The Girl with the Wrong Name (10 page)

But when he speaks, his voice is quiet and calm and kind. “It’s okay,” he says.

“Andy,” I whimper.

“It’s okay. Just don’t move.”

He carefully unbuttons his soiled shirt and peels it off his sturdy shoulders, dropping it to the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“Let’s just start with the jacket,” he says. “Can you get the jacket off? Do you want me to help?”

I nod. I’m a puke-stained child, and Andy is the paternal voice of reason. I do whatever he tells me to do. He helps me slowly pull the jacket off and drop it to the floor next to his shirt. I know the button cam is shooting our feet now, or the rumpled folds of my jacket, or nothing at all.

“Okay, now the dress,” he says. “How do we get it off?”

“Zipper in the back.”

“Do you need me to help?”

“I can do it.” I reach behind me and find the zipper. It slips twice from my sweaty fingers before I finally manage to pull it down. I peel off the revolting bodice and step out of the skirt, letting the dress fall to my ankles.

The moment it hits the floor, I wake from my kindergarten trance. I’m not a five-year-old girl, and Andy is not my father. He’s a half-naked man, and I’m a full-grown woman, standing before him in a black bra and panties—close enough to feel his breath on my shoulder.

The rest of the world goes dark, leaving a white-hot spotlight glaring down on our skin. I’m drowning in my nakedness and blinded by his. I’d shamefully pictured his naked chest more than once. I’d seen glimpses of it behind the tattered holes of his V-neck; I’d seen its outline under soggy white cotton. But here it was, unveiled, in the flesh, and every contour, every freckle, every wispy blond hair is exactly as I’d pictured.

I look at his chest and think of Michelangelo’s
David
. Then I think of my fat, funnel cake–induced ass. I think of my fleshy stomach. I think of the gash on my cheek, and I shove Andy aside and run to the bathroom sink, snatching my white towel from the floor and wrapping it around myself like a giant Ace bandage. I lean over the faucet and blast the cold water, splashing my clammy face and neck.

I grab the spearmint mouthwash next to the sink and drink in a huge mouthful straight from the bottle, swishing it around, spitting it out and taking a second mouthful—so much that it dribbles down the sides of my mouth. Then I flip off the cold water and flip on the hot until it’s scalding. I douse myself twice with boiling-hot water, trying to scrub away my face, but when I look up at the mirror, it’s still there.

I forgot to use my mirror technique.

I forgot to focus on the tight close-ups and the individual features. Now I’ve accidentally taken in the whole picture, the whole face, the whole me. The hot water has fogged the mirror, enough to blur the scar. I can see the hint of a face; I’m just not sure I recognize her. I’ve tried not to look at her for so long. Who is this person with trails of tears pouring down her scoured cheeks? Who is this?

Andy steps into the bathroom and turns me around. “Please don’t cry,” he says. But it’s too late; I’m already crying. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t seen it in the mirror.

“I’m seriously begging you,” he says. “You can’t cry. I have this problem when I see a girl cry, I just want to—”

“Why can’t you
remember
her?” I plead for the answer now. “What really happened that night? What do you really remember about her? Anything?”

Steam rises from the faucet behind me, billowing like smoke. Andy looks down at my towel and then up at my face. The look in his eyes compels me to hide my jaw with a swath of wet hair.

“I remember that you were wrong,” he says. “You were wrong about her.”

“About what?”

“You said she ‘gave herself’ to me that night, but she didn’t. Because she had never . . . you know . . . Sarah was still a—”

“Everything’s the same. Everything about us is the same.”

His eyes roam across the features of my face, down to my shoulders and back again. “You do look like her,” he says quietly.

“But you said she was a Pretty Girl.”

“She is.” He steps into me. His bare right hip presses up against my stomach through the towel.

“But then I can’t look like her.”

“But you do. You look more and more like her every day.” He leans his face past my last inch of personal space, his bangs brushing across my forehead, his nose grazing mine, his mouth a breath away from mine. His fingers engulf my left arm and climb my bare shoulder toward my neck. I’ve never given over to anything in my life. I never even knew what it meant. But I feel my entire body giving over to his.

My hands clutch the sink behind me, and I push myself up to meet his lips as my towel falls to the floor. But his caress doesn’t stop at my neck. Before my lips can find his, his fingers climb past my chin all the way to the left side of my jaw. His fingernails inch toward my scar, and I’m stricken. My body goes rigid. I want to punch and kick and ravage and destroy. I want to run as far and as fast as I can. It all boils down to fight or flight. And I choose flight.

I duck down under him and grab my towel, draping it over my chest and running from the bathroom, jumping over the heap of ruined clothes and the puddle in the doorway. I grab a pair of sneakers and sweatpants by the closet. I trip as I climb into both, then grab a gray hoodie from the foot of my bed and rush out my door. I zip it up as high as it will go, pull the hood over my head, and run to the kitchen, to the back stairs, to the overcrowded street, to the only safe place in the world I know.

Chapter Ten

I hardly remember how I got to Max’s apartment building from my house. Subway? Cab? On foot? All three? I’d been counting on my camera to remember things for me, but I’d conveniently abandoned my iPhone in the puke-stained jacket on the bedroom floor. Now I could only record events with my
actual brain
, which was proving to be my least reliable organ.

Miraculously, I was able to remember the key code to get into Max’s building, but once I reached his floor, I could only pound on his apartment door for as long as it took him to answer. No texts to warn him, no emails, just my fist.

“Okay, shut up already!” I finally heard him holler from inside. I kept on knocking. “Whoever it is, I already hate you so much,” he grumbled as he flipped the lock and swung open the door. “I seriously do. I hate you with a deep—Theo?”

Max stood tall and lanky in the doorway, his hair making all kinds of bed-headed decisions of its own, his blue track pants riding too low on his hips. I’d woken him up. He flipped on the foyer light, and I realized he was shirtless. The dark hair on his chest narrowed into a slim trail over his low-slung waistband.

I spun away and tugged my hood down over my eyes. “Where are the freaking
shirts
tonight, people?” I croaked. “For the love of
God
,
where are the shirts?”

Max laughed groggily. “Excuse me? You just woke me up
with the whack-ass knocking. I thought you were the cops from
Cops.
I
had
to answer shirtless. Good thing my parents are out.”

“I just need you to put on a shirt,” I told the hallway carpet. “I’m not coming into this house until everybody puts on a shirt.”

He yawned loudly. “I think I crashed watching
Sports Center
.”

“That still leaves you without a shirt.”

“I’ve got a variety of shirts in my room. Come in, and I’ll pick a real winner.”

“I’ll wait,” I said.

I felt him staring at me. “You’re serious?”

“Yes, Max, I’m serious. Just go put on a shirt, and I’ll wait out here.”

“Okay, fine,” he huffed. “But you need to dial down the crazy by, like, thirty percent before I get back.”

“I can’t do that right now,” I called to him as he shut the door.

An eternal half-minute later, Max swung his door back open in a black Shins T-shirt. His hair was still a wild black forest, but he’d made an effort to tame it. “Okay, I’ve shielded you from my nakedness. Now are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“I need your help. I know I completely screwed you yesterday, but I’m just . . . right now, I just need you to . . .”

“Wait. Are you crying?” He tugged my hood down.

“What? Hell, no, this is just allergies.” I pulled the hood back over my face and pulled my hands inside the sleeves.

He grabbed my stump of a hand. “You suck at lying, Thee. Anyone ever tell you that?”

Thankfully Max’s parents didn’t
have any puritanical rules about coed visits from friends. Before The Night in Question, our sessions had always taken place on his bed. It was queen-size, large enough for each of us to stake out a full side of the mattress, flat on our backs, and stare at the ceiling (“the Freudian position,” we called it). We got to his room, and he shut the door, switching on the chrome floor lamp next to his desk.

“No, too bright,” I said.

He looked a little puzzled, but switched it off and turned on his TV instead, letting the fish tank screensaver light the room in a wash of aqua. “Better?”

I nodded, then threw myself onto his bed and shimmied across the mattress till my back was against the wall. He crouched down to take his usual side, but something inside me screamed for him to back off.

“I need the whole bed,” I whispered. “Could you just sit next to me?”

He rose, his forehead creased. “Okay,” he agreed.

Even in the pale digital glow, I could see the concern in his eyes. Or was it pity? I felt like an injured pigeon he’d just found on the street. The room grew pin-drop quiet. His apartment was downtown, on the twentieth floor of a converted office building, shielded from everything below with soundproof windows. Normally I loved it here; it was the antidote to my dilapidated, secondhand disaster area, all blond wood and white paint and chrome. (His mom had decorated the whole place). But tonight, I felt like I was trapped inside a huge IKEA fishbowl. Like I was on display for the whole city to see.

“Thee, you have to tell me what’s going on,” Max urged. “Wherever you’ve been going, whoever you’ve been seeing, you have to tell me. You can’t keep going like this.”

I pushed myself onto my knees and peered at Max across the rumpled bed. I hesitated, trying to find the perfect words, but it all just spilled out like tweaker babble. “Max, you’re the sanest person I know, and I need that right now. I need your sanity because I know what’s
happening to me can’t actually be happening. It’s just that people said some things to me tonight, and someone called me by the wrong name, and Lou has been saying all this stuff to me about how I’m a different person ever since, you know, ever since that night. I’m meaner and faster. And I haven’t really looked at myself in the mirror since that morning. I couldn’t really bear to look at myself for weeks, but tonight I looked, I
really
looked, and I just . . . I couldn’t tell. The mirror was so foggy, I know that’s all it was, it’s not some kind of ghostly possession, there’s not some freakish metamorphosis happening here. I just need you to confirm that it’s not happening.”

Max didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t blame him; he probably wanted to be certain I was completely finished with my deranged rant. Eventually he took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he began. “Can you just clarify what’s not happening? I’m not totally clear on what’s not happening.”

“I just need you to look at me and tell me what you see.”

“I see a hood.”

I ripped back the hood and turned to the left, showing him the side of my face that wasn’t ruined. “What do you see?”

“I see your profile.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking. Does this side of my face look any different to you?”

“Different how?”

“Different than before. Different than before that night.”

“Still not sure what you’re asking.”

“It’s a
simple
question.”

“Then what is the question?”

“
Max
. Am I me?”

He paused. “Are you you?”

“Yes. Am I definitely me?”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Now that is a
deep
question. This just turned into the best session ever.”

“No, that’s not . . . Look, I know how I sound right now. I just need you to help me go over a few things. I just need to make sure.”

“Make sure that you’re you.”

“Yes.”

“And how do we do that?”

“Just ask me some questions.”

“Questions about you?”

“Yes, questions about me, about us, about our history. Questions only I’d know the answer to. Like, ask me when we first met.”

“Okay, when did we first—?”

“It was in the math lab in eighth grade. You asked me if I knew some math whiz dude named Theo, because this Theo guy was supposed to tutor you.”

“Oh, shit, I forgot about that! And you played along for, like, ten minutes. You said this ‘Theo guy’ was a notoriously sadistic psycho who tutored with an iron fist.”

“Right, and he weighed three hundred pounds, and he insisted all his students call him Keyser Söze.”

“
Right
, right.” Max sat up straight, laughing. “And I shouldn’t be afraid when he brought out his bloodstained training hammer Petey.”

“Yeah, and he ate entire wheels of smoked Gouda during sessions.” I began to smile, too. “And he practiced ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ forcing his students to answer rapid-fire algebra questions while listening to Slipknot and Nickelback.”

“Yes. See?” He leaned closer. “You’re you. You’re definitely you. No one else could have known about the Gouda.”

I nodded. And in that instant, the day’s fatigue took hold of my body, and I fell onto his pillow, flat on my back, head slipping back into the hood. I rested my hands on my stomach and closed my eyes like a corpse in an open casket.

“Give me another one,” I said.

“Okay.” The sound of his voice carried me through two more deep and easy breaths as he thought of his next question. “Okay, what was the first thing I asked you at our first tutoring session at your apartment?”

“Easy. Mom brought us bergamot tea, and you asked me if she’d ever tried to poison a boy who came over.”

“Correct,” Max said. “And what did you say?”

“I said I hadn’t had a boy over since the fourth grade. Then I tested the tea for poison.”

“See, you still have the best memory of anyone I know.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure about that one.” The pale blue ceiling was beginning to fade.

“Okay, last question. For the big money.”

“Go,” I mumbled.

“When you came to my last game, what was the final score?”

“It’s a trick question,” I said sleepily. “I’ve never been to any of your games. Can’t take the stench of that many stools in one room.”

“See?” He grinned. “I knew you were you. I even know you when you’re pretending to be someone else.”

My eyes snapped back open. “What are you talking about? When did I do that?”

“Sorry,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about that now. Try to get some sleep.”

“No, I don’t need sleep.” I sat up so quickly that Max slid back in his chair. “Tell me. When did I pretend to be someone else?”

“Come on, Thee, it’s just us here. You seriously want to tell me you had nothing to do with the letter?”

“What letter?”

He sighed, reached into his track pants pocket, and pulled out a wrinkled square of college-ruled paper. He unfolded it and began to read aloud.
“A Declaration of Romantic Intent
.
Dear, M. I really need to talk to you. Please don’t be alarmed by the heading of this letter, but our time is running out here at Sherman, and I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t tell you how I truly feel
. . .
”

I’d never felt so
stupid in my life. No, not stupid, ignorant. Too oblivious to see the blatantly obvious.

No. Stupid. I felt really stupid.

Dear M.
I had written “M” for
Mike
.
Hadn’t Lou and I been writing that letter to Mike DeMonaco? No, apparently not. And the more Max read from Lou’s—my—letter, the clearer it all became: those nine million urgent texts they’d sent me; Max so desperate for a session that he’d braved an hour of Beowulf Book Club with Mom and Todd; Lou’s tired, angry eyes when she confronted me on the street. She wasn’t afraid I’d ruined our five-year friendship with Max, she was
jealous
. She thought I was trying to steal him away right after I’d helped write her Declaration of Romantic Intent.

Max continued. “
I know you’ve only seen me as one thing for the past five years, and I know that people sometimes only see you as one thing, too. They see a dude’s dude. They see another jock in a jersey who cracks a lot of jokes and has a strict cheerleader-only hookup policy
. . .
”
He looked up. “Okay, that’s not fair.”

He waited for me to provide an amen, but I remained silent. He frowned and kept reading. “
But I know there’s a whole other side to you
.
A romantic side. A heroic side that you’re too embarrassed to show anyone. I see the real you in little bits and pieces every day, even if no one else can.

“All I’m asking is for you to wake up and see that there’s another side to me, too. Sometimes I don’t even think you see me as a girl. Who knows—maybe sometimes I haven’t wanted to be one. But I swear, I’m not asking for some big romantic epiphany. All I’m asking is this: When you see me tomorrow, look again. Erase every single memory you have of me for the last five years and pretend you’ve never met me before. Look at me and pretend I’m a girl.

“If you follow these instructions—if you follow them just exactly as I’ve instructed—then I think you’ll see it. I think you’ll see what we could be.

“Love (not to be confused with IN
love just yet),

Lou
”

Max tossed the letter across the bed and stared at me.

“What?” I asked, unsure what I was even doing here anymore.

“It’s a good letter,” he said.

“I agree.”

“But it doesn’t really sound like Lou.”

“I disagree. I think it sounds just like her. Why? What did she say to you?”

“I haven’t talked to her yet. I’ve been avoiding her since she handed it to me. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Why?”

“Thee.”

“What?”

“Seriously? I’ve been in the room at least twice when you’ve helped her with a Cyrano letter. This whole letter is you. It even uses all caps for emphasis.”

“Okay, fine, so I helped her write the letter.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Dude.”
He jumped off the chair and flopped down beside me in our Freudian position. I let him; maybe I was too tired to protest. “I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I did read that Cyrano play.”

“You read a whole play?”

“Fine, the CliffsNotes helped, but I watched that Gerard Depardieu movie with you, and for someone obsessed with Cyrano, I think you’re missing the point.”

“Oh, really? And what exactly is the point, Max?”

He let out a caveman grunt, grabbed one of his pillows, and crushed it over his head. I had to strain to hear his muffled voice through the small opening under his pillow. “The point is, Cyrano didn’t just write Christian’s letters as a favor to his buddy—he wrote them because he was trying to say something to Roxane.”

“Now I literally can’t hear what you’re saying. What are you trying to say?”

He ripped the pillow off his head and pushed himself up, putting us face-to-face. “That’s what I’m asking you,” he said, probing my eyes at close range.