Lucid (21 page)

He opens a bottle of his dad’s fancy wine. It tastes really good and makes me feel warm and flush. He tells me I can drink up because there’s a second bottle of the same wine, which he already opened. I feel a bit like that’s a red flag, but I push the thought away.

He sets a cheese tray by the plushy couch, assuring me that while he prefers blue, these are “double cremes” that won’t mask the taste of the wine. I’m sure Andrew wouldn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I don’t either, but I am here and he isn’t. I kick off my pumps. I love cheese.

Thomas mentions casually that there will be three or four callbacks among the several (though unnumbered) women who are
auditioning for Robin. He is “working on it.” Well, he’s certainly working on something.

On the bookshelf, there’s an adorable picture of him with a five-year-old’s version of the Hair. His mom is quite beautiful, duh, and seems very adoring. When I compliment her, he tells me that she passed away from breast cancer when he was nine. This brings tears to my eyes, and I tell him the story of my dad. He is only the second (and certainly nicest) boy that I have ever discussed my dad’s death with. He really listens, and it’s nice to share it with someone who understands. I don’t know any other kids who have lost a parent. Not that Thomas is a kid, I suppose. My mom tried to get me to join a teen support group. I went once. Having a dead parent be the only thing I had in common with those kids just made me feel lonely.

Dinner begins with a salad that he overdressed (guys do that a lot). He made garlic bread, which is about the last thing anybody would want to eat if they are thinking of kissing someone. The table is set beautifully; there’s a crystal vase with peonies, which happen to be my favorite flower. He is trying hard, as whatshisname once noted, and I like it. Especially tonight.

It’s easy to make a case for Thomas. He’s easy on the eyes, he’s easy to be with, he promises an easy life. What’s there even to debate? Well, how fast and how far to go with all this, of course, being barely seventeen and even more cautious realizing that I am basically (expensively) drunk.

Just as I reach this point in my rigged debate, a strong and confident hand reaches a plate down in front of me. The aroma of white truffles mixes with the alcohol in my system and the positive energy
of my thoughts, so that when that masculine hand strokes the hair from my neck and begins massaging my shoulders, I realize something. Old Andrew is right about one thing. I do know how to handle this.

I wrap my fingers around his wrist, excited by how slender and delicate they look against his musculature. I only have to pull very slightly, and his mouth comes to mine, and I rise half out of my seat, twisting my body into a full, openmouthed, committed kiss that sends a definite (though slightly blurry) thrill through pretty much all of me.

He lifts me up, and I wrap my legs around his waist, pulling him closer. He rests me down on the table and starts to kiss my neck as his hands work the buttons of my peasant blouse. I weave my hands through his gorgeously thick hair. All of this feels good and exciting until, without really knowing why…

I push him away. Gently at first, and so he understandably feels it isn’t a serious move but just me being playful. So I push him away harder and he stops. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. And only then do I understand why.

“No, I’m so sorry, Maggie. Are you sure you’re okay? I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to pressure you or make you feel uncomfortable or force myself on you…” He keeps a respectful distance between us and keeps apologizing, clearly worried that he pushed a young girl into the deep end.

“I’m the one who kissed you, Thomas,” I remind him.

“And I took it further and faster than you were ready for. I want you to set the pace for us, Maggie. I have to keep reminding myself that you are much younger than you seem. I want you to take as
much time as you need to figure out what you want. I’ll be here. And whatever you decide, I promise it will have no relevance on your chances for Robin.” Right.

I rebutton my shirt and pull my pumps back on as easily as I’d kicked them off. Thirty minutes later I ring the bell at Andrew’s door. I don’t really care if the little blond skank answers in a teddy or less. In fact, I don’t really care about anything but seeing him right now.

The door opens. He’s alone. So I don’t even try to hide what I’m feeling. He looks sad and sympathetic and angry, and he gives me a big hug. I feel like a little girl. Which is what I am.

“What did he do to you?”

I tell him that Thomas was wonderful and didn’t do anything wrong. I just picked the worst (but necessary) moment possible to remember Andrew’s advice that it’d be wrong for me to settle for anything less than love.

At this point, he has one brotherly arm around my shoulders and invites me in. I freeze, and his surprise makes me ask to make sure he’s alone. He doesn’t understand why I’m asking.

“I told you Carmen and I broke up.”

I don’t have it in me to act my way out of this one.

“I saw you driving around with this very pretty blond girl.”

He looks at me with his lopsided smile. “If I was driving someone around in my car, why would they necessarily be in my apartment at eleven o’clock tonight?”

Throwing all self-respect into the gutter, I say, “Because before she got into the GEM with you, she came out of your apartment at eight o’clock in the morning.”

My mind floods with all the humiliating questions about how I could know something like that. But instead of asking them and instead of wearing a face that would hurt my feelings, he says…

“You’re just having a really bad night. The person you’re talking about is Cassie. She’s my sister-in-law. She got into a horrible fight with my brother. And we’re close, so she came over late and crashed. And then I spent half the day telling my idiot brother what an asshole he is and how lucky he is to be with someone who really loves him.”

I stare in his eyes. “You should really charge for this stuff. Putting broken girls back together.”

“You’re not broken,” Andrew tells me. If only he knew the half of it. Or the other half of me, as it were.

So we sit in his kitchen, and he makes me hot chocolate and we pitch mini-marshmallows into our mugs as we talk. He wants to know how I left things with Thomas, and I tell him that things aren’t terrible. Thomas simply figures that being younger than I look, I got in over my head a little and need more time to figure out what I want. It would’ve been incredibly rude of me, not to mention courageous, to have told him that I already knew. So I didn’t. I’m also worried once I tell him that, despite all his perfectness, I don’t want to date him, my chances for Robin will go from slim to none. I’d like to believe he’s genuine in his assurance that whether we date or not won’t affect business. He’s a good person. Andrew reminds me that ultimately it’s not Thomas’s decision who gets the role either way.

We talk for about an hour. He makes me bacon and eggs since I dashed out of Thomas’s before dinner.

“You never asked why I was staking out your apartment when I saw Cassie and you this morning.”

“And I’m not going to.”

“Here’s why. I had a dream last night. In this dream, I was sort of me, but my name was something else. I was just starting to date some guy in my high school, and he had to get up in the middle of the night to pick up some once-and-future girlfriend at the airport.”

He stares at me. He’s a terrific listener. So I tell him that this dream does not explain in any logical way why I was drawn to spy on him. But it is the reason.

“And I guess because the boy in my dream lied to me, it made me doubt how wonderful he was. And maybe I thought if you were lying about Carmen, it would mean that you weren’t as terrific as I need you to be.”

“Why do you need me to be terrific?”

“Because I need someone to be terrific. And you are, and you’re very important to me.”

“But this guy in your dream, that was like a boyfriend.”

“Yeah. The dream is always different from my life. The same in some ways and modified and twisted and different.”

“The dream.”

I simply make one of the real threshold decisions of my life. “It’s a dream I have every night. Every night since forever. It’s never the same dream, it’s the same alternate life.”

I’ve said the words out loud. He is stunned by them. The second hand on the clock on the wall seems to move faster and the words tumble from my lips as I explain.

“Yes, alternate life. That’s what it is. My name is Sloane, which is
actually my real first name. I live in a little town called Mystic, Connecticut, where I have actually only been twice. I go to high school. I get to be blond and have actual breasts…”

He laughs in a very nice way, which helps me feel brave enough to continue.

“My father is alive there and very nice, though not my best friend like my dad was. I have no sister and two brothers. My mom there is the opposite of Nicole. We are close, but there’s a huge anger thing in my heart toward her that I don’t really understand. At least not there, I don’t.”

“But you understand it here?”

“I think I do. We can’t read each other’s minds.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?”

I take a deep breath. “This is the really hard part. This is the part where you learn how crazy I am and you’ll have to decide if you’re still going to be my friend.”

“I already decided. And I already know you’re crazy. And you can stop talking about this right now if you want.”

“Here’s what ‘we’ means. Every night, I dream about her life in Mystic. And when she falls asleep in Mystic, she dreams the whole day I live here in New York. And I think I’m real and she’s my fantasy…”

“And she thinks the same?”

I’m too afraid to speak. The kitchen falls silent. I can hear the tick-tick of the clock on the wall.

“But you know the difference, right? I mean, you know you’re real. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be either, or Jade, or your dad, or everyone out there on the street right now. Right?”

I nod. And I quietly say, “That’s what Sloane thinks too.”

He smiles. “Only a storyteller like you could come up with something like this. Amazing.”

I start to cry. He thinks it’s a story. The truth of this is far more than insane. It separates me from everyone and everything. Anyone, who isn’t my shrink, I tell this to will never really love me or be close to me.

Because of my tears, I can see in his face that he realizes this is actually true. And I am a freak. And this makes me cry harder, so that he comes over and hugs me tight to calm me down. But I know when he lets go, he and I will never be the same.

I
wake up feeling utterly betrayed. Even if James never liked me the way I wish he’d liked me and I misread his actions and words as flirtatious, he must like me enough to want to be my friend. Why lie about this airport run? I guess he didn’t lie so much as omit. Which leaves my mind to do horrible imagining. If it is an uncle or a guy friend, he’d just say it. It has to be some girl and he realized I have an enormous crush on him and he knew that telling me that would be devastating.

And I strangely feel betrayed by Maggie. We share the world’s weirdest secret and she goes and blabs it to Andrew, what, to try to impress him or something? She obviously wants him to want her, even though she’d run like crazy if he did. Just like she ran like crazy from Thomas. Andrew has had plenty of opportunities and hasn’t taken them. Showing up on his doorstep crying and spilling a sacred secret just seems desperate.

I would never tell anyone about us. Especially not a boy I wish liked me. I feel a tremendous ache to tell James everything else in my heart and soul and mind. Except Maggie.

I roll on my side to stare at my tree and see a star on my pillow. A fallen star. Looking up, I can tell it has fallen from the Field of Wildflowers, a constellation to the left of Delicioso, where all the great sky beings go to make wishes. I guess I should make a wish.

I suddenly feel inspired by Maggie’s spying. I jump into jeans and a T-shirt, ones that fit pretty tight and great just in case he blows my cover. I take the time to coat my lashes with some mascara because he’s an eyelash guy and all. Skip breakfast entirely, sneak out of the house undetected, and ride my bike down to James’s house, throwing caution to the wind and leaving my life-sustaining helmet at home. A fatal head injury might be just the thing, particularly just outside his front yard, where he and his strumpet (Shakespeare for “slut”) will drive by my mangled body in his stupid Targa, having to swerve wildly to avoid treating me as roadkill, only to jump from the car, run to my side, tears on his face as he desperately feels for my pulse, lifts me in his strong arms as if I were weightless, and turns to her and announces that I’m the one he really loves.

Sounds like a plan.

He isn’t home. Nor does he come home during the nearly three hours that I sit behind that stupid tree, playing Fruit Ninja on my iPhone. Every time a car drives by, I lie flat on the ground so they can’t see me from the road. Mystic is a small town. Not sure how I’d explain what I’m doing here.

Once I’d been at a keg party at Esker Point, basically just a bunch of kids from school sitting on the beach, drinking bad beer out of red
plastic cups, your average rite of passage, and I responsibly walked home instead of getting a ride from Joe Stevens, who definitely had done at least one keg stand. The next morning our neighbor Mrs. Lamb came over to borrow some eggs and mentioned in front of my mom and dad that she’d seen me walking down by Beebee Cove. “Can’t get away with anything in this town,” she said, and winked. Luckily she made no reference to the fact that I most certainly had appeared inebriated.

Since my phone is running out of batteries and I’m losing my mind, I give up on my stakeout and hop on my trusty Schwinn. I take Marsh Road and bike through Noank, the little village right next to Mystic. I pass by the park and Carson’s General Store, where I’d usually stop for an ice cream soda. Instead, I pedal as fast as I can and fly down the big hill toward the town dock. The water is sparkling out before me. If my brakes give out or if I was very adventurous, I could fly straight off the dock and into the mouth of the Mystic River. But I turn left at the last minute and coast onto Front Street. Right past Bill’s house.