The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (10 page)

Her eyes close, and she leans into me, impervious to the crush of people around us, the din of other kids clamoring for drinks, for music, shouting conversations. Her weight moves against me, and I feel the soft swell of her breasts press into my chest. The pressure of them makes my breathing go faster. My other hand moves around her waist, on instinct, finding the small of her back and drawing her closer to me with urgency. Her hands are in my hair, and my skin tingles where her fingertips touch me, along my cheek, behind my ears. Our lips move, hunting for each other, and the world starts to fall away.

“Nice!” Tyler shouts in my ear, shattering the perfect bubble of Maddie's kiss.

He claps me on the back and comes in for a high five, but stops short with a laugh when he sees our faces. Maddie and I drop each other and both turn back to face the bar, our cheeks hot and red. Maddie reaches up to adjust her cat-eye glasses, which have been knocked askew. I leave Tyler's hand hanging in the air, but he covers by dropping it to the girl's shoulder and giving her a brotherly shake. The girl claps, laughing at us.

“Scuse me!” Maddie calls out to the bartender, too loudly. “Can I get another Malbec? And he wants a tequila shot. Thanks.”

The bartender grunts an assent.

Maddie's fingers drum on the top of the bar. She looks at the ceiling.

I clear my throat, trying to come up with something good to say. Do I acknowledge what just happened? It'd be cooler not to, right? God. I'm always so nervous, making the first move. And girls
always want you to make the first move. The first time I kissed my ex-girlfriend, at this party in a friend's basement, I was so nervous I almost threw up.

A long minute wears by while we wait for our drinks with both of us pretending we weren't just making out in a bar. Tyler and the girl from the other bar crush in next to us, trying to flag the bartender down, both of them looking sidelong at Maddie and me and grinning. Finally, after what feels like an hour, our drinks plonk down in front of us. Maddie picks up hers and turns her shoulder to me, taking a slow sip and looking across the bar into the middle distance.

“Oh,” I say, realizing what's going on, and I reach into my jeans pocket to fish out my wallet. “How much?” I ask the bartender.

“Twenty-two,” he shouts.

“Christ,” I mutter, and leave some wrinkled bills on the bar.

“Dude!” Tyler shouts, thrusting into the awkward dead space between Maddie and me. All I can think about is Maddie's skin, which is a relief because until five minutes ago all I could think about was Annie. But now I have to come up with a way to get rid of Tyler. “Did he tell you about workshop?”

Maddie eyes Tyler through her cat-eye glasses and takes a long sip of her wine.

“He's a freaking genius!” Tyler continues, and the girl he's with says yeah, which is weird, given that she wasn't there, but whatever.

“A genius, huh?” Maddie smiles at me from behind her wineglass.

I shrug in what I hope is a nonchalant way. I keep my gaze on her. I want her to feel me, looking.

“He didn't tell you?” Tyler's gotten served a beer, and the girl is holding a Cosmo. “Krauss is already telling everyone his film is
powerful
. Next week, man. Just you wait.”

“Tyler. Come on. Jesus,” I grumble.

Maddie's watching this exchange with a smirk. “I bet she'll like the footage of me best, though,” she says.

It's true. The footage of Maddie is going to be the best part of
Most
. The guy with the Concorde obsession is also pretty awesome. But those few minutes of Maddie, draped in frayed burgundy silk, leaning her head back into ruffles with lidded eyes, under that warm perfect light in Eastlin's store; that's the part that makes me forget to breathe.

What I want most, is to be different,
she says.
I want to make a new now. I don't want to be a name, or a place, or a story that someone else tells about me. What I want is right here. What I want is right now. That's why people come here.

Then her eyes open halfway, and she gazes long and hard at my camera. At me. Into me.

What else do you want, Maddie?
I ask offscreen.

But instead of answering, she fills her hands with burgundy chiffon and rains it over me and my camera, layer upon layer winding and falling and tangling together until I'm wrapped in so many gauzy layers that none of us can tell where the camera ends and the world begins.

I
should go,” Maddie whispers.

I can barely see her, in the dark. She's just a silhouette in the blue shadows of my dorm room on Waverly Place, her hair falling over her shoulders, propping her weight on one arm as she gazes down at me. My hand plays over her shoulder, tracing the laurel leaf tattoo up and down the side of her neck.

“Did that hurt?” I ask, brushing my fingertip along her skin. I can't imagine needles digging color into that perfect, kitten-soft skin.

“Come on,” she says, brushing my hand away. “Give me my shirt.”

I don't actually know what happened to her shirt. I remember peeling it off her shortly after we fell in the door, but that was a while ago. We've been tangled together on my twin dorm mattress for a couple of hours, exploring first tentatively, almost politely. Lips meeting, then tongues, and then pressing together, hunting for each other in the dark. Her breath gasping in my ear as my hands moved over her jeans, thinking about undoing the button, not having the nerve. At one point she bit my lip, but I'm pretty sure it was an accident.

“You don't have to go,” I say softly.

All at once it seems impossible that she should go. She cannot
possibly go. She must stay here, and lie next to me, and let me wrap my arm around her waist so that I can fall asleep with my nose buried in her musk-lemon hair. This is what's real. This is what's good.

“No, I really should,” she says.

She trails a fingertip down my chest, which is lightly slicked with sweat. Her fingertip finds my happy trail, draws slowly down the skin of my belly, and circles my navel. It's exquisite torture. Eastlin's jibe of the day before yesterday replays in my head, and I wonder if I should leave some kind of note on the door to warn him. Or a tie, maybe, like my dad says they did in college in the 1970s.

A tie? Who am I kidding. I don't even own a tie.

She's sitting on the bed next to me, her feet drawn up. Her bra is black, all lace and ribbons like a Halloween costume. She tucks a hank of hair behind one ear and watches me. Slowly, the finger inches its way down, devastating, deliberate, almost painful in its insistence, until it reaches the waistband of my jeans.

I shift myself without meaning to, aching, straining for her to touch me.

Does she know? Can she tell?

She must know. I can just make out her eyes in the dark, watching me.

Please,
I think.

I should say it,
I think.

I want to say it. But I'm afraid. She probably thinks I've done this a lot. Or worse, what if she
doesn't
think I've done this a lot? What if she finds out I have no idea what I'm doing? My ex-girlfriend would never let us get this far.

I swallow, staring at Maddie, hard. She tugs on the waistband of my boxers, which stick up out of my jeans.

Oh my God.

“Please,” I whisper.

“Wes,” she whispers back. “I can't. I have to get home.”

Her hand withdraws, and I see her silhouette move against the window, her back bending as she rummages on the floor, finding a tank top and pulling it over her head.

I groan in dismay.

A soft laugh reaches me through the dark.

I sit up, grasping for her. My hand finds her belly, soft and warm under her tank top. I bring my lips close to her ear.

“Are you sure?” I whisper.

Her hand closes over mine and removes it from her belly, placing it with resolve back on my own leg where it belongs.

“I'm sure,” she says in her regular voice.

I flop back against my pillow with a resigned sigh, arms cradling my head, while she gets to her feet, picking up a sock here, a bag there, lifting her arms to roll some of her hair into a thick knot on the top of her head. I watch her, a lazy smile on my face.

She hops while pulling on a shoe, clonks into something, says, “Ow.”

“Do you want me to put on the light?” I ask her.

A knee presses into the mattress next to my hip and then her weight is on top of me. Maddie leans down, her hands on my cheeks, which have grown stubbly in the past few hours. I feel her breath on my face, a loosed strand of her hair brushing against my shoulder. Slowly, deliberately, she moves her lips to meet mine. It's almost more than I can take, and my hands move to her hips, my kiss getting more insistent. Her weight feels perfect, on top of me.

“
Wes,
” she says, disentangling herself from my grip and climbing off the bed.

“Stay,” I say. “Please? Nothing has to happen. We can just sleep.”

Am I lying? I don't think I am. I hope I'm not. I swear to myself that I'm not lying to her in the same moment that I try to remember
which desk drawer holds Eastlin's seemingly inexhaustible condom supply.

“You don't understand,” she says.

There's a pause, and I wonder if she's going to tell me something crazy, like she has an STD or something. Or what if it's something worse? I flash to the girl in the uptown jeans from the séance the other night, the one with the baby, and my stomach makes a sickening lurch.

Instead, she sighs and says, “I have a curfew, okay? I have to get home.”

“You have a . . . what?” I sit up.

“Look, can we talk about it tomorrow? I've really got to go.” She's pulling her bag over her shoulder and rolling on some lip gloss and is clearly ready to leave.

“Oh.” I can't keep the confusion out of my voice. How can she have a curfew? She lives in a squat with a rich, alcoholic gutter punk named Janeanna! Doesn't she? In a flash I realize that of course she doesn't. “Okay,” I say, trying not to sound annoyed.

I get up, find her with some difficulty, and fold her into my arms. She stiffens against the embrace, but then relaxes into it when she senses I'm not trying anything, even letting herself lean her cheek on my shoulder for a long minute. I comb my fingers through her hair where it falls down her back.

Standing there in the dark, holding her, warm and soft and lemony, my eyelids start to get heavy. When she says, “Okay,” and breaks free from my arms, I sway where I'm standing.

I don't think I've ever been this tired.

“Good night, Wes.”

By the door, she hesitates.

“Good night, Maddie. You going to get home okay? Should I get
you an Uber?” I ask her, running a hand through the floppy part of my hair.

“I'll get a cab,” she says. “Don't worry about it.”

I wrestle with the idea that I should see her out to the street and into a taxi. I should pull on my sneakers and put on a shirt and walk her down past the security guy and flag down a taxi on the corner and give the cab driver her address (Curfew?
What?
) and thunk on the top of the cab with my fist and wave good-bye to her, and I absolutely would do all of these things if it weren't for the solid wall of fatigue that has bricked itself up around me, insisting that under no circumstances will I leave this room.

Instead I say, “Text me when you're home, okay?”

And she says, “Okay. See you,” and then the door clicks shut.

I crawl into bed, shaking with equal measures of frustrated desire and fatigue. With a groan of appalled surrender I peel my jeans off, grope for a tube sock on the floor, close my eyes, twist my body in the sweat-soaked sheets, and think of her.

• • •

A door opens and shuts, and light from the hallway spills into my dreams, causing me to twitch half awake. One eye cracks open just enough to ascertain that Eastlin has gotten back from wherever he was, and he's silently moving around our room, pulling off his clothes and gathering up his stuff for the shower. I consider asking him how his night was, but before the thought can fully form, sleep has wrapped its fingers around my mind and pulled me down, down, down into the dark.

I'm in the Village, walking down Bowery, but it looks different. At first there are tons of people there, and I feel like I'm supposed to know some of them, but nobody looks familiar, and there's no sound, it's like watching a silent film. Then there's a girl there, in the crowd, dressed in fishnets and cutoffs and platform boots, and I call
out, “Maddie,” but she doesn't hear me. She's far ahead, and getting farther away, so I run to catch up with her, because there's something very important I'm supposed to do, but the faster I run, the farther away she gets. She's getting swallowed by the crowd, but I can just see the back of her head, with her two hipster pigtails brushed forward over her ears. “Maddie!” I shout, but no sound comes out, and all these hands in the crowd are grabbing at me and holding me back so that I can't move, but I'm still moving somehow. I get closer, almost close enough to touch her burgundy frayed dress, and I stretch my hand forward, I reach out my fingers to touch her, but my hand grabs nothing, and she turns around and stares at me with her bottomless black eyes.
Wes?
I think she says, but her mouth doesn't move.

Wes?

There's someone in the room. I'm sure of it. I don't know why I'm sure of it, because I don't think there was a noise, but I'm sure of it. I listen. I hear breathing, and I tell myself Eastlin must have come back from the shower and I didn't hear him come in, and now he's here, he's asleep across the dorm room from me, we're in the NYU dorm on Waverly Place and I'm in summer school and we're all safe, and everything is okay, and there's no reason for me to be awake, except I am. Aren't I?

I listen harder.

I'm not awake. I must still be dreaming. I'm dreaming there's someone with me, and I'm supposed to do something. There's something I haven't done. I don't remember what.
Most
? No. Workshop's not 'til next week. Tyler? No. I don't remember. What am I supposed to be doing?

Wes.

I want to explain that I'm sorry I don't remember what I was supposed to do, but I can't see the people I have to explain to. I can't see who's talking to me. Someone is talking to me.

Wes.

Someone is saying my name. Someone wants something. It's not my dad. Is it? No, I'm not at home, I'm not in Madison, I'm in summer school. I'm in New York. I'm scowling, the sheets twisted around my legs. I can feel the pillow under my head. I'm soaked through with sweat, and my heart is beating very fast.

“What?” I say, or think I say, but I don't hear anything. I can feel someone close to me. Someone is breathing close to me.

Maddie is close to me.

No, Maddie left.

I bicycle my feet, kicking the sheets away.

“Wes!”

I don't know where the sound is coming from, if it's inside my dream or if I can really hear it, but there's someone in the room with me and I'm dreaming there's someone in the room with me and . . .

“Wes!”

“Arrrrgh!” I cry, muffled, my mouth full of pillow. I'm struggling in the sheets, fighting against something. I'm gasping for breath, but the pillow is there and I can't breathe and I try to reach up and pull it away.

Hands are on my shoulders, soft hands on my shoulders.

“WES, WAKE UP!”

Hands are shaking my shoulders, cold hands, and they're shaking me. They're really shaking me. They're really shaking me because there's a girl sitting on the edge of my bed with her hands on my shoulders, and she's screaming, “WES, WAKE UP!”

My eyes fly open, and I flail and twist out of her grip, scrambling back against the headboard, pillows and sheets spilling to the floor. My heart is thudding in my ears, and I can't hear anything but the rushing blood pumping under my skin.

“You're . . . you're . . .” I'm panting, my eyes dart left and right. It's still night. It's dark in my dorm room and I can just see the girl silhouetted against the blue light of my bedroom window.

“Shhhhh!” she shushes me, a finger pressed to her lips. Her bottomless black eyes plead with mine.

“But . . . how did you . . . ,” I sputter.

The figure sitting on my bed reaches a hand forward for me, reaches for me, and she's in a frayed burgundy dress and I'm terrified. Instinctively I withdraw from her hand as it reaches for me in the dark.

“Wes,” she says, and her mouth is moving this time, because this is real. This is really happening.

My breath is coming fast, and I gather the covers up to my bare chest as if that will keep me safe. But I'm awake now, I'm definitely awake, in the moonlit cinder-block dorm room I can see my desk, and Eastlin's desk, and a lumpen shape of Eastlin asleep in his bunk across the room from mine, and the blue window shade growing pale with early morning light, and the mechanical hiss of the air conditioner, and there, at the foot of my bed, tiny in a lace-trimmed dress with heavy sleeves gathered at her elbows and a perfect crimson bow nestled between the swell of her breasts, sits Annie.

Annie is sitting on the foot of my bed.

“What,” I gasp, not sure why I'm so afraid. “What. How did you get in? How did you know where I . . . What are you doing here?”

She stares at me, with those eyes, that perfect mole on her upper lip.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

This isn't what I expected her to say. I don't know what I did expect her to say, but it wasn't that.

“How did you get in here?” I whisper, mindful now of Eastlin's gentle snoring in the room with us.

“What do you mean?” she asks, looking genuinely puzzled. “But I told you I'd be right back.”

“What?” I ask, confused. I must be still dreaming. I must still be asleep. She's not making any sense.

“Wes,” she says, and she rests her hand on my foot under the covers. “Can you help me?”

I blink at her. Annie. She's sitting on the foot of my bed. Her eyes are boring into me. Her skin is whiter in the moonlight, almost supernaturally white. How did she get into my room? How did she even know where I was? And yet, through my confusion and fear, it's still there. The tug of her. Of wanting to be near her. Even as my heartbeat thuds with adrenaline I feel pleasure, and relief.