The Careful Undressing of Love Read online

  We’re not far from 4:36 now, and the five new names we learned are stuck in my head, which I guess they’re supposed to be. Next Tuesday we will learn five more, and five more the week after, and by next year they will be on our History of the Affected tests; they will be words on flash cards.

  I used to think that people learning my name made me more real, made my grief more solid. After Jack’s funeral, I’m starting to doubt. We’re vocabulary words, we’re concepts, we’re like the state capitals or the pledge of allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer—words people can say without meaning anything at all.

  I sit next to Cruz. Closer than I have to. He makes me feel real.

  I look to make sure Angelika isn’t lurking, but I think I know deep down that she’s with Delilah. That she is always going to be with Delilah now.

  “I didn’t hear much,” I say finally, and Cruz pushes my sunglasses from my face into my hair.

  “What’d you think, about what Delilah said?” he whispers.

  “I’m with . . . Owen.” I pause before his name because I forget it for a second. “I don’t think about you like that.” But even when I say it I’m thinking of the size of his arms and the shape of his curls and that we’re both quiet and strange when we’re sad or worried.

  I think about how he knows me in an impossible way that no one else will ever know me.

  I think about the moon—that it is always there but waxing and waning. That it is both predictable and shifting. I think love is something like that.

  Like moons and tides.

  Cruz moves closer to me.

  “My mom has a boyfriend,” I say. “And she cut her hair.”

  He nods.

  “You and I don’t believe in the Curse,” I say. It did not used to be something we had to clarify. It was as obvious as not believing in the Easter Bunny. “Our dads didn’t believe in the Curse.” I pull my sunglasses back down. It’s a little like taking a shot from Jack’s flask—the volume of the world gets turned down, the edges seem less harsh.

  Thinking the Curse is ridiculous was easier when Jack was alive.

  Cruz looks at the bench. His dad’s name is on there somewhere. So is my dad’s.

  “We can be sad about Jack without being terrified of everything?” I wanted to say it as a statement but it slips out as a question. I hate not being sure about things anymore. I look at my phone and it’s four thirty and we are moments away from the newest ritual, the next thing that’s supposed to make us feel stable and in control, but there’s chaos happening beneath the surface of my skin.

  Nothing’s certain. I reach for my hair, then for my key, then for the edge of the bench. None of it steadies me. I am officially unsteady.

  Cruz reaches for my glasses and pulls them right off my face. The sun is strong in a way it wasn’t a few minutes ago. It moved in the sky, and now we’re in sunlight instead of shade, without moving an inch.

  The world is too bright and too harsh, and I have to squint.

  Cruz kisses me.

  When Owen kisses me, I know exactly how I feel. I feel good, in the simplest, best way. I feel sexy and eager; I always want more. I can get lost in it.

  This kiss with Cruz is a hard and true kiss. Lips. Tongues. My hands in the softness of his hair, his hands on my shoulders, the bench holding us up. I am alert. I am not lost at all. I am right here in the garden, desperate and awkward and unsure.

  I can’t breathe.

  We keep kissing and I think I might pass out from the endlessness of it. I thought kissing was an escape, but I’m still right here, aware of honking cars and my hair slipping into my eyes, getting caught between our lips, aware of Cruz’s nose hitting mine and the creak of the bench when we try to move closer together.

  When he finally pulls away, I leap up from the bench like the kiss was gravity. My knees buckle and I stumble a little. I don’t have balance or breath or any of the things a person needs.

  I grab my glasses back from him and throw them over my face so that I can breathe again.

  I look at the time. It is 4:36. It is the first second Minute of Silence. It is the beginning of a new time.

  “We should—” Cruz starts, but I put my finger to the lips he just kissed. I can’t not do the thing I’m supposed to do. This is a part of our life now, whether we like it or not.

  The street goes quiet. Cars pull over. Someone who didn’t get the memo honks, a long sustained note, then they screech to a stop, too, the sound of remembering.

  Someone’s TV is on, and someone’s water is running, I’m sure of it. When everything’s quiet, you can hear more clearly. Cruz and I are breathing hard.

  In Chicago someone has been in bed for a week and is starting to smell like they’re rotting a little. In Chicago someone is calculating the number of seconds they’ve been without the person they love. In Chicago someone is capturing bits of bone and flesh in test tubes, trying to name victims that everyone already knows are dead. In Chicago they are at the very beginning of the things I know so well.

  We’re at the beginning, too, I think, standing in the shadow of the thing we shouldn’t have done.

  “I’m sorry” is the first thing I say at 4:37, when we are allowed to move on from the tragedy half a country away. In Chicago they are still stuck, of course, and I feel guilty for the moving forward.

  Cruz touches my hair and I think maybe he’s not so sorry.

  “Mom says people do crazy things after a big loss,” I say.

  “So this is about Jack,” Cruz says.

  “I’m with Owen,” I say again, but it’s even less convincing now.

  “Are you afraid of being with someone you love?” My heart stops in the garden. All I can think of is lemons and lamb and The List of names. I don’t want to look at Cruz. I look at my bracelet-covered wrists.

  I want to be Lorna who says, “No, I’m not afraid of anything!” but I am not that Lorna. I am Lorna who already lost the idea of one beautiful future. I don’t want to take the risk to imagine another.

  “Owen’s wonderful,” I say.

  I’m not afraid of the Curse. But I am maybe a little afraid of love and the way it changes everything.

  “So is Charlotte.” Cruz sounds defeated, though, like he doesn’t want it to be true.

  We’re supposed to talk about it more, the thing that happened, the things that are happening. But I’m trying hard to decide kissing Cruz doesn’t mean anything. That’s the easier choice, and I am desperate for ease.

  Dolly and Betty appear at the entrance to the garden. Betty clears her throat and there’s no more room for Cruz and me to talk about anything. I take one big step away from him. The space feels easier.

  I’ve always been LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla, and I liked the way the future looked, all of us staying that way forever. I imagined texting Cruz the kinds of secrets someone in their twenties or forties or seventies might have. I imagined a Shared Birthday at twenty-one with big bottles of champagne and at thirty with Delilah and Jack’s kids hanging on to them, eating honey cake for the first time. But that’s already gone. We’re all these brand-new people, and on a street filled with tradition and old widows and long histories, that seems impossible. I’ve never been brand-new.

  “You know, you’d look good with short hair, too, I bet,” Cruz says like he lives inside my mind. I reach for my hair. I’m scared kissing him has made it vanish. It’s still there. Long and fine and silvery and tangled at the ends.

  Betty and Dolly wave hello like it’s a warning. They pick basil leaves and mint leaves and they water the whole lot. It smells fresh and foreboding.

  Cruz and I say good-bye the Devonairre Street way, with our hands clasped for one second.

  Grab, grasp, gone.

  14.

  There’s a café that turns into a bar in the evenings. It’s called Julia’s and it’s in
Prospect Heights, straddling two distinct Brooklyns—one that is settled in with families and histories and old men who stand on the sidewalk and talk in loud voices over the sound of traffic, another that is shiny and new, filled with just-married couples who drink expensive cocktails and go to cafés with their laptops and are pursuing master’s degrees in predictive arts or the History of the Affected. They bump up against each other, these two Brooklyns, and Jack took us to Julia’s once to watch them move around each other, avoiding eye contact, both sides scowling at the other but never actually speaking.

  Julia’s was his favorite because everyone went to it, each group huddling into its own corner, but necessarily waiting together in the bathroom line. Plus, since Jack was an Abbound, they didn’t ID us.

  I go there now, wanting Jack but also wanting to be far, far away from Devonairre Street and Angelika and Cruz and the way I am starting to feel. It’s a long walk, down streets that I know so well I notice the smallest changes—one bank chain morphing into another, a bodega with a new awning, a sad city tree planted at a corner where there used to be a newspaper dispenser.

  Each change feels like another tiny loss, a bit of the future that was promised to me and taken away. The last two blocks I get nervous that Julia’s won’t be there anymore. Maybe it’s become a boutique or an Olive Garden or a parking lot. When I catch sight of the white lettering on the huge windows at the front, I can finally breathe.

  No one knows where I am.

  I step inside and it’s not the usual mix of old and new residents. Everyone inside is young and dressed up and a little bit too drunk for the time of day. There’s a white girl in a white dress with flowers in her hair and a black guy in a fancy suit is kissing her earlobe.

  It’s a wedding party.

  I bundle my hair on the top of my head, a silvery bun, and hang my sunglasses from the top of my shirt. I wish I were wearing something satiny and sequined, but I’m stuck in tights and a shirt that barely covers my ass.

  I decide not to care.

  I take a flute of champagne from a waiter who doesn’t look at my face to guess my age and I finish it off in three epic swigs. It sparkles in my throat and it gives me permission to move closer to the bride and groom, who are now holding hands while they talk to different groups of friends. I like the way love lets everyone in—if it’s around, everyone can feel it. It makes some people uncomfortable or wistful or jealous, but it warms me up and helps me relax. I like how we dress up to celebrate love, and that no one in this room is afraid of what happens next.

  The groom rubs the bride’s hand with his thumb. The bride turns to look at the groom every third sentence. They move around their party and I follow close behind, making sure to keep love in my line of vision.

  “I didn’t get the cocktail-attire memo either.” There’s a guy behind me. He’s my height, pale skinned and rosy cheeked. He’s wearing jeans and an untucked plaid shirt that’s frayed around the sleeves. He is staring at my ass.

  “Who says this isn’t cocktail attire?” I polish off my second glass of champagne. It bubbles in my nose, an uncomfortable feeling that makes me squirm and giggle.

  “Bride or groom?” the guy says.

  “I’m not either.” I feel like Isla, not myself, and I swing out one of my hips so that my body takes a new, un-Lorna-like shape.

  “Bride,” the guy says, smiling at himself. “Bride’s friend, I mean. Denver.”

  “Like the city.”

  “Denver like the city. You?”

  “Lorna.”

  “Not a city, then.” He is moving closer to me, this guy who might be seventeen or twenty-two or someone else’s boyfriend or a terrible person.

  “It means forsaken.” I shrug, like it’s not a name with weight and form and fate. I shrug like I am not a Devonairre Street Girl or an Affected person or the littlest bit famous, sometimes. I shrug like I have been to more weddings than funerals, like being around love is no big deal for me.

  “That’s one of those words that I know I should know what it means, but I don’t really,” Denver says.

  The word love is like that for me, but I don’t say that. “I have a secret,” I say. “I don’t know the bride or the groom. Or anyone else in this room.”

  Denver grabs us two more glasses of champagne and lifts his up to toast. I get a spark of guilt. “To showing up unannounced,” Denver says.

  “To being in the company of love,” I say.

  We clink. We drink. Julia’s looks good, covered in champagne and white balloons and confetti. I decide on a new Future Lorna. She’ll change her name and seek out weddings across the country. She’ll sneak into them, soak them in, and disappear. She’ll kiss a new boy at each one, but she won’t love any of them. She’ll have a collection of cocktail dresses and a stomach for champagne and cake.

  The bride and groom’s song is “Unchained Melody” and they don’t dance to it so much as melt into it. They sway, but only slightly. Some of the guests look away, like the embrace is too much, too intimate to watch. They refill their drinks and pile cheese onto crackers. Denver takes my hand and we watch like it’s a movie, like it’s for us.

  I explore the shape of his hand. It’s rougher than Owen’s, smaller than Cruz’s. He has an unworried face and a hard grasp on my hand. Other friends of his wave hello and I beg them all not to notice me, not to recognize me. I’m terrified someone will pull him aside and explain who I am. When he’s grabbing us cupcakes, I tuck the key around my neck down my shirt and make sure no strands are coming loose from my bun.

  I watch him weave his way back from the cupcakes. It takes much longer than the few feet between us would suggest. He hugs pretty girls in short dresses and they laugh at jokes that probably aren’t funny. A guy friend of his steals his cupcake and stuffs it in his mouth and Denver takes the guy’s beer and polishes it off, the both of them looking like they’re in a dance they’ve performed a hundred times before.

  They look the way LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla does when we’re eating honey cake or sneaking wine in the garden. Practiced. Familiar. Like nothing will ever change.

  I stop waiting for him to return to me and I go get him. I don’t care who he’s talking to or what normal-person ritual he’s enacting.

  I kiss him.

  I kiss him so hard he stumbles back before recovering and kissing me too. I can hear his friends snickering and whooping, but it’s not embarrassing, it’s glorious, it’s what they would do if he was kissing any girl from any street, and it makes me kiss him harder, letting more of him in through my lips, wrapping my arms more tightly around his neck. It feels good, it lights up my senses. It’s not a world-altering kiss. It’s nothing like kissing Cruz or Owen.

  I don’t care.

  I pull him through the music and the candlelight and the tipsy trays of champagne into a bathroom. I press against him.

  “Is this okay?” he asks, which makes me laugh because I’m making it happen so of course it is.

  “This is great.”

  I reach down his pants and he pulls my tights down too and the touching is frantic and exciting. The bottom of my back is pressed against a sink and someone could walk in at any moment, but I don’t let that stop me. I move against him and it’s not sex but it’s all the movements of sex, all the back-arching and grinding and heavy breathing of it.

  One of his hands pulses between my legs and the other travels up into my hair.

  I tense, and he feels it because he slows the hand between my legs, but the hand in my hair is the one I’m worried about. My hair loosens and his breath quickens and—

  “Your hair’s amazing—”

  “I should go,” I snap, pulling up my tights and shifting my hips around, trying to get them back in place. I’m all crooked and wet.

  “What’s wrong? I thought you wanted—did I do something wrong?” Denver looks a lit
tle brokenhearted, and I thought he was maybe older but now that I’m really seeing him in the harsh bathroom light, I think he’s probably my age. They’re all about my age—eighteen and getting married and seeing a vision of the future that is clear and lovely and romantic and safe.

  I hope this is the worst thing that happens to Denver this year.

  “I don’t belong here,” I say, touching my hair, feeling for fallen strands, clues of who I am.

  “We can sit and talk. We don’t have to—I didn’t expect any—”

  He’s sweet, this Denver, but he’s also a huge mistake and a secret I’ll have to keep forever.

  I leave the bathroom and the synthetic lemon smell of cleaner. I push aside balloons and weave around tables with white floral arrangements and discarded unfrosted ends of cupcakes, half-full champagne flutes, lipsticked napkins.

  I let myself walk by the bride and groom, taking a last look at the way their elbows keep them connected. She doesn’t notice that the bottom of her dress is picking up crumbs and spilled beer and dust; he doesn’t notice the bad music that no one’s dancing to or that another couple is having a fight in the corner.

  Love is maybe about not noticing, and that’s a problem, because now I notice everything.

  I leave behind Julia’s and the taste of champagne and an hour of being a normal girl and the biggest mistake I’ve made that no one will ever, ever know about.

  It’s a long walk home, each step of it trying to forget the taste of Denver’s mouth, the feel of his hand desperate for me, and the idea that I could be someone else, UnAffected and UnCursed and reckless and free.

  15.

  I’m hungover the next morning. I’m glad that Denver’s face was indistinct and that I never got his last name. He was an impossibility and a terrible thing I did and that’s it. I will leave him there, at Julia’s with a flushed face and unzipped pants and the memory of a mysterious girl.