The Careful Undressing of Love Read online

  I shiver.

  On the computer, the article about us is still up, “The Ones You Shouldn’t Love,” in bold black script across the screen. It looks like a sentence—a life sentence where we have to be lonely and scared and not-quite-real people forever.

  “It’s too late,” Angelika says, her voice breaking, her face old again immediately.

  “No,” Delilah says again. “No.”

  Mom turns away from the window and Roger follows her, but I stay.

  I only have eyes for Delilah.

  My Delilah who isn’t mine anymore.

  Mom and Roger eat stew but I stay at the window. I watch Delilah and Delilah watches me. I am not as fearless as Mom and I am not as fearful as Delilah. I don’t know what I am.

  “I see it on you, too,” Delilah says, right before curfew hits and she has to hide away from the possibility of love. I catch sight of Isla, scowling at me. Delilah’s told her about me and Cruz, for sure. Wondrous Isla Rodriguez is also a scared little girl who doesn’t want to lose her big brother. “I see it all over you, Lorna.”

  21.

  I walk to school alone. It is something I’ve never done before, and the streets look different when I’m by myself. They’re wider, for one, and I notice things like broken windows and purple-painted doors and missing bricks on the surface of brownstones. One lawn has a statue of the Virgin Mary I’d never noticed, which seems impossible because it’s practically life-size. There’s a new bar that looks seedier than things in this neighborhood usually do.

  Cruz, Charlotte, Isla, and Owen are at the door when I get there. They are standing not exactly together and not exactly apart.

  “It’s bad,” Isla says. Her lips are colored red and her eyelashes are so long I think they must be fake.

  “What’s bad?” I ask, assuming she might mean me. Charlotte’s hands are wrapped around Cruz’s bicep and she’s pressed against him so tightly not a breath of air could get in between them.

  Cruz isn’t looking at me.

  “They’re talking about us,” Isla says. “They’ve seen.”

  “Maybe I should go,” Owen says. He forgot to kiss me hello, or maybe I forgot to kiss him.

  “Hey,” I say, and everyone’s watching us too closely. “Your shirt’s all messed up. You missed a button somewhere along the way.” I let myself touch his chest, at the place where the button-missing occurred. I have the feeling—dreadful, certain, sinking—that it is the last time I’ll be touching him there. He looks surprised at my finger and at his shirt and at being in the morning sun in front of school. He looks surprised at the way the world has been, lately.

  “I’ll fix it,” he says. “I’ll catch you guys later, okay?” He leans toward me and then away from me, like a tree in the wind, trying to decide whether to kiss me. It is the moment. If he leans one way it means we are together; if he leans the other, it changes everything. It’s funny, the way one missed kiss can matter so much.

  He steps away, and I’m left unkissed.

  My friends give me a breath to recover before pointing to the door of the school. It’s our picture from the article.

  We all look caught by surprise in the image, which is funny considering how much time we spent readying ourselves for it, how made-up and overly styled and hyperaware we all were that day. But there it is: me, Isla, and Charlotte sitting down, our bodies mostly covered by the back of the bench, our necks craned as we all look over our shoulders, the words Love Was Found Here on display below us. Isla’s mouth looks like a doll’s—all red and surprised, and Charlotte’s lips form a tight line. But in the photograph I have the shadow of a smile—it’s hanging on my lips, which are almost all anyone can see of my face, with my sunglasses taking up the rest of me. Delilah stands behind us, looking up at the sky, at Jack, but when you look closer, her eyes are actually closed, like she is tilting her head to feel the heat of the sun.

  We are us but not-us in the photograph.

  We are us but not-us here on the sidewalk in front of the school, waiting an impossibly long time to go inside.

  Over our faces, written in red Sharpie, the words AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  It is worse inside.

  Cruz and Charlotte veer left to their first period of class while Isla and I veer right. Isla has a strut. Her hips wag and she keeps flipping her long Devonairre Street hair. I wonder how she does it, how she manages to stay strong while they all watch us.

  Then I find out.

  “Hide me?” she says, turning to face the wall. She slips a flask out of her pocket. It’s smaller than Jack’s, and probably filled with something sweeter. She drops her head back and takes a shot. “You need some?” she asks, and it’s so early in the morning I still remember a few of my dreams, but I almost take a sip, too. I shake my head and Isla grins.

  “You’ll be begging me for some later,” she says.

  Isla heads into her homeroom and I reach the door of mine.

  Mr. Manning’s lumbering frame blocks the door. He has a stain on his tie and hair in his ears but he’s a good teacher. That’s what I told Delilah when she told her story about the crush she thought he had on her the night Jack died. “You think everyone has a crush on you,” I said. “You think this chair has a crush on you. You think Angelika’s dog has a crush on you.” Delilah shrugged like yeah maybe, and Jack didn’t laugh but he smiled.

  I have Mr. Manning for English second period, and I like the way he talks about characters in books like they’re real people. He’s always asking us how we feel about them, instead of what we think about them. It’s a small difference, but it matters to me.

  “Ms. Ryder,” he says. “How are you holding up?”

  “Oh. Okay. Thank you. Thanks.” I’m surprised by the gentleness of his voice.

  “I lost a friend very young, too. I know you and Jack were close.” He is half whispering, like death is a secret.

  “What was his name?” I ask, some part of me wanting to know everything there is to know about Mr. Manning’s dead friend.

  Mr. Manning takes a step backward, a small shuffle of a step that I wouldn’t normally notice, but he sort of trips when he does it so it’s hard to miss.

  “Alan,” he says. I nod, like that makes sense. I have more questions—when and how and why—but Mr. Manning’s eyes keep drifting to something behind my head and his neck is turning pink. I glance behind me, to see whatever it is he’s seeing.

  It’s the photograph. I can see more details now—the glint of the keys around Isla’s neck, the over-the-top brightness of the hearts on my top, the way Charlotte’s braids are uneven, the clench of Delilah’s fists.

  Mr. Manning clears his throat. “I remember when Alan passed away, school was just awful. Hard to focus. All I wanted was some time alone.”

  “Sure,” I say. The bell rings but Mr. Manning isn’t letting me in the door.

  “I bet you’re feeling that way, about Jack. He was a good kid. Had him in my AP class with Delilah. Saw them fall in love right before my eyes. Figured they’d be getting married right after graduation.”

  “Sure. I thought that, too.” I try to look around Mr. Manning to see my classmates but he takes up so much of the doorframe that I can only catch sight of a few curious faces. I take a step, to remind him it’s time for class to start, but he shifts and braces his elbows against the frame.

  “Anyway, Ms. Ryder, I was thinking you might like a free period. A few free periods even. We were all thinking . . . Some of us thought that might be good. For you. The room next door is open. Maybe you’d like to go there?”

  Mr. Manning has stopped looking me in the eye.

  “I’m okay being in class,” I say. Mr. Manning wipes his brow. He looks at the photograph behind my head again.

  “Delilah and Jack. I never would have put them together. We teachers don’t always know what’s going on with ou
r students.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and behind him the class is being rowdy. Still he doesn’t move from his place at the door. “I’d never have thought Delilah would fall in love with Jack, but there you go, right?”

  “Love works in mysterious ways?” I want the conversation to stop, or shift, or turn into something else entirely.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Manning says. “Anyone could fall in love with anyone.”

  There’s a siren somewhere outside the building. We listen to it build in volume, then recede. I think of Cruz, even though I shouldn’t. I think of the Bombing. I think of Jack. And we’re both quiet for longer than is comfortable. “I don’t really need a free period,” I say. “I’m okay for class.”

  Mr. Manning doesn’t move. His elbows stay pinned to the frame. His feet move a little farther apart so that his legs help create a wall, too. He clears his throat again. And again.

  I’m dizzy.

  Mr. Manning looks at that photograph one last time, shuffles back into his classroom, and shuts the door.

  “Don’t ever be ashamed,” my father told me when I was little and Angelika was trying to talk to me about the Curse. “The second you start to feel shame, you get rid of it.” Even in these last few days I’ve felt nervousness and doubt; I’ve felt sadness and fear. But I haven’t felt shame.

  Now I feel a wet, itchy feeling.

  Shame.

  I go to the empty classroom, and I wait for the moment of silence to come.

  It does, of course. It always does.

  • • •

  In the moment of silence, all I can think of is Cruz.

  I think my father wouldn’t mind. This is what he wanted for me. To be in love. To feel like my organs are weightless, like they’ve left my body, even. Like I am hollow except for thoughts of Cruz, which are filling me all the way up. My father wanted me to be in love.

  I don’t know that this is love.

  Except I do.

  I touch the key around my neck, for protection that I don’t believe in. My father used to roll his eyes at that reflex. “That key is just a key,” he’d say. “Nothing magic about it. It doesn’t even open anything.” He always sounded so certain, I’d drop the thing right away. Today I hang on, my mind finally asking the question What if the Curse is real after all?

  I try to hear my father’s voice again. A forgotten memory blossoms—my father holding my chin in his hand for the first and only time. “Whatever happens,” he said as we sat on the stoop finishing ice-cream cones and watching the sun go down, “don’t listen to Angelika. Don’t let her persuade you to be afraid. Ignore her. No matter what.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was eight and it sounded fine. Easy. “Can I have another cone?”

  He gave me another cone, like the extra ice cream sealed the promise.

  Some promises are hard to keep.

  The Minute of Silence stretches on forever when you’re by yourself, quarantined. The rest of the city, the nation, gets to move on. But I’m stuck in an ugly Spanish classroom, looking at a list of basic verbs, remembering my father and the promises I made, and trying to figure out if they mean more or less now that he’s gone.

  It is 10:11 on another Tuesday morning, and my father has been gone for almost seven years, and maybe, maybe I’m in love like I promised him I would be.

  I put my head on my desk and listen to the silence ending, the world moving on. I don’t move on, though. I never do.

  They won’t let me.

  22.

  Charlotte joins me during second period, and Isla during third.

  None of the male teachers are letting us into their classrooms. Some of the male students protest us, too.

  Charlotte says, “Ms. MacQuinn was fine, but the boys said it was either them or me. What is that even? They can’t do that!”

  “Plus you’re with my brother,” Isla says.

  “Right. Yes, I mean, of course.” Charlotte blushes and plays with the key around her neck and a ring around her finger I hadn’t noticed before. It must be new. It’s copper and thread thin and pretty on her hand. “I have a boyfriend,” she whispers, and I swear she looks at me from the corner of her eye.

  We’ve never been close on our own, Charlotte and I. She’s always been skeptical of me and I’ve always been judgmental of her. It’s never mattered, because we were LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla and those ugly feelings were one tiny part of it.

  Now it feels like it matters.

  All this time I’ve been thinking that Delilah is the one floating away from us. But Isla and Charlotte are sitting close together and they exchange a series of secret looks and I think of Isla on the sidewalk in front of my house last night and the fact that I keep kissing Charlotte’s boyfriend, and it hits me.

  I’m the one who’s different.

  I’m the one who’s floating away.

  Isla’s lipstick is smudged and a button on her shirt is undone. Angelika would go crazy at how much of her is exposed.

  I bet her flask is empty now.

  “What happened with you?” I ask, but I already know.

  “I’m not going to be a nun just because I can’t be in love,” Isla says. Her shoulders betray her. They shiver and shake and I think she likes whatever it is she’s doing in the Latin room and under the stairwell and in the basement, but she’d like love, too.

  She has a scarf from Angelika with her, I think all the girls do but me, and she pulls it from her backpack, wraps it tight across her chest so that she’s covered the way Angelika wants us to be. Her head drops a little, a telltale sign that she’s drunk. It’s strange—what rules Isla follows perfectly and what she rebels against.

  “You can—” I start, wanting to tell her she doesn’t have to listen to Angelika.

  She shakes her head. “This is what I’m doing. I don’t want to talk about it. You obviously don’t get it.”

  “I don’t get it,” I agree.

  “I don’t get you, either,” she says.

  “I saw you outside my building last night,” I say. I want her to apologize or tell me it didn’t mean anything or laugh it off. She doesn’t.

  “I know,” she says, and that’s that.

  And even though she said she didn’t want to talk about it, Isla starts talking about it.

  “I’m not going to fall in love,” she says, “I’ll be the girl they can be with and not worry about love.” She shrugs and I’m positive there’s a hickey on her neck. “Love’s not worth it. I’m not made for all that.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “I don’t believe. But I don’t not believe. I’m not like you or like Charlotte or like Delilah used to be.” Isla says it all like a challenge, and I wonder whether the things I’ve always loved—being part of a whole, being attached in this complicated and unbreakable way, the street itself—are things Isla has always hated. “I’m doing this my way. I’m not going to be the girl they’re telling me I am—all sad and alone or brokenhearted and in love and fated to destroy everything. You all can be those girls. I want to be . . . I’m a different kind of girl.”

  When we were younger, Isla looked up to us, I think. She borrowed Charlotte’s glasses and my dresses and Delilah’s turns of phrases and practiced being some combination of the three of us.

  Now she only looks and talks and acts like Isla Rodriguez.

  “Isla,” Charlotte says. But the way she says it tells me she doesn’t have anything else to say.

  “Like I said, I don’t want to talk about it,” Isla says. “What happened to Jack—I can’t let that happen to someone that I—no. I don’t need love. I don’t even know what it is. I’m starting to think no one actually knows what it is.”

  “Angelika says it’s a leap. It’s a fever. It’s a certain thing that shows up on your skin,” Charlotte says, like a good student.
r />   “What do you say?” Isla asks.

  No one is asking me.

  I’m not ready to answer anyway. Angelika and Delilah say love is knowable and clear, but I disagree. It’s blurry. It’s shaky. It’s not math or a fever at all. Not for me.

  “I don’t know that there’s a moment when you’re in and when you’re out,” Charlotte says, all careful and whispering, and I wonder whether she’s hearing my own thoughts. “I know that’s what Angelika says; I know that’s what we’re supposed to think about it. But I think it’s more like a shadow. It follows you around. And you don’t know when it’s there or not, until you catch sight of it, attached to you, stretching and showing some strange new part of you.”

  We sit in the poetry of the way Charlotte’s speaking.

  I hate that she’s talking about Cruz. I hate how beautifully she’s able to talk about loving him. I hate how real those words make it.

  “Maybe you never know if you’re in love or not,” I say. “Maybe no one knows, and we all wander around talking about it like it’s something tangible and knowable, but actually we’re all full of it. Maybe even the people who say they’re in love are wondering is this what they meant?”

  I can see that the idea bothers Charlotte and Isla, but I like it. I like the idea that there aren’t answers, no matter how many goddamn questions we ask.

  Maybe that’s what my dad liked, too—the quest for answers, but not the answers themselves. Only the asking.

  The minutes pass, and so do hours.

  The principal comes in at lunchtime with her assistant, bringing lunch trays to our desks. Lasagna, a sad iceberg salad, a chocolate chip cookie, a soft dinner roll, a too-hard pat of butter.

  “Room service!” the principal says, her glasses thick like Charlotte’s, her nose a beak, her voice too enthusiastic for the occasion.

  “When are we getting out of here?” I ask when it’s clear Isla and Charlotte aren’t going to say anything at all.

  “We’re working out what our plan is,” she says, an implied enthusiastic exclamation point at the end of the sentence. It hurts my ears, how hard she’s trying to make this seem normal.