I just expect my dad, but Mom is there too, all perky in her black wool pants, a cashmere cape. “I thought we were meeting at brunch,” I say.
“Oh, I just wanted to spend some time in your dorm. It’ll help me to picture where you are when I’m not with you.” She turns to Kali. “If that’s okay with you.” Her voice is so polite, Kali might never catch the bitchiness in it.
“I think it’s sweet,” Kali says.
“Are you ready, Allyson?” Dad asks me.
“Almost. I can’t find my running shoes.”
Mom gives me a look, like I obviously lose everything all the time now.
“Where’s the last place you left them?” Dad asks. “Just picture it. That’s how you find missing things.” This is his typical advice, but it usually works. And sure enough, when I picture my shoes, still packed in the suitcase under my bed, that’s where they are.
When we get downstairs, Dad does some halfhearted stretches. “Let’s see if I remember how to do this,” he jokes. He’s not much of a runner, but he’s always telling his patients to exercise, so he tries to practice what he preaches.
We take off on a path toward the river. It is a true autumn day, clear and brisk with a sharp bite of winter in the air. I don’t love running, not at first, but usually after ten minutes or so, that thing kicks in and I sort of zone out and forget what I’m doing. Today, though, every time I even begin to lose myself, it’s like my mind defaults to that other run, the best run, the run of my life, the run for my life. And then my legs turn into waterlogged tree trunks, and all the beautiful fall colors fade to gray.
After about a mile, I have to stop. I claim a cramp. I want to go back, but Dad wants to check out the downtown and see what’s changed, so we do. We stop at a café for cappuccinos, and Dad asks me about my classes and waxes nostalgic for his days in organic chemistry. Then he tells me how busy he’s been and that Mom is having a really hard time and I should go easy on her.
“Isn’t she supposed to be going back to work?” I ask.
Dad looks at his watch. “Time to go,” he says.
Dad leaves me at the dorm to change before brunch. As soon as I step inside, I know something’s wrong. I hear ticking. And then I look around, and for a second, I’m confused because the dorm no longer looks like my dorm but like my bedroom at home. Mom has dug up all the posters from my closet and put them up in the exact same configuration as at home. She’s moved my photos around, so they too are a mirror image of my old room. She’s made the bed with a mountain of throw pillows, the throw pillows I specifically said I didn’t want to bring because I hate throw pillows. You have to take them off and reorganize them every day. On top of the bed are clothes that Mom is folding into neat piles and laying out for me, just like she did when I was in fourth grade.
And along my windowsills and bookcases are all my clocks. All of them wound up and ticking.
Mom looks up from snipping the tags off a pair of pants I haven’t even tried on. “You seemed so glum last night. I thought it might perk you up if it looked more like home in here. This is so much cheerier,” she declares.
I begin to protest. But I’m not sure what to protest.
“And I spoke to Kali, and she finds the sound of the clocks soothing. Like a white-noise machine.”
They don’t sound soothing to me at all. They sound like a hundred time bombs waiting to explode.
Sixteen
NOVEMBER
New York City
The last time I saw Melanie, she had a fading pink streak in her blond hair and was wearing her micro-skimp Topshop uniform with some teetering platform sandals she’d picked up at the end-of-season sale at Macy’s. So when she charges at me on a crowded street corner in New York’s Chinatown as soon as I’m disgorged from the bus, I hardly recognize her. Now the pink streak is gone; her hair is dyed dark brown with a reddish tint. She has severe bangs cut short across her forehead, and the rest of her hair is secured back into a bun with a pair of enamel chopsticks. She’s wearing this weird, funky, flowered dress and a pair of beat-up cowboy boots, and she has cat-shaped granny eyeglasses on. Her lips are painted blood red. She looks amazing, even if she looks nothing like my Melanie.
At least when she hugs me, she still smells like Melanie: hair conditioner and baby powder. “God, you got skinny,” she says. “You’re supposed to gain your freshman fifteen, not lose it.”
“Have you had dining hall food?”
“Yeah. Hello, all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar. That alone makes the tuition worthwhile!”
I pull back. Look at her again. Everything is new. Including the eyewear. “You need glasses?”
“They’re fake. Look, no lenses.” She pokes through the air right to her eyes to demonstrate. “It’s part of my whole punk-rock librarian look. The musician guys love it!” She pulls off her glasses, sweeps down her hair. Laughs.
“And no more blond hair.”
“I want people to take me seriously.” She puts her glasses back on and grabs the handle of my suitcase. “So, how’s almost-Boston?”
When I chose my college, Melanie made fun of the fact it was five miles outside of Boston, like the town we grew up in was twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. She’d said I was circling urban life. She meanwhile, dove right in. Her school is in downtown Manhattan.
“Almost good,” I answer. “How’s New York?”
“Beyond good! So much to do! Like tonight, we have options: There’s a party at the dorm, a decent club with eighteen-and-over night on Lafayette, or a friend of a friend invited us to a loft party in Greenpoint, where this awesome band is playing. Or we could go to the last-minute tickets place in Times Square and see a Broadway show.”
“I don’t care. I’m just here to see you.”
I feel the slightest pang when I say that. Even though it is technically true that I’m here to see her, it’s not the whole story. I was going to see Melanie at home for Thanksgiving in a few days anyway, but when my parents booked my tickets, they said I had to take the train because flights were too unreliable and expensive on a holiday weekend.
When I imagined six hours on a train, I almost felt sick. Six hours of pushing back memories. Then Melanie mentioned that her parents were driving down the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to do some shopping and driving her back, so I got the brilliant idea to take the cheap Chinatown bus to New York and catch a lift back home with Melanie. I’ll get the bus back to Boston too.
“Aww, I’m happy to see you as well. Have we ever gone this long without seeing each other?”
I shake my head. Not since we met.
“Okay, so dorm party, Broadway show, club, or really kick-ass band in Brooklyn?”
What I really want to do is go back to her room and watch movies and hang out like in the old days, but I suspect that if I suggested that, Melanie would accuse me of being adventure averse. The party in Brooklyn sounds the least appealing, and is probably what Melanie wants to do, so it’s probably what I should choose. So I do.
It’s like I picked the right answer on a test, the way her eyes light up. “Excellent! Some of my friends from school are going. We’ll eat first, then go back and drop your stuff and get ready and trek out together. Sound good?”
“Great!”
“We’re already in Chinatown, and my favorite Vietnamese place is nearby.”
As we wind through the twisty, crowded streets, full of red lanterns and paper umbrellas and fake pagodas, I try to keep my eyes on the sidewalk. There are signs everywhere. One of them will inevitably say double happiness. Paris is more than three thousand miles away, but the memories . . . One pops up, I push it away. But then another appears. I never know when one is going to jump out at me. They are buried everywhere, like land mines.
We go into a tiny restaurant, all fluorescent lights and Formica tables, and sit down at a corner table. Melanie orders us some spring rolls and a chicken dish and tea and then she folds up her glasses and puts them into a case (to better protect the imaginary lenses?). After she pours us each a cup of tea, she looks at me and says, “So, you’re doing better?”
It’s not so much a question as a command. Melanie saw me at my absolute lowest. When I got back from Paris and completely lost it, she let me cry all night long, cursing Willem for being a sleazy scoundrel just like she’d suspected all along. On the flight home, she cast scathing looks at anyone on the plane who looked at me funny when I kept crying for the entire eight-hour trip. When, somewhere over Greenland, I started hyperventilating, wondering if maybe I hadn’t made an epic mistake, if maybe something hadn’t happened, if maybe he hadn’t got waylaid, she’d set me straight.
“Yeah. He did. He got way laid. By you! And then he got the hell out of Dodge.”
“But what if . . . ” I’d begun.
“Allyson, come on. In one day, you saw him get undressed by one girl, take a secret note from another, and God knows what happened on the train with those other girls; how you think he really got that stain on his jeans?”
I hadn’t even thought of that.
She’d taken me into the tiny airplane bathroom and shoved the Sous ou Sur T-shirt in the garbage. Then we’d flushed the coin he’d given me down the toilet, where I imagined it falling all those thousands of feet, sinking into the ocean below.
“There, we’ve destroyed all evidence of him,” she’d said.
Well, almost. I hadn’t told her about the photo on my phone, the one Agnethe took of the two of us. I still haven’t deleted it, though I haven’t looked at it, not even once.
When we got back home, Melanie was ready to put the trip behind her and turn her attention to our next chapter: college. I understood. I should’ve been excited too. I just wasn’t. Every day we schlepped to IKEA and Bed, Bath & Beyond, to American Apparel and J. Crew with our moms. But it was like I had a permanent case of jet lag; all I wanted to do was take naps on the display beds. When Melanie left for school two days before me, I burst into tears. Everyone else thought I was crying for the pending separation from my best friend, but Melanie knew better, which was maybe why she sounded a little impatient when she hugged me and whispered into my ear, “It was just one day, Allyson. You’ll get over it.”
So when Melanie asks me now if I’m better, I can’t let her down. “Yes,” I tell her. “I’m great.”
“Good.” She claps her hands together and pulls out her phone. She fires off a text. “There’s a guy going tonight, a friend of my friend Trevor. I think you’ll like him.”
“Oh, no. I don’t think so.”
“You just said you’re over the Dutch dickwad.”
“I am.”
She stares at me. “The first three months of college are the most action you’re supposed to get in your life. Have you so much as blinked at a guy?”
“I’ve mostly kept my eyes closed during all the wild orgies.”
“Ha! Nice try. You forget I know you better than anyone. I’ll bet you haven’t even kissed anyone.”