Stalker Girl (18 page)

Her father’s excitement was over the top, yet endearing. And for a little while, the updates helped distract Carly from the misery she was resolutely avoiding.

She put some time into her application essay for Denman.

But Brian’s sudden and complete absence left a huge void in her life, and no amount of baby-gazing or research or writing could fill it.

She missed him terribly. In those moments when she couldn’t concentrate on her paper or admissions essay, she’d click through pictures from the summer, with Ernestine is Everywhere music blasting on her iPod. She had a bunch of pictures from Baldwin Rock; another bunch she’d taken from the lumpy armchair in the corner of the shed at Ernestine’s of the guys rehearsing or goofing around for the camera. Her favorite was one she’d snapped of Brian asleep in room nine the night after their trip to the secret underground room. His face was completely relaxed, and there was a little smile on his lips.

That smile and all the pictures were proof of what they’d had together, how much she’d meant to him, how happy they
both
had been and would be again.

Then there were his old texts. Her phone could hold 400, and she’d saved every one of the 271 he’d sent. She reread them all, the best ones several times.

She kept tabs on the band, setting up a Google news alert for “Ernestine is Everywhere” and checking Shira Zeidman’s blog once a day. Shira was a better updater than Avery, who kept the band’s pages. That’s how she heard about their being signed.

This was huge. Their dream. What they’d been working so hard for all this time. There was no way Carly could not congratulate him. Not just him, but all of them. It was the friendly thing to do.

For two weeks she’d successfully resisted the urge to call or text Brian. She figured a simple, casual, and relaxed message couldn’t hurt. She composed a one-word, one-screen text:

It took him a while—forty-three and a half hours—but he responded.

She was on a bus on her way home from school when her phone announced a text from Brian. Even though she’d been waiting and obsessively checking for messages, she jumped when heard the personalized ringtone he’d composed one night back at Ernestine’s when they were sitting out on the roof, so she’d always know when a text was from him. It worked on her like a bell on Pavlov’s dogs. As soon as she heard the first three notes, her heart started pounding. She clicked on the message and found:

Carly took it as a good sign. Those three letters—plus the friendly exclamation point!—gave her hope. It wasn’t exactly
I miss you and can’t stand being alive without you by my side
. But it wasn’t
go away forever
, either.

The lines of communication were open, Carly told herself. And where there was communication, there was hope. She didn’t notice how much this sounded like something out of her mother’s collection of self-help books.

 

Encouraged, she decided to wait a week longer, and then try a face-to-face. She would drop by String, the music store in the Village where he worked Saturdays. It would be a casual visit, a “happened to be in the neighborhood, stopping to say hi” pop-in. He would see that Carly could be normal, that she had a life outside of him. She wouldn’t make a scene, beg him to take her back, or anything like that. She would just pop in and pop out.

And she really would happen to be in the neighborhood. She’d been planning, ever since she’d decided to write about the Triangle Fire, to visit the site. Not that there was much to see. Only a plaque on the side of a building that now belonged to NYU. But it was just a matter of blocks from String.

She wasn’t exactly sure how they were going to get from “Hi, I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by” to back together with a clean slate, but she figured the details would work themselves out over time. The important thing was for Brian to see that the clingy, needy, jealous person he’d seen wasn’t the real Carly.

 

It didn’t go as she’d imagined.

When she got there, he was in the back, in the glassed-off room where customers could try out instruments, helping a young girl—she was maybe eleven, twelve—and her father test out electric guitars.

Sampson, the big, dreadlocked store owner, was at the counter, doing something at the computer. “Hey, Carly. Long time no see.”

Carly could tell by the way he nervously glanced back at Brian in the demo room that he knew something.

The question was, what? Carly hadn’t told a soul about what she was sure was just a temporary breakup. What had Brian told people?

“Hey, Sampson.” She tried to sound casual, and she might have been succeeding until she actually said the cheesy words, “I was just in the neighborhood and I thought I’d stop by.”

“Oh, yeah? What brings you down here?”

“I’m doing a paper on the Triangle Fire.”

The look on his face told her two things: he had no idea what the Triangle Fire was and he didn’t believe her.

And so she stupidly started rattling off facts: the number of girls who died, how the doors were locked to keep them from leaving before their shift was over, how a lot of them jumped out the window rather than burn.

He nodded, like he was humoring her. Like he knew better.

As she was talking to Sampson, she kept an eye on Brian and so she saw his face when he realized she was there. He did a double take. She raised her hand in a tentative wave and smiled.

He didn’t smile. His eyes didn’t light up. He didn’t even wave back. He just turned away and kept talking to his customers.

After a while he walked the girl and her father out of the demo room. The girl was cradling a shiny red guitar in her arms, beaming.

He wouldn’t look at Carly. “Hey, Sampson. So Hayley here’s decided on the Squier Fat Strat.”

“Ex-cell-ent choice. Excellent choice, young lady. ‘A double deadly tone machine with rock-star looks’ from the fine people at Fender. Come right over here, Dad. I presume you’re buying?”

“Thank you,” said the dad to Brian, reaching out for a handshake. “Thank you so much for your help.”

“No problem,” Brian said. Then he pointed at the beaming girl. “Good choice. Come back and show me what you learn in a couple months, okay?”

She looked at the floor, blushing. “Okay.”

When he turned to look at Carly, the smile disappeared. He stepped aside, holding the door open, and nodded for her to come into the demo room.

“What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to stop in and say hi. I was in the neighborhood. I’m doing a paper on the Triangle Factory fire in 1911. Did you know that was right around here?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeah. Over near Washington Square—”

“Carly—I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to—”

“I just wanted—”

The heavy glass door swung open. It was the guy who just bought the guitar for his daughter.

“Hey,” Brian said, smiling his broad Brian smile. “What’s up? Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” the father said. “We forgot the name of your band.” He lowered his voice, “My daughter was too shy to come in herself.”

The girl stood on the other side of the door, looking down at her feet. Brian walked over, tapped on the glass. When she looked up, he gestured for her to come back.

Carly slipped out the door as she walked in.

CARLY LEFT
String mortified. Humiliated. Denial had disguised itself as hope and made a fool of her.

She forgot all about going to the Triangle Factory site and spent the rest of the day crying, slowly making her way all the way uptown on foot for work that night at SJNY.

Now that she’d been face-to-face with Brian again, she had to accept the truth. Instead of lighting up at the sight of her, Brian had recoiled.

She had to face it. She knew she had to face it. The first thing she had to do was tell Val. She would swallow her pride. She wouldn’t just tell Val about the breakup; she’d tell her everything. About how she’d been obsessively reading his old texts, listening to his songs over and over, clicking through the pictures again and again. She wouldn’t hold back anything.

Val would set Carly straight. Save her from herself.

As soon as she got to Val’s room, she spilled the whole sad story.

“Oh, yeah,” said Val. “We’ve got to nip this thing in the bud.”

“I think we’re well past the bud stage. This is more like full bloom.”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever we want to call it, it ends tonight. I am not letting you turn into another Katrine.”

After they’d both showered and dressed for work, Val made Carly erase all the texts and pictures on her phone right then and there. She said Carly had to do it while she was motivated. Carly wanted Val to do it for her, but Val refused.

“Uh-uh. You gotta hit that button yourself. It’s part of the healing process.”

Val stood over Carly with her blow-dryer. If Carly so much as slowed down, if she looked like she was getting ready to read one of the texts or study one of the pictures, Val would blast her with hot air until she picked up the pace.

“Uh-uh. Delete. Delete. Delete. That boy is taking up too much rent-free space in your head and it is eviction time.”

“But—”

“No buts. Delete. Delete. Delete. His number, too.”

They couldn’t delete the music or pictures from the iPod without Carly’s computer, so they agreed that the next day, they’d do it by phone. Carly would call Val, and Val would talk her through those.

When they went downstairs, Val made Carly tell Luis the news. She said this was also part of the healing process. If Carly didn’t tell people, it would be too easy for her slip back into her old ways.

When Carly had to say it out loud to him, the tears started all over again.

“God, I’m such a mess.”

“Don’t worry,” said Luis. “I was a mess after Katrine and I broke up.”

“You were not.”

“Yeah, I was. I didn’t show a lot of it in public, but I was.”

“But you broke up with her.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So usually it’s the dumpee who’s a mess.”

“You think he’s not upset, just because he did the breaking up? I broke up with Katrine, sure. But it’s not like I stopped thinking about her. You don’t stop caring just like that. I’m sure Brian still thinks about you.”

Carly hoped he wasn’t thinking about her right then, because she knew that if he was, he wasn’t thinking good thoughts.

Sitting at the bar with Luis, with the truth out there for all to see, Carly felt calm. The grief was there. Her eyes were hot, and she had that exhaustion that comes after a day of tears. But she knew she’d be okay. She hadn’t realized just how hard she had been working to keep her secret. She was glad she’d told Val and Val had made her tell Luis. With Val’s support she could face the truth. It was a breakup, not a hiatus. People went through them all the time. Val was right: people lived.

“¿
Valería?
” Angela called from the podium by the front door.
“Ven. Vente aquí y escúchame. ¡Ahora mismo!”

“
Un momento, mamá.
” Val slid off the barstool.

Luis said, “You shouldn’t worry, you know. There’ll be other guys.”

“I’m not worried.” It hadn’t even occurred to Carly to worry about whether or not there’d be other guys.

“Good.”

Val rushed back and breathlessly announced—repeating Omigod and
Dios mío
—that Bernie Williams—the former Yankee center fielder and pride of Puerto Rico—was coming in for dinner that night.

Val threw her arms around Carly. “He’s going to sit in with the band!”

 

The first thing Carly thought when she heard this news was how the Quinn family loved Bernie Williams. Especially Sheryl. Until she spent the summer hanging around the Quinn family, Carly had been only vaguely aware of Bernie Williams. She knew who he was, of course. You couldn’t live in New York and not have a passing acquaintance with the Yankees’ roster. Thanks to Val she even knew that Bernie Williams was Puerto Rican, despite the misleading name. But she hadn’t known anything about his music. And then all summer long, whenever they were losing a tough game, Sheryl would put his CD on at full volume and dance around Ernestine’s kitchen. She said it brought them good luck. Sometimes—about half the time—it did.