My heart quickened. Anthony’s room had been a study in intensity, a still-life whirlwind of mess and inspiration. If only I could go there. Just to sit on the edge of his bed, to pore through his papers, his books, his prints, the vellum and watercolor and charcoal sketches rolled up on shelves and stacked in orange crates.
“I want to see it, Hatch. Just for a night. If you’ll let me, please. I want to see his room again.”
Hatch seemed unsurprised at this request. He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and pulled from it a plastic card with a magnetized stripe on one side.
I slipped it into my jacket. “Thank you.”
“The journal’s in the top drawer of his desk. You know what it looks like.” Hatch shrugged. “It’s yours, anyway. I read it once—but it wasn’t for me. Everything that’s in that notebook is about you.”
I nodded. Yes, I wanted that journal. The journal that Anthony had cracked open and started writing the night we met. He’d never let me see, not once. But I knew that this evening I’d go to his room, and I’d spend the night reading everything in that notebook once, twice, three times over.
And when I became too sleepy to read, I’d curl up on the empty bed, and I’d tuck his notebook under my cheek, and I’d fall asleep with all of his outsized, kind, funny, strange, wild thoughts burning up my brain. In my dreamworld, I would feel him take me in his arms again and unwrap me, his body heavy on mine, his hands cupping my face, kissing me just as he had that last weekend, the weekend I’d stayed with him in the dorm before Valentine’s Day.
“It’s so noisy tonight.”
“Dorm life.” His breath in my ear had sent warmth from my neck down my spine. “How it always is. Thursday means the start of the weekend. I got used to it this semester. But it’s making you uncomfortable, so let’s just go to sleep.” He made a curve of his body that mine fit perfectly inside.
He was right. It was hard to feel intimate when it sounded like a house party in every other room.
And then, my idea. “Listen, I think I know a place we can go next weekend. Upstate.”
“I don’t care what we do. Long as I’m around you.” Pushing his nose into the hollow of my neck. Whispering. “Ever since I met you, I’ve been nonstop. Ideas for one painting, then for another—it’s totally crazy.”
“Ha. Does that make me your muse?”
In the darkness, I sensed his mind circling the thought in earnest, though he didn’t answer. “Talk to me more about this getaway.” His arm closing me in.
“My dad’s sister, my aunt Gail. She lives up in Mount Kisco. I know she’d like to meet you. If you can get the time off, I’ll drive us.”
“She’d be cool with that? With…us?”
“No doubt. She’ll love you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I love you.”
That night, everything had seemed so perfectly, effortlessly possible.
“Next weekend, then.”
“Only thing is it’s supposed to snow maybe.”
“What’s a little snow? Makes it more romantic, right?”
And I would feel his body again, heavy over mine. I would feel him slip away from me into sleep. And then I would close my eyes, willing myself into my unconsciousness, to disappear first before he disappeared again.
Epilogue
I see it as soon as I enter the gallery. It’s hanging at the opposite end of the room. Which means that when they moved it out of that apartment, they noticed the K sprayed bold and directly onto the dining room wallpaper. That must have shocked them. It makes me smile.
Familiar and yet foreign; at first I’m afraid to approach. It has been almost three years since Anthony painted it. I can fit into the shape of that girl, but I know that I am changed. He only knew me as a girl who turned to face in a new direction. But now I am the girl who actually left.
It’s crowded. Hatch is here, and Lucia’s uncle Carlos, who is the curator of the show, and Lucia herself, who ended up staying in the States, where she’s attending Hunter College. And Maisie—and others, so many others. It’s a bump and jostle. I’m only off work and home for a few of these end-of-summer days, and still I feel a bit jet-lagged. Also maybe a little self-conscious in my California casual, my jeans faded and my T-shirt simple and loose. No sleek fashion getup for me.
“Those jeans! You hold on to clothing the way other people keep pets,” Rachel joked when she came over last night with some of the old gang, including Sadie and Perrin and Holden—with Cass—for my tasting-menu Folly. It was an ambitious medley of everything I’d learned this past semester in culinary school, with a few dishes straight out of The Reef, the restaurant in Long Beach where I’ve been working all summer.
I knew I’d feel off-kilter, mixing in with this sleek arty world. But I never would have missed this night.
“Hey, you!” Alice raises her hand from across the room. Alice de Souza is why the gallery space is packed, although the show itself is stand-alone provocative—Lucia’s uncle has an eye for art that goes beyond just-another-rich-dude-collector. There’s a lot to look at on the walls. But Alice is the main draw. She’s become even more famous in these years since I first met her, when she was just a wild-card member of Kai’s street-artist pack, another bandit with a spray can and a chin-set view of her big place in the world.
Alice is legit; she’s graduated past It-girl into purposeful, complex work. I read all about her in a glossy magazine piece in a San Bernardino hair salon while I was getting a trim; her likes and dislikes and her goals and what she ate for lunch. She’d seemed as far away as Mars.
But Alice is worthy of her hype. She’s eye-catchingly cool, too, as she strides toward me, knowing that every eye is on her—some trying not to stare, others completely unapologetic. “I’m so glad you could make it.” And then she cuffs the side of my ear with a kiss. It is a kiss-kiss sort of night, and we’re all playing our parts.
“Me too.”
“Ready?”
“Yep.”
“Good, then come on. Come see it, Ember.” Her hand, an artist’s hand, is large and brown and fine-boned. My hand, a chef’s apprentice hand, is nicked and burned and well protected in hers.
We are immediately sidetracked, of course. By Lucia’s uncle Carlos, who greets me with the manic energy befitting the host of a highly successful party. This is officially a hot venue; it will be written up, photos are being snapped, paintings will be sold.