Authors: Emily Franklin
“If white is the absence of color,” he says downing a glass of white (of course) wine, “I don’t think that’s purity.”
“Go on,” says Angus, seriously intrigued.
Asher stands up and wanders around the room as he speaks. “Purity — to me at least — has nothing to do with absence or abstinence or avoiding anything. It’s more to do with openness.”
“So where does wearing black fit in?” Arabella asks, annoyed. She passes the white asparagus to me and I eat a spear while listening, even though my appetite seems to have vanished in Asher’s presence. It’s not like school-crush stuff here; I feel magnetized to him, completely taken with his physical being, his words, everything.
“Black is everything,” Asher says. “All colors, all feelings.” He looks directly at me. “It’s a mistake to think that clarity is purity. The mix and confusion, the overwhelming nature of desire and despondency is pure.”
Ahem! I know I’m not imagining his stares, the electrical current between us, because it’s obvious. Or maybe I just want it to be so. We eat risotto and white truffles, monkfish with a white sauce, and have white chocolate fondue with marshmallows and white raspberries during the gift exchange.
“Oh, my presents are upstairs,” I say. I excuse myself to go get the books I’ve brought for the Pieces, the Hadley socks I’ve brought for Clive, and realize I’ve brought nothing for Asher. I could give him the socks, but they were meant to be kind of joke. Plus, they’re white and lame. Oh well, I’ll have to just explain and get him something later. My arms filled with the gifts, I turn the lightswitch off with my elbow and am in the dark room for two seconds when Asher appears in front of me and without saying anything slides his hands under my hair, tips my head back, and kisses me. Then, before I can even catch up to myself and the kiss, it’s over and we’re back downstairs, seated in the drawing room as if nothing’s happened.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Monti!” Arabella is saying gleefully. “Love, look!” She waves a large brass skeleton key in my face. I’m still in the kiss-fog for a second and then snap out of it in time for her explanation. “This is our ticket to a hot term. Monti has the most incredible flat just off of the King’s Road…”
“I thought you girls would like it,” Monti shrugs and smiles. “Rather than the horrid dorms at LADAM.” She turns to me, “Arabella spent so many nights out of the dorms last year we barely knew how to track her down — thankfully she’s got that cell phone.” Probably, Arabella was at Toby’s, but of course I keep quiet about that.
“Those dorms build character,” Angus interrupts. “Everyone ought to have the experience of living the way real artists do, with shite accommodations, beans and toast to eat, and no money.”
“Like me, you mean?” Asher says and cocks his head to one side, his dark hair falling across his forehead.
“I suppose,” Angus nods. “A little hard work never hurt anyone.”
“Just because I accept their money doesn’t mean I’m any less of an artist, Asher,” Arabella says. She looks to me to say something.
“I don’t know — I mean, there is this supposed link of art and struggle,” I say. Arabella looks pissed. By pissed I mean both the American meaning — pissed off — and the English — drunk. “But I think you should do what you want.” Asher and Arabella both stare at me.
“What would you do?” Clive asks and actually has a normal tone for once. “If you had loads of money, do you think you’d be more or less inclined to work hard?”
I sigh and squish a marshmallow between my fingers. “I don’t know. I’d like to say it wouldn’t change anything; that I’d still want to write music and earn my way up the rock-folk ladder, but at the same time, if someone clicked their fingers….” I snap for emphasis. “And just made me a professional musician — I don’t know. It’d be hard to turn that down.”
Nods all around except for Asher, who stands up, takes a final slug of his drink and says, “Thanks for the gifts, everyone. Thanks for the food, Angus, Monti. I’m due at Heathrow in the morning, so I’ve got to run.”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
Arabella butts in. “Some island? Where is it this time, the Galapagos or the Seychelles?”
“Neither,” Asher says. “And why do you even care? You’re got your cushy flat to run to, and your even cushier boyfriend…”
Monti perks up. “Boyfriend? I didn’t know you had a lover, Arabella!” I’m embarrassed both by the use of the word
lover
and that I’m stuck in the middle of a sibling skirmish. Arabella, meanwhile, looks panicked that Asher’s about to spill the royal beans.
“No,” I say. “I have a boyfriend — not Arabella.”
Two — or twelve — glasses of wine too many, Monti slurs, “Oh, right then. I see. A nice American boy?”
“Um, yeah,” I stammer, lying in an attempt to deflect the attention away from Arabella who mouths thank you. “His name’s Jacob.” Monti and Angus wait for me to say more, as if giving the name of my imaginary beau isn’t enough. “And I miss him.”
Arabella giggles and offers me a candy cane, which I promptly shove in my mouth to avoid further verbal fumblings. Asher clears his throat and looks at me. “Well then, I guess that settles that.”
I want to explain myself, to erase what I’ve said, seeing as I’ve just made it clear not only to Asher that I’m off-limits, but that I’m the kind of person who cheats on her boyfriend with a complete stranger. “Wait,” I say.
Asher comes back and stands very close to me. Close enough so I can feel his breath on my face. It smells sweet and minty. “What?”
“I didn’t get you a gift,” I say. “But not because I didn’t want to — I just didn’t know you existed.”
Arabella interrupts us. “Aren’t you going to be late for your models?” she asks. Then she turns to me, “Asher likes to photograph nude women.”
“They’re not nude,” he says. “And even if they were, who the hell cares?”
“I might,” I say.
Arabella rolls her eyes. “It’s not illegal or anything. He’s a shoot assistant — you know, for catalogue photographers. Bathing suits, lingerie, supermodels. Every straight man’s fantasy.”
Now it’s my turn to smirk. “What a hardship,” I say. “You really are struggling for your art.” I don’t mean it to be that sarcastic, but I can’t help it. The thought of Asher galavanting (or whatever you do on photo shoots) with semi-clad models on a beach makes my insides twist up. But he thinks I have a boyfriend, so there.
“Bye everyone! Arabella — be good. And Love?”
“Yes?” I stare at his mouth.
“Have fun in London,” Asher says. I’m about to say that I will, that I’m psyched, that I can’t wait, but he says, “And say hi to your boyfriend.”
Back in the living room, the white-dressed rest of us greet the dawn with Happy (not Merry) Christmas and hugs. Arabella tucks her feet under a cushion and hands me a woolen throw which I put on my feet. The candles have seeped onto the table cloth, Clive is snoring on his chair, and Angus scrounges for leftover liquor though he’s still drunk and clearly the worse for wear. Monti, splayed out on the chaise longue as if she’s just fainted there, looks glamorous despite her impending hangover.
“Hey,” I whisper to Arabella. “No one spilled anything.”
Arabella looks at her stain-free outfit. “The benefit of all white foods, I guess.” She closes her eyes and mumbles. “I hope you had a good time — and I’m sorry about Asher. See what I mean? Forget you even met him, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, and it comes out wobbly — which in my case — has nothing to do with liquor consumption and everything to do with knowing that forgetting Asher would be impossible.
“Taxi!” Arabella puts her arm up and a black London cab comes flying over, its brakes squeaking. She climbs in and lowers the window halfway. “Now, you’re sure I can’t convince you?”
“I’m positive,” I say. “It’s for the best.”
“Okay,” she breaths in deeply. “Good luck.”
And just like that, I’m alone, with a pile of bags, in front of Gladwell Mansion, which — despite its name — is a complete shithole. It’s also my dorm. Even though Monti’s flat sounds awesome, and the idea of having my own apartment with Arabella is undoubtedly appealing, there’s a large part of me that kind of agrees with what Asher was saying. Not that I need to slit my wrists and struggle and be miserable to be an artist, but that I should — or want — to experience the real student life here. My life. Not Arabella’s. So I slug my crap up the three flights of stairs to room sixteen-a and find that it’s connected to sixteen-b, in which two girls are screaming at each other.
“Bitch!” one yells. “You lying sack of shit!”
“Whore!” the other shouts and is about to slap the first one until they notice me and go from screeching to completely friendly. “Oh, hi!”
Um, bi-polar, anyone?
“Hi?” I say and it comes out a question because the vibe is so weird in here. I drop my duffle on the sixteen-a side of the doorway.
“We’re not total lunatics in need of anger counseling, by the way,” the girl with a pixie haircut says. “We’re practicing for our Stage Rage class.”
“Yeah,” the other one adds. She’s tall with skin the color of instant coffee (ah, Mable would be proud of me for using caffeinated substances for my descriptions) and a pile of hair that’s long enough to be tucked into her suede jacket. “After we finish telling each other to go to hell we’re going to get a coffee. Want to come?”
I smile and say, “Sure. Can I watch you duke it out, though?”
“We love an audience,” the pixie says. “I’m Fizzy.” I’m bubbly I want to add, but she gestures to herself. “Real name’s Gertrude, otherwise called Rude, Rude turned into Rizz and Rizz morphed into…”
“Fizzy, good to meet you. I’m Love.”
“Oh, God, I’m Keena,” the other woman says. “Not a sane name among us.”
At the tiny coffeehouse three streets in back of the dorm, Keena stirs milk into her tea and says, “I know, I know I’m supposed to be on the American coffee kick that’s sweeping the country, but I still like tea. Good, old-fashioned harvested tea — loose, preferably, in a bag if you must.”
“Thank you for that rant and rave, Keena, and now back to our regularly scheduled program,” Fizzy says in mock news broadcaster-speak. To me she adds, “Keena’s just a bit old colony for my tastes.”
“Don’t let my mother hear you say that,” Keena laughs and Fizzy joins in. When I stay quiet, out of the joke loop, they look at me. “Oh, right — you don’t know Keena’s mum.”
“Nope,” I say and sip my coffee. It’s not Slave to the Grind by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not bad. Especially because it’s warm in here and freezing rain outside, especially because I’m not wandering around aimlessly, and especially because I am not alone wondering why the hell I’ve chosen to live in the dorms instead of the posh place Arabella’s got six Tube stops away.
“Her mother is Poppy,” Fizzy says, thumbing to Keena.
Now I get it. “You’re Poppy Massa-Tonclair’s daughter?”
“The very one,” Keena says with obvious pride — and deservedly so — her mother has won every literary prize from the Booker to the Orange to the Pulitzer. “Out of wedlock, of course.”
“Really?” I ask. “They never tell you that in the bio at the back of the books.”
“I know,” Keena shakes her head. “Actually, they used to — in the mid-seventies when she first started writing, but then with the whole Thatcher regime and the political climate of the eighties in this country, it just wasn’t as hip-bohemian, so the publisher decided to make her bios more…”
“Mundane?” I offer.
“Right.” Keena watches me drink my coffee. “So what’s your deal, Love?”
“I’m not sure I have one,” I say. “My life seems pretty mild compared to yours here. My dad’s the principal at Hadley Hall, my school — which you might know from Arabella. And my mother’s…”
Keena looks at me and waits for me to talk. Fizzy ruffles her hair — it’s short and standing up on end, and she makes it flip direction just by running a palm over the top. When I don’t say more Fizzy adds, “We’ve heard lots of good things about you from Arabella, of course, but she never mentioned you were quite so beautiful and reserved.” Huh? That’s how I come across? One: cool, because I’ve never been beautiful — pretty, maybe. Two: weird, because it’s not how I see myself at all. Somewhat appealing and goofy — but not beautiful, and certainly not reserved
“Maybe that’s not how Arabella sees me,” I say. Damn the drama devotees for being so inquisitive.
“No,” Fizzy says. “I bet she does — we just have that anti-American kind of slant, I guess. Shame on us for being so closed minded.” Fizzy swats Keena’s hand like she’s scolding her.
“Yeah — I guess I thought you’d be pushy and loud, or a big old slag like everyone on American television. You do know what a slag is, right?”
“I believe I do,” I say in my best uppercrust Brit — thank you Gwyneth Paltrow for showing me the way, “Slag is equal to slut and hag and can be said either seriously, as in Lindsay Parrish the biggest bitch I know is such a slag and she always will be in my mind for sleeping with my first boyfriend and trying to steal my supposed-soulmate, Jacob. Or, in a mock way — as in, give me that last bite of biscuit, you slag.”
“Hey — the girl learns fast,” Keena says. “And, if the example you gave was true, slag is definitely the proper terminology.”
“Damn straight,” I nod.
“Come on,” Fizzy says. “Let’s go back and unpack your stuff and go meet Arabella for dinner.”
“At the Buttery?” I ask. In the packet of information was a whole section on Student Life that read like it had been printed twenty years ago, which it probably had. The Buttery, it stated, was the dining hall of the campus, but served tea with scones in the afternoon and dinner at long communal tables. It sounds glam, but when I walked through it, the tables had a sticky sheen, stray peas rolled underfoot, clinging to my shoes, and the place was devoid of any people or good vibes.
“Fuck no,” Keena shakes her head and wraps her long multi-colored scarf around her neck. “The Buttery is terrible. Honestly, you would be hard-pressed to find worse food anywhere. Trust me — I’ve spent a ton of time in third world countries, and I’d take the beans or rice any day over that slop.”