Tiny Pretty Things (37 page)

Mr. K shakes his head, and leaves me standing there. As soon as he’s out the door, I let out one raging scream into my ballet sweater.

Alec’s house looks like it always does, but gift wrapped for his father’s birthday party. A beautiful Upper East Side town house between Madison and Fifth Avenues. Even better than mine. Though my mother would never admit it. But when we get to the door Mr. Lucas hugs me with only one arm and doesn’t kiss my cheek like he used to. His new wife’s hand is so cold on my shoulder that I shiver, and Alec’s sister, Sophie, who used to beg me to do her makeup and help her with her pirouettes and
sautés
, barely musters the enthusiasm to wave in my direction. The parlor is filled with important dance types, milling around in their evening finery, most of them onto their third or fourth cocktail. None of the other students are here—not even Alec’s precious Gigi. Most of us are not deemed important enough, unless there’s a legacy, a family history at this school. Which I have, thanks to Adele. And my grandmother’s money.

“Alec’s upstairs,” Mr. Lucas says, before he leans in to embrace Adele and compliment her on her most recent performance. He even quotes a line from the
New York Times
review. His ridiculous wife laughs wildly, like Adele is a celebrity, which I guess for ballet world people she is. But I will be, too, someday. And then they’ll regret their cool treatment of me.

“Is he . . . expecting me?” I say. It doesn’t sound right, the words formal and strange in my mouth, and their faces show as much discomfort as I’m feeling. I don’t wait for an answer, just head up the stairs like it’s every other Thanksgiving or Christmas or birthday celebration, even though now he loves someone else, and I’m all alone.

His door is wide open, and I catch sight of him before he notices me in the frame. I never forgot how handsome he is, but he looks even better than the image in my head. Maybe it’s seeing him in normal clothes instead of his practice clothes, but he’s so boyish and beautiful and real, I almost can’t breathe. When I do finally manage a breath, it turns almost immediately to tears.

That’s when he sees me.

I try to make the tears silent ones, at least, since I can’t seem to make them dry up. But I sniffle a few times, and then break down into full-on sobs. I haven’t cried like this—loud and unforgiving—since the Christmas my father left, and the thought of that makes me cry more. Between my knee and the random April snow shower outside and the sound of my reckless sobbing,
I’m practically reliving those horrible days.

“Oh my god, what? What happened? Did your mom—” Alec moves toward me and I let him wrap me in a hug. I cry into his shoulder until his crisp white dress shirt is soaked through in the shape of my eyes and mouth. He rubs my back and shushes me, his mouth next to my ear. One movement of his mouth and he’d be kissing the lobe, working his way down my neck until we’re making out on his bed. It’s such a familiar routine, I’m surprised he doesn’t do it just on reflex.

“Everything’s wrong,” I say at last. I whisper, but I probably don’t have to. There are glasses clanging downstairs and loud bursts of laughter followed by a frantic mix of voices, everyone trying to talk over everyone else, Adele’s voice coming out the clearest, getting the most space.

“What did she do?” Alec says, still thinking this is all about my mother, when really she’s only a part of it.

“She’s . . . fine. She’s been okay. Distracted by drinking.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you want me still?” I press my body against his a little. He resists, but not so much that he pulls away.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m with Gi—”

“That’s okay. It doesn’t even have to be anything real. Don’t you just want me, though? Like before? I won’t tell. Couldn’t we—” I reach one hand around his neck and run one finger back and forth across the place where his hair meets his neck. He always liked that, and he shivers a little in response.

“You know I’ll always care—”

“I know she’s really inexperienced,” I say. It’s not planned, and it’s not exactly the best argument to get what I want, when what I really want is Alec to love me again. But I’ll take anything right now.

“God, Bette—”

“I miss you so much. You have to miss me a little. You don’t do all that with someone and then just never think about it again . . .” I reach down to his pants. The waistband. And then the button. The zipper. He doesn’t push my hand away.

I expect to feel a rush of love, a kind of bliss that I can have him again, but instead I can only think one terrible thought:
I’ve got to find a way to let Gigi know about this.

Then, as if he heard what was going on in my head, he jolts away from me.

“Hey. No. I’m sorry. But no,” he says. His words are still nice, maybe because his shirt is still wet with my tears, or maybe because I look so pathetic all dolled up and limping and throwing myself at him. I don’t say anything in response; there’s nothing to say. He takes a few steps back and gives a sad little smile.

“Why do you like her?” I ask, because I’m nothing if not my mother’s daughter—a glutton.

“We shouldn’t talk about this,” he says. “Not right now.”

“No, tell me. I can take it,” I say.

He sighs.

I give him a small shove. “I want to know. You owe that to me at least.”

“She’s easy,” he answers, and doesn’t mean the kind that comes with random hook ups. “She makes me laugh, and forget all the crazy stuff at school. Okay?”

I step back.

“We’ve been a mess for a while, Bette. We started doing our own things,” he says.

I put my hand up. “Got it.”

“Look, I’m going to go downstairs,” he says, quickly swapping his tear-soaked shirt for a crisp, new one. “Cheese plate. Say hi to your sister. You come down whenever you’re . . . ready. Okay?” I don’t say anything. “Okay. Hey, everything’s gonna be okay.”

Then I’m alone in his bedroom, and it all looks just the same as it has for years, but different, too, because he’s not in it and there’re no photographs of us on his bulletin board and the bed is perfectly made instead of mussed up by our bodies rolling around on it.

Then I notice it: a brown box marked with Gigi’s name sitting on his desk. A little pile of origami roses next to it. A letter. Some chocolates.

I don’t go for the letter, though a part of me aches to read it, to know what words he uses with her, how he tells her how beautiful she is. If he loves her. I finger the roses. I pick up the roses one by one. I wish I could stuff the box full of more of the photos of Alec and me. Whoever gave her those did me a favor. I wonder if he still has his copies, and I wonder if he even knows about her getting the pictures. I wonder why Gigi didn’t tell him.

I try to ignore a tiny whisper inside my chest:
Maybe because she’s better than you, Bette
.

To get rid of the thoughts, I ramble through his room, and look for his copies of the pictures. Obviously, she hasn’t gotten the message that Alec and I are meant to be. She needs to remember that Alec and Bette existed. That Alec and Bette meant something. I know he used to keep them in his closet, in a box within a box where he kept other private things: a few sad
Playboy
magazines, a letter from his real mother, whiskey bottles stolen from a hotel room, a photograph of his father as a younger man and a gorgeous Asian dancer that has been folded and unfolded so many times you just know it was in a wallet for years.

And the pictures of me and Alec, together. They are mostly of me, though Alec’s legs and hands and eye line are sometimes in the frame. Alec took some of me on my own: naked and smirking at the camera. Then I convinced him to set the timer and get in the pictures with me. In one, my legs are wrapped around his waist and his face is buried in my neck. Two years ago, when we were just moving from kissing and holding hands to taking off each other’s clothes and touching what was underneath.

But right under them are something even better: all the love letters we sent each other. Bundled with twine like something out of a romance movie. When we were fourteen, he’d said we should make a time capsule and bury it near the tiny fountain in the backyard. Something he’d seen on TV. He made me bring him all the letters he sent me, then put them together like puzzle pieces. I’d been
stupid back then. Told him it wasn’t sexy, as if I really knew what that word meant. He stopped writing me letters after that.

He won’t miss them
, I think.

And then:
I still know him best
.

And then:
She would never do this.

I choose the best letters, the ones where he tells me all the things he loves about me, the ones where he tells me we’ll be together forever and get married, the ones where he tells me how beautiful I am. Then the rest of the night’s not so bad. Alec keeps smiling his sad smile at me, and Mr. Lucas ignores me, and no one tells me how pretty I look or how great I was in rehearsal. But it’s really not so bad. Because I’m taking back control.

When I get back to the dorms, I go to the Light with the letters, paper, glue, and scissors. Where I can be alone. I lock the door behind me. I cut out my favorite phrases from the letters, arranging them on the page and gluing them down. I ignore the thoughts cramming into my head:
This is crazy. Only psychopaths do this. This is some serial killer–type stuff
.

I imagine the look on her face when she sees what we had, what she will have to live up to, what she’ll never be. The insecurities popping up inside her after I deliver these to her room.

“I’m not crazy,” I say. “Alec and I know everything about each other. We belong together. We have a history. We were meant to be.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

IT
’
S
3
O
’
CLOCK ON SUNDAY
,
and the bustling kitchen of Jayhe’s Elmhurst, Queens, restaurant, Chae’s Chom Chom, is crammed with people—busboys, dishwashers, waiters, several cooks, and his dad, who’s running the show. Jayhe’s in training to take over this branch, and even though he’s not happy about it, he still seems pleased to show it off to me. And to show me off to his dad, apparently.

His dad hands me a series of tiny appetizer plates brimming over with spinach salad, pickled radishes, bean sprouts, and more. The waiter behind him sets down others: kimchee, crispy sweet potatoes, fried onion pancakes, dumplings. The porcelain dishes clink a melody along the table as they’re arranged before us. My stomach balloons just looking at all this food. But my mouth waters. I want to eat it. And keep it down.

Jayhe’s dad says something in Korean. I don’t understand what he says, but I think I get what he means. “Eat,” he says to me in English, nodding toward the plate. “Good for your ribs.”

He always pauses for me to respond, but I can’t. I feel a stupid lost-in-translation expression climb over my face. It’s embarrassing.

There’s another flurry of too-fast Korean, but I understand the word
halmeoni—
grandmother. I can see her small, wrinkled face and those warm eyes. I wish I could see Jayhe’s grandma again. It’s been too long since someone’s been that kind to me.

Jayhe and his dad fuss a little. Jayhe’s shaking his head and says no a bunch of times. His dad is distracted for a moment, giving one of the waiters a direction.

“What’s he saying?” I whisper to Jayhe, feeling ridiculous that I can’t fully understand my own language.

“Not important,” he says, popping a potato into his mouth, which lets him get away with not answering me.

“But it is. He was talking about your grandmother and me. I heard him.” I nudge his leg until he sighs.

“He said after we eat, that I should take you to go see her,” he says, dipping his chopsticks into another dish. “You know we . . .” He swallows the word
can’t
along with the
jwipo jorum
, the fish jerky, strong and chewy in his mouth.

I stir a spoon in my tofu soup. While he wants me here, he could never bring me that far back. Not without everyone knowing what we’re doing. This all started out as a game, and now I’m here with his dad, in one of their family restaurants. It hits me that this has become something so much more than what I thought. And it still has to be a secret.

But I think maybe, when I go back to the dorms, the other Korean girls will know anyway. Because the scent of sesame oil pervades everything—and I know I’ll go home smelling like it, sharp and pungent. His dad sets down more bowls, and stares at me, waiting. I know he wants a little head nod, the approval that everything is so good. But it’s hard to enjoy food anymore.

I take a tentative bite of the hot pan-fried
mandus
and dip out more soup, then, knowing what Jayhe wants, take a big slurp. Jayhe and his dad grin at each other, then Mr. Chae nods toward the kitchen door. “Go, sit, enjoy,” he says, his dark eyes—the same as Jayhe’s—twinkling with delight. “Good appetite!” And he and Jayhe exchange glances that I decipher easily: he’s pleased that his son has found a girlfriend who actually eats. Not like Sei-Jin.