All You Never Wanted (5 page)

“And I thought that perhaps you’d contribute? I know it’s last-minute.”

“Oh.”

“Because you’re such a surprising voice, Thea. I’ll never forget that essay you wrote freshman year. You remember. About the thunderstorm when you were a little girl and your sister—”

“Okay sure maybe.” Grange wouldn’t stop until I caved. But
she was high if she thought I’d write her a story. Writer-girl was the clashing opposite of who I was now.

“Wonderful!” The trill, the melty eyes. Trademark Strange.

“The only thing is that I don’t have much time these days,” I quickly added. “Junior year and all. Especially not for the, you know, the empty acceptance of a magazine that nobody—I mean, not very many people—will read.”

As Grange fell silent, I noticed how her orange-rinsed hair and faded blue irises and pink-sheened lips were like those washed-out colors of dipped Easter eggs. Though even as I thought this cute-creative thought, I slapped it off since Grange was looking at me funny.

“Oh, I heard that,” she breathed, with a finger-poke to my shoulder. “
Empty acceptance
. There’s
pathos
to that. You’re still in there, Thea!”

No, I wanted to tell her. No, I’m not. I had graduated from that. I was a different kind of performer now. Grange’s musty laws, like
Show, don’t tell, Omit needless words, Kill your darlings, Write what you know
—none of them made sense. I seriously wondered if anyone who’d sweated over a Word doc story ever told a big, dirty ole whopper. It was a similar accomplishment. But a whole different kind of challenging.

Everyone knows your written story is a lie. But if you’re going to get people to believe your lie out loud, then you have to muffle them in your breezy, shocking, junky, juicy, sexy, needless words. As for your darlings? That’s the goo of anticipation. What sticks ’em to their seats. And the whole entire point of the project is that you’re launching yourself into the void. Spitting in blood and crossing your heart to vouch for an experience you’d never
known. That you couldn’t feel, touch, or taste until the moment it was on your tongue and you realized—
everyone is buying this crap. Even me
.

It pumped me up just to think about.

“I’ll get back to you,” I said.

“All right, then. Lovely.” Grange went a touch limp. She was like a baby blanket—highly important for a brief, forgettable time of life. And then, forever after, hugely shameful. Well, unless there was a third phase of Grange. Like after I’d been out in the world for a while and I came back to Greenwich Public with nothing but a buttery affection for its vintage phone box, its milk and paste and sneaker smells, and maybe even for Strange, too.

But now she needed to run along and fetch another essay-sweating freshman. I was too old, and besides, I was busy.

When she emerges from her shower, Joshua is fiddling with her wooden tissue-box holder.

“What are you doing?” Though she knows what. Well, suspects.

“This is the safest place,” he says. “It’s only temporary.”

“ ‘Safe’ is a relative term, don’t you think? I mean, this is
my room
, Joshua. My room,
in Arthur’s house
.”

“I’ve got nowhere else to stash this,” he says. “If I keep it at my place, Sam and Buddy will smoke it, or J.P. will give it away to all his friends. And you know my old man’s already looking for a reason to throw me out.”

“It’s not fair.”

In response, Joshua offers that lopsided grin, but it feels oversold. Alex is shivering. The heat of the run, the warmth of the day, and the steam from the shower were a temporary bonfire that she’d built in her body. A comfort that’s gone too quick. Fresh hunger sweeps through her.

She wonders if smoking would take the edge off. Joshua seems to guess her thoughts.

“Come on, baby. Tell you what. I’ll give you a full twenty percent,” he says, “if I can keep the bag here. It’s really good quality. Just this once, okay?”

“Are you
wheedling
me?”

“Actually, I’m
weed
-ling you. Ha-ha-ha.” He fake-laughs, but he genuinely likes that one. His smile broadens his face and restores his confidence. Joshua is proud, and he gets embarrassed to ask for things. But this is such a mean ask.

“You know I don’t smoke.”

“Dude, it’s just for the one day.”

“
Dude
, and then where does it go?”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he says. “It’ll be gone. That’s all you need to know.”

He’s planning to deal it. Alex had figured as much, because that’s what her boyfriend, Joshua Gunner, does. She didn’t find this out until she was a couple of months into the relationship. Fully in love—or at least in full adoration—and therefore unable to accept his habit as a flaw. So she talked herself into Joshua’s explanations, weak as they were. That he was saving every penny. That he never laced it, or ripped off kids, or traded in harder substances.

Lately, though, he’s upped his game. More phone calls, more texts. She found out from his father that he’s failing Intro to Economics this semester. And when Joshua fails at one thing, he needs to succeed at something else.

She wants to find the nerve to tell Joshua exactly what she thinks about all this. She wants to tell him how stupid he’s being, and how reckless. How dealing pot is an act of self-sabotage, especially when that guy Savini has practically guaranteed Joshua’s only real shot at a future outside Ten Pin.

Joshua usually keeps his business to himself. Odd that he’s
flaunting it. Jamming it in her tissue box at the very same moment that she’s walked out of the shower. He wants her to be angry. He wants her temper to be some kind of proof that she cares about him. He wants her to deal with him. She gets it. Thea tries the same tricks. But it’s so hard to grapple with any conflict when all she’s obsessing on is the hole in her stomach and the breakfast that she wants so badly.

“Fine. Keep it there,” she says tiredly. “I don’t need your twenty percent. Just promise me it’ll be gone by the time Arthur gets back from Los Angeles. It’s way too disrespectful to him. Okay?”

Mention of Arthur annoys Joshua. Especially in a context of respecting him. A young guy with nothing doesn’t have much heart for an old guy with everything. He nods acknowledgment, barely, then reaches for Alex. “Thanks for this. You know I love you, right?” Smoothing her wet hair from her forehead, he presses his mouth against hers. His breath is a source of warmth. She aches for something—maybe him—and it’s a jolt. Wanting Joshua feels so long ago, a scrapbook memory.

“I better get ready for school,” she says, breaking away. “I’ve already missed assembly. Not that anyone’s paying attention over there.” It’s so disorienting, in some ways. Four years of being roll call accounted for every single day, and now, in this last month, they’d loosed all the ropes.
Fly away, little seniors! We hardly care where you land!

“Yeah, sure. Okay.” She’s hurt him. But he’s hurt her, too. What kind of asshole move is this, anyway—hiding his pot in her room? If she wants to make this day count, she should start now. She should call Joshua out. Refuse to accept the baggie. Argue
with him, nag him, tell him that it’s his future with Tom Savini—not with her—that should be focusing all his energy.

These thoughts snap to life and die just as quick.

It’s not worth it. Too tiring, to fight that fight.

So she says nothing. Moves to get dressed.

The first defeat of the day.

Sooo … who were the richest kids? My eyes looped the Figure Eight.

Ka-ching
, the McBrides.

Ka-ching
, Fiona Levine, whose father was a guitar player for some rock band I never heard of, but that Mom talked about like the Eighth Wonder of the 1980s.

No funds for Ty “Monty” Mountbatten, even with that hurrah of a last name, like he’d been raised on champagne and fox hunts. If we’d been living in medieval times, Monty’s mom would be the town slag. In this life, she sold real estate. Mostly upscale bachelor condos. Using her commissions to get more plastic surgery so that she could sell more real estate to more horndog divorced dads. And although Monty himself was a low-key great guy, he had more of a guest pass than a stamped card to the VIP scene.

I’d been going to announce the party all Gia fabulous-casual to everyone, but now that I’d got myself seated, I was feeling more covert. When you’re not sitting at it, the Figure Eight is Shangri-la. It’s like everyone over there has achieved a kind of coolness nirvana that you, in your lowly, B-list lunchroom state, can only jealously chew over at.

Once inside, however, you see the nuances. The hierarchy.

And this was my seventh time here since last fall, when I’d
first made Emma McBride squeal over that story I’d told on myself, about me strutting around the Indian Harbor Yacht Club with my skirt bunched into my underwear. No, it hadn’t happened. But it had achieved two things:

And that is a true fact, courtesy of King Arthur’s membership. A fact that used to somewhat mortify me. Who wants to be part of a club that would have shunned me for my entire pre-Arthur life? But I was mostly over it. Arthur’s money was like a giant Band-Aid. If it didn’t heal, at least it concealed the wound.

As I watched Monty, wondering if I could cruise him into my party on his coolness frequent flier miles alone, I sensed Fiona scrutinizing me.

“Thea,” she said, breaking through another conversation about which sucked worse, Vail or Tahoe. “Can I ask you something?”

“Mmm?” I made my eyes go hard and half-mast. On guard.

“Considering everything you just told us about your sister, isn’t Alex being on the reckless side? Lately, I mean?”

“Mmm?” I repeated in the exact same inflection, which got an easy, mild laugh from the table.

Fiona looked self-conscious. She could be awkward. She had Figure Eight status more on rock royalty than her own merit. “Not
to judge. But if Alex really was born with this shared, Siamese-twin stomach,” she continued, her voice gaining decibels as people started listening in, “then why isn’t she more careful with her health? Like, I guess what I mean is, isn’t it really bad that she’s lost all that weight? Medically?”

The problem with seat-of-your-pants storytelling was that you just had to hope nobody started picking its wedgies. And my story today had been way too spontaneous. Partly because it was inspired by Grange.

“Pathos” was the word Grange had used. The word that stuck with me all morning. The word on which I’d hung this lie that burst from me like a tragic anthem after someone mentioned seeing Alex’s bestie Jessica Torres’s name on the “Who’s Having a Birthday” list, and joked that springtime seniors were harder to find than Waldo—especially on their birthdays.

Birthdays. Missing. Alex. I’d cast my pathos right there in the lunch line, with a McBride in range. How, technically speaking, my poor sister Alex had been born with a sister attached to her. A conjoined twin who’d been too small and weak to live.

I’d spun every detail I could remember off that PBS documentary I’d seen on conjoined twins. Lily Genovese had actually gotten surprisingly teary, grabbing her bagel off her tray and fleeing the lunchroom. Cole Segal then told me Lily’s twin brother had died in infancy from some kind of heart defect.

But how could I have known that?

On the bright side, a McBride had nudged me. “Siamese twin, for real? Creepy. I’ve got to ask you some things—don’t tell Alex, but I’m curious. Come sit over here. With us.”

And I was in.

But now Fiona was waiting for my answer. How to play it? I stalled.

“Jeezus, Fee. Did you trade your brain for a pistachio?” Monty had jumped to my defense before I could invent one. “Alex Parrott isn’t Siamese
anymore
. Last I checked, she didn’t have a sister fused to her hipbone.”

“Exactly,” added the other McBride—Ali, I think, had the freckle on her lip. “One was sacrificed so the other could live a normal life. Which means Alex can do what she wants to her body. She can have bulimia or whatever all day long and who cares, right?”

“Sorry.” Fiona checked to see if I was upset. Yes, she’d be a good invite. Joshua could probably score a sale from her. Unless her retired rock-star dad had a better dealer, which was a real possibility.

Oh. Ouch! This thing had been happening with my body lately. Like sometimes when physical stuff went wrong with me, it took me too long to react. A good example is back in November when I jammed my pinkie with my hockey stick and broke it in two places and it sort of veered off like a twig. Everyone came flying in from the field, going
“Ahhhhh! Ewwwwww! Are you okaaaaaaay?”

For a second or two, I’d just stared at the finger. All I’d wanted to do was scream along with them. As if that finger was twisting off another girl’s hand, not mine.

So it took me a moment for that knot in my stomach to get my attention. Another moment to identify why I felt so bad. This time, the reason wasn’t expressly physical.

Bulimia? Seriously? Is
that
what the kids thought?

VIP juniors like Fiona got their information from their VIP senior equivalents, like the Four Blondes (of this group, none were blond, and Alex was a member).

This was what Al’s three best friends were saying about her?

What a trashy rumor.

Because it
was
a rumor, wasn’t it?

Of course it was. Had to be.

“Bulimia, that’s cute. She’ll love that,” I said to the freckle-lipped McBride.

“No, I am not kidding. What’s the deal? Senior stress? Chronic fatigue? Lyme disease?” asked Fiona. “My cousin had tick-bite fever. He got disgustingly skinny.”

“Not at all. It’s nothing like that,” I answered. “Alex is a catalog model. She was discovered by a modeling agency when she did an internship at
Haute
magazine this past winter. It’s pretty easy for her to gain and lose weight. I should be insanely jealous, right?” As I gave it my best, most unjealous, most proud sister laugh.