Playing Keira (3 page)

“This is, like, geek small talk,” he says. “Or large talk, as the case may be.”

We both laugh awkwardly, then fall silent as we watch more chain stores and shopping centers slide by the window. Sometimes I think about a single store, and all the people who work in it. How they’re like a little community all their own, with dramas and politics and traditions. How that store may be the place an employee has worked at for ten years. And it goes right by us in the blink of an eye.

Then I think of my mother again, about where she has been working since she left. Maybe it was at one of these stores. Maybe she was not well enough, mentally, to teach anywhere. She struggled with severe depression for most of her life and all of mine. The day after my thirteenth birthday, two years and two months after she left, my father sat me down and laid out her history for me. Because, as he said, I was old enough to understand. Like it’s a natural, simple part of puberty: you grow taller, you get your period, and it suddenly makes perfect sense why your mom could seem like your best friend one day, an alien the next.

When I think of her not being well enough to teach, I get nervous. She could be not well enough to . . . well, to be herself anymore. With me.

Stay distracted.

“What have you written about lately?” I ask Garrett. I’m just keeping things balanced here: he asked me about math; I’ll ask him about journalism.

“I just finished a piece about a local woodworker who carves carousel horses.”

“Is there a big demand out there for wooden carousel horses?”

“Read my article and find out. It’ll be in the
Signet
next week.” He pauses, considers something for a moment. “I’m not sure what I’ll do next. I heard there’s a documentary film crew shooting in town, so I was thinking of checking that out.”

Something inside me drops off a cliff.

I have to admit I hadn’t anticipated this, although I should have. Okay, think. Would Rayanne know about the movies? Yes. Rayanne is totally plugged into that stuff.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “They’re shooting
Five at Sixteen
.”

“What is
Five at Sixteen?
”

I’m always surprised when people don’t know. Insulted, even. Which is psychologically problematic.

“It’s a series.
Five at Six
, then
Five at Eleven
. Now sixteen. They’re following five kids growing up in Mountain Ridge, doing a new movie every five years. I haven’t seen them myself, but my roommate is a film major and she’s written a paper about the first two.”

It’s astonishing, really—the level of detail I can achieve in my bullshit.

There is no roommate, and of course I
have
seen them myself. I am one of those five kids.

Did I really think I could
not
be, even for just a little while?

As my father likes to tell it, the filmmakers chose me when I was six years old, out of dozens of my kindergarten schoolmates, because clearly, they were doing something right in the parenting department. He and my mom were two academics devoted to raising a child with the perfect combination of elements, and they were honored to share their experiences. The truth was,
he
was honored; my mom hated it, but went along because in the end, she always went along. As for me, well. Even then, I knew being chosen had very little to do with me, and a lot to do with my family. Two brilliant academics, my father African-American and my mother about as white as you can get.

Sometimes I think my first ideas about myself formed when I was watching my parents talk about me in
Five at Six
. Now, of course, I’ve got the added bonus of my mom bailing on us in front of a film crew and then again on countless screens viewed by millions of people.

I could hate these films and nobody would blame me for it, but actually, I try to be grateful. Because the first movie is a record of who I was, my life with my family before things started to fall apart. The second movie is a reminder of who I don’t want to be—my mother, withdrawing from the people who love her, retreating even from herself. Helpless to stop any of it.

Also, I never would have gotten to know Nate without them, because Nate is one of the five, too. Rory Gold is another one, and sometimes I wonder how much of what I know about her comes from the movies, and how much comes from real life. There’s Felix, who doesn’t think he’s on my radar, but I read his blog. I even comment sometimes, although he’d never guess that “Sunshine & Roses” is me.

The fifth is a girl named Justine Connolly. What I see of her, I see from afar. But it is close enough to know that what you see is what you get. I’m so baffled by how she accomplishes this, lives it, that I can’t get too near. I think it would hurt too much.

Garrett has taken out his phone and is writing some notes on it. “
5 at 16
, doc series,” it says at the top.

I will be so busted.

At a point in the near future, maybe even tomorrow, Garrett will do some research about the
Five At
movies. He’ll see a picture of me, and maybe even read about what happened. Then perhaps he’ll write a feature story about the girl with all the lies, and forget about those moments when the energy between us seemed nearly flammable. You can’t fake energy like that. I know it was real. But Garrett won’t care about it once he knows, and it was stupid of me to even let myself feel it in the midst of all my pretending. I’ll get what I deserve.

Until then, I can enjoy being Rayanne, who’s enjoying sitting with Garrett.

“Wanna play a game?” he suddenly asks. I turn to see him waving a small advanced Sudoku book. “We can take turns.”

I can’t help but smile. I do Sudoku at night when I have insomnia. “Sure,” I say.

“Ladies first,” says Garrett, handing me the book and a pencil. I look the puzzle over. It’s a tough one. I don’t go for the obvious blanks. I put a seven where I’m pretty sure there should be a seven, and hand the book back to him.

I watch Garrett as his eyes sweep over the puzzle, biting his lip, rolling the pencil up and down between his thumb and forefinger. I bet he’s a great boyfriend. I bet he brings Mary-Kate tiny gifts—Robert Browning poems copied onto vellum paper, or a bouquet of bare twigs arranged in an empty jelly jar.

My father never did this for my mother, although I know he did other things. He liked the grand gesture of a surprise weekend at a fancy hotel, or bringing in a caterer on Thanksgiving so she wouldn’t have to cook. As a little girl, I was dazzled by this stuff. Then, as I got older, I noticed that these gifts were never just between the two of them. He made sure everyone knew and responded accordingly.

I understood that my dad had an image to project, and learned how to project my own.

Garrett hands me back the puzzle and I see he’s made an easy choice. I don’t hold it against him. The easy ones are building blocks that must be locked in before you go any further. He’s doing me a favor, and I’m thinking this is probably on purpose.

“Where do you like to hang out?” he asks.

I could take this as a come-on, if he didn’t claim to have a girlfriend and if I were actually me. But I’m Rayanne, remember? Where does Rayanne like to eat?

“I go to Muddy Joe’s a lot, to work or read. The library’s too quiet.” Rayanne and I really would not hit it off at all. The library is my home away from home, in the second comfy chair in the periodicals section—the one with the mysterious yellow stain on the arm. “Open mic at Esoterica is fun. And my friends and I like to eat at the diner.”

Open mic at Esoterica has always
sounded
fun, even if it’s not something I would ever do. What does Rayanne order at the diner? She does not get an egg-white omelette with spinach and feta like I do at the Bistro every Sunday with my dad. She gets pancakes and bacon. She gets hot chocolate instead of cranberry juice. She stays for hours, chatting with her friends, even when the place is crowded and it’s not fair to tie up the table. They take the corner one when they can, the one with all the windows and the glorious view of the ridge. Because, why not? Someone has to sit there.

“What about you?” I ask finally. “Where’s somewhere great to go that I haven’t heard of?”

Garrett sighs and says, “I don’t go out as much as I used to.” Then he adds quickly, “Except for when Mary-Kate comes up to visit. We’ll check out the galleries in town, then go to the Tea House.”

Something about him saying this rings off. Forced. It suddenly occurs to me that there may be no Mary-Kate.

Which would be bad. I really want there to be a Mary-Kate, so I can ignore that flash I felt earlier. So I can just enjoy it for what it was on an intellectual level. I keep her real by picturing Garrett and Mary-Kate at the Tea House in town, hunched over a pot for two of Darjeeling and an apricot scone.

My mother used to take me every Thursday to the Tea House, an old, yellow Victorian in the middle of town with modern buildings all around it. Somebody from way back must have refused to sell, and refused and refused, and then maybe died and fortunately, somebody thought it was a cool space. Mom would order me a pot of chocolate tea and she’d get some hard-to-pronounce green tea, and we’d talk. Like friends, getting a good look at our days, holding them up to the light so we could both see them better. Later, as I got older, I did most of the talking, and she would half listen while flipping through an academic journal or grading papers. Then she would just sit and watch people, a dazed look on her face, while I sipped in silence and actually wished for the half-listening days.

I enter in my Sudoku number and hand Garrett the book. He very quickly enters in another and hands it back to me. We go back and forth like this for a while, taking longer and longer amounts of time to postulate an answer.

It’s my turn with the puzzle, and I’m weighing my options when the bus goes into a seemingly eternal right turn, spiraling downward toward a toll plaza—a Fibonacci spiral, probably—and I realize we’re about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel. I feel like we should take a moment to be awed by this thing, a pathway under the bottom of a river. Really, the only cool aspect of taking the bus.

My father and I take the train when we go to the city to visit the museum or attend performances and literary readings. “There’s no poetry in a bus,” he said once. He likes arriving at Grand Central, with the starry ceiling and the shiny, four-sided clock on top of the information booth smack in the center of the big hall. The steady but frenetic pace of the commuters, walking a straight line in a firm direction. I follow the hunch of his back through the crowd; he always assumes I am right behind him. When we lived in Paris, we’d take the Métro and he’d hold my hand—tug it, really—and I loved how it hurt just a little. A good hurt. But now, I guess, I’m too old for that.

He doesn’t know that I can’t be on a train without picturing my mother that day she left us. I imagine her with red, bloodshot eyes, the dried tears still sticky on her cheeks. She’s writing me that letter on a rickety tray table, struggling to keep her hand steady despite the train’s movement. It takes her the whole trip to finish it, to say what she wants to say the way she wants to say it. Does she know it’s a letter I’ll read every night for three months, until the next one comes?

Did she do that herself, with the letters I wrote back to her? And why hasn’t she written in over a year?

The bus comes out into daylight again and I see people starting to pack up their belongings. I know we must be close. Sure enough, two blocks later, the driver comes back on the PA system, thanking us for riding with him today. I watch to see which people like to jump up the second the bus stops moving.

Garrett is not one of those people. He just sits back, all the time in the world.

“Is Mary-Kate meeting you here?” I ask.

He looks perplexed for a moment, then says, “Oh, no . . . I’m supposed to call her when I’m in and she’ll tell me where to meet her.”

He takes out his phone and dials a number. I hear a woman’s recorded voice, then a beep.

“Hey, it’s me,” says Garrett. “I’m here. Call me!” He seems awkward, nervous. I grow more suspicious that Mary-Kate hangs out with Rayanne in the Imaginary People lounge.

After he hangs up, I hand him back his Sudoku puzzle. “Too bad we didn’t get to finish,” I say. And I mean it, because it really bugs me to leave a puzzle unfinished. Especially a hard one like this, which we seem so close to cracking.

Garrett takes the book without a word and stuffs it into his briefcase, stands and grabs the jean jacket out of the overhead bin. He then steps forward into the aisle, moving toward the door. I follow him, not sure if that’s it. Are we not supposed to say good-bye? Did he not feel what I did, and is this the downside of a hopped-up imagination?

But when I start to climb down the steps of the bus, I see he’s waiting for me, holding out his hand to help me down. I take it and smile, and his fingers are warm, so warm. I reluctantly let go when I’m supposed to, and we walk side by side through the door to the terminal. Any stranger watching us would think maybe we were a couple, although I don’t think any stranger is bothering.

At the bottom of the escalators up to the street level, Garrett stops.

“Hey, what are you doing right now? Are you going straight to your mom’s?”

“I was planning on it,” I say. I don’t know what I was planning. I am pretty sure, however, that I’m not yet ready to knock on that door. The projected thrill of being in the city, anonymous, alone, is not so thrilling now that I’m facing the reality of it. “But I don’t have to,” I add casually. “It is early.”

Inside, I am thinking,
Mary-Kate does not exist and you need to hang out with me
.

“Let’s go get something to eat and finish the puzzle,” he says. “I have to wait for Mary-Kate to call me back, and I’d love the company.”

Then he smiles and runs his fingers through his hair again, acting as if he didn’t just read my mind.

We’re at the far end of a corridor-shaped restaurant called Café Miko, sitting down with coffee and bagels. Garrett surprised me by getting a cinnamon raisin; I got an everything because I think it’s quietly hilarious to order an “everything bagel.” Garrett places the Sudoku book on the tiny, wobbly Formica table between us.