The Beautiful Between Read online

  Well, actually, of course he wouldn’t. He never tells me anything about himself, and come to think of it, I never tell him anything about myself. We limit our conversations to school, studying, and Anorexic Alexis. That’s pretty much it.

  And certainly if it was serious, Jeremy wouldn’t have come by to smoke every night like that. He would have been home with his family. Why would he want to stand on a corner with me at a time like that?

  My mother and I go shopping after brunch. We walk down Madison, from the Eighties to the Seventies, stopping in little boutiques along the way. My mother is on an accessories kick. She picks out belts, and for the first time I notice that maybe her fashion sense isn’t as perfect as I used to think. She always seemed so glamorous to me: the best-dressed mom when she took me to school, not like the moms who showed up in the morning wearing sweats or leggings, looking like they just got out of bed. No, my mother had outfits; she dressed up for everything. Now I wonder who she was trying to impress. She picks out shoes much flashier than I would ever wear, and I’m a teenager. I want to tell her they’re not right, but I think she’d get mad, or hurt. So I keep my thoughts to myself and we continue down Madison, on to the next store. In the Seventies, there’s one block where the sidewalk is paved differently than it is anyplace else. The cement literally shines in the sunlight; there are sparkles on the sidewalk. When I was little, I used to imagine the street was paved with gold and silver for the princes and princesses walking across it, and even for me. I concentrate on it now, squinting at the sparkles, still not quite understanding how or why they paved it that way.

  Later, while my mom is still shopping, I decide to do some amateur detective work at home. Like, really amateur—my detective work is limited to going through the drawers in my mother’s desk, a piece of furniture I’d never really taken notice of before; it always seemed more decorative than functional. My mother takes up most of the apartment—on phone calls, she literally paces from one end to the other, snaking her way in and out of each room, even the bathrooms. Her clothes take up the closets in her bedroom, the ones by the front door, and even part of the closets in my room. I don’t think she could possibly confine anything of importance to something as small as this desk.

  But still, its three drawers are the only place I can think to start looking, even if I’ve never actually seen her sit there.

  The first drawer is full of envelopes and stamps—old stamps, like twenty-five-cent ones that would barely get a postcard to its destination now. And old greeting cards: not cards she’s received, but cards I’m sure she intended to send to people—blank birthday cards and anniversary cards and get-well-soon cards. I’m sure my mother bought them all so that she’d have a supply on hand when the need arose, but I’m equally certain she has no memory that they’re here. Or maybe she’s just stocked up this drawer because she believes that a woman should have such a supply at her disposal.

  The second drawer, I’m surprised to find, has old pictures of mine—not photographs of me, but drawings with crayon and marker that I made when I was much younger. I find my kindergarten diploma, which isn’t really a diploma so much as a piece of construction paper on which we’d drawn pictures of ourselves and over which our teacher wrote “Kindergarten Diploma.” When I was little, my now-dark hair had flecks of blond in it, and I notice that I’d tried to show this in my picture by using both brown and yellow markers for my hair. The result makes it look like I had a group of bumblebees attacking my skull. I take it from the drawer to save it. I’m sure that my mother won’t miss it.

  The third drawer is photographs. My mother has albums, but she never fills them properly, and ends up leaving photos around the apartment: stuck between books on shelves, piled up in a basket in the kitchen and on top of her bedstand, crammed into her jewelry box. She may hate clutter, but she’s still not particularly organized. The photos in the desk are older, like maybe she stuffed them in here when she cleared up the piles of photos that she’d left around the house we lived in before my father died, before we moved into Gram’s apartment. There are baby pictures of me, pictures of her from when she was in college, pictures of her when she was pregnant and of my grandparents holding me not long after I was born. And there are pictures of my father, of course. There’s one of him holding me as a baby; one with both my parents in which it looks like they were off to a costume party—he’s dressed as a football player, she as a cheerleader. And there is one of the two of them sitting in a chair, my mother on my father’s lap. It must have been taken in the seventies or early eighties: their outfits make me laugh. Both of their pants flare out at the bottom. My mother is smiling at the camera and my father is smiling in another direction, like he’s in conversation with someone across the room, his arms twist around her back. I don’t know why, but this picture means more to me than the ones I find from their wedding day, of the three of us together, of my father holding me while I sleep. I don’t take any of them except for this one of the two of them. I think I like it best because they just look like any other young couple. There’s no gravity to it, no wedding ceremony or new baby, and certainly no awareness that their time together would be limited. They were just a pair of young people spending time with friends. It’s comforting to think of them this way—there’s nothing special about them; they weren’t marked, somehow; you couldn’t tell that they were going to come to a sad end. Maybe they weren’t even married or engaged yet in this picture. They were just hanging out, the way I would like to someday with a boyfriend.

  I tuck the picture into my copy of A Farewell to Arms, next to a paragraph about having enough love so that you never have to feel lonely. I wonder if my mother is lonely. She wasn’t my mother yet in this picture; she wasn’t much older than I am now—maybe my age exactly. Maybe my parents were high school sweethearts. I know that they grew up together, lived only a few blocks away from each other here in the city. My mother went to an all-girls school, though, so they can’t have gone to school together. It occurs to me that he might have been the only man she ever loved. If he’d lived, who knows what might have happened between them—maybe they’d have had more kids, or maybe they’d have fought, had affairs, gotten bored with each other and divorced. But no doubt my mother believes that she would have lived a happy life with him, had he lived. It must be incredibly lonely, believing that.

  I know that I haven’t found anything to help me on my search, nothing other than some evidence that my parents were in love. And that is something, but it has nothing to do with how he died, and that’s supposed to be what I’m looking for. I didn’t think I would find anything, but I’m disappointed anyway, because I’m not at all sure where to go next.

  Luckily, Jeremy calls that night from a taxi to tell me that he’s on the way over for a cigarette, which provides a nice distraction.

  I should, I know, be angry with Jeremy, or at least irritated at his audacity—calling me every night of the week except Saturday, when he had something better to do. And angry at myself for always being here, always being available. The truth is, I never have anything better to do than to stand outside my lobby while he smokes. Even when I go to a movie or something with girls from school, I’m home by around ten. And somehow Jeremy knew that about me—not only does he know it now that we’ve been hanging out, but even before, it never occurred to him that I might have had a reason to say no to him. I guess princes don’t ever expect to hear the word “no.”

  As I step out of the elevator, cross the lobby, and get hit with a chilly burst of evening air coupled with the odor of cigarette smoke, I decide that I should, in fact, be very, very angry at Jeremy and that it is not okay to treat me like this, to invite himself over. Tonight he has called me from the cab on his way here—he didn’t even call first to make sure I was available, to make sure I wanted to see him.

  I should be angry. A popular girl, a confident girl, would be angry—not excited to see him again, not excited that this isn’t finished, even though he didn’
t come over last night.

  He’s crushing a cigarette under his heel. When he sees me, he lights two cigarettes, holds one out to me. I take it but don’t put it in my mouth, and I try to ignore what has struck me as a very intimate gesture—his lighting my cigarette in his mouth. Even if I’m not really mad, I can try to pretend.

  “Jeremy, you know, what if I was busy, or sleeping or something?”

  “Then I would have told the cabdriver to turn around.”

  “Dude, that’s just not okay. I’m not one of those girls…. I’m not Marcy McFuckingDonald, okay? I’m not your girlfriend and I’m not just here at your disposal every evening for a cigarette break. I have a life, you know.”

  Jeremy doesn’t seem even ruffled. “What did I interrupt, then?” he asks, and he makes it sound polite.

  I look at the ground, embarrassed. “That’s not the point.”

  I look up and Jeremy smiles crookedly, just one side of his mouth up. “I know, Sternin. But shouldn’t it be?”

  It’s really hard not to smile back at him. I can feel the sides of my lips curling up, both of them. I can’t even manage just a half smile, like he did.

  “It’s just not nice, Jeremy. It’s not nice to just come over, to expect that I’ll be available like this.” I stop myself before I say that I don’t even know him, that we’re not even friends. Bad enough that I said that I wasn’t his girlfriend, cementing the fact.

  “Do you want me to stop coming over?” He says it politely, softly. Not like a threat. He says it like he means it, even though he must know, as well as I do, that I would never say yes.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He smokes silently for a few minutes. I drop my cigarette to the ground, unsmoked except for Jeremy’s having lit it.

  “I know you’re not Marcy McDonald. If you were anything like Marcy McDonald, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “God, what did she do to you?” I’m surprised at myself for asking flat out, just like that, but something about Jeremy made me feel entitled to ask. Like, You come to my house every night, I let you intrude on my life, you know how my fucking father died, don’t you, so at least tell me what Marcy did. It’s not like I’m asking whether the rumors about Kate being sick are true. If they even qualify as rumors. It’s just something my mother said.

  Jeremy doesn’t say anything.

  “Come on, dude, it’s not like she cheated on you.”

  Jeremy looks straight at me, exhaling smoke. “How do you know that?”

  “Who would she cheat with? Brad bloody Pitt?” I’m embarrassed that I’m flattering him. And I’m embarrassed by my use of the word “bloody.” I expect Jeremy to make fun of me for it. I don’t know where it came from; it sounds like something one of the characters in my fantasies might have said. Sometimes I make my fairy godmother British.

  But Jeremy just smiles and says, “Nah, too old. He’s so nineties.”

  “Well, I don’t know, then—whoever. She wouldn’t cheat on you. No girl is that stupid.” What am I saying? I sound pathetic; I sound like I feel privileged just to get to see him so close-up. “I just mean, you know everyone. It would totally get back to you. And you could totally decimate her reputation, and that’s important to a girl like that. I mean, it’s even important to me.”

  “So I shouldn’t decimate your reputation?” He’s teasing me.

  This conversation is so frustrating that my lips are raw, since I bite my lower lip every time Jeremy speaks. I was supposed to be angry at him for showing up rudely; I was supposed to be acting more confident.

  And really, why am I being so nosy about his breakup with Marcy? I like gossip just fine, but I’m not like my mother or Gram: I don’t seek it out; I don’t really relish it. The fact is, this is none of my business. But I feel entitled to know about it, like how people in kingdoms feel entitled to know what’s going on in the lives of their royals. Like all the tabloids in Britain sharing the secrets of the Windsors. People probably couldn’t explain why they care, but they still think they have a right to know.

  Finally Jeremy says something seriously. “Connie, it was nothing. I just thought I could trust her, and it turned out I couldn’t.”

  “So that means she cheated, right?”

  Jeremy shakes his head. “No, kid, it doesn’t mean she cheated.”

  “You can be a real pain in the ass, Jeremy. I’m trying to have a conversation here. You don’t have to act like I’m your little sister.”

  He grins slyly. “My little sister knows why we broke up.”

  And he leans down and kisses me on the cheek, but he holds his lips there a second longer than is casual, leans in a little more. His hand squeezes my upper arm, and the pressure of it is comforting. It feels, actually, like the kind of squeeze you might give your little sister, and funnily enough, I kind of wish I could be. How nice to have a boy like this looking out for you, teaching you who you have to steer clear of; telling you about high school parties and what goes on there, that maybe it’s okay to drink and do some drugs—just make sure it doesn’t get out of hand, and of course you can sit in the lounge with the upperclassmen, no one will cross me.

  Well, I guess I’m a cliché, a fatherless girl longing to be taken care of by the boy she finds attractive. Nah, for it to be a real cliché, he’d have to be much older.

  “See you tomorrow, Con,” Jeremy says, releasing my arm and walking to the corner. I watch him stick his hand out for a cab and I wait until he climbs into one before I turn to walk into my building. Like I need some assurance that he’s going to get home safely or something.

  8

  It’s raining on Monday. I guess we’ve been lucky so far that when Jeremy’s come for a cigarette, it hasn’t rained. I guess it was only a matter of time. Jeremy sits with me at lunch. Alexis isn’t even there today, so there’s no excuse for the way that we sit without talking.

  But everyone around us is talking.

  “I swear to God, she’s in the hospital.”

  “No way.”

  “They said it was anorexia—”

  “Who said?”

  “How the hell should I know? But anyway, I heard it was really coke.”

  “Heard from where?” Jeremy cuts in. Jeremy and I think we know better. We’ve been watching her. We know it’s anorexia.

  It was Brent Fisher who said that, and he’s obviously embarrassed. Emily Winters comes to his rescue. “It’s true. I heard Mrs. Downing on the phone with her mother.” This has to be a lie. Why would Alexis’s parents tell the faculty it was coke? If anyone had heard anything, it would have been from one of Alexis’s friends. Emily tries to loop me in. “I meant to tell you about it, Connelly, this morning.”

  I shrug. “I haven’t heard anything.” Emily looks disappointed in me, and I feel bad that I didn’t take her side. Jeremy touches my shoulder before he gets up to leave.

  Kate isn’t in school either, but no one’s whispering about her, at least not out in the open. I guess a sick seventh grader isn’t exactly fodder for the rumor mill like an anorexic coke addict.

  In physics, the formulas swim over my head and it’s all I can do not to beg Jeremy to tutor me again. The chairs in the physics lab aren’t really chairs but stools, with desks so high they come up to my chest when I’m standing. I swing my legs from the high stool, which makes me feel even younger, even more clueless, like I’m way too little to be in this grown-up class where everything is so hard. After class, I look to Jeremy for help, for some reassuring look that he understands everything and he’s here to help, but he’s surrounded by two guys and Nina Zuckerman, the most beautiful girl in our class, and maybe the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in real life. She’s wearing almost the same thing I’m wearing—jeans and a tank top under a cardigan sweater—but the outfit looks so different on her, so thoughtlessly stylish that you can tell it takes effort for me to dress right but she doesn’t even have to try. I couldn’t possibly go up to him in those circumstances. I can only
take his help if he offers it.

  I’m spending a free period in the library, and it occurs to me that there must be records somewhere about my father’s death. The school has a bunch of old newspapers on microfiche; maybe I can just find his obituary. It’s such a simple idea that I feel stupid not to have thought of it before. The microfiche are still organized by card catalog, unlike the rest of the library. I guess no one ever has cause to look at the New York Times from over a decade ago. I’m about to open the card catalog when I realize that I don’t know the exact date of my father’s death. He died after I turned two; that’s all I know. I wish I could remember the funeral, at least—if I could remember what I wore (if I went), maybe that would help me figure out what time of year it was. I’ve never been taught how to use a card catalog—everything’s computerized now—and I’m embarrassed to ask the librarian for help. She’s practically senile anyway, with glasses thick like Coke bottles, her gray hair cropped close to her head. I can’t imagine she would have the wherewithal to help me. And I can’t imagine admitting to that woman, the one with the bad glasses and the unflattering haircut, why I need help, that I’m looking for my father’s obituary. If she asked why, I could just pass it off as sentimentality, not give away that I don’t know how he died. But I’m sure she’d see through me, that she’d know I was searching for something I’m not supposed to know. She’d hesitate. She probably doesn’t even know that my father’s dead. She’d react with shocked sympathy, put her doughy arm around me. I would be mortified when she refused to help me. Maybe she’d suggest that I ask my mother.

  I’ve been standing in front of the card catalog for more than five minutes now. My hands hang at my sides—I haven’t even pretended to know where to begin, which drawer to reach for. I think I might cry. And I am completely startled to feel a hand on my shoulder. Of course it’s Jeremy. Of course I make an awkward inhaling/grunting noise as I turn to face him, stifling the lump in my throat. I try to play it off.