“This is no way to live! Can’t you see that?” She felt the tears in her throat and behind her eyes, but she wouldn’t cry. He wasn’t safe enough for crying, and hadn’t been in a long time. It’s too lonely this way.
He shook his head. Of course he couldn’t see it. Because it was how he lived too.
“Bridget. You live the way you choose. You let Perry do the same.”
And me. You let me be, he might as well have added.
She wouldn’t sit down. She wouldn’t eat his eggs. But she would live the way she chose. She would do that for him.
She grabbed her duffel bag and her backpack and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. That was what she chose.
“So when he called, I told him I couldn’t talk,” Julia explained, sitting cross-legged on Carmen’s twin bed in their small dormitory room in Vermont. “I felt bad and everything. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m not going to be into it this summer.”
It was funny. The setting was new—the campus of a performing arts center that housed the theater festival—but the situation was the same—Julia sitting on a dorm-room bed at night telling Carmen the latest episode in her off-again relationship with Noah Markham, scholar and stud.
Carmen nodded. She had finished putting all her stuff away, so she started refolding things.
“I mean, what if I meet someone here, you know? Have you looked around? There are a lot of good-looking guys. Probably half of them are gay, but still.”
Carmen nodded. She hadn’t really looked around yet.
“A place like this, anything can happen. You know how costars are always falling in love on movie sets and ruining their relationships?”
Carmen read Us Weekly often enough to know the truth of this. She put a bottle of the shampoo they both liked on Julia’s dresser. She saw the familiar black-and-white picture of Julia’s mother in the silver frame. Julia kept it in her dorm room at school. It was a glamorous picture taken by some famous photographer whose name Carmen only pretended to know. Julia’s mother had been a model, Julia told her. She was beautiful, certainly, but Carmen also registered that Julia’s mother almost never called.
Carmen didn’t put out any pictures of her family, but taped inside the cover of her binder she kept a small picture of Ryan on the remarkable day that he was born. She’d also taped a picture of the Septembers at Rehoboth Beach, the last time they’d all been together. Sometime during the winter she’d moved it from inside the front cover to inside the back cover, because though the sight of it made her happy, it made her happy in the saddest possible way.
Julia watched Carmen arranging the room. “Hey, did you pick up the Teramax conditioner?”
Carmen raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Was it on the list?”
Julia nodded. “I’m pretty sure I wrote it on there.”
Carmen scoured the pharmacy bags but couldn’t find conditioner of any sort. “I must have missed that somehow.” She felt guilty, though she didn’t even use it.
“Don’t worry about it,” Julia said.
“I’ll pick some up when we go into town,” Carmen said apologetically.
“Seriously, it’s fine,” Julia assured her.
Julia fell asleep at some point, but Carmen lay in her bed. She had to remind herself where she was.
After a while she got up and checked the list that she and Julia had made for her to take to the pharmacy. Teramax conditioner was not on it.
She went out to the hall to call Lena. Lena didn’t answer, so she left a message. Tibby didn’t answer either, and Bridget had already left for Turkey.
Even though it was late, she called her mom.
“Nena, hi. Is everything okay?” her mom asked in a groggy voice.
“Fine. We’re just settling in here.”
“How does it seem?”
“Good,” Carmen said without really thinking about it. “How’s Ryan?”
Her mom laughed. “He threw his shoes out the window.”
“Oh, no. His new walking ones?”
“Yes.”
Carmen pictured Ryan and his tiny sneakers and she pictured her mom racing around trying to locate them.
“Street or courtyard?”
“Street, of course.”
Carmen laughed. “So what else is going on?” she asked, somewhat wistfully.
“We met with the painters today.” Her mother said it as though she’d met with the president.
“Oh, yeah?”
“We’re having them skim coat every wall. We’re starting to choose colors.”
Carmen yawned. She didn’t have much to say about skim coating.
“Okay, Mama, well, sleep tight.”
“You too, nena. I love you.”
Carmen tiptoed back into the room and crawled into bed, careful not to wake Julia, who was a light sleeper.
Carmen knew her mother loved her. That used to provide a certain sufficiency. That alone had been enough to make her feel like somebody.
It used to feel like she and her mother were almost one person, living one life. Now their lives were separate. Her mother’s identity wasn’t one she could tag along with anymore.
It didn’t mean her mother didn’t love her. She’d given Carmen life, but she couldn’t be expected to keep giving it. And yet Carmen wasn’t sure how to live by herself.
She tucked her hands under her pillow, and even though she could hear Julia’s breathing a few feet away, she felt terribly lonely.
When Lena got to her room that night, she called Carmen back, hoping it wasn’t too late. “I have to ask you something and don’t jump all over me,” she said, after giving Carmen a chance to relocate to the hallway.
“As if I would,” Carmen said, too curious to pretend to be hurt for long.
“Am I over Kostos, do you think?”
“Did you meet someone else?” Carmen asked.
Lena gazed at the ceiling. “No.”
“Did you look at someone else?”
Lena felt herself blushing and was glad Carmen couldn’t see. Carmen had always combined an extravagant capacity for near psychic brilliance and total obtuseness, but she rarely used them both at the same time. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I think you will be officially over Kostos when you talk about—even really look at—somebody else.”
“Isn’t that a little simplistic?”
“No,” said Carmen.
Lena laughed.
“One of these days you are going to fall in love and forget about him. Sooner or later it has to happen. I’d hoped it would be sooner.”
Lena crossed her feet under her on the bed. Could she forget Kostos? Was that what she was supposed to be striving for? She’d so far aimed at “getting over” him, whatever that meant, and she often prided herself on making strides toward that goal. But it was hard to imagine forgetting. She wasn’t really the forgetting type.
“I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“I think it is. I think it will happen. And you know what else I think about Kostos?”
Lena sighed. She had reached her limit of saying the name Kostos out loud and far exceeded her limit of hearing it said by others. “No, smarty. What?”
“I have this weird premonition that as soon as you forget about Kostos, you are going to see him again.”
Lena felt activity in her stomach. It had both the heavy quality of sickness and the fizz of excitement. She was glad the bathroom was right there.
“Oh, you do, do you.” Lena tried to calibrate her voice for lighthearted sarcasm, but it sounded dark as mud.
“I really do,” Carmen answered solemnly.