At least when she hugs me, she still smells like Melanie: hair conditioner and baby powder. “God, you got skinny,” she says. “You’re supposed to gain your freshman fifteen, not lose it.”
“Have you had dining hall food?”
“Yeah. Hello, all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar. That alone makes the tuition worthwhile!”
I pull back. Look at her again. Everything is new. Including the eyewear. “You need glasses?”
“They’re fake. Look, no lenses.” She pokes through the air right to her eyes to demonstrate. “It’s part of my whole punk-rock librarian look. The musician guys love it!” She pulls off her glasses, sweeps down her hair. Laughs.
“And no more blond hair.”
“I want people to take me seriously.” She puts her glasses back on and grabs the handle of my suitcase. “So, how’s almost-Boston?”
When I chose my college, Melanie made fun of the fact it was five miles outside of Boston, like the town we grew up in was twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. She’d said I was circling urban life. She meanwhile, dove right in. Her school is in downtown Manhattan.
“Almost good,” I answer. “How’s New York?”
“Beyond good! So much to do! Like tonight, we have options: There’s a party at the dorm, a decent club with eighteen-and-over night on Lafayette, or a friend of a friend invited us to a loft party in Greenpoint, where this awesome band is playing. Or we could go to the last-minute tickets place in Times Square and see a Broadway show.”
“I don’t care. I’m just here to see you.”
I feel the slightest pang when I say that. Even though it is technically true that I’m here to see her, it’s not the whole story. I was going to see Melanie at home for Thanksgiving in a few days anyway, but when my parents booked my tickets, they said I had to take the train because flights were too unreliable and expensive on a holiday weekend.
When I imagined six hours on a train, I almost felt sick. Six hours of pushing back memories. Then Melanie mentioned that her parents were driving down the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to do some shopping and driving her back, so I got the brilliant idea to take the cheap Chinatown bus to New York and catch a lift back home with Melanie. I’ll get the bus back to Boston too.
“Aww, I’m happy to see you as well. Have we ever gone this long without seeing each other?”
I shake my head. Not since we met.
“Okay, so dorm party, Broadway show, club, or really kick-ass band in Brooklyn?”
What I really want to do is go back to her room and watch movies and hang out like in the old days, but I suspect that if I suggested that, Melanie would accuse me of being adventure averse. The party in Brooklyn sounds the least appealing, and is probably what Melanie wants to do, so it’s probably what I should choose. So I do.
It’s like I picked the right answer on a test, the way her eyes light up. “Excellent! Some of my friends from school are going. We’ll eat first, then go back and drop your stuff and get ready and trek out together. Sound good?”
“Great!”
“We’re already in Chinatown, and my favorite Vietnamese place is nearby.”
As we wind through the twisty, crowded streets, full of red lanterns and paper umbrellas and fake pagodas, I try to keep my eyes on the sidewalk. There are signs everywhere. One of them will inevitably say double happiness. Paris is more than three thousand miles away, but the memories . . . One pops up, I push it away. But then another appears. I never know when one is going to jump out at me. They are buried everywhere, like land mines.
We go into a tiny restaurant, all fluorescent lights and Formica tables, and sit down at a corner table. Melanie orders us some spring rolls and a chicken dish and tea and then she folds up her glasses and puts them into a case (to better protect the imaginary lenses?). After she pours us each a cup of tea, she looks at me and says, “So, you’re doing better?”
It’s not so much a question as a command. Melanie saw me at my absolute lowest. When I got back from Paris and completely lost it, she let me cry all night long, cursing Willem for being a sleazy scoundrel just like she’d suspected all along. On the flight home, she cast scathing looks at anyone on the plane who looked at me funny when I kept crying for the entire eight-hour trip. When, somewhere over Greenland, I started hyperventilating, wondering if maybe I hadn’t made an epic mistake, if maybe something hadn’t happened, if maybe he hadn’t got waylaid, she’d set me straight.
“Yeah. He did. He got way laid. By you! And then he got the hell out of Dodge.”
“But what if . . . ” I’d begun.
“Allyson, come on. In one day, you saw him get undressed by one girl, take a secret note from another, and God knows what happened on the train with those other girls; how you think he really got that stain on his jeans?”
I hadn’t even thought of that.
She’d taken me into the tiny airplane bathroom and shoved the Sous ou Sur T-shirt in the garbage. Then we’d flushed the coin he’d given me down the toilet, where I imagined it falling all those thousands of feet, sinking into the ocean below.
“There, we’ve destroyed all evidence of him,” she’d said.
Well, almost. I hadn’t told her about the photo on my phone, the one Agnethe took of the two of us. I still haven’t deleted it, though I haven’t looked at it, not even once.
When we got back home, Melanie was ready to put the trip behind her and turn her attention to our next chapter: college. I understood. I should’ve been excited too. I just wasn’t. Every day we schlepped to IKEA and Bed, Bath & Beyond, to American Apparel and J. Crew with our moms. But it was like I had a permanent case of jet lag; all I wanted to do was take naps on the display beds. When Melanie left for school two days before me, I burst into tears. Everyone else thought I was crying for the pending separation from my best friend, but Melanie knew better, which was maybe why she sounded a little impatient when she hugged me and whispered into my ear, “It was just one day, Allyson. You’ll get over it.”
So when Melanie asks me now if I’m better, I can’t let her down. “Yes,” I tell her. “I’m great.”
“Good.” She claps her hands together and pulls out her phone. She fires off a text. “There’s a guy going tonight, a friend of my friend Trevor. I think you’ll like him.”
“Oh, no. I don’t think so.”
“You just said you’re over the Dutch dickwad.”
“I am.”
She stares at me. “The first three months of college are the most action you’re supposed to get in your life. Have you so much as blinked at a guy?”
“I’ve mostly kept my eyes closed during all the wild orgies.”
“Ha! Nice try. You forget I know you better than anyone. I’ll bet you haven’t even kissed anyone.”
I pull the weird innardy parts out of the spring roll, wiping the excess grease on a paper napkin. “So?”
“So the guy I want you to meet tonight. He’s way more your type.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Though I know what it means. It was absurd to think that he was ever my type. Or I his.
“Nice. Normal. I showed him your picture and he said you looked dark and mysterious.” She reaches out to touch my hair. “Though you should cut your hair into the bob again. Right now it’s more of a blob.”
I haven’t cut my hair since London, and it hangs down my neck in a messy curtain.
“That’s the look I’m going for.”
“Well, you’re achieving it. But anyhow he’s really nice, Mason—”
“Mason? What kind of name is that?”
“You’re getting hung up on a name? You sound just like your mother.”
I resist the urge to stab her through the eye with a chopstick.
“Anyhow, who cares? Maybe his name is really Jason but he just wanted to call himself Mason,” Melanie continues. “Speaking of, no one calls me Melanie here. They call me Mel or Lainie.”
“Two names for the price of one.”
“It’s college, Allyson. No one knows who you were. There’s never a better time to reinvent yourself. You should try it.” She gives me a pointed look.
I want to tell her that I did. It just didn’t take.
Mason actually turns out to be not that bad. He’s smart and slightly nerdy, and from the South, which explains the name, I guess, and he speaks in a lilting accent, which he makes fun of. When we get to the party on a desolate stretch of windblown street, miles from the subway stop, he jokes that he’s from the hipster police and do I have enough tattoos to be in this part of town. At which point Trevor shows off his tribal armband and Melanie starts talking about the “tat” she’s thinking of getting on her ankle or butt or other places girls get them, and Mason looks at me and rolls his eyes a little.
At the party, an elevator opens up directly into a loft, which is both huge and decrepit, with giant canvases all over the walls and the smell of oil paint and turpentine. It smelled like this in the squat. Another land mine. I kick it away before it explodes.
Melanie and Trevor are going on and on about this kick-ass band, whose grainy video they show me on Melanie’s phone. They’re congratulating themselves on seeing them at a place like this, before the whole world discovers them. When the band fires up, Melanie—Mel, Lainie, whoever—and Trevor hop to the front and start dancing like crazy. Mason hangs back with me. It’s too loud to attempt conversation, which I’m glad about, but I’m also glad that someone stayed with me. I feel my tourist sign flashing, and I’m on native soil.
After what seems like forever, the band finally takes a break; the ringing in my ears is so loud it’s like they’re still playing.
“Care for a libation?” Mason asks me.
“Huh?” I’m still half deaf.
He mimes drinking something.
“Oh, no thanks.”
“I’ll. Be. Right. Back,” he says, exaggerating the words like we’re lip-reading.
Meanwhile, Melanie and Trevor are doing a kind of lip-reading of their own. They’re in a corner on a couch, making out. It’s like they don’t notice anyone else in the room. I don’t want to watch them, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Seeing them kiss makes me physically ill. It’s hard to push that memory down. The hardest. It’s why I keep it buried the deepest.
Mason comes back with a beer for himself and a water for me. He sees Melanie and Trevor. “It was bound to happen,” he tells me. “Those two have been circling each other for weeks like a pair of dogs in heat. I wondered what was going to trip the wire.”
“Alcohol and ‘kick-ass’ music,” I say, making air quotes.
“Vacations. Easier to start something up when you know you don’t have to see someone for a while. Takes the pressure off.” He glances at them. “I give them two weeks, tops.”
“Two weeks? That’s pretty generous. Some guys wouldn’t give it more than a night.” Even over the din, I can hear my bitterness. I can taste it in my mouth.
“I’d give you more than a night,” Mason says.
And, oh, it is so the right thing to say. And who knows? Maybe he’s even sincere, though by now I know that I cannot be trusted to discern sincerity from fakery.
But still, I want to be over this. I want all those memories to disappear or to be supplanted with something else, to stop haunting me. So when Mason leans in to kiss me, I close my eyes, and I let him. I try to lose myself in it, try not to worry if the bitterness in my mouth has actually given me bad breath. I try to be kissed by someone else, try to be someone else.
But then Mason touches my neck, to the spot on it where the cut from that night has since healed, and I pull away.
