Fans of the Impossible Life (12 page)

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HarperCollins Publishers

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Over the next couple of weeks I decided to pretend that there was nothing unusual about the fact that I now seemed to have friends. It was easier to act like my father's amazement at my requests to hang out at the mall on a Saturday or go over to Mira's house to watch a movie was not an accurate reflection of how alone I had been before. Of course I was even more amazed than he was, but if I allowed myself to think about it too much I would start to panic, sure that it couldn't last.

Mira and Rose and I now sat together at lunch, the two of them finally abandoning the Molly/Sarah/Anna table, where all talk had permanently turned to the internal politics of the JV cheerleading squad. I left my life of solitude in Peter's office behind, and the three of us claimed a regular spot at a table in the corner of the cafeteria.

Our current lunch topic was the fact that the school had given us permission to have an Art Club exhibit by the library
in the spring, much to Talia's satisfaction. They were just giving us a hallway, one mostly used by students who needed to print out something on the computers, but it still felt exciting to know that it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't started the club.

Most of the club members had decided on their projects already. Rose was the most ambitious, planning to craft an oversized Jenga tower out of 3D cardboard pieces inscribed with quotes from Freud.

“Every viewer takes a piece, and it's finished when it falls over,” she informed us.

Mira was having trouble coming up with an idea, and I was worried that she would stop coming to the meetings. Keeping her in the club suddenly felt important to me, as if her leaving would be some kind of personal rejection.

“There's nothing you want to make?” I asked her.

“I'm not an artist,” she said. “I just joined the club because you asked me to.”

“Who knew Jeremy had such pull with the ladies?” Rose was dissecting an unappealing-looking square of cherry-chocolate cake. “Chocolate should not be tarnished by the abomination of fruit,” she explained.

“But what about your clothes?” I insisted.

“What about them?” Mira said. “It's just thrift-store stuff.”

“Yeah, but you sew. You have all of those projects.”

“Those aren't art.”

“They could be,” I said. “If Rose can make some weird Jenga tower you can make anything.”

“The tower is not the art,” Rose insisted. “The art will be the moment the tower collapses.”

“What about when the librarian knocks it over by accident?” Mira said. “Will that be art?”

“I know you're teasing me, but that's a good point. Maybe we could put a velvet rope up around it. Or caution tape. Like it's a crime scene.”

“No one will knock it over until you want them to knock it over,” I said.

“The whole point is that I'm giving up control.” She went back to dissecting her chocolate cake and Mira rolled her eyes. I tried not to laugh.

“I'm just saying that it doesn't have to be a painting or anything like that,” I said to Mira. I pulled an art book from my bag. It was Nick Cave's
Meet Me at the Center of the Earth
, the one that she had taken from me that day back in September when I had first spoken to her, when she had signed the club petition. It was filled with photographs of people covered in hair and sticks and fabric. She took it from me and flipped through the pages.

“You could make something like that,” I said.

She smiled.

“Maybe,” she said.

My attempts at persuasion succeeded, and Mira announced at the next meeting that she was going to make a piece of “wearable art” for the show.

After that, Rose and Mira and I started staying after school in the studio to work on our projects. Sebby came by most
afternoons to help, declaring that all good artists needed a studio assistant. Peter found a sewing dummy and got permission for Mira to set it up in the corner. She brought in some of the clothing that she had purchased with ambitious intentions and then inevitably shoved into the back of her closet, and began to slowly piece together an idea.

“They look happy to be out and about,” she said, sifting through the giant tote bag of abandoned apparel. She would sit for hours cutting out small patches of fabric and arranging them on one of the drafting tables, staring at them for a while, then rearranging them. Sebby would try to distract her with suggestions.

“Aren't you going to make a pattern?”

“This isn't
Project Runway
, Sebby.”

He stood up very straight for his best Tim Gunn impression.

“Make it work, Mira.”

“Thank you, Tim,” she said in a voice that I came to understand meant “Leave me alone. I'm thinking.”

Then Sebby would give up and inevitably demand that I draw elaborate Sharpie tattoos on his arms for him.

“I want a pirate ship with a merman attacking it.”

“I have my own project to work on, you know.”

“Why do you people even have a studio assistant if you're just going to ignore him?”

I would hold his arm while I drew, turned over to the soft skin on the underside, the marker like a conduit of something
still indefinable running between us.

I couldn't really work on my own project when they were there. When they left I would go out with them, closing up the room behind us. Some afternoons we would all go together to the diner, but on days when we had too much homework we would say good-bye to each other at our lockers. Mira headed to the late bus or got a ride with Rose and Sebby in Rose's car, and I would secretly go back to the studio. I kept the lights off so the janitor wouldn't know that I was staying even later than was allowed. Then I would go into the back of the supply closet and pull out my canvas, three feet by five feet, stretched myself. The biggest I had ever done. I set it up on an easel by the window for light, although as the weeks went by and the evening light got dimmer, I had to rely on a small desk lamp, shining back and forth from the paint palate to the canvas, hoping it wouldn't be noticed from the hallway.

At this point there were still things that we didn't know about each other. Secrets that we had to protect. It would be a while before it was all out in the open, the messy and difficult and unmanageable truth of our individual lives. But we were starting to learn.

Rose's secret was that her family had money. A lot of it. Most of the students at St. F came from upper-upper-middle-class families, but Rose's family was just undeniably rich. They had made a fortune generations earlier from an old-school manufacturing empire that literally made nuts and bolts and now resided in what could only be called a castle, built by an
early Manhattan adopter of New Jersey as a nice place for a robber baron to have a country home. It was hidden down a private road behind a brick wall that made the Victorian mansions of Mountain View look like they were trying too hard to be noticed. Real wealth hid itself tastefully on multiple acres.

Rose was the middle child, with an older sister and younger brother, and somehow she had gained a reputation in the family for being the low-maintenance one, which just meant that she was better at keeping her bad behavior to herself. When she started high school she convinced her parents that she could be trusted to move into a section of the house that had its own entrance, a round turret with two floors and a separate bathroom. The arrangement worked out well for all of them. Rose pretended that she was behaving herself and they pretended to believe her.

Sebby and Mira and I were summoned to Rose's private apartment for the first time one Friday early in November. Halloween had passed without much fanfare the week before. Sebby said Halloween was for “con artist children.”

“It's not respectable to beg for candy,” he said. “One must earn one's candy. Or steal one's candy.”

Rose invited us over after acting grumpy at school all week. She refused to drive us to the diner, claiming that it was “a hostile environment,” instead asking us to come over and help her dye her hair. We made a quick stop at the mall for bleach, developer, and blue Manic Panic, then Mira and I found ourselves lounging on Rose's plush bedroom rug, flipping though
magazines and eating all of the snacks that we could find across the way in the kitchen of the main house, while Sebby and Rose mixed the bleach in the bathroom.

“It smells disgusting,” Mira said.

Sebby stuck his head out of the bathroom. The plastic gloves on his hands were covered in white goo.

“I think I'm getting brain damage,” he said.

“It's worth it!” Rose yelled from her perch on the toilet.

“We should all get brain damage so you can go Technicolor?” Mira said.

“I am in need of a major life change and the only thing I can change about my stupid life is my stupid hair,” Rose said. “And if we don't do it tonight I'm going to continue to be a huge bitch to be around.”

“And that will be different from normal, how?” Sebby asked.

Rose turned around in her towel and tried to swat at him. He held his gloved hands in front of him for protection.

“You do that, you get your mouth bleached, lady.”

Rose turned back to the mirror and looked at herself.

“Really, we could do my moustache while we're at it.”

“Gross!” Mira yelled from the other room. I took a pen and started drawing moustaches on the models in
Allure
. Mira snickered.

“Look, little Miss Perfect Skin, some of us are pale, pasty, white people with disgusting black hair growing in places that it shouldn't be, okay?”

“Pay attention,” Sebby demanded. “Or we won't even make
it to the blue tonight.”

“At least close the bathroom door,” Mira said. “It smells terrible.”

Sebby kicked the door shut.

“What is Rose so upset about?” I asked Mira.

“I don't know,” she said. “But if she's banning us from the diner I'm sure it has something to do with Ali.”

Rose had become increasingly sullen during our recent diner trips, one time even refusing to talk to any of us for the rest of the night when Ali was too busy to wait on us and asked another waitress to take our table.

“Maybe Ali told her not to come by anymore,” I said.

I had crafted a small mountain out of Wheat Thins and Cheez Whiz, and Mira and I were slowly making our way through it.

“Maybe,” she said. She put another Cheez Whiz sandwich in her mouth.

“Oh my god, why is terrible food so delicious?” she said.

“I'm guessing that Cheez Whiz isn't an approved part of your elimination diet?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Not supposed to be adding in dairy for another month.”

I picked up the bottle of Cheez Whiz and looked at the ingredients.

“I really doubt that this has any actual dairy in it, if that helps.”

“It doesn't, but thanks.”

Sebby came out of the bathroom, taking off his gloves.

“Ze surgery vass a success,” he said in a German accent. “But ze patient now hass ze head of a donkey. And ze ass of an ass. Vhat I'm telling you is zat she's an animal.”

“I'm setting the timer,” Rose called from the bathroom. “How long?”

“Forty minutes for albino white,” he said.

Rose came out of the bathroom.

“Is it normal that my head is burning?”

“Yes,” Sebby said.

“How about that my eyes are burning?”

“Probably.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Mira and Rose sent the boys to go forage for more snacks in the kitchen while they waited for Rose's Saran wrapped hair to transition from white to blue. They were sprawled on the rug, Mira looking through a copy of
Glamour
magazine.

“See, this is why I can only read European magazines,” Mira said. “I mean, what is this? ‘Give your man pleasure like he's never felt before'? That is some serious patriarchal bullshit.”

“Preach, sister,” Rose said. “They're my mom's. She uses them to torture herself so she'll have something to talk to her life coach about.”

Rose picked up a remote control and pressed some buttons, aiming it toward a speaker in the wall. A Tegan and Sara song started playing.

“Is that your stereo?” Mira asked.

“Yeah. It's this crazy wireless sound system my dad had installed,” Rose said. “Like I live in a creepy bachelor pad or
something.”

“It's cool, though,” Mira said.

“Is it?” Rose said. “I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but people come to install things in this room more often than my parents come visit me.”

“I thought you liked living separate from them.”

“Sure, I mean, it just gets a little lonely, I guess. When Ali and I were together over the summer she stayed here every night for almost a month. It was the first time I felt like, okay, there's a reason why I live like this.”

“So what happened with you two?”

“She comes from this really conservative Korean family, and she acts like she doesn't care what they think, but of course she actually does. She didn't tell them about me, but they assumed she was with someone when she didn't come home for a month. That was bad enough. If they knew Ali was a lesbian they would completely lose their shit. So eventually she was just like, ‘I need to go home, my parents are freaking out.' She never said that it meant that we were breaking up. But in retrospect she had never said that we were really together.”

“If she lived in your room for a month, that seems pretty together,” Mira said.

“I know,” Rose said. “That's what I thought.” She flipped absently through the pages of a magazine. “She's only a year and a half older than me, but she does this
you don't understand
thing with me. Like,
You don't understand that two people can spend every minute of an entire month together and then just stop.
”

“It sounds like it's more about her family than you.”

“Well, she also started hanging out with Nick around the same time, and I kind of feel like it has something to do with him too.”

“You think he likes her?”

“Yeah, kind of. I don't think she would go for it or anything. I think it's more of that ‘straight guy who thinks it's cool to hang out with a lesbian' thing.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Oh man, that is totally a thing. They think that we're, like, their weird alterna world doppelgangers or something. Or else they just think lesbian sex is hot. And it's hard to blame them for that.”

“So Nick probably wants to sleep with both of you,” Mira said, laughing.

“So gross, right? I don't know what he wants. I just don't trust him. And I can't help thinking that he talked Ali out of wanting to be with me. Like he probably thinks I'm not cool enough for her or something.”

Rose lay down on the floor, the Saran wrap crunching under her head.

“How could he think that?” Mira said. “You're the coolest person I know.”

Rose smiled. “Well, you go to St. F. You have a terrible frame of reference.”

Mira closed the magazine she had been flipping through and tossed it into a corner.

“Listen,” she said. “If Ali is so weak that she can't make decisions for herself about her life, then she's not the right person for you.”

“Yeah, I know that in theory. And then I remember what it was like to be with her and I feel like I just need to remind her and she'll remember how great it was. So I end up sitting in the diner for hours, staring at her, waiting for her to remember. And the stupid truth is that maybe she just doesn't want to be with me.”

“But now you'll be super cool with your blue hair,” Mira said.

“I know, irresistible, right?”

Rose got up and went back in the bathroom, lifted a section of the Saran wrap to check the color's progress.

“No, I mean the blue hair is more to say fuck it,” Rose said. “If she doesn't like me, so be it. I don't care. ”

“That's such a lie,” Mira said. “You totally care.”

“Yeah, but wouldn't it be nice to pretend that I'm someone who doesn't?”

The boys came in from the main house with armfuls of snacks. Sebby had decided to add streaks to his own hair and he now had twists of tin foil standing up like antennae on his head.

“Your kitchen is like a grocery store, Rose,” he said, handing Mira a bag of Oreos.

“Oh no, evil!” Mira said, dropping the Oreos like they were on fire. “Why do you do this to me?”

Jeremy sat down next to her, depositing the rest of the
snacks in the middle of the rug. Sebby went into the bathroom, where Rose was removing her Saran wrap.

“Is it ready?” he asked.

“Holy shit, that's blue,” Rose said, looking in the mirror.

“They're going to freak at school on Monday,” Mira said. “That is definitely not ‘within the spirit of the dress code.'”

“Good.” Rose came back in the room and turned up the music. She started doing a crazy dance, banging around her newly blue hair that was plastered to her head like a sticky helmet.

“Freak out at the dyke rejecting your heteronormative arbitrary beauty standards!” She picked up the copy of
Glamour
and rubbed it on her body. “I got your glamour right here, bitch!”

Sebby started laughing and came out of the bathroom to flip his hair antenna in solidarity. Mira pretended to be embarrassed by both of them and hid her face in the carpet, and Jeremy drew blue hair on Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover of
Ladies' Home Journal.