The Wangs vs. the World(7)

“But you said it was a camisole,” she’d said. “That’s like a tank top.”

“Okay, it smelled like lady boobs,” he’d replied, grinning, and then tried to reach up her shirt.

Now she wished that she had let him, because with Grace gone, he’d probably never come around to her room again.

Grace wheeled a desk chair over to the closet and balanced on it, pulling her luggage down from the top shelf. She jumped off the chair, launching it backwards towards Rachel, who stopped it with her purple ballet flat.

“Maybe you’ll get to have your own room,” said Grace.

“I think your roommate has to kill herself before they let you room alone.”

“Do you think it counts if it happens after they transfer?”

“Shut up, Grace. You’re not going to kill yourself.”

“You never know,” said Grace, pulling all her jeans off their hangers. Maybe they’d all commit suicide together. Or maybe her dad would drive them off a cliff. God, maybe she should just leave everything. If they were going to be poor, or dead, what was the point of having the same exact deconstructed rabbit-fur vest that Kate Moss was wearing in last month’s Elle? On the other hand, maybe being poor could be kind of glamorous, with holey old T-shirts and guys who had to work as bartenders and whole meals of just french fries, in which case, maybe it would also be kind of glamorous to have her clothes. She’d be like a Romanov or something, deposed and in hiding from all the worlds that mattered.

Her father had said, “Just the important things.” What was that supposed to mean? Grace looked at the pile of denim on the floor, then kicked it towards Rachel.

“Here,” she said. “Take it. I’m sick of them all anyways.”

“Seriously?”

Grace didn’t answer, just kicked the pile again as she turned to pull down the cork bulletin board, layered with clippings, over her desk. She laid it across her bed and started picking out the tacks, cupping them in her left hand. As she worked, she thought about Parents’ Weekend last year, when she’d walked up to their room and seen Rachel lying on the bed, her head in her mother’s lap. The door to their room had been ajar, and Grace had stood there for a long moment, watching as Rachel’s mother smoothed her daughter’s hair away from her face and gazed down at her, half smiling, full of love. She’d never felt jealous of Rachel for even a second until that day.

“Are you really bringing everything on that board? All those pictures and things?” asked Rachel.

“Of course.”

“Isn’t it kind of . . . kind of morbid?”

“What’s morbid about it?”

“Well, they’re all pictures of dead people.”

“People die. Deal with it.”

“Yeah, people die, but that doesn’t mean that you have to plaster them all over our walls.”

“They’re your walls now, aren’t they.”

“I’m just saying, I know why you put them up and I think it’s creepy. You can give up pretending that’s not the reason.” Rachel took everything so seriously. That’s what happened when you were a total drama nerd.

“Why don’t you give it up, Rachel? Rachie Pie? Oh wait, I forgot. You’re saving yourself for, like, Andrew Lloyd Webber or something. You’re too good to just have s-e-x.”

“That’s not what this is about! Why does everything have to be about sex with you?”

“I thought that everything was about death with me.”

They faced off for a moment, then Rachel spoke. “I’m . . . I’m sorry for you. Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do? Like, do you want to borrow some money or something? Or, um, we could . . . steal you some food from the cafeteria? That you could take with you?”

Grace stared at her roommate, who was kneeling on the ground, greedily feeling up a pair of her jeans. She could kick Rachel in the face right now and never even have to deal with it. A satisfying crunch in her annoying, curly-haired face. She’d aim straight at the zits that always piled onto Rachel’s forehead, a bubbly constellation of them, and Rachel’s head would snap back and she’d have to shut up and Grace wouldn’t even get in trouble. Or maybe she’d have to go to jail, but what would it matter?

She turned back to the board.

“Isabella Blow,” said Grace, untacking a photograph of a thin woman quivering in profile, a crazy confection of a hat perched on her dark chignon.

“Elliot Smith.” She untacked another torn-out photograph, the singer’s Frankenstein face staring straight at the camera, pockmarks unretouched, holding his fist over his heart.

“Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.” Two photo-booth shots side by side, the woman with half-moon eyes and the man with his sweet, sad mouth, both raising their chins and looking down their noses like rebel bank robbers.

She looked at Rachel again. “They’re all brilliant.”

Rachel walked over to the board bowlegged, struggling to button up a pair of Grace’s jeans. “The cover of The Bell Jar. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love on Sassy. And this? Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963,” she said, tearing the Diane Arbus photograph off of its tack and reading the caption. “Dead, dead, dead. How? Oh yeah, that’s right, suicide, suicide, suicide.”