“I love you,” he murmured, his hands reaching up under her shirt. He didn’t hang around for that beat, that momentary vacuum where she was meant to respond in kind. His hands were already up under her shoulders, unbending himself over her for a real kiss. He didn’t need her to say it back.
She used to have the idea—an untested belief, really—that you loved someone in a kind of mirror dance. You loved in exact response to how much they were willing to love you.
Brian wasn’t like that. He did his loving openly and without call for reciprocation. It was something that awed her, but that set him apart, as though he spoke Mandarin or could dunk a basketball.
She plunged her hand under his T-shirt, feeling his warm back, his angel bones. “I love you,” she said. He didn’t ask for the words, but she gave them.
There were so many things you took for granted. So many things you hardly noticed until they were gone. In Carmen’s case, one of those things was her identity.
She did have one once, she thought as she put the last of the props away in the darkened and empty theater.
She had once been the only child of a single mother. She had been one quarter of a famously inseparable foursome. She had been a standout math student, a fashionista, a good dancer, a control freak, a slob. A resident of apartment 4F. Now these things were gone, or—for the moment, at least—undetectable. She had come up with nothing to replace them. Except for maybe Julia. She was lucky to have Julia.
Ideally, you grew up in a house with a family and then you went to college. You left your home and family there, kind of waiting for you. You left a hole roughly the size and shape of you. You got to come home and fill it every once in a while.
Maybe this was only an illusion. Nothing stayed the same. You couldn’t expect your family to sit there in suspended animation until you came back. That required a babyish narcissism that not even Carmen could muster. (Well, maybe she could muster it a little.) But so what if it was an illusion? Illusions could be really helpful sometimes.
The important thing was that home stayed where it was and you got to move. You could always plot your location in the world by your relationship to it. I’m so far from home, you could think, when in, say, China. I’m so close to it, you could think, when you turned the last corner and saw it again.
As Carmen’s mother liked to point out, teenagers and toddlers were very much the same. They both liked to leave their mother, so long as their mother did not move.
Well, Carmen’s mother did move. She was a moving target. Home was a time and no longer a place. Carmen couldn’t return to it.
As far as Carmen was concerned, that made the leaving a lot harder. It also made the plotting of your location very tricky indeed.
For the first seven months of the school year, nothing felt familiar and nothing felt real. Except for maybe food. She felt as though she’d stepped out of the flow of time. She watched it go past, but she didn’t take part. She just waited there, wondering when her life would start again.
She had lived big before. She really had. She was ambitious, she was pretty. She was a young woman of color. Now she felt like a ghost. The pale, starchy cafeteria food made her pale and starchy. It blurred her lines.
She depended too much on her context to know herself. The faces of her friends and her mother were mirrors to her. Without them she couldn’t see herself; she was lost. She’d first realized it that strange and lonely summer in South Carolina when she’d met her stepfamily.
She and Win Sawyer, the guy she’d met last summer, had gotten together a couple of times in the fall, but she had purposely let it trail off. She didn’t know or like herself enough to be knowable or likable when she was with him. She had nothing to offer.
It turned out that she wasn’t very good at making friends. That was one of the problems that came of having three pals, ready-made, practically waiting for you to be born so they could befriend you. She hadn’t had to work that muscle you use to make friends. She doubted she even had that muscle.
Her first mistake was believing that she and her roommate, Lissa Greco, would be instant friends, and that their relationship would be a stepping-stone to social consequence. Lissa set her straight pretty quickly. She’d arrived at Williams with her two best friends from boarding school. She was petulant and undermining to Carmen. She wasn’t looking for another friend. She accused Carmen of stealing her clothes.
In the beginning Carmen was disoriented by her loneliness and wanted desperately to see Tibby, Bee, and Lena. But as time passed, she started to avoid them in subtle ways. She didn’t want to admit to them or herself that she wasn’t quite making the go of college that she’d hoped.
Once, she went to Providence and saw Bee in her glory: her soccer friends, her glorious roommate, her eating friends, her partying friends, her library friends. She saw Lena in her different kind of glory, quiet in the studio, surrounded by her beautiful sketches. The weekend she spent in New York with Tibby, it was three of them to the room, including Brian, and Tibby won a departmental prize for her first short film.
Carmen didn’t want them coming to see her here, where she had no glory at all. She didn’t want them to see her like this.
She first met Julia in the late winter in the theater department, where Carmen was signing up for a playwriting class. Julia mistook her for a theater type. “Have you worked on sets?” she’d asked Carmen.
Carmen couldn’t figure out whom she was talking to. “Me?” she’d finally asked. She wasn’t sure which was more surprising: that Julia took her for a set builder or that Julia was talking to her at all.
How low I have fallen, Carmen thought miserably. Nobody in high school would have mistaken her for a set builder. She’d been one of the cute girls, particularly by the end of high school. She showed off her belly button in tiny shirts. She flirted outrageously. She wore red lipstick to take her SATs.
Carmen tried to scrape together a little bit of dignity. “No, I’m not really a set person,” she said.
“Oh, come on. Everybody’s a set person. Jeremy Rhodes is directing a production of The Miracle Worker for senior week, and we’re getting desperate,” Julia explained.
Carmen recognized Julia from the cafeteria. She was one of the few freshmen that people knew a
bout. She was beautiful and somewhat dramatic-looking, with her pale white skin and her long black hair. She wore vintage jackets and long bohemian skirts and made a certain amount of noise with her various pins and beads and bangles. She was small and thin but used the oversized gestures of a person who knew she was being looked at.
“Well, sorry,” Carmen said.
“Let me know if you change your mind, okay?” Julia said. “It’s a really cool group of people. Really tight.”
Carmen nodded and fled, but she did think about it. She thought wistfully of having things to do and “really cool” people to do them with.
Julia approached her again in the cafeteria a few weeks later. “Hey, how’s it going?”
Carmen felt self-conscious because she was eating alone. She was torn between being unhappy that Julia was seeing her this way and being happy that all the rest of the people there were seeing her with Julia. “All right,” Carmen said.
“Did you get into the writing class?”
“Nope,” said Carmen. “How’s the play going?”
“Really good.” Julia smiled a winning smile. “Still looking for people to join up.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You should really think about it. Jeremy’s very cool. There are only three performances and they don’t start until after exams. Why don’t you come tonight? We have a rehearsal at seven. Just see what you think.”
“Thanks,” Carmen said, feeling almost absurdly grateful. Grateful that Julia had noticed her, remembered her, talked to her, invited her to something. Did Julia know how alone she was here? “Maybe I will,” she said.
So grateful was she, she probably would have agreed if Julia had invited her to drink poisoned Kool-Aid.
And that was how, one week later, Carmen found herself standing on a ladder wearing a tool belt. If her friends saw her, they would not recognize her. No one in her high-school graduating class would recognize her. Or at least, she hoped they wouldn’t. She didn’t recognize herself. But really, who was herself? Who?