Three Quarters Dead (8 page)

I’d known all along this entire . . . situation had been too bad to be true.

ONLY TWO OR three people got on at our station. I kept my head down. The train was mostly empty, running against rush hour. I wrestled out of my backpack and settled next to a window. The train jerked and rolled, and it dawned on me that at this particular moment in time nobody on earth knew where I was. The plastic seat sighed under me.

And in that exact second my phone rang. I froze. Why hadn’t I shut it off? I didn’t need anybody trying to stop me. I didn’t even want another message from Tanya because I’d already had the one I wanted. Needed.

I rummaged in my backpack for the phone. It was my mother’s number. I tapped her straight to voice mail. I’d already left her a message that I was going to Dad’s up in White Plains. Which was enough. The White Plains train flashed past this one right now, loaded with commuters heading home.

From the corner of my eye I glimpsed my reflection in the window here on the shadowy side of the aisle. I sat shoulder to shoulder with myself. The two of me, the dead one I’d been and the live one now that Tanya had texted.

Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie. Their names sang in my heart and hip-hopped in my head. If only I’d known this morning that I was going to meet up with them, I’d have kicked myself up a little when I was getting dressed. Put forth a little effort on my hair. I wore it long and smooth, longer than shoulder-length, like Natalie’s. But I hadn’t done anything about it for days. I hadn’t cared what I looked like for weeks. I’d have worn the same top two days running if I could have made it past my mother. I just didn’t care. I kept to the dress code with a collar on my shirt. I tied a sweatshirt type top around my waist. I just didn’t care.

The week after Easter there’d been a school day hot as June. One of those days when you can almost see the buds popping on the trees. Tanya had pulled her shirttails out of her waistband and tied them in a knot. You couldn’t be sure if you were seeing her belly button or not.

She cut the dress code that close, and by lunch every girl in school had tied her shirttails in a knot and was showing skin. Every girl and three or four guys from the art department.

THE TRAIN WAS braking for the Riverdale station already. My throat began to close up a little bit. The city was just ahead, tall and gray into the sky. I wanted to fast-forward and be there because doubts were creeping into my head. They nagged me like a mother.

What if that message Tanya texted was just . . . in my mind?

What if it was only something I wanted, not something that was?

Maybe when you’re as lonely as I’d been, you hear things and see things that aren’t true. Maybe I was losing my—

No. That message was real. Totally. And nothing else was. That message had . . . punched the restart button and changed everything back to the way things were supposed to be.

The train lurched and rolled on, and just ahead across a river Manhattan rose. The windows at the tops of the high-rises burned with gold fire from the sinking sun.

125th Street then, and the plunge into the tunnel under Park Avenue. I could find my way around the city, more or less. As a family, when we’d been a family, we used to come in for
The Nutcracker
and ice-skating at Bryant Park and Dylan’s Candy Bar at Sixtieth and Third. Only this past Christmastime Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie and I had come in for the Rockettes’ holiday show. We’d changed clothes at the apartment where Tanya’s aunt Lily lived. It wasn’t that long ago. It was when things were real. I knew my way. I just didn’t know what I’d find when I got there.

If anything.

The doubts nagged, and my heart pounded. We were coasting to a stop along the platform way down under Grand Central Station.

Just as I was struggling into my backpack, a guy stood up from his seat ahead. We’d meet at the door.

He was a blond-headed guy in Lacoste and long shorts, carrying a see-through garment bag with a blue blazer inside. I looked again, and it was Spence Myers.

Spence Myers with the triple 800s on his SATs and early admission to Georgetown. I clenched up like a fist. It was like I hadn’t really escaped, or made a clean break. I panicked, but fought it.

I pulled me together. What did it matter? As a rule, you can see seniors, but they can’t see you back.

“Kerry?”

We were meeting at the door, stepping out onto the platform. He was pulling the iPod out of his ear. I thought about my hair. The sweatshirt sagged around my waist.

“What are you doing in town?” said Spence Myers like we were old pals. He was editor of the school newspaper. Back at the beginning of the year I’d thought about going out for it, working on staff as a lowly sophomore gofer or something. But then when I got in with Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie, when would I have had the time? I needed to keep my time open. And in fact they were the only way Spence could know who I was. Because I was on the fringes of Tanya’s group.

“I—I’m just coming in to have dinner with my dad,” I said. “We’re taking a late train back.”

It was a Friday night. It made sense. Why shouldn’t I be in town with my dad? I hadn’t thought about needing an alibi. But here one was. It practically jumped out of my mouth.

“You?” I said, like we stopped for a chat in the school hall every day or so.

“Party tonight,” he said. “Then I’m staying over for an interview in the morning,” Spence said. “It’s for a summer internship with a nonprofit. Then back for the prom tomorrow night, and the after-prom thing at Chase’s. Big weekend.”

Huge,
I thought, almost losing the thread of why I was here. Why
was
I here?

“Who are you going to the prom with?” I asked him. It seemed a mature question. While in my head I could hear Tanya saying,
“Not Spence Myers. . . . He has some growing up to do.... I’ll get back to him later.”
I could hardly hear anything else.

“Bunch of the guys,” he said, “keeping it real.”

I didn’t know where to go with this. He was a senior. He was all about internships and keeping it real and the prom with guys and early admission to—

“How are you doing?” Spence said to me as the gates got closer. “You still seeing the counselor?”

He knew that? I never thought people could see me unless I was with Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie. If then.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Today was the last session.”

“Ah. Well, it’s good if you can move on,” Spence said. “You have to.”

He had. But then, had I ever seen him and Tanya together, just the two of them?

“It was all a mistake anyway,” I said.

And he probably thought I meant seeing the counselor was a mistake. That’s what he probably thought.

WE WERE OUT in the station now, where National Guard soldiers patrolled in camouflage, with guns. People were everywhere, and sound bounced off the marble walls. Now we were crossing the concourse, this gigantic space with more people surging in every direction, swinging laptops, running for trains. Everybody moving from one world to another. And way up above all the stars of the galaxy, all the astrological signs, lit up against the turquoise blue ceiling.

I was a little numb again. It was all
Bright Lights, Big City,
and I was strolling through it with a major senior guy, so there was nothing particularly real about any of this.

“Your dad in Wall Street?” Spence asked.

“What?” My dad? Wall Street? My dad was in White Plains, miles from here, where he lived and worked. “Oh. Right. Yes, he works on Wall Street.”

Lie Number Two,
and Wall Street was downtown. Tanya’s aunt’s apartment was uptown. Two different directions. Two different trains. We were past the big clock and the newsstand now and almost at the subway entrance.

“You?”

“My folks have a place on Sixty-ninth,” Spence said, “Lexington and Sixty-ninth. I’m staying there tonight.”

That meant he’d be getting an uptown train. And I needed an uptown train too because Tanya’s aunt lived on Seventy-second Street. But I’d just told him my dad was in Wall Street, or on Wall Street—however you say it. So I ought to be looking for a downtown train. He was pulling a subway pass out of his pocket as we headed down another flight in a mob of people.

MY HEAD WHIRLED. I supposed I could take a downtown train. Then get off somewhere and switch over to an uptown one. But I could also get totally lost and end up living permanently in the New York subway system. Or Brooklyn. It was like a—I don’t know what—like a bunch of mole holes. A maze. And the signs made no sense. None. You had to know what you were doing.

I’d be lucky to get on the right train, let alone get on the wrong train and then change to the right one. I had to get away from Spence. Here’s how bizarre this whole business was—I was trying to dump one of the major senior guys in school. Also the best-looking. I was so off my turf I couldn’t believe it. Also, I wasn’t used to making my own decisions.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I have to buy a ticket.” He had a pass. He could just go through the turnstile and . . . vanish down the mole hole. This lower level was teeming with people. If enough people got between us, I could just melt away, delete myself.

“No, take your time,” he said. “I’ll wait with you till your train comes. It’s a zoo down here, and there are weirdos.”

He waited while I stood in the ticket line. I had this much time to think. And to wonder, in spite of my grief—would it have killed me to keep using lip gloss?

He was still there when I came back, dry-lipped, ticket in hand. “Actually,” I said, “I’m meeting my dad uptown. He’s having a drink with some people. At somebody’s . . . apartment.”
Lie Number—

“Come on then,” Spence said, and I followed his swaying garment bag through the turnstile. He had a college haircut already, the blond hair at the back just brushing his shirt collar. In fact he was an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, except he had his shirt on. Now we were elbowing our way down more crumbling steps to the number 6 uptown train.