Lacie left every morning around eight for work. Once the door slammed I would settle at my desk and open my laptop. I never started writing until she left. I needed to be alone.
Once she was gone, though—oh, how I wrote, with a faith that now breaks my heart. It was this simple: I believed I was writing a novel. For years I had believed this, but now I had an agent, and a solid draft, and all I had to do was fix it, fix it with all the vision and force within me, and glory would be mine. Though I am not that much older now, I look back on that girl with pity and frustration. She had such faith that her effort would be rewarded, that if she just dug in and worked, she would be lifted out of her life, the ordinary humdrum of tutoring teenagers, to a lifetime of mornings.
For my mornings—daydreaming at my desk, polishing a few lapidary sentences, scrawling out my dreams, sipping coffee—were the best part of my days. On the other side of publication there would surely be a lifetime of it. On scraps I tried out alternate exchanges of dialogue; breathlessly I whispered sentences, then swooped with my pen to correct errant syllables.
The novel focused on the friendship between two girls, one beautiful, the other plain; one popular and kind, the other closed like a fist. There comes between them a beautiful boy. Betrayal. Then violence—strange, ambiguous violence.
The problem, as you may have deduced, is that there are approximately one million other novels with this plot. The glamorous, beautiful one; the plain, smart one. A rueful adult narrator still puzzling over the past. Oh, it was all familiar territory—I was counting on my language, my beautiful crystalline language, to launch my career—but there was another problem too. Portia could no longer see it.
She kept sighing. “I just don’t understand the stakes of this story. I don’t get the why of it. Why does this book need to be written?”
The book needed to be written so that I could get on with my life. The book needed to be written so I could get a polite, middle-class sum of money, quit tutoring, which even after a month I already despised, and move into the adult part of my life.
But that was just me being glib. Glib was not a good strategy. I tried earnest: “The stakes are, she’s a girl who never goes after what she wants, and you sort of want her to go after what she wants, but when she finally does, it’s a disaster.” Phone cradled to my ear, I paced.
“So what’s the consequence of that? Why does this story matter?”
“Well, it’s about guilt. And shame.”
Silence. I looked at Lacie’s bookshelves. Barbara Comyns, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor. All the subtle British ladies who believed in subtle emotional devastation.
“I think, in this next draft,” Portia spoke slowly, and I pictured her in her glassy gray office, eyes distant as she reached into my project, into me, “you should try—maybe even as an exercise—writing from Lacie’s point of view.”
“What, really?” The idea viscerally offended me. “Why?”
“I just think we need to understand her more.” Portia’s voice darkened like a purple-black bruise. A warning, almost.
* * *
—
After the phone call I wandered through the house, touching Lacie’s things. That’s what I did sometimes during these long lonely daylit hours when I was supposedly writing my book: touch Lacie’s things and wonder about her. Why had she let her subscription to Harper’s lapse? Why was she invited to Fabienne Hook’s solo show about bioluminescence? Did she ever eat her dark chocolate?
Living with Lacie while writing about her had gone from deeply bizarre to completely normal in a remarkably short amount of time. After all, I wasn’t writing about the real Lacie, but the cipher in my mind. It seemed simple enough to hold them apart, though every so often I plucked a detail from her life. No harm in that. But now Portia wanted me to get into her head.
That day, I found myself standing in the doorway to her room, looking at the unmade bed, the accordion drying rack, the stacks of paperback books. Right, I thought. This is what I haven’t let myself do.
I didn’t snoop. I will say that for myself. Okay, maybe I opened her underwear drawer, but the sight of the Victoria’s Secret bra—we’re talking red lace, push-up, wires—discombobulated me. I thought Lacie was better than that.
Then I went through her closet, but only because I wanted to find the dress she had been wearing that morning at the farmers’ market. It was a cheap dress, pale peach, with a sweetheart neckline. I saw her again, picking through those fresh herbs. The way the cheese man had held out his knife. Her fear when she had first seen me.
Soon I was kicking off my jeans. Pulling my shirt over my head. The dress swished as it settled around me, clung to my hips as it clung to hers, scooped a soft line above my breasts. I studied the mirror.
In the pale dress I looked like Lacie. Sexy. I smoothed my hand over my stomach, sighing. Was this what Ian liked? Had he seen her in this dress, did it make him want to fuck her? What was their fucking like? Did he still make her cry?
I hurried to my desk and began to type.
Once we were pirates.
Standing in the hot black wings, my face stiff with makeup, eyelashes gummy, lips tacky, I buzzed: with Leo, with Lacie, with us. Leo flicking dust off my costume, Lacie straightening his crinkled stockings, the two of them laughing and mouthing the words to every song. Best of all, the long fight, cheering on Captain Hook, our knees sore against the auditorium stage, Leo’s thigh against mine. Scalding.
Why, even? He was just a boy. A pretty boy, long and lanky, with a loping walk and dark, smeary eyes. Skin so pale you could see blue blood beneath. He played the guitar. He was, in seventh grade, still nice to girls. Once he borrowed my eraser in math class; once he said he would write a song for me, though he never did. Leo, Leo Kupersky: every class has a boy like him, delicate, fawnlike, more beautiful than handsome, upon which adolescent girls can safely pin their fantasies. They should stagger under the weight of our dreams, these pretty boys, but no, Leo enjoyed our love, he loved it.
We roamed the halls of the school during the first act, pressing our faces against the dark windows of the locked classroom doors, our dull jail cells suddenly exotic on a Saturday night. In our striped tights and felt vests, we clowned around, slaying the dead hours cottoning our brief moments onstage. We squinted and said, “You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,” and “Can you give me a back rub? My shoulders are tense.” Leo always gave the back rubs, his long hands, muscled from guitar, working first Lacie’s shoulders and then mine.
We were cast as Starkey, Bill Jukes, and Noodler, and our big moment came when we brought the theatrically squirming Tiger Lily to Captain Hook. Pure heaven: the three of us in a music classroom with Lydia Firkins and Walt Stevens, learning how to drag Lydia to Walt, how to coordinate our limbs.