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.
He was right, after all; it didn’t leave a scar, though part of me wishes it had. At least I’d have some evidence, some justification of this permanence. Stains are even worse when you’re the only one who can see them.
Seventeen
DECEMBER
Cancún, Mexico
It has become tradition when we arrive in Cancún for Melanie and me to strip to our bathing suits as soon as we get into the condo and run to the beach for an inaugural swim. It’s like our vacation baptism. We’ve done it for every one of the last nine years we’ve come down here.
But this year, when Melanie digs through her suitcase for a bikini, I go to the little desk next to the kitchen that normally holds nothing but cookbooks and prop open my textbooks. Every day, from four to six, I am to have study hall. I get New Year’s Day off, but that’s it. These are the terms of my parole.
I kept my grades a secret throughout the entire semester, so when the report cards showed up at the end of the term, it was kind of a shocker. I’d tried. I really had. After my midterms were so dismal, I’d tried harder, but it wasn’t like my bad grades were a result of slacking off. Or skipping classes. Or partying.
But I might as well have been partying, given how tired I was all the time. It didn’t matter if I got ten hours of sleep the night before—once I set foot in the lecture hall and the professor started droning on about wave motion, writing up equations on the monitor, the numbers would start dancing before my eyes and then I’d feel my lids grow heavy, and I’d wake to other students tripping over my legs to get to their next class.
During Reading Week, I drank so much espresso that I got no sleep at all, as if I was using up all the credits from the class naps. I crammed as hard as I could, but by that point, I’d fallen so behind, I was beyond help.
Given all that, I thought it was miraculous I finished the semester with a 2.7.
Needless to say, my parents thought otherwise.
When my grades came through last week, they flipped out. And when my parents flip out, they don’t yell—they get quiet. But their disappointment and anger is deafening.
“What do you think we should do about this, Allyson?” they asked me as we sat at the dining room table, as if they were truly soliciting my opinion. Then they presented two options. We could cancel the trip, which would be terribly unfair for the rest of them, or I could agree to go under certain conditions.
Melanie shoots me sympathy looks as she disappears to change into her suit. Part of me wishes she’d boycott the beach in solidarity, though I know that’s selfish, but it seems like something the old Melanie would’ve done.
But this is the new Melanie. Or the new, new Melanie. In the month since Thanksgiving, she looks totally different. Again. She cut her hair all asymmetrical and fringy, and she got a nose ring, which her parents gave her crap about until she told them it was between that and a tattoo. Now that she’s changed into a bikini, I see that she’s let her armpit hair grow, though her hair is so fine and blond, it barely shows.
“Bye,” she mouths as she slips out the front door, her mom, Susan, thrusting a tube of SPF-40 into her hands. My mom is digging through a suitcase for her special magnifying glass so she can check all mattresses for bedbugs. When she finds it, she walks by me and pretends to look at my chem book with it. I snap the book shut. She gives me a pissy look.
“You think I want to be your warden? I thought I’d have all this free time now that you’re in college, but it’s like keeping you on track is its own full-time job.”
Who asked you to keep me on track? I fume. In my head. But I bite my lip and open the chemistry textbook out and dutifully reread the first chapters as Mom has instructed me to do for catch-up. They make no more sense to me now than they did the first time I attempted them.
That night, we all six go out to dinner at the Mexican restaurant, one of the eight restaurants attached to the resort. We go here every year for our first night out. The waiters wear giant sombreros, and there’s a traveling mariachi band, but the food tastes the same as it does at El Torrito back home. When the waiter takes our drink orders, Melanie asks for a beer.
The parents gawk at her.
“We’re legal to drink here,” she says casually.
Mom gives Susan a look. “I don’t think that’s wise,” Mom says.
“Why not?” I challenge.
“If you want my opinion, it has to less to do with the age than the expectation. You’ve grown up with a drinking age of twenty-one, so you’re not necessarily prepared for drinking now,” is Susan’s therapist answer.
“I’m sorry, but did you not go to college?” I ask. “I can’t imagine it’s changed that much. Do you not remember how all anyone does is drink?”
My parents look at each other, then at Susan and Steve.
“Is that’s what going on with you? Have you been drinking too much at school?” Dad asks.
Melanie laughs so hard that the special bottled water Mom brings sprays through her nose. “I’m sorry, Frank, but do you not even know Allyson?” They continue to stare. “On the tour last summer, everyone drank.” There is a moment of shocked silence. “Oh, spare me! The legal drinking age in Europe is eighteen! Anyhow, everyone drank but Allyson. She’s totally straight and narrow. And you’re asking if she’s boozing it up at college? That’s ludicrous.”
My dad stares at me, then at Melanie. “We’re just trying to understand what’s going on with her. Why she got a two-seven GPA.”
Now it’s Melanie’s turn to gawk. “You got a two-seven?” She clamps her hand over her lips and mouths, “Sorry.” The look she gives me is one part surprise, one part respect.
“Melanie got a three-point-eight,” Mom brags.
“Yes, Melanie is a genius, and I am an idiot. It’s official.”
Melanie looks wounded. “I go to the Gallatin School. Everyone gets As,” she says apologetically.
“And Melanie probably drinks,” I say, knowing full well she does.
She looks nervous for a second. “Of course I do. I don’t pass out or anything. But it’s college. I drink. Everyone drinks.”