Authors: David Levithan
“As her manager—” Mark begins, trying to save me.
“I’d like to buy them.”
Audra and Brad freeze. Their heads tilt in synchronized intrigue.
“All of them,” Violet says. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t buy paintings priced below five hundred apiece, so I insist on paying that amount. The extra hundred goes directly to the artist.”
“Well, technically the breakdown is fifty-fifty of the
total
amount,” Brad says.
But Audra holds up a hand and, with that, Brad is silenced.
“That’s very generous,” Audra says. “And I assume you’re comfortable with still having them hang in the show?”
“Oh, sure,” Violet says. “As a favor to
you
. Kate doesn’t exactly need the extra exposure.”
Audra’s mouth tenses, but only for a moment.
And now, instead of fighting back tears, I’m staring at Violet in amazement. Here she is, with her short, messy hair and the tiny scar by her eye. With the scarf Lehna told me about and the mouth I dream about at night. But also with a clear voice I hadn’t yet heard, and posture a little more slouchy than I’d imagined, and a slightly rounder face than in my tent photograph.
She is who I imagined and she is not who I imagined.
“One thing, though,” she says, her head cocked, looking at the blank pink wall where the paintings will be. “Do you have those red dots? The kind that mean the painting’s been sold?”
“We typically just mark the price sheet.”
Violet grimaces. “Oh, that’s disappointing.”
“We can get red dots,” Audra says.
* * *
We spill out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk, Mark and Violet and me. We make it around the corner before collapsing in laughter against the side of a building.
“My mom is going to kill me when she sees her credit card bill,” Violet groans. “At least she’s on a different continent, so my death is not imminent. Hey,” she says to Mark. “We didn’t formally meet. I’m Violet, Lehna’s cousin.”
“I’m Mark.”
“My manager,” I add.
“Right,” she says. “Manager.”
“Yeah,” Mark nods. “And Katie’s my SAT tutor.”
“Interesting arrangement.”
“It is indeed,” Mark says.
“I feel like celebrating my first major art investments. Who wants sushi?”
Mark and I raise our hands.
The restaurant feels peaceful even though almost all the tables are occupied. There’s no music playing, only the murmur of voices, and the light is perfect, not too bright. The hostess appears with three menus and leads us to a corner table, Violet right behind her, Mark and I following.
“Should I disappear?” Mark whispers. “This place seems kind of romantic.”
I shake my head. “I want you here,” I say. “I need you.”
“Whoa,” he says. “I’m flattered, but you know I don’t think about you that way, right?”
I jab him in the ribs with my elbow and he yelps. Violet turns to us and raises an eyebrow.
I smile. Mark shrugs.
We take our seats. I am grateful that the table is round so we don’t have to decide who sits next to whom.
I want to sit next to her, but I’m afraid to. I want to feel her close, but I want to see her face.
Our waitress arrives with tea and fills our little cups. As soon as she turns away, Mark pulls out his phone and positions it above the table.
“Oh no,” Violet says. “You’re one of
those
people? You can’t just drink your tea—you have to Instagram or tweet or Facebook it?”
“No,” he says. “I just have to text it.”
“Text it to who?” I ask.
“You know who.”
“Seriously?”
“Who’s you know who?”
“Ryan,” I say. “His best friend slash sort-of boyfriend.”
“Oh!” Violet says, eyeing him. “I did
not
call that one. But okay. Sort-of boyfriend. Tell me about that.”
“Not even sort-of boyfriend,” Mark says. “
Former
sort-of boyfriend.”
“Ouch. Go on.”
He looks at me, and I’m not sure why, until I realize that the beginning to this story involves last Saturday night when I was supposed to be meeting Violet but instead found myself watching Mark dance almost naked in a bar.
“I want to apologize,” I say. “Last Saturday got … complicated for me.”
She smiles, but I can see some hurt behind it.
“Yeah,” she says. “From Shelbie’s house to the Facetime Mansion. I guess I assumed you’d have a story to tell me someday.”
“Yes,” I say. “Someday. But for now, I’ll just say that I found myself, by chance, in a bar during an underwear-only dance contest, of which our friend Mark here was crowned the winner.”
And from there the story unfolds and expands, stretching into the far past, how they met, how it felt, and the more recent past, how they kissed, how it felt—and the future Mark saw for them until Saturday night, when the sight of Ryan dancing in the bar shattered it.
“This is heartbreaking,” Violet says. “Really. I feel for you. But please,
please
do not send this boy a picture of tea.”
“You think it’s pathetic?” Mark asks. “I know, I know: I should be ignoring him. He’ll probably get this text and just wish it was a text from Taylor. He’ll barely look at it.” He lifts the cup and smells it. Sets it back down without sipping. “But the thing is that Ryan really likes tea. Especially green tea. And I never drink this stuff. So maybe it’ll get his attention or something.”
“Right,” I say. “Like he’ll wonder who you’re with. Or in what ways you’re changing. You’ll become mysterious.”
“Kate. Mark. Seriously.
Tea
is not going to make you mysterious. This is what I want you to do. Think of one sentence—just one. It has to be the truth. It has to come from your heart. Now go ahead and write it, but don’t press
send
yet.”
As he’s thinking, the waitress returns and we place our orders. When she leaves, Mark enters something into his phone.
“Okay,” Violet says. “There is something you should know about me. I tell stories with morals. I am going to begin one now.”
Mark and I nod our approval.
“So there was this guy I knew in the troupe. Lars. He was maybe in his thirties and he was a lion tamer. A real natural with the animals; he was never even afraid. In addition to being fearless, he was a romantic. One night he told me about this girl he once knew and loved when he was a little kid. Like a
long
time ago, when he was eleven or twelve. Her name was Greta, and in the beginning of spring she told their class that her family was moving away, that that was her last day there. She cried as she told everyone, and he felt overcome by his love for her. He went home and he wrote her a poem and he delivered it to her on her doorstep. He can recite the whole thing, but I only remember one line, which translates into
Your silky flaxen hair glints golden
. It sounds terrible, I know. He assured me it just loses its effect in the translation, but I’m not so sure.
Anyway
. In every town we stopped in for a circus show, somewhere close to the fairgrounds where we’d set up camp, that line would appear spray-painted on a wall somewhere. I finally asked him about it. I said, ‘What if Greta sees it one day and she remembers it, remembers
you,
and she wants to find you, but she can’t?’ Most of the performers didn’t use their real names, and Lars was one of them. If she tried to look him up she would have found him untraceable. And I thought, if he still thinks about this girl from his childhood
so
much that he’s scattered notes for her on buildings all across Europe—if he wants to reach her that badly—why wouldn’t he leave her some kind of clue so she could find him?”
“And what did he say?” Mark asks.
“He said that I was missing the point. Finding each other was not the point. What really mattered, according to Lars, was that she knew.”
I lean forward. “Knew what?”
“How much he loved her. How he still thought of her. He had this fantasy that she’d be going about her life somewhere in Berlin or Madrid or Oslo. She’d be walking her kids home from school, or buying bread, or heading home from the office and she would see that line scrawled across a brick wall, or a wood fence, or a billboard over a train track. A love letter. She would think of him. She’d remember her younger self. It might change her life. Or it might not.”
We’re quiet. Our soup arrives. Steam rises and we take our first cautious sips.
“The moral,” she says, “in case you haven’t come to it yourself, is that sometimes it’s enough just to put something out into the world.”
“So I’m supposed to send this text.”
She nods.
“You
must
send that text.”
He takes another sip, sets the bowl back down, and stares into it, brow furrowed.
“But Taylor,” he says. “There’s no way Ryan will ever choose me over Taylor.”
“You can imagine what might happen after you press
send
,” Violet says. “But you don’t get to control it. And it could surprise you.”
He looks at me, waiting.
“As your SAT tutor and your friend, I feel that I have an investment in your future,” I say. “And I think you have to gamble in order to win.”
MARK
It feels great for about three seconds.
Katie and Violet are excited that I’ve done it, I can tell. And that makes me happy, to have pleased them.
Then the bottom falls out.
What.
Have.
I.
Done?
If Apple really wants us to become addicted to their products, if they really want them to be the zenith of user-friendliness, why in Job’s name isn’t there an
unsend
button? How hard would it be to enable us to take it all back, to erase the mistake before it’s seen?
What.
Was.
I.
Thinking?
What kind of spell did Violet cast that made me write what I just sent?
I will fight for you.
From what strange place did that rise up? How could I think, for even a moment, that this was something Ryan would want to receive?
What a Foolish Frederick I am.
Violet’s still proud of me—she’s completely unattuned to my rising panic. But Katie can tell something’s wrong.
“What is it?” she asks. “What did you say?”
I pass her my phone. She takes one look at the message and says, “Goodness.” Then she passes the phone to Violet, who reads the message and returns it to me.
“Is it true?” Violet asks.
“Is what true?”
“Would you really fight for him?”
I nod. But the nod isn’t enough, so I add, “I would fight for him.” And that’s still not enough, so I go on. “In fact, I would tear through rubble with my bare hands to get to him. I would lift cars. I would wrestle down anyone who said we shouldn’t be together. Because if you want to know the truth—if you
really
want to know the truth—none of that could be nearly as hard as being in love with him and not able to tell anyone about it. Including him. I have this
thing
inside me, and it’s angry and it’s scared and it’s uncertain and most of all it’s so completely in love with him, and it would do anything to keep him, even if it means things staying the way they are now.”
I cannot believe I am telling them this. Why am I telling them this?
Before I can stop myself, I push further.
“I can’t let him fall in love with someone else. I can’t let it happen. Not like that. I am so mad at him and I am so in love with him, and it hurts to be realizing it like this. Would I fight for him? I have been fighting for him for years. And I’m losing
.
No matter what I do, I’m losing. But I have to fight anyway.”
I want to laugh, because right now, sitting across from me with such matching concern, Katie and Violet look like a perfect couple. Exactly what I don’t have. Which makes me do the opposite of laugh.
“You’ve never told him,” Violet says. It’s not a question. It’s obvious.
“I tell him all the time—I just make sure it’s never when he’s listening. I say it when he’s in the other room, or when he’s asleep, or when the music’s really loud. Sometimes he asks me what I just said. And I tell him never mind. Or I make up something else, something that isn’t ‘I love you.’”
I know talking about a problem is supposed to make you feel better about it, but talking about this only manages to make it feel more present. All my words, all this talk, is balanced out by the silence of my phone.
No reply.
No reply.
No reply.
Unsend
.
“You can’t keep it inside,” Violet offers.
“Or maybe I can’t keep it at all,” I tell her. “Maybe it was never really mine in the first place.”
You can be naked with someone and remain unknowable. You can be someone’s secret without ever really knowing what the full secret is. You can know he’s even more scared than you are, but that doesn’t make you any less scared yourself.
We would draw lines, and then we would cross them. Underwear was going to stay on. We were going to mess around but not have sex. We were only going to have sex once, to see what it was like. We were not going to make it a big deal. We were not going to let it affect our friendship. We were not going to tell a soul.
I don’t think he’s said a thing to anyone.
I imagine he told Taylor that I was his friend. His wingman. His best friend.
If Taylor even asked.
Katie says my name gently, draws me back. She’s looking at me carefully, while Violet watches my phone with a mix of surprise and horror at its inactivity. Maybe when she puts texts out into the universe, they come back to her quickly. Maybe she really thought her plan was going to work.
The waiter has probably been hovering for an hour, waiting for the teary gay boy with the phone problems to compose himself long enough to order more raw fish.