9.

As a special parting gift from Stuyvesant—a final act of cruelty—I was awarded zero-period gym my senior year, which meant I had to be in the girls’ locker room by quarter of eight each ever-darkening morning. After school Vanessa and I had SAT prep on Twenty-Third Street, and then we’d go for coffee and anxiously bark vocabulary words at each other while doing our other homework.

I got home late one night in October and heard Mom’s TV. I was in a phase where I’d decided to stop worrying about her. She’d passed the real estate test and she had two new listings, so she had stuff to keep her busy. I was glad she was awake, in bed with a hunk of white, runny cheese, her latest obsession.

“How was the class?” She held a cracker out at me, still looking at the TV.

“I’m totally fried,” I said. “It’s too much. I can’t wait till it’s over.”

Mom said nothing and went back to her cheese. Her bed was overgrown with mail and dry cleaning hangers. I made my way to it, using the flashing TV light to navigate.

She was watching a movie where two kids were getting married, and they didn’t want a big wedding but their parents did. It was a movie from the fifties. I could tell because the girl character started every sentence with “Why,” as in “Why, I wouldn’t dream of going to the picnic without you.”

The guy on TV was yelling. “Maybe we should forget the whole darn thing!” he said. I turned and leaned my head against her leg. Her duvet smelled like nail polish remover.

“Why can’t you be more like them?” Mom asked, her head gesturing up at the screen.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“They’re just so polite and … obedient. They respect their parents.”

“I respect my parents,” I said, although I could hear my own mocking tone of voice.

“Right,” she said. She’d cast the cheese onto the pillow next to her and was patting Pond’s onto her face. My mother had a penchant for cheap drugstore beauty products. “That rental car company is still breathing down my back. Honestly, Thea, I got another bill from them today. It’s been months since that little episode.”

“Really?” I asked sheepishly.

“Yes, still,” she said. “We gave you our hard-earned money to go and be on your own and study in another country, and what did you do?” she asked. “You took that money and paraded around the continent doing God knows what.” She set the Pond’s jar down on her chest and yanked the tie on her robe.

“God, we’ve been through that so many times already,” I said. “Can’t we laugh about it yet? Can’t it be a story that we have now that we like to pull out of our hats from time to time at parties?”

“Don’t be flip, Thea,” Mom snapped. “There is absolutely nothing amusing about that episode and there never will be, to me or to Daddy. You could have been in a much more serious accident, or gotten raped or murdered, and we might never have found you.”

They’d given me three thousand dollars for a work-study program in London, where I was supposed to take some “new math” course at UCL (Dad’s thing) and a design class at Central St. Martins (my thing). I stayed at Mom’s older sister’s in Fulham and got a job at a café. But by the beginning of August I was getting really bored. Vanessa was doing an exchange student thing, living with a family outside of Venice, so two weeks before the classes ended, I quit my job, told my aunt, who was clueless, that I was going to visit a friend, and I met up with Vanessa in Italy. I had a thousand euros from the café job and from what Dad had given me, and Vanessa had more, so we took off. I’m not sure why, but I felt like I deserved to do what I wanted, and what I wanted was to go with Vanessa to Portofino and then up to the top of the Matterhorn in Switzerland, to watch the sun rise, and then to Ireland or Scotland, if we had money left, to check out all the beautiful yarn. I love yarn, especially raw, prickly yarn straight off a lamb, in rich, dark colors. It was the best two weeks. We were the dirty Americans. We got drunk and found cute guys everywhere, made out with them in cafés, behind crowded market stalls, in smelly bathrooms. We slept in hostels or in two-star hotels, or sometimes in the train station, on our bags. We’d wake up sweaty and hungover and change our minds about where to go next and find some cheese and bread and stay another day. I’d called Mom and lied, lied, lied, saying I was still in London. I knew she’d never check in with her sister because they didn’t get along—Dad had actually been the one to call her and arrange my visit. We would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t sideswiped someone in our rented car in Galway, on our way back to Dublin, right at the end. It was the first time I’d used a credit card the whole trip, and I thought I’d be home in time to intercept the bill. But when I returned the car, the rental company called my mother, the primary cardholder, to get her insurance information. After that it was a shit show.

“Such callous disregard, Thea,” Dad had said, the pain of deception knitted into his thin, gray brows. “I’m deeply, deeply, disappointed.” Well, so am I, I remember thinking. I’m disappointed that you couldn’t figure out a way to stick it out together so I wouldn’t have to pack my stupid rolling Swiss Army suitcase every weekend like a traveling monkey and waste my allowance on cab fare to your stupid house by the river—far, far away from any subway, when I’d rather just stay put at Mom’s.

“I would think twice before you ever pull a stunt like that again,” Mom said, slapping the lid on the Pond’s jar.

“Actually, there’s this arts program at Edinburgh next summer that I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

She muted the TV and glared at me.

“I’m kidding,” I said. The phone rang in my room and I rolled off her bed.

“Don’t stay on long,” she called. “I can hear you, you know.”

“College is so boring,” Will said when I answered. “They’re all next door. I can hear them.”

“Are they eating pineapple pizza?”

“Yeah, that’s right, and friggin’ taco sandwiches. Hell, I just want to go to sleep. With you. I wish we could be together all the time. I wish you could live in my drawer. I wish I could uncork you from a bottle whenever I wanted. God, I just miss you, Thee.”

I breathed in his voice, little pinpricks moving across my chest, as though my heart were waking up from falling asleep.

“Imagine we’re really old and you die and everyone sees me trudging up and down First Avenue with my boots undone,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Poor Vic.’ ”

“You changed your name?”

“Yeah, I changed my name to Vic, thinking it would make me feel better.”

“But it doesn’t,” I said.

“No, it does not,” he said indignantly. “But they all say, ‘Poor old Vic, lost the love of his life,’ and the other widowers bring me Ovaltine and doughnuts, which I can’t eat because I’m so bereft. And they ask me out.”

“The widowers? You’ve gone gay?” I watched puffs of cottony smoke billow from a tower outside my window, thinking, White looks so strange in the dark.

“No, I mean widows,” Will said. “The ladies. I take one out a few times, but soon enough, wouldn’t you know it, she starts to bug the shit out of me.”

“Let me guess, she gets on you about exercising.”

“Right. ‘Fitness first,’ she cackles over and over, like a parrot, so I break up with her because she just reminds me that I don’t care about fitness anymore because you’re not there. At night I’d lie in my little single bed, remembering G-Rock, my flower girl. Your green eyes that catch fire when you’re in the sun and the way your face automatically points to the sky when you laugh. I’d look out my window, at the little sliver of moon and I’d say, ‘Damn you, moon, give me back my girl.’ I’d curse, then I’d beg, then I’d curse, then I’d beg, all night, every night, till I finally died too.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Sad, right?”

“So sad.”

“Well, maybe it’ll end happier than that,” he said. “Maybe you won’t die and I won’t die and we’ll live happily ever after forever. We’d be the first people to live forever.”

“That’d be nice,” I said. I stretched my legs to a cool part of the mattress and pictured us living in a tiny, gold-wallpapered apartment in Paris on the Seine, next to that famous bookstore. How great and weird would it be if we stayed together forever, I thought. High school sweethearts. How great and weird.