Playing Keira (2 page)

I’m not some budding fashion designer. I’m not sure I even enjoy all the tweaking. But when you’re voted Best Dressed in your class two years in a row, you’ve got shoes to fill. Literally.

“Thanks,” I say, then add, “Nice jacket.”

“It’s actually Mary-Kate’s, swiped from her biker brother. She left it the last time she visited.” Garrett fingers the leather, maybe remembering a moment when she took the jacket off so he could run his hands under her shirt. Yes, my mind goes there.

“So, Rayanne,” he says, shifting in his seat now, toward me. “What are your big plans for Saturday in the city?”

He had to ask. Most people wouldn’t. They’d think it rude or nosy, and if it weren’t for the girlfriend, I’d assume he was hinting at something. But I look at him, something in his brown eyes fresh, unspoiled. Here is a person who knows nothing about me, and suddenly there is nothing more intoxicating.

“I’m going to visit my mom,” I say. There’s at least one reality where this statement is true.

“Cool,” says Garrett, and why wouldn’t he? It really is that simple for some people.

I’m not sure why I feel the need to add something here, but I do. “I see her every other weekend.” Just like that, Rayanne’s story is taking shape. She’s waiting to bust out. “This time we’re going to a show, I think. She said she got tickets for something.”

It solidifies quickly in my head: Rayanne’s mother doesn’t take her to operas and ballets the way my father does. She buys tickets for every trashy, flashy Broadway show that opens. Before the performance, they eat at a theme restaurant in Times Square and drink neon-blue mocktails. Afterward, they get coffee and talk about which songs they liked best.

The way Rory Gold and her mother probably do. I’m fully aware that the reason why Rory Gold bugs me has less to do with her mad math skills and more to do with her mom.

One Friday night two months ago, my friends Izzy and Claire and I went to a movie. We were waiting for it to start when Izzy nudged me and pointed to a spot a few rows in front of us, where Rory and her mother were sitting. Izzy and Claire said a bunch of catty things, all variations on the already-lame joke of Rory and her mom being on a “hot date” together, and I joined in because that’s what they expected me to do. After the movie was over, I found myself standing in line for the ladies’ room two people behind the Golds. They were talking about the movie—which scenes they liked, the strong points and weaknesses, the performances. The kind of intelligent and thoughtful conversation I would never have with my friends. The kind I do remember having with my mom, when she still seemed to care what I had to say.

The memory of it climbed onto me from somewhere below, grabbing my knees and making them buckle, nearly pulling me to the floor.

Later that night, I made my plan: to find out where she might be. To go to her. Or at least to try. I did not tell a soul.

I thought about confiding in my friend Nate, the only person on the planet who could possibly understand. But he wouldn’t have approved of some parts of the plan, and I couldn’t risk him spilling the beans.

I’ve been keeping so many secrets lately that now, here with this stranger named Garrett, it feels terrific to spill. Even if they’re not real secrets, just made-up ones.

As the bus travels closer to Manhattan and the address I have scribbled on a used gum wrapper in my purse, I tell Garrett more about Rayanne. Rayanne is from Rhode Island—I picked a place I know a little about, because every summer we visit my dad’s family in Providence. Rayanne likes sushi but not meat. Rayanne lives in a dorm now but next semester, she plans to rent an apartment near Main Street with her three very best friends.

As Rayanne takes on flesh and bone, dimension and complexity, it feels good. I think of my mother again. The screaming freedom of leaving behind the person you were, or imagined you were, or others thought you were—what are the differences, anyway?—simply by changing your surroundings. Choosing to be someone new.

I thought about giving Rayanne a boyfriend, but the window on that closed. I can’t give her a boyfriend now, after telling him all these other unimportant things first. It will sound made-up. I know: the irony.

Garrett and I are silent for a while. We’re driving through a nondescript stretch of the Thruway, trees and hills and houses in repeating rotations. The kind of scenery that makes a trip feel long and aimless.

Finally, I ask Garrett what courses he’s taking, too curious about whether or not he has my dad.

“Victorian lit,” he says, and digs a tattered book out of his briefcase. He flips through the pages, many of which are dog-eared. For a second I think he’s going to read something to me, but then he just gives the book an affectionate glance and puts it away. Maybe he changed his mind about something. Maybe he’s realizing that chatting me up like this might seem like flirting, and Mary-Kate would be pissed if she knew. Garrett stuffs his briefcase near his feet and runs his hands through his hair, which is noticeably less wet than it was when he first got on the bus.

I watch his hands as he does all this. He doesn’t realize how sensual the movement is, or that I’m a little obsessed with this particular body part. Garrett’s hands are good sized and his nails are trimmed, clean. They are not hairy. They’re not dry and cracked, so maybe he moisturizes. I imagine what it would be like to stroke the backs of them, and how soft the skin might feel.

The only hands I let myself touch are Nate’s, and that’s because I know they are safe. They’re not going anywhere I don’t want them to. I often touch his knuckles and wrists when we’re talking, and he doesn’t take it the wrong way. He has huge hands, and I guess that’s part of what makes him a great swimmer; they’re like flippers, he’s said to me. Our friendship is the kind where he hugs me good-bye. It feels incredible, but I only let it last for a moment or two. When it gets to a third moment, I start to panic. I start to remember.

I was fourteen, and my dad and I had been living outside Paris for two years while he taught on a fellowship. The fellowship was ending, and it was time to go home. Back to Mountain Ridge, back to the place where I had become the Girl Whose Life Fell Apart in Front of Everyone. My friend Alexandra decided to throw me a going-away party. Alex was the first friend I’d made when I’d arrived at the American school in France, officially American like me but for all intents and purposes, French. She taught me everything I needed to know, including the importance of accessories and how to order at a café so that you didn’t sound like a tourist. My father hadn’t let me go to any parties up until that point, but this one was for me, so how could he say no?

Olivier was an older boy who lived in Alex’s building, and he showed up at the party. He’d seen me from time to time when I visited Alex, and I’d seen him back. He’d check me out in a way American middle-school guys would never dare, full of obvious wonder and appetite.

At the party, Olivier waited until the first slow song and pulled me onto the dance floor, and I was so surprised, I didn’t think to say no. He held my hips and I looked around, panicky, to see what the other kids were doing so I could copy them. I reached out and wrapped my arms around his neck like the girl next to me was doing with her partner, and we swayed to the music. He rested his chin on my shoulder; we were exactly the same height. I pressed my face into his neck, and he smelled like the handmade soap shop I liked to stop into on my way to school.

I was just beginning to relax, to get past the half terror, half thrill of being so close to a guy I barely knew, when the song changed. Without a word, Olivier took my hand and led me to a corner. He put one arm on each wall, and I should have felt trapped but it was a totally exciting gesture, like he was holding up the room for me. Then he kissed me, in front of everyone. Not with a gentle buildup but instantly rough, urgent, with a tongue down my throat. It wasn’t exciting anymore. It was disgusting, and I didn’t want it. I pushed him away but he clung on, as if he knew this was his only chance. Then he let go and laughed, saying something in French about how I was just as he’d imagined, “
une Américaine froide
.”

A cold American. That stung, because I felt like all I had inside me was heat. Burning me up, radiating from my fingertips, desperate for somewhere to go.

What do you do with that kind of fire? When you don’t understand it, and nobody’s shown you how to use it? You can try to put it out, but that doesn’t always work. So you seal it up in some cold, cold metal chamber of your heart. The shiver starts there and moves through your whole body and after a while, you don’t notice it anymore. It just becomes part of who you are.

When my father and I came back to our lives in Mountain Ridge, the Ice Queen thing served me well. People assumed I didn’t care what had happened, so they stopped caring themselves, and eventually forgot.

The funny thing about the Ice Queen is that some guys want her. She’s a challenge, or they figure the chill is a small price to pay for hooking up with a person everyone thinks is attractive. The few guys who’ve summoned the guts to ask me out get the answer that my father doesn’t let me date, which is true. I let them think what they want to about Nate and me; they can wrongly assume we are “friends with benefits,” if it makes them feel better about something in the world.

Lately, I’ve realized that the chamber where I sealed up that fire is not airtight. It has cracks in it. The flames lick out when I least expect them, like this moment with Garrett and his hands.

If I find my mother in the city, if she wants to see me, maybe she’ll hug me. Maybe she’ll put her hands and arms around me and press them against my body to make sure I’m real, to commit the shape of me to her memory. If this happens, it will be the first time in five years that a parent has held me.

My dad is not a bad man. He just lacks certain things to give. Don’t we all?

A cell phone blares into the quiet of the bus, and several heads turn to see which passenger is the bonehead who forgot to turn off their ringer. An elderly man a few rows up scrambles for his phone, answers in what he probably thinks is a whisper but is actually louder than most normal conversations. “What?” he hoarse-hollers. “I’m on the bus!”

Garrett and I look at each other, and it happens. We laugh. It feels good, like for that one second, we’re friends. Then I reach into my purse to make sure the ringers on both cell phones are turned off. On each of them, there’s a missed call from the same number. I don’t recognize it, but I’m pretty sure it’s the phone at the place I’m supposed to be at this moment. There are no calls from my father, and even though I left him a message about how I didn’t want him to contact me, I was kind of hoping he’d ignore the request.

I’m careful not to let Garrett see that I have two cell phones. Not sure I can come up with a lie to explain that away.

We listen to the guy on the phone wrap up his call, and the bus seems even more silent in its wake. Then Garrett turns to me and says, “You know what a Fibonacci sequence is, right?”

“Of course,” I say, a little indignant. Has he been thinking all this time about another conversation topic? Is he testing that I really am a math major? “I thought you were a journalism guy.”

He smiles, a mischievous spark in his eyes. “Who was also a high-school mathlete. Besides, writing and mathematics have more in common than you might think.”

I know this, actually. I would never tell anyone, because of the acute nerdiness of it, but I’ve lain awake at night thinking about the connection. And thinking about how I can never tell my father these thoughts because it would make him too happy, and then thinking about why I can’t tell my father something that would make him too happy.

Garrett takes my pause as a sign to continue. “Mathematics deals with patterns and symmetry, right? A good piece of writing has both, especially when you think about a poem or, for someone like me, a really tight, well-structured nonfiction piece. And then there are all those symbols in math. One thing stands for another. There are symbols in writing, too, but we don’t call them that; we call them metaphors and stuff.”

I wonder if this was something my parents talked about, discussed in bed at night or at dinner with friends. I wonder if this was the thread they grabbed on to, delicately yet firmly, when everything else about them was so different.

“I can see that,” I finally say to Garrett. Right now, it’s so much easier to let him think he’s introduced me to a whole new concept.

“What’s your favorite example of the Fibonacci?” he presses gently, curiously.

I glance out the window, as if the view of the Lamps Plus we’re now passing will help crystallize my thoughts. “Pineapples,” I say. In a Fibonacci, each number is the sum of the previous two, so it goes one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, etc. Count how many scales make up one diagonal row on a pineapple, then count them on a row going the other direction. Almost always, the first row will have thirteen scales and the second will have twenty-one. Fibonacci numbers, in sequence.

“Mmm,” he says, and I’m not sure if he’s imagining the sequence or the taste of the actual fruit. “Nice. Why’s that your favorite?”

“I don’t know. I guess with the pineapple, it’s an example of how something seems totally random, then mathematics shows you how it’s not random at all but was actually planned out carefully by something.” I think this is so amazing that occasionally, when nobody’s looking, I’ll stand in the produce section of the supermarket, running my fingers over the pineapples, and just count. “What about you?” I ask Garrett.

“Well,” he says, looking down, almost ashamed, “it’s cliché, but I’m going to go with the spiral dimensions of a nautilus shell. The Fibonacci sequence is explaining the pattern that makes it beautiful. I wish all beauty could make such sense.”

I stare at him, thinking,
Who is this guy?
He looks back at me and doesn’t glance away. It happens in a single electric flash, but something changes.

“Sorry,” says Garrett, dropping his head back. “I know it’s way early in the morning for this kind of conversation.” I would like to tell him that it’s never too early for this kind of conversation, especially when you’ve been hoping to have this kind of conversation with someone for years, but instead I just say, “I don’t mind.”