, I rip the page from the sketchpad. The real, flesh-and-blood Stella has turned back to the window, knowing what I’m about to do. I wish I could see her reaction, but I don’t stick around after I do this, and I won’t let today be different. It’s only a drawing, after all.

I set it on the end of the chaise, glancing over in time to see her blink. She knows I’m right here. “See you tomorrow. And thanks.” I turn on my heel and head for the door.

Just before I reach it, she whispers, “You’re welcome.”

Chapter Four: Stella

As soon as he’s gone, I look toward the sketch, my heart thudding. He was different today. Will his sketch be different, or will I look as hunted and vicious as I usually do? Will I look worse?

My fingers tremble as I turn it so I can see. I lean forward, putting my face over the one in the sketch. Dark hair frames a streamlined face. The eyes of this girl are ebony and bottomless, almost liquid. She’s ferocious-looking, but not in a cruel way. She simply looks powerful. Like she can get what she wants. Like she’s about to stand up, walk across the room, and take whatever pleases her.

God, I wish I was this girl.

It’s the most inaccurate sketch Daniel’s ever done, which tells me he was
really
off today.

I should crumple this up and toss it in the fireplace, like I have with all the others, but I … can’t make myself do it. Pinching either edge and holding it out in front of me, I get up and head back to my room. His request to me today still hovers in my thoughts. Something was bothering him, and he just came out and asked for mercy. It was my moment, the one I had been waiting for. I saw it in his eyes—if I pushed at the right place, it would flip his switch, and he’d be gone. He’d decide that the money wasn’t worth all my bitchiness. I could have had my way.

But when that moment arrived, I hesitated. I wish I knew why.

I lay the sketch on my desk and grab
Anna Karenina
. I flop onto my bed, needing to get Daniel and his irritatingly handsome face out of my head. I spend a few hours reading about Anna’s unraveling and a bunch of other relatively boring stuff about Russian peasantry and the value of land or … something. I drift off somewhere in there, but when I do, Daniel sneaks up on me again, his scruffy hair hanging over his forehead, his blue eyes peeking through.

“Gah! Leave me alone!”  I tell my own brain. I grab for my iPad and look at recipes for a little while, scrawl a note to Willa asking her to get almond paste the next time she goes to the store, then check my email for the first time in weeks. I only have one message. From Taylor, my roommate at Wellesley. I’m surprised, because she seemed so relieved when I told her I wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t blame her, either. But it’s nice of her to check in, to care.

Her email says:
Found a pair of your gloves at the bottom of the closet. Do you want me to send?

My stomach clenches. Two and a half years at Wellesley, dozens of birthday cakes, hours bonding over helicopter moms and clueless dads, nights in front of the TV in the common room, and plenty of hugs over tragic break-ups and low exam scores, and this is the only social connection I have left, and it’s not actually social. It’s a businesslike inquiry about gloves.

So I respond:
Hi, Taylor! So nice to hear from you! How’s the semester going so far? How are things with Elliot? Were his parents nice? I’m

I stop typing. She didn’t ask me how I am. Why am I writing this? She probably wouldn’t want to reply—it would be a chore to her, just like
I
was a chore to her. I’ll never forget when she lost her temper at me, a week before winter break, and snapped that she was requesting to change rooms because she couldn’t stand having a roommate who never actually left the dorm, who ate from the vending machines to avoid going to the dining hall, who shouldn’t even be at the school since I stopped attending classes with a month left in the semester.

All I could say to her was,
you’re right, Taylor. I’m sorry, Taylor.
All I could think was,
God, get me the fuck out of here before I lose my mind.

She was so sympathetic and worried the first time I had a panic attack—in the middle of a crowded movie theater lobby. Of course, neither of us knew what it was at the time. It came up on me so sudden, this tight feeling in my chest, and then my stomach heaved and I broke out in a cold sweat. This incredible urge to run came over me, and I tried to push my way out, but there were so many people and we got herded into a corner. I knew I was going to faint or fall through the floor or throw up or maybe all of the above. Taylor called an ambulance, her eyes wide and her face white, her free hand rubbing my back as I sank into a corner and curled in on myself, certain I was dying. The paramedics showed up and took me to the hospital, where they told me
nothing
was wrong. A kindly doctor patiently explained that I’d had a panic attack and asked me if I wanted to make an appointment at the school’s counseling center. No, I didn’t. I wanted to tell him he had no idea what he was talking about. I called my dad and had him arrange an appointment with a cardiologist, who did every diagnostic test known to humankind … then told me that it was all in my head.

I decided to believe him, because hey, I’ve always been good at anything that involved thinking. I told myself that it wouldn’t happen again. But then it did, in the dining hall. And again, in the middle of a fucking history lecture. I couldn’t control myself at all. I figured if I just avoided the places I’d panicked, maybe it would stop.

The last straw for both Taylor and me was when we were caught on the highway on the way home from a late evening shopping trip, traffic all around us due to an accident ahead of us. I felt it coming, this slither of pain in my chest, and I begged Taylor to drive on the shoulder, on the grass, anything to get us off the road. My hands were shaking. I was sure I was going to throw up. My stomach was tied in crazy knots. My heart squeezed up so tight that I
knew
it was about to explode. I started sobbing. Taylor veered out of traffic to a chorus of horns and got pulled over by a cop for blocking the shoulder. By the time he was done giving her a citation, I was feeling a little better. Instead of being glad, she seemed mad that I wasn’t dying.

I paid for the ticket, but she was done. So was I. My world became the size of my dorm room. My dad had to fly out and travel with me just so I could get home for the holidays.

I blink down at my cheerful email to Taylor, all my exclamation points screaming
I’m fine! I’m happy! I’m trying too hard!

She doesn’t want to hear from me. She’s glad I’m gone. I delete her email and logout.

This is my life now. I sit in this room by myself. I read classic novels. I bake cookies and cupcakes and send them home with the housekeeper. I have art lessons with my mom’s mister. Daniel, not Danny or Dan or Danielle. I don’t even know his last name, but now I’m thinking about him again. My mom said he was an artist from the co-op downtown, and that he teaches there. I open my browser and do a search for the co-op’s website, where I tap the
Artists
tab. It’s a simple site, nothing fancy, but they do have pictures of each artist and a brief description of their work. Markus Brower, a sculptor who looks a little like he belongs in a biker gang. Lyle Dykstra, a portrait painter with a graying comb-over. Daisy Bakalar, who does still lifes and landscapes in oil pastels, and has a pretty, round face and long hair. Sasha Miller, a potter with shoulder-length black hair and eyes that are beautiful but somehow sad at the same time. Caleb McCallum, a painter with dark brown hair and a face that could land him on a runway at fashion week.

And Daniel Van Vliet, his mischievous blue eyes staring out at me, with a face that’s probably landed him in plenty of women’s beds. His profile says his style resembles what would happen if Willem De Kooning had one too many drinks and played seventeen straight hours of Final Fantasy before sitting down to draw the portrait of a hyperactive lizard.

I read it again, certain that I skipped some key word or sentence that renders that statement understandable. It’s not there. I look up Willem De Kooning and peruse a few of his paintings, then slide my way back to the co-op website and click on Daniel’s portfolio. There are several pics here, taken of pieces he’s completed in the last two years—none of which resemble De Kooning’s style in any way. Many of them are listed as being part of private collections, but some are for sale in local galleries.

I flip through each picture, enlarging them so they take up my whole screen. Daniel’s style is … well, I don’t know anything about art, but it seems ballsy, I guess. And playful. There’s nothing dark about his paintings. He seems to gravitate toward bright colors, and sometimes he uses newspaper clippings cut into odd shapes and positioned to emphasize certain words or phrases. One has six words right down its center, cut from newspaper headlines:

Do

Not

Glue

Your

Faces

To

All around the words, tucked and overlapping, are stills from reality television shows, movies, news programs, photographs from the war, and, in the bottom corner, there’s a large magazine photo of a possum with its mouth wide open, its sharp little teeth gleaming. Daniel’s painted over parts of the images in ways that completely change the mood, enhanced them, layered them on top of each other, and left a few blank spaces where it looks like clippings have been pasted and torn off. All of it looks intentional, though, because even in those blank spaces, there’s texture, as if he’s challenging the viewer to guess what was there. The whole thing is silly and irreverent, like he knows he’s part of this culture and he’s laughing at himself as well as the rest of us. And the possum seems to be there just to make you wonder
why
it’s there. Or maybe he’s being really literal, and he’s advising viewers not to glue their faces to possums. Which is good advice, if you think about it.

It makes me smile even though I don’t want to. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or well-done or crap, but I think it’s clever and worth a second look.

I spend time on each of his paintings, gorging myself on the vibrant, gleeful, perverse images, and as I do, a sense of dread wells up inside me. I didn’t want him to be good. Or interesting. I wanted him to be an over-sincere, sappy hack, because then his body and face would explain it all. I wanted his work to be obvious and dumb, because then I could dismiss it. And the funny thing is, a lot of it
is
obvious, and some of it is kind of dumb, but in all cases, it’s clear that’s exactly how he wants it to be, because there are too many sly flashes of cleverness for it to be anything else. It’s like he’s controlling what he offers and how much of it he’s willing to give. Like he has no intention of baring his soul to anyone, but he’ll put on a damn good show so you forget that’s what you wanted in the first place.

So. Daniel Van Vliet might be a man-whore, but he is clearly not brainless. Far from it, unfortunately. I do a search for his name and find a couple of mentions in various places. It turns out we graduated from the same high school, four years apart. He was on the hockey team. He graduated from Becker two years ago with a BFA, and he was magna cum laude, which meant he didn’t mess around, not when it came to his grades, at least. I do an image search and find a picture of him, probably in high school or right after, at some party with his arm slung over the shoulders of a guy who looks a lot like Caleb McCallum. I wonder if they’re friends.

I wonder why I’m wondering.

Abruptly, I turn the iPad over and push myself off the bed. “What is wrong with me?” I mutter.

Feeling too restless for my own skin, I head down the hall and into the living room, where I find my mom staring out the window, cradling a glass of wine against her chest. “Hi,” I say as I approach, not wanting to startle her.

She looks over at me. “Estella,” she says, forcing enthusiasm into her voice. “Are you joining us for dinner?”

“Us?”

“Your father and I.” She sniffles and takes a generous sip of wine.

“We’re eating together?” We never eat together. “Um, sure.”

I follow her into the kitchen. The housekeeper has left something in the oven, and my mom yanks on oven mitts and pulls it out. A roasted chicken and potatoes.

“I made a chocolate torte this morning,” I offer, pointing to my creation on the kitchen island. “Maybe we could have it for dessert?”

She runs her hand down her side. “I’m trying to lose a few pounds.”