The Princesses of Iowa (20 page)

I thought about lying, about telling her it was all covered, no sweat, but before I could compose myself, my mouth opened and I heard myself saying, “God, no. I’m freaking out about it.”

She beamed. “Oh, that’s great.”

I shifted my bag on my shoulder. “Well, I’m glad someone’s enjoying my pain.”

Her face tilted up to the sky, squinting against the vast whiteness. She shook her head a little, jingling her earrings. “No! I mean, I totally understand, of course, because it’s like, high stakes here, right?”

I smiled. “Right. Muttnik.”

“Right!” She dug around in the side of her bag and pulled out a cell phone. “Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Um,” I said, and stood there while she texted someone with both thumbs. When she finished, she glanced at the phone once more before flipping it into the bag’s larger pocket. “So,” she said, and looked at me as if waiting for an answer.

“Yes . . . ?” I asked.

“Yes? Fabulous. Do you mind driving? I would, of course, but my car is an absolute disaster and I’m completely embarrassed to let anyone set foot in it.”

I shifted my weight. “Um . . . what?”

“Or we could both drive,” she said thoughtfully. “Bigger carbon footprint, but then you wouldn’t have to bring me back here on your way home. And then afterward, if . . . Yeah, that works better. So you want to meet there?”

“Meet where?”

She stopped. “At Starbucks? To write? You said yes?”

“You didn’t ask,” I said, sounding more petulant than I meant to.

Shanti squinted up at me. “Really?”

I shrugged. “Nope.”

The parking lot was mostly empty already, and it was quiet between us for a moment, until Shanti burst out laughing. “
Really?
I didn’t? God, no wonder you look so confused! Am I going senile or something?” Stress bubbled in my veins and I couldn’t smile. I had to get this goddamn thing written. I had to.

“Okay, anyway,” Shanti said, still smiling to herself. “You should come write with me. I’m going to go work on my story for class, and you should come with me. Yes?”

I took a deep breath and nodded. “Sure.”

Being with Shanti was as different from being with Nikki and Lacey as being with Ethan had been. I couldn’t stop comparing them in my mind. Nikki would have talked the entire time, Lacey would have spent half the time leaning over the counter, flirting with the college guy who was pulling espresso shots, but Shanti sat across from me, leaning so far over her notebook she was practically resting her face on the paper, and worked. Her pen scratched through lines, she chewed her bottom lip, and sometimes she muttered to herself, making faces at her book. She wrote and she revised, and across from her I wrote and I revised, and after an hour or so Ethan walked through the door and tapped a finger on our table as he passed us on his way to the counter. Shanti smiled without pausing in her writing or looking up.

“Hey,” I said.

“How’s it going?” he asked quietly.

I looked across the field of
X
s and lines. “I don’t know, actually.”

“Sometimes that’s the best way to do it. Just let yourself write whatever. Don’t think too hard about it.”

The words were familiar, and I squinted at him. “That’s what Mr. Tremont said.”

Ethan shrugged. “He learned it from me.”

“You wish,” Shanti said, balling up a napkin and throwing it at him. “Don’t you have work to do?”

He sighed. “A true intellectual’s work is never done.”

“Yeah, it takes a lot of intellectual capacity to froth milk,” Shanti said.

“You see what I have to put up with, Paige?”

I nodded seriously. “Hey, Ethan?”

“Yes? You wish to thank the guru for his wise words?” He pressed his hands together as if in prayer.

I brushed my finger against my cheek. “You have a mint chip . . . right there.”

He laughed.

“A what?” Shanti asked, but neither of us answered. “You’re both weird,” she announced, and turned back to her notebook. “Get frothing, Guru Man.”

Ethan winked at me then headed back behind the counter. I turned to a clean page, took a breath, and started writing.

It was after dinner by the time I turned into the driveway. The first thing I noticed was the lights. Every bulb in the house, it seemed, was blazing bright into the chilly autumn night. The house was lit up like the tacky ceramic houses my grandmother always set out at Christmas, gathered in a tiny village atop synthetic snow. Even with all the lights on, my house didn’t look warm.

The second thing I noticed was the car, parked under the ash tree at the curb next door. The car in which I’d ridden to a thousand school dances and trips to the mall, the car with a long scratch colored in with Sharpie where Lacey had misjudged the distance between the passenger door and a mulberry tree (but with no traces of the accident last spring, as though it never happened). It was the first car I’d ever driven, long before my parents even dreamed of letting me get behind the wheel. Brenda Lane’s car. My fingers curled tight against themselves.

Inside, they were all sitting in the living room: Brenda, my mother, Lacey, and Nikki. Brenda was hunched over under my mother’s arm, shaking so hard that she bounced slightly against the firm sofa cushions, and at first I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. Lacey’s face, though, was streaked with red and as frightened as I’d ever seen it. For a moment I saw her as she was last spring, crawling up out of the ditch, confused, crying, covered in wet spring leaves and sparkling squares of glass.

Something close to nausea crept up my throat, and I searched my mind for what I’d done wrong. There was nothing specific, no rule I’d broken, no law I’d breeched, nothing that would upset Brenda Lane. Was there?

My mother looked at me, and I braced myself for the tirade.
Where were you? Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you telepathically sense that you were needed here?
I hugged my notebook against my waist, its cover tucked against the soft fabric of my shirt.

She held my gaze, staring at me until I grew uncomfortable and looked away. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “There you are, dear.” Her thin hand rubbed against the sharp shoulder blades that stuck out of Brenda Lane’s back like stumpy wings. The gold and diamond rings on her left hand caught the light of the reading lamp behind her and scattered tiny rainbows through the room. She cleaned and polished them every week so they’d do just that. “Honey,” she said, almost whispering over Brenda’s shaking skeleton, “would you do me a big favor and bring me out a box of Kleenex?” By the time she got to the end of the sentence, she was merely mouthing the words.

I nodded quickly and fled the room. The kitchen was dark by comparison, lit only by the faux-vintage chandelier hanging over the island in the center. In here, the air was cooler, like slipping out of an overcrowded party to sneak a cigarette and look at the stars. Someone must have died. Mentally, I scanned through every person we knew, looking to match a face with a funeral, a morbid game of Go Fish. Lacey’s grandmother? Grandfather? Oh God, Prescott? What if it was Prescott? Would I have to speak at the funeral? I had only ever been to one funeral in my life, in May of my freshman year, and it wasn’t someone I knew well: my grandmother’s sister, who had lived in Pennsylvania. Miranda and I were fascinated by the hard wax of Great-aunt Earlene’s white body, the unmoving ridges of her breasts and knuckles and chin. Miranda dared me to touch the body, and I did, glancing over my shoulder first in case anyone in the receiving line was watching. I poked the corpse on the arm just above the wrist, and Miranda and I grabbed each other’s hands and rushed out of the room into the humid night air.

“Paige?” my mother called, her voice quiet still but insistent, and I grabbed a box of tissues and hurried back into the living room. Brenda was shaking even harder, rolling her face in her hands and making noises halfway between a mumble and a moan. I stretched my arm as far as I could to hand the box to my mother, unwilling to get any closer to Brenda than I had to. She’d been like a mother to me as long as Lacey and I had been friends, which was, essentially, our whole lives. The whole of our lives that mattered, anyway. I’d seen her thrilled and I’d seen her angry, had seen her sleepy and sick and drunk and stressed out and giddy and hungover and plain pissed off. In all the years she’d been my second mother, I had never seen her like this. Not even last spring, though maybe the difference now was in me, standing sober and unmoved as Brenda fell to pieces.

A part of my brain, the part that was still sitting at the coffeehouse with Shanti, still hunched over a notebook, searching for words, wondered: Is seventeen too old to be afraid of the adults around you? Because if I had to put a finger on what I was feeling, I would have to say
afraid.

My mother looked up at us, me standing like a statue as far from her as possible, Lacey sitting stiff and red faced in the chair by the windows, Nikki puddled on the floor at her feet, looking uncertainly sad and sympathetic. Nobody, I could tell, knew what to do with this grief.

“Paige,” my mother said, “why don’t you take the girls up to your room for a while.”

I nodded mechanically and they stood, and we all trooped up to my room, closing the door a half second after Brenda’s voice started wailing below.

In my room, there was a second of silence in which we all shifted, turning over the questions of who we’d been to one another and who we’d be tonight, before Lacey perched her fists on her hips and announced, “He’s getting
married.
”

Nikki rushed over to her as if to hug her, but at the last minute Lacey turned away and Nikki ended up behind her, standing solemn like a bridesmaid. “Who is?” I asked.

Lacey scowled at me, lips pinched together, and I knew the answer to my own question before the sound of my own voice faded from my ears. “Oh.”

“That fucking asshole,” Lacey said, and burst into tears.

She didn’t want to talk about it, no matter how much Nikki hugged and cajoled her. Lacey got ahold of herself quickly, and her face set like plaster. My heart was divided: half accusing and angry; half sorry for her, and sorry that I couldn’t do anything to help. Even sorrier that I didn’t really want to.

She wouldn’t talk, so finally I turned on the TV in my room and we fell into our usual positions without thinking, Lacey on my bed, Nikki on the floor resting her back against the mattress, and me in the high-backed chair by the window. On TV, people spoke earnestly into a confessional camera. “I’m sorry, but I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to win.”

On the floor, Nikki nodded to herself. Lacey remained impassive. I couldn’t shake the stress about my creative writing assignment and wanted to get out my notebook, but I thought it would look bad.

Nikki sneezed into her hand, three times in a row, like a cat.

There was a pause. “Bless you,” I said. Lacey stared straight ahead, seemingly engrossed in the TV. She had the tiniest smudge of mascara under her left eye, and I almost pointed it out to her. But then I softened, thought,
So what?
Instead, I grabbed my notebook.

“What are you doing?” Lacey asked.

“Nothing. Just something for school.”

“School,” she echoed, sounding almost like she had no idea what I was talking about. Even though her face was impassive, her voice betrayed her: I could hear the loss. The ache.

Nikki reached over to squeeze Lacey’s hand, and I felt stupid. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why couldn’t I drop the barbs of resentment and be there for my friend, my best friend? God, I thought, no wonder Lacey turned to Jake. He knew how to be there for someone.