And then there she is. Clearly she’s borrowed from her friends’ closets again, wearing tight black pants and a red sweater that hugs her body as if it were knitted as she wore it. Her hair is curled into waves and draped over both shoulders. She still shifts her feet, as if uncomfortable, but she doesn’t look out of place at all. She looks perfect.
“Red’s a good color on you,” I say as she steps forward and hands me a foam cup with a glorious stream of steam emanating from it.
“You don’t have to be nice. I would have given you the coffee anyway,” she says. My hand brushes against hers as we exchange the cup and my heart beats with a heavy thump, the kind I get when a roller coaster drops.
“I would have fought you for this coffee,” I say, winking before taking a sip. I leave my gaze on her, noting the redness creeping into her cheeks as they round, her mouth dimpling the corners with her tight, bashful smile.
“And the compliment was genuine,” I add. I expect her to hide her face from the attention. That seems to be her usual reaction. But she doesn’t. Instead, her lashes kiss her checks gently with the slowest bat and her lips part as her smile grows a little more.
She leans her head to the right, toward the pathway, and we head to our train. We’re later than last time, and the platform is more crowded, so as the train approaches I take her hand to keep her close. I didn’t think before I acted, but now that her hand is flush to mine, my fingers wrapped around hers, I am doing nothingbutthinking about what this is and what it means.
I maneuver us to an open set of seats and our hands break the second we sit down. I notice she doesn’t have a coffee, so I offer her mine. She shakes her head and leans into me.
“No, that was a gift,” she says.
My eyes drop to her mouth, briefly, and her tongue makes a short swipe across her bottom lip before she sucks it in and looks down at her lap, her leather bag flat under her palms.
I feel the eyes on us. She must, too, though she seems intent on keeping her focus on her lap and the leather strap her thumb keeps rubbing obsessively.
I give in and scan the train, catching a few whispers between fellow students to our left, and knowing smirks on the faces of a few girls to our right. My phone becomes my refuge as I pull it from my pocket to scroll through social media. It’s a good distraction until a photo of my sister fills my screen. I blacken the screen immediately and put my phone away, having seen too much already.
The posts have gotten less regular, but they still happen. Usually, it’s girls from the younger forms who have turned my sister into this sort of icon. They lament her passing and talk about how Welles isn’t the same without her walking its halls. They’re right, too. It’s not. But they didn’t truly know her. They like the attention, and that’s what squeezes my insides. They aren’t even photos they’ve taken themselves. They’re the ones Anika shared on her page.
I haven’t visited her profile in a few weeks. Morgan offered to take it down after the services, since she had Anika’s passwords. My mom wanted her to leave it up, though, as if that somehow lets my sister live on. Maybe it does. Or maybe it just keeps the door open enough to prevent closure. It isn’t worth the fight for me, not if it means that much to our mom.
There’s a different kind of heaviness in my chest now that I’ve seen my sister’s eyes. She would tell me I’m being a jerk right now. As I glance back to Lily’s hands, I notice the shimmer of Anika’s bracelet and it brings a faint smile to my lips. It’s hard not to add these things up. I may have called the mystical crap my sister was into bullshit, but she believed it to her core. “Signs,” she would say. “They’re everywhere.”
I shift my coffee to my other hand as the train slows for the last suburban stop and under the cover of bodies shuffling in. With standing passengers now to shield us from gossip, I stretch my right hand toward Lily’s, eventually linking our pinkies. It causes me to chuckle once, silently. A quick glance to Lily’s face reveals something in her expression I don’t know that I’ve ever seen—a peaceful confidence. Her smile is barely there, and maybe she’s not even aware of it. Maybe it’s a hint for me, a gift to let me know I did the right thing just now.
We ride the rest of the way without speaking, and I never once move my hand.
* * *
Whatever balance I struck in my soul on the way toThe Affiliatewas wrecked the moment I made my first cold call this morning. Or what wassupposedto be a cold call but instead was a direct line to one of the company’s biggest ad client CEOs.
It started out harmless enough. Charming banter about me being the new guy and someone was probably pranking me and having me call the “big guns.” We hit it off initially. Of course, that was when the conversation was brand new and I was answering the man’s questions about my plans after school, what I wanted to study, how I liked working forThe Affiliate. From there, things . . .escalated.
I’d like to argue that it wasn’t completely my fault. Though our dad wasn’t around, his brothers were, and they made sure that I had a good sense of right and wrong, meaning the Patriots over the Cowboys, the Red Socks rule the Yankees, and real men bleed Celtic green.
“Please tell me you didn’t say the wordchump?” Todd is rubbing his head across the desk from me, head down, phone positioned between his resting elbows.
I wince and he pops his gaze up, brows raised.
My shoulders creep toward my ears.
“I didn’t exactly callhima chump. It was more a general term, for Yankee fans, and…”
“Theo, the man’s license plate is literally THEBABE.” Todd’s mouth gets slack, like he’s gonna vomit, and I shake with nervous laughter.
“Well, that’s kind of false advertising. Clearly,he’snotthe Babe.” I swallow down my chipper tone when Todd’s eyes meet mine again.
I’m so fired.
“Theo, do you know how hard that license plate is to get in New York?” Thankfully, his phone rings before I’m able to answer. I was going to mention that I saw them available in one of those shops in Times Square.
“Cosmo! Hi, thank you for calling me back,” Todd begins, pouring on the charm. He waves a hand toward me, I assume to dismiss me, so I get up and push my chair in as he spins his back to me. “Yeah, I mean interns, right? You get what you get and sometimes it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Ouch.