The Dirty Ones

I open it up, with no intention of reading her private thoughts, just interested in how she put this all together. None of the pages match. Some are made up of thin parchment. Some are old, yellowed accounting ledgers. Some are even worn, yellow envelopes that you use for inter-office mail. “It’s really nice.”

“Sofia loves them too. I’m gonna go home on Sunday and grab a few extras I have to give to her and Camille for Christmas.”

“You’re going home?” I ask, closing the book and setting it aside. But it bumps into another book. “What’s this?” I ask, picking up the other book.

“Can you believe Sofia has a first fucking edition of The Great Gatsby and she reads it?” She laughs. Shakes her head. “I mean, what the fuck is wrong with her?”

“This?” I ask, turning the book in my hand. “How do you know it’s a first?”

“I know,” Kiera says. “I’m obsessed with this book. Like I have about sixteen different copies at my cottage. But not this one.” She laughs again.

“Hmmm,” I say. “I think I knew that.”

“Yeah?”

I nod. “Yeah, because you had one of these journals back in school. You wrote in it all the time. And the cover was a lot like this.”

“No,” Kiera says. “No. No, no, no. No way. I never made a journal of The Great Gatsby. My writer’s heart would shrivel and die if I tore up a copy of that book to make a journal. And I certainly never owned this edition.”

I shrug. “It must’ve been a later edition. But it definitely had this,” I say, pointing to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name in gilded gold on the front.

“That’s impossible,” Kiera says. “I just… I didn’t own a copy. And they don’t make them like this. There is no other edition like this. And anyway, like I said, I’d never cut up a Gatsby book.”

I just stare at her for a few seconds. Because how is it possible we have two totally different memories? I know for sure. For. Sure. That book I picked up back in school had this cover. It most definitely said The Great Gatsby on it.

But she’s telling me I’m wrong.

“You’re mixing it all up, Con. That’s all. You used to read Gatsby out loud to us that year, remember?”

“What?” I shake my head. “No. I never read this book. I almost failed my American Lit class in freshman year because I read the CliffsNotes version before the final exam. I barely even remember what it’s about.”

Kiera laughs. “You’re stupid. You read this to us all the time. You probably just never looked at the cover.”

“I don’t know,” I say, so confused. “You’d think I’d remember a guy called Gatsby.”

We stare at each other for a few moments. And I don’t know what she’s thinking… but I’m wondering, What the fuck? How did this whole Gatsby thing get so turned around?

“Can I read this one?” I ask, not sure why I’m asking since it’s not her book. But very sure why I want to read it. I need to see if I remember anything. “I swear, I never read this book. Out loud or otherwise.”

She sucks in a breath of air. Thinks about this for a few moments. Then says, “If you’re very careful you can read the first page. But no more than that.”

I can’t help myself, I laugh.

“I’m serious. I don’t think you understand what this book is.”

“I’ll be careful,” I say. “Promise.”

“OK,” she says. “Then read it out loud.” She stretches her body out, long legs bumping into me, cold bare feet tucking themselves under my knee, as she positions her forehead right up against the window and looks out at the building across the street. “But just one page.”

So I begin…

“‘In my younger and more vulnerable years…’”

Kiera sighs, but I keep going, logging her reactions as I narrate the story for her. She sighs a lot, curls her body up—I miss her cold feet when she does that—slides both hands under one cheek, and closes her eyes as I continue. Already one hundred percent certain that this was not the book I used to read to them back in school.

She doesn’t stop me when I turn the first page. Or the second, or the fifteenth. In fact, we’re almost on chapter two when she sits up and places both her hands on the window, looking out into the night.

“Do you see that?” she says.

I stop reading and look out the window. “That light?”

“Yeah. Did you know that’s Camille’s apartment? What time is it? I wonder what she’s doing up?”

I look around the office and spy a digital clock. “Three forty-seven.” Then I see a figure walking around. I put down the book and crawl across the sectional so I’m right up next to the window with Kiera. “Is that Bennett?”