All Adults Here(24)
The guy said he was in high school at Brooklyn Tech, which was only a few blocks away from their school. He said this in her DMs, and then he said it to her in person at the coffee shop on Fulton Street, and then he said it to her again at his apartment by Prospect Park, an apartment clearly occupied by a single adult man with no parents in sight. Katherine had told Cecelia this in the same tone that she’d used to tell her about stealing a Juul from a Starbucks bathroom, where she’d found it resting on the lip of the sink. She was excited, as proud as a peacock fanning its stupendous feathers.
Cecelia looked at the pile of clothing August had left for her—T-shirts, mostly, plus a few mystery items. He kept thrusting things over the metal curtain rod, and they fell on Cecelia’s head like enormous snowflakes, if snowflakes smelled vaguely of mothballs. She peeled off her T-shirt and stood there in her bra, looking at her reflection in the cloudy mirror. She was taller than she had been at the beginning of the summer. She had a mole on the left side of her stomach, which she thought made it look like she had two belly buttons, like someone from a realistic science-fiction movie, where the world was mostly the same except that people had extra body parts and machines could talk. Her boobs were still pathetic and, Cecelia was pretty sure, disfigured. Her mom’s nipples were brownish little polka dots on her boyish body, but Cecelia’s were soft pink, hardly darker than the rest of her skin, and that just seemed wrong. It also seemed wrong that a boy was standing right outside the dressing room and knew that she was at least partially naked. Sometimes Cecelia had fantasies about moving to rural Pennsylvania and living with the Amish, canning fruit and making pies and swimming in a floor-length dress. Covered up. That sounded so much easier. Maybe a burqa.
She reached down and grabbed the first thing on the pile. It was a vintage jumpsuit, flame red with orange stripes running from shoulder to wrist. Cecelia stepped into it and zipped it up. It fit her perfectly and made her legs look three miles long. She turned around to admire the gathering in the back. She could do a karate kick. She could jump. She could fix a car, or fight crime, not that she knew how to do either of those things. Cecelia looked like a badass, which was not something she’d ever looked like before. Cecelia thought about her body as a thing totally disconnected from her brain, a tadpole with feet, only halfway to where it needed to go. The jumpsuit made her feel like a whole frog. She could even leap. Cecelia pulled aside the curtain and August bowed, pleased.
“See, that’s cool,” he said. “Like, David Bowie. I mean that as a compliment.”
“Thanks,” Cecelia said. She knew that her mother loved David Bowie but Cecelia didn’t know any of his songs or what he looked like, and so she just tried to put on a neutral expression.
“I made my best friend, Emily, try that on, but it didn’t fit,” August said.
“Oh,” Cecelia said, surprised to discover that it felt like she had been poked in the abdomen with a stick.
“She always comes to visit during the year. She lives in Westchester, Dobbs Ferry. We go to camp together. It’s been, like, four summers. Her parents are therapists and love to talk about feelings and sex and stuff, but, whatever, they let her sleep in my room.”
“Oh,” Cecelia said again, hoping that her face made it look like she’d had even a smattering of the life experiences August had had, and that she absolutely understood his situation. “Cool.”
“So, you live with your aunt?” August asked. He was putting things back on their hangers, and Cecelia hurried back into the changing room, to try on the rest of the pile, and to make sure she left everything hung up and folded. She didn’t want to leave a mess, she wanted to help.
“My grandmother. I mean, for now.” The weirdest part of the whole thing was that for the first time in her life Cecelia saw her entire future as a giant question mark. That was what she pictured—before, it was another year of her middle school, then vying for a spot at one of the good public high schools, and then college. She thought she’d want to stay in the city, maybe, or maybe not. But that was five years away, and five years ago she was eight years old, and so five years sounded like an eternity. Now, instead of any of that, there was just a giant empty space, like her future had been abducted by aliens. A question mark floating in the sky.
“What happened?” August asked, gently.
“I don’t know,” Cecelia answered. It had gotten away from her, that was the truth. “Stuff.”
Downstairs, the bell tinkled again, and Porter called out, “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?” and Cecelia wondered if her parents would let her sleep at a boy’s house. They probably would, because the notion of it being anything other than a Sound of Music sing-along would literally never cross their minds, or, even more likely, they wouldn’t understand why any parent would say no. Juliette had tried to talk to Cecelia about making love (her words) the day that Cecelia got her first period, which made Cecelia bury her face in a pillow and scream. At that moment, Cecelia was pretty sure she didn’t know anything about anything, and that she was the most pathetic teenager who had ever lived, but at least she knew what she was going to wear on the first day of school.
Chapter 12
Condolences
Astrid made two loaves of banana bread and two trays of turkey meatloaf. It wasn’t exactly summer food but who cared, they were both dishes she could make with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back. Barbara had grown up on the Connecticut shore, Astrid knew, but had moved her mother to Clapham a decade ago, when her health began to decline. Lots of people did that, moved their aging parents closer instead of clearing out a room in their own house, the way previous generations had. Of course in a marriage, such decisions were fraught and almost always told you who held the most power. Barbara and Bob were childless, and Astrid imagined that Barbara had made the case for her mother to be their roommate, but maybe she was wrong. It was impossible to know what went on in anyone else’s home, behind closed doors and behind closed mouths.