Volition (5 page)

I am a writer.

I should be able to find something in New York City, right?

I get out of bed and square my shoulders.

I am going to be Carrie Bradshaw, like Tony said.

I am going to fix my life and swear off men forever.

It’s going to be great.

There’s hardly anything in Catherine’s fridge because she eats everything in sight. The girl has always had the metabolism of a sixteen-year-old boy, and she can eat whatever she wants without gaining an ounce. If there’s anything around to eat, Catherine will eat it. She makes daily grocery store trips instead of weekly.

I find some crackers in her cupboard and start to munch, contemplating my next step in life. My mind wanders to Hayden Rockefeller, and I bring my cracker hand up to my forehead in disgust. I am so stupid. Who drops a postcard in someone’s lap? I’m not sure who I think I am. Carmen Sandiego? That girl from
Serendipity
?

Crunch.

I’m frozen to the spot because I’ve stepped on something. I just stand there, holding the box of crackers in one hand. I stop chewing because that seems impossible right now.

I’m afraid to move, but I’m also afraid to stay where I am because I have a pretty good idea what it is that I’ve stepped on.

I dive toward Catherine’s bed and hope that it doesn’t stick to my foot. I turn around, and sure enough, I find a cockroach staring back at me. I throw the box of crackers, and I make a sound that I’m sure only cows make when they’re giving birth.

I desperately want to spit the cracker out, except that I can’t. I’m frozen to this spot because if I move, it might run. If it runs, I will have no idea where to find it, and then I’ll have to leave. I can’t leave because I’m only in boxer shorts and a tank top, and that’s not really proper New York City attire.

I run to Catherine’s bathroom while keeping an eye on the creature. It hasn’t moved, but I’m sure I haven’t killed it. Those things have exoskeletons like aliens, and I once heard that they could survive a nuclear holocaust.

I arm myself with hair spray and the baby powder that Catherine uses as dry shampoo.

I can’t squish it because I’ve also heard that if you crush them, all their eggs will come out, and you’ll have an infestation.

I shudder at the thought and work up all the courage I can.

I bend down and study the creature as closely as I dare.

The antennae move, and I’m done.

I spray the hairspray and yell a battle cry like this is
Braveheart
. It tries to scuttle away, but I am relentless. When I’m out of hairspray, I start dumping baby powder on it. It stops moving, and I breathe a sigh of relief as I study the mountain of white powder in the middle of the floor. After a moment, I laugh at the ridiculousness of what’s just happened.

Then, the mountain shifts, and I see legs crawling. I scream and cover it with a plastic cup. I jump up onto Catherine’s bed.

Just then, she comes through the door with grocery bags in hand. “What on earth?”

She looks at me, and I point to the floor.

“What the fuck is that?” I ask, breathing hard. “Why won’t it die?”

I laugh at the irony of the situation because I kind of feel bad for the cockroach. It wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t die. Fate hates both of us.

“Poor little guy,” she says, looking at the mess I’ve made.

I don’t move from her bed, but she calmly leaves the room.

She’s leaving me here with this?

She returns a minute later with a man.

He’s tall, and he has an accent when he says hello to me.

“Tate, this is Leo. He lives down the hall. He always gets these things for me.”

Leo waves and walks over to the cockroach like he does this every day. I watch in horror as he picks up the cup,
touches
the cockroach as he places it inside, and walks over to the window.

“Oh no! No, you are not doing this to me!” I squeal.

I jump off the bed as he climbs on it. He opens the window and throws the little guy out. It lands on the ledge of the window, and I make him push it over the edge, so it doesn’t crawl back in at some point.

“That probably just landed on someone,” Leo tells me.

I know it’s meant to instill guilt, but I’m too busy shuddering to care.

Leo leaves, and Catherine just stares at me.

“You’re unreal. You’re all doom and gloom until a little bug gets in your way. I’ve seen you kill tons of things, but you can’t kill a cockroach?”

She points to the would-be tomb of baby powder that’s glued together by hairspray.

“You’re cleaning that up, you know.”

Then

CASPER VAN DAMME. He was my first love.

He was everything I saw in myself and more. He wore black leather jackets and expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses, and he was always high on something.

Sometimes he would get high on me, or so he would say.

I liked that a little too much because I was sixteen and thought he was my end-all-and-be-all love that I had been waiting for.

Ever since I saw my parents’ love, I was waiting for that one person who would make my soul sing. I loved Colin, and of course, I loved Catherine, but it wasn’t the same. I thought Casper was it.

Instead of driving around with Colin and Catherine, I started going to parties with Casper. He would drape his arm around my shoulders like he possessed me, and he would walk into a room with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth like James Dean.

He didn’t care about his grades.

He defied authority.

To me, his chaos was perfection.

I knew I would never be normal. I would never be that light and airy girl that my sister was. I would never be Catherine either. I accepted myself as the princess of darkness, and Casper was my prince.

He told me I should dye my hair black to match his, but I couldn’t. I said I was allergic to the dye when my hair was really the only thing that connected me to my mother. Margaret McKenna had the most beautiful, thick, long blonde hair anyone had ever seen, and mine was just like it. If I dyed it black, I would be losing a piece of her, and as much as I wanted to commit to my new identity, I couldn’t do it.

One night, we were making out in his Porsche when he started pulling off my leather jacket. I snapped back. Boys were always moving faster than girls.

“Casper?” I whispered, feeling uncertain.

“What?” He slumped back in his seat and away from me, annoyed that I had stopped him.

“Do you love me?” I asked, looking at the way the moon reflected off the dashboard instead of looking into his eyes.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

“What is love?” he asked finally.

Casper was always very philosophical—or so I thought.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Is this love?”

He leaned closer and started kissing me again. “This is whatever you want it to be, baby.”

Inside, I cringed, but I tried to force that down because I didn’t want to think badly of him. I loved him. I knew that much. I wanted to be with him.

I liked the danger that Casper put in my life, so I let him do whatever he wanted.

I was constantly straddling a thin line. On one side, I knew I was being reckless, and my parents would not like reckless. On the other, I wanted to see how far I could go and still come out unscathed.

As I went farther and farther down my dimly lit path, I realized
unscathed
was a relative term.

Boys like Casper didn’t wait for anything too long. Everything was physical, and he hated talking. He said talking ruined the natural chemistry that we had.

After a few months, part of me felt like Colin and I were rubbing off on Catherine, leeching some of the good out of her. There was no way to put it back, and I hated that for her. She deserved better than us.

I started to see Colin less and less.

I didn’t like any of it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed adulthood.

Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed any of it.

My parents would have hated who I had become, but I didn’t know how to come out of my downward spiral.

Most nights, I curled up in my bed and cried silently, trying not to wake Catherine.

Most nights, I had terrible nightmares about rushing water just barely dragging me under, and no one could hear my screams.

Now

CATHERINE SAYS SHE’S going to a Columbia party, and she begs me to join her.

I ask her if it’s a fraternity party, and she tells me no. It’s for Columbia graduate students. I reluctantly agree to go because I haven’t been into sloppy parties since one fateful evening in college.

“Good God,” she says, snapping me back to reality. “You need to forget about Casper. He was horrible.”

“Catherine,” I tell her, “have some respect.”

“Sorry,” she says.

But I know she doesn’t mean it.

She never did like him one bit, but he still holds a tiny piece of my heart. He deserved better than what he got.

I roll my eyes and hang my head off the side of her bed so that my hair drapes all over the floor. Remembering the cockroach, I recoil and pull all my hair up.

She laughs and throws a black dress at me. “Wear this.” She tosses me some black platform booties. “And these.”

I know I don’t have a choice, so I groan and pull them on.

Ten minutes later, she’s rimming my eyes with kohl.

“I’m going to look like a panda,” I tell her, not wanting to look like the airplane stewardess.

“Shut up,” she says.

I realize she’s lost some of her sweetness through the years.

“You look hot.”

I look in the mirror and study her handiwork. She’s somehow managed to make it smoky without making it look like I’m Pete Wentz after a concert circa 2005.

She makes me flip my head over and ruffles my hair around. “There. Now, you’re like a hotter version of Serena van der Woodsen, if that’s even possible.”

We make our way to the subway in our five-inch heels, which is not an easy task. I need a new MetroCard, so we miss the first train while I’m fighting with one of the machines.

We pop out from underground twenty minutes later, and then we have to walk.

And walk.

And walk.

“How much farther is it?” I ask, feeling like there’s no way I’m going to last in these shoes for the rest of the night.

At least it’s cooler now, not blazing hot like it is during the day in New York City in June.

“It’s just a few blocks.”

“I hate blocks,” I groan.

Catherine giggles at me. “You can’t hate
blocks
, Tate.”

“I do,” I tell her. “I hate them. Why can’t you tell me in miles? Miles are so much easier.”

“No,” she says, still laughing, “they’re not. With blocks, you can see them. Avenue blocks are just longer than street blocks.”

“I hate the grid,” I tell her as we trudge our way to this godforsaken party.

When we arrive, I have to use Catherine’s handkerchief to wipe my brow because of the humidity. It’s humid in Charleston, too, but this is a different kind.

She nods in approval and leads me up two different stairways to an apartment she appears to know from memory.