Summer in the Invisible City (6 page)

Allan came to my recital, after all.

There were ten girls in my class, and ten sets of parents watching us from behind a strip of red masking tape that Anyeshka had put on the hardwood floor. It felt amazing to have my mom and my father there.

Waiting in line before my solo, the pianist banging out our songs, I felt like something important was about to happen. Arms in first position, my right toe pressed to the ground, just waiting to burst across the stage. I knew the moves by heart: sashay-sashay-leap, then fifth, then élevée, and then curtsy.

There were only two girls in front of me and my heart was starting to race. I looked out at the parents. My mom smiled as she watched the girl who was doing her solo. And then Allan turned abruptly and left the room.
No
.
Come back
, I willed him with my mind. He didn't know it was almost my turn.

He missed my solo. My limbs felt heavy as I skipped across the stage. My mom had seen me practice a million times at home, but Allan had never seen me dance. At the
end we curtsied and all the grown-ups flooded across the tape and embraced us.

“Where's Dad?” I asked. The word regained its unfamiliar sound, tasting ashy in my mouth. The best girl in the class was standing next to me. I just wanted her to hear me say it once.

“I'm not sure,” my mom replied calmly.

We walked out of the classroom into the damp, linoleum-floored hallway. Allan was leaning against the turquoise wall, typing on his phone.

When he saw us he put his phone away.

My mom stood behind me, her hands resting on my shoulders.

“Good job, Sadie,” Allan said.

“Did you see my solo?” I asked, suddenly hopeful. Maybe he had watched the performance from the hall.

Allan shrugged. “I got this phone call I had to take so I left right after the part where you were . . . you know . . . twirling.”

“That was before my solo,” I said lamely. I stared at the floor. The tips of my pink ballet shoes were scuffed up and graying, and the elastic band that stretched across my foot looked homemade and pathetic. My feet looked nothing like the beauty of a real ballet dancer's feet.

“Hey,” Allan said.

I looked up at him and he reached out and ruffled my hair a little. “You were great. You were fantastic.”

And then he bent down so his face was close to mine.

“The whole show was like your solo because I was only watching you,” he said seriously.

“Really?” I said. Allan's words parted the clouds that had settled over me, and now the sun burst through.

“Can we get ice cream at Luigi's?” I was asking both my mom and Allan, but I was looking at Allan.

Allan straightened up and looked at my mom. “I have to go, actually.”

“But you like Luigi's,” I protested. “Remember? You said the coffee ice cream tasted like real coffee.”

Allan's eyes met mine for a fraction of a second and then they flicked back up to my mom. “I can't.”

“That's fine, Allan.” My mom sighed.

“But—” I started to object.

“I'd love to but I can't. But great job, today. You're a star,” Allan interrupted. He squeezed my shoulder quickly and then he turned.

I stood there, frozen in place, and watched Allan disappear down the hall. While he walked, he wrapped his scarf tight around his neck, preparing for the cold outside. I could feel myself sinking into a hole in the linoleum floor.

“Come on, Sadie,” my mom was saying. “Let's get you changed.”

But I could barely make out her words. All I could hear was the silence that Allan had left behind.

The world seems half-empty on the Fourth of July weekend because so many people are away. Most of the rich bankers and the real estate agents are at their country houses, and everyone else is at home with their families or at the beach. It's funny knowing a place so well that you can feel its pulse change, like your own breathing slowing down in the moments before you fall asleep.

Willa and I walk around her neighborhood in I-don't-care clothes and drink Frappuccinos as the summer day fades to dusk. We stroll down a leafy block, past a big brick school with a grid of darkened windows, and then a row of brownstones. I can see inside to living rooms with paintings and bookshelves, warm lamps flicking on as the evening sky grows dark outside. The sounds of someone practicing piano music, playing the same few bars over and over again, emanates from deep within some building.

This is the best thing: walking around on a warm night and letting the world envelop you. When my mom and I lived near the park, we used to walk around the reservoir
every night when the weather was good. We'd do as many loops as we needed to until we stopped feeling worried or tired.

Tonight, Willa and I have a destination. We are going to Video World, the old movie rental store that's somehow still in business. It's the only video store I know of, and Willa and I love it there. We spend more time picking out movies than watching them. We even love the cases that the DVDs come in, all plastic and greasy with these low-res pictures of the stars taped to the front.

I'm walking in the DRAMA section when I see
Heathers
.

“What about this?” I ask Willa.

Willa looks up and wrinkles her nose. “What's that?”

“It's Izzy'
s favorite movie,
” I say nonchalantly.

Willa raises an eyebrow.

“I think I've seen it, actually,” Willa says, after a minute.

After a half hour of cruising the aisles, we leave with two things that we've both already seen:
Pitch Perfect
and the whole first season of
Game of Thrones.
It's a perfect combination for a sleepover.

—

We ride the elevator up to Willa's floor with her upstairs neighbor Miles. Miles is a year younger than us but a foot taller, not including his curly hair which adds another three inches. He's bone skinny and pale, with huge blue eyes and glasses, like a not-cute Harry Potter. He goes to an uptown prep school and he's such a genius that he skipped a grade, so he's going to be a senior next year, too.

“I see you guys are having about as wild of a Friday night
as I am,” he says, and he nods at our bag of videos and sloppy stay-at-home clothes.

“We're party animals. What can I say,”
Willa deadpans.

—

Back at Willa's, we order pizza and curl up on the big, soft couches. Everything
about Willa's apartment is perfectly worn in: framed school photos on the wall and scratches in the guest bathroom marking her and her sister's growth every year.

We're halfway through the second episode of
Game of Thrones
when Willa's sister, Danielle, comes home.

“Hey, kids,” she says, dropping her purse on the floor. “What are you watching?”

She's wearing tight black jeans that show off her long skinny legs and a white tank top that makes the tan on her arms glow. Danielle and Willa have matching features and the same straight brown hair, but everything comes together on Danielle in a way that it all falls apart on Willa.

“Sshh,” Willa says. “None of your business.”

“I'm going to open a bottle of dad's wine. Don't tell,” Danielle says, traipsing into the kitchen.

Danielle is one of those girls who is equal parts sweet and scary. She went to one of the uptown all-girls high schools, and for some reason she always looked like even more of a bad girl in that old-fashioned plaid uniform. When Willa and I were younger, we used to go through Danielle's drawers when she was out and tally all of the condoms and cigarettes, speculating about all her secrets. We'd spend hours wondering who she liked and when she'd first had sex.

“Cute shoes, Sadie,” Danielle says when she comes back.

“Thanks,” I say, proudly peeking at my vintage sandals.

“Willa, why don't you ever wear cute stuff?” she asks, swatting the back of her sister's head.

Willa ducks away. “Leave me alone.”

Danielle looks back at the screen.

“
Lemme guess,
” she says. “They all die.”

“Stop talking, we're watching,” Willa whines. “You're being so annoying.”

“I just wanted to tell you—”

Willa grabs the remote and pauses the TV show. Then she glares at her sister. “Fine. Speak.”

“I wanted to tell you I'm going to a party tonight at someone's apartment from your grade,” she says. “Do you guys want to come?”

I'm shocked and excited that Danielle invited us to something. Danielle has never once included us in anything before, in all of history. College must have made her nicer.

“Our grade?”
Willa scoffs.
“Wow. That must make you feel like a real loser.”

“I know, it's embarrassing,” Danielle says. “But Katie wants to go.”

“Whose party is it?” I jump in.

“This guy Justin Chang,” Danielle says.

My heart leaps into my chest.

“Justin?” I repeat. “I know who that is. He's friends with Phaedra and Izzy and everyone.”

What I don't say is
that means Noah might be there, too.

Willa looks at me, not smiling. I try to act normal, slump
down onto the couch, and look at the TV like I don't care.

“
I don
't want to go out,” Willa says.

“Okay. Well if you change your mind I'm not leaving for a while,” Danielle says, turning so quickly that her shiny brown hair fans over her shoulders like a girl in a shampoo commercial.

—

After Danielle goes to her room, I can't concentrate on the TV show anymore. There's a party and everyone will be there. Why does Willa have to be so above it all the time? Why can't she be normal and get excited about a party for once?

It must be a full twenty minutes because we're into the second act of the next episode when Willa pauses the TV, and her eyes bore into me in the silence.

“What's wrong?” I ask.

She glares at me.

“What did I do?” I repeat.

“Just go with Danielle if you want to go so bad,” she says, as if she'd been inside my head this whole time.

“Do you think Willa is happy?” Danielle asks in the taxi. She brought a SmartWater bottle full of vodka and orange juice and she takes a sip. And then she says, without waiting for me to answer, “It's rad you are old enough to party with. I wish Willa would party with me. What's with her?”

“She'
s just Willa,
” I say.

“You're so right,” Danielle says. “That's such a little sister thing. To just, like, do what you want all the time and not care if other people are making everything easier for you.”

I tug on the hem of the tight black dress Danielle let me borrow. It's too small for me, but Danielle said it's too small in a good way. It feels like just yesterday that she was screaming and literally throwing shampoo bottles at us when she found us trying on her clothes in eighth grade. Now, I'm wearing her dress with her permission, going to a party with her on a Friday night.

“Here. Have some,” Danielle says, shoving the bottle at me.

Danielle is watching and I don't want her to regret bringing me so I take a sip. It tastes terrible.

“Anyway, Willa is still awesome. I can't wait for her to
come to Yale,” she says. “I'll be a junior when she's a freshman. That will be amazing. She's going to love college. You're going to love college, too. It's so much better than high school. Where do you want to go?”

“I think I want to go to IACA,” I say. “In California.”

But Danielle isn
't listening. She taps on the plastic that divides the backseat from the driver. “Excuse me? Sir?”

The driver doesn't turn around, but says, “Yes, ma'am?” with a thick accent.

“Can I smoke in here?”

“No! No smoking! You cannot smoke!” he replies. I can see him trying to catch Danielle's gaze in the rearview mirror. She sinks back into the pleather seat and rolls her eyes.

As the taxi curves onto Central Park West, the velvety black trees zip by to our right, blending into the night sky. To our left, the looming apartment buildings stare down at us, their stone faces hard as armor.

—

Justin lives on the corner of Eighty-Third Street and Riverside Drive. It's one of those huge, almost block-size brick buildings that look like a thousand others in the city, including the one we lived in when I was really little. There's something so strange about walking into an unfamiliar building that is almost identical to a familiar building. The tiny differences between each one, like the placement of the elevator and the smell of the walls, seem dangerous.

The metal jaws of the elevator open and Danielle and I ride up to the ninth floor. The hallway that leads to Justin's apartment gives me the same strange feeling as the lobby. I
feel an uneasy kind of déjà vu. Like when you dream about a real place but everything in the dream is altered in ways that you can't name.

Someday, I'm going to do a photography project where I take pictures of people's hallways. I could take a trillion and no two would be exactly the same. And if I hung them side by side, all the differences between them would pop out.

Danielle pushes open the door to Justin's apartment and we are immediately sucked into the party. People's faces slur together, music and laughter and heat erasing all the eerie surrealness of the hall.

“Ugh, everyone here is in high school,” Danielle complains.

“How can you tell?” I ask.

“
I just can,
” she says. “I'm gonna go find Katie.”

There's a dance party in the living room, and Phaedra Bishop is sitting on one of the couches talking to a girl I've never seen. She catches me staring at her and she smiles and beckons to me. I walk up to them, standing awkwardly.

“Hey, you,” she says, patting the sofa next to her.

“Is Izzy here?” I ask.

“No, she left for the country,” she says. “I'm going tomorrow 'cause my dad had to work late. I'm so sick of the city. It's so gross in the summer.”

I nod in agreement. I'm used to people around me acting like certain things are normal—like country houses and private school tuitions. “Where's your country house?”

“Cape Cod,” she says. “It's so beautiful. It's been in our family forever; it's really old. I think it's haunted.”

“Wow,” I say.

“Hey, actually, I wanted to ask you,” she says, her eyes focusing on mine for the first time. “Izzy mentioned that your dad is an artist. I didn't know that.”

“Oh, she did?” I
stammer
. “Yeah. He is.”

“What's his name?” she asks.

“Allan Bell?” I say, swallowing. And then I add, “
I don
't think you'd have heard of him.”

“Allan Bell
 . . .”
she repeats it to herself. “I'm gonna ask my mom. My parents are really involved in the arts. And I love art, too. I'm not talented at anything, but I think I'll probably be an art history major in college. What kind of stuff does your dad make?”

“He's made a lot of things,” I say. “He makes sculptures and does performances. He's been in the Whitney Biennial a couple of times and both times he made installations and videos.”

I think I see a flicker of approval flash in her eyes, but it's gone as quickly as it was there. Is it possible that Phaedra Bishop is curious about me just like I'm curious about her?

The girl on her other side holds out a glass of a clear liquid, offering it to Phaedra. Phaedra shakes her head no. Then she says, to me, “You want some? It's vodka soda.”

“No thanks,” I say.

“
I don
't drink either,” Phaedra says.

I don
't correct her—I do drink, sometimes. But it feels good, being on Phaedra's team.

“I'm back,” Danielle announces, grabbing my arm above the elbow. “Katie isn't here. She left. Let's go.”

“Already?” I ask. “But we just got here.”

“I'll take you home. I'm going to meet up with Katie. She's at a bar, but you need IDs to get in so I can't bring you,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, deflating.

Embarrassed, I wave good-bye to Phaedra and follow Danielle through the party back toward the entrance.

The front door to the apartment swings open as we approach it and more people pile in. Danielle walks past them all, determined to leave.

I notice him before he notices me.
Sam-from-somewhere.
He doesn't smile, but something else registers on his face when he notices me and it feels better than a smile.

“Hey,” he says. “Are you leaving?”

“Yeah, we were going to.” I look at Danielle, who isn't happy that I'm stalling.

“Bummer. We're just getting here,” Sam says. And then he grins and gently flicks my arm with his thumb and forefinger. “You should stay.”

Stay
. The word expands, blooming into the wonderful and scary possibilities of
staying
.

“What now?”
Danielle groans.

“Maybe, um . . .” I begin. “Maybe since you're going to a bar anyway and I can't go, maybe I'll just . . . stay.”

“Fine,” Danielle says, seeming a little relieved to be free of me. “See you later. Don't get kidnapped or whatever or it'll be my fault.”

—

I look up at Sam. His eyes don't look as green in the dim lights as they did the other day at the beach. There is a
peeling sunburn on his nose. I wonder if he got it the day we met or in the week since then. I wonder about what he has been doing since I last saw him.

“So,” I say, shrugging nervously.

“So,” he replies. “How's it going?”

“Okay. How's it going with you?” I ask.

“All right,” he replies.

“That's good,” I say.

Maybe it's because I remember how real things felt when we talked last time, but the conversation between me and Sam feels really extra small now.

“Wanna go in?” he asks.

I nod. We wander through the apartment silently, which feels better than forcing stupid party chatter. We walk past a bedroom where people are crowded together with the lights off and the music turned up too loud. We walk past the line for the bathroom where girls are huddled in groups of three, whispering. Somehow, me and Sam are outsiders together. Sometimes he leads the way, and sometimes I do.

It's strange, this weird comfort we have, like old friends. On the way here with Danielle, and whenever I'm with Izzy, I feel compelled to keep the conversation going. That if I stop asking questions and saying witty things, they'll remember that they don't actually want to hang out with me. Around Sam, it feels safe not to talk.

After a loop, we end up back in the living room. There's a small balcony outside of a set of sliding glass doors and I follow Sam onto it. A few smokers are huddled in the corner.
They ignore us and we silently agree to ignore them, too.

Sam leans against the wall and stares out at the Hudson River and to the New Jersey skyline on the other side. A big ship that looks like a party boat, with red, white, and blue lights popping on and off, glides down the surface of the slick dark water.

“Are you doing anything fun for the Fourth of July weekend?”

His words snap my attention back to him. “Not really. Are you?”

“I'm going to New Hampshire tomorrow,” Sam says.

“Nice,” I say. “How do you get there? Do you have to fly?”

“We drive,” he says. And then he adds, “Driving is this thing that people do where they sit behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and it moves and . . .”

“Oh, right . . . driving,” I say, scratching my head theatrically. “I've heard of it.”

He smirks. “I didn't want to assume.”

I roll my eyes, trying not to laugh.

“Yeah, we'll leave at the crack of dawn tomorrow,” he continues. “To beat the traffic.”

“Who's going?” I ask.

“Me and my mom,” he says. “Her boyfriend is staying because he says he has to work. Which pisses me off.”

“Why?” I ask.

“He's never been to New Hampshire,” Sam says. “They've been dating for two years and we moved to New York to live with him, and he hasn't once seen where she's from.”

“Oh,” I say. “Is he very busy?”

Something sad blazes in Sam's eyes. It's so quick, I almost don't see it happen, like the shutter snapping open for a fraction of a second inside a camera lens. For that moment, I'm seeing straight through him to his heart.

But all he says, is, “Yeah. Really busy.”

“I can't imagine my mom having a boyfriend,” I say, after a minute.

“She never has?” Sam asks.

“No,” I say. “And my parents were never even married.”

“Mine neither,” Sam says. “They had me in high school. So dumb.”

“They had you in high school? Wow,” I say. “How old is your mom now?”

“
I don
't know.” He shrugs. “What—thirty-three? No. No, she's thirty-four. That's right.”

I feel my jaw drop. “Omigod. That's so bizarre. My mom is fifty-seven. She didn't even have me until she was forty.”

Sam nods slowly. He moves away from the wall and rests his forearms on the banister of the balcony. I stand next to him and do the same. The edge of my arm is touching the edge of his, and I can feel the exact shape of where our skin is making contact, like a clothing iron, searing its shape onto a blouse.

“Good for her,” Sam says. “I always feel so bad for my mom. Like she's wasted her whole life raising me.”

“I'm sure that's not how she sees it. I always wish my mom was younger,” I say. And then I add, “It's weird how I keep telling you things I never tell anyone.”

Sam doesn't react to what I just said, and I'm worried I
went too far. But then he turns his head and his eyes find mine in the darkness.

“I know.”

I try to hold his gaze, but he looks down. “Going back is gonna be weird.”

“You're not excited?” I ask.

“Not really,” he says. “My friends there . . . it all feels different than it used to.”

“Different how?” I ask.

Sam sighs, and gazes out at the view. On the street, ten stories below, a taxi pulls up in front of Justin's building and a family piles out. They look like toys, all shrunk down to miniature by the distance.

“I mean, I spent most of this year feeling like New Hampshire was home and I was just visiting here,” he says. “I had a girlfriend there, and all my real friends were there. But then . . .
I don
't know. Things changed. Now, this is more like home in some ways.”

My chest tightens at the word
girlfriend
.

“
A girlfriend?
” I repeat. “Do you still . . . ?”

Sam looks at me but he's not seeing me. His eyes are far away.

“No,” he says. “We broke up a few months ago. But we're still friends, I think.”

“So you're gonna see her this weekend?” I ask, trying to sound like I don't care.

“Yeah, probably,” he says. “
I don
't know. It'
s weird.
”

“What's her name?” I ask.

He elbows me a little. “You don't know her.”

“Yeah, never mind,” I murmer, tucking my hair nervously behind my ears.

“Mandy,” he says. And then he corrects himself, sounding a little sadder this time. “Amanda.”

Sam bites a nail, stares out into space, and then he shakes his head like he's shaking off a thought. He turns to me.

“What about you. You have a boyfriend?” he asks.

I shake my head no.

“Why not?” he asks, a teasing smile breaking on his lips. “Nobody good enough?”

“Yeah, right,” I scoff. “I've never had a boyfriend. I had this one thing with this guy, but we were never, like, together.”