Just One Day (13 page)

Sixteen

NOVEMBER

New York City

T
he last time I saw Melanie, she had a fading pink streak in her blond hair and was
wearing her micro-skimp Topshop uniform with some teetering platform sandals she’d
picked up at the end-of-season sale at Macy’s. So when she charges at me on a crowded
street corner in New York’s Chinatown as soon as I’m disgorged from the bus, I hardly
recognize her. Now the pink streak is gone; her hair is dyed dark brown with a reddish
tint. She has severe bangs cut short across her forehead, and the rest of her hair
is secured back into a bun with a pair of enamel chopsticks. She’s wearing this weird,
funky, flowered dress and a pair of beat-up cowboy boots, and she has cat-shaped granny
eyeglasses on. Her lips are painted blood red. She looks amazing, even if she looks
nothing like my Melanie.

At least when she hugs me, she still smells like Melanie: hair conditioner and baby
powder. “God, you got skinny,” she says. “You’re supposed to gain your freshman fifteen,
not lose it.”

“Have you had dining hall food?”

“Yeah. Hello, all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar. That alone makes the tuition worthwhile!”

I pull back. Look at her again. Everything is new. Including the eyewear. “You need
glasses?”

“They’re fake. Look, no lenses.” She pokes through the air right to her eyes to demonstrate.
“It’s part of my whole punk-rock librarian look. The musician guys love it!” She pulls
off her glasses, sweeps down her hair. Laughs.

“And no more blond hair.”

“I want people to take me seriously.” She puts her glasses back on and grabs the handle
of my suitcase. “So, how’s almost-Boston?”

When I chose my college, Melanie made fun of the fact it was five miles outside of
Boston, like the town we grew up in was twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. She’d
said I was circling urban life. She meanwhile, dove right in. Her school is in downtown
Manhattan.

“Almost good,” I answer. “How’s New York?”

“Beyond good! So much to do! Like tonight, we have options: There’s a party at the
dorm, a decent club with eighteen-and-over night on Lafayette, or a friend of a friend
invited us to a loft party in Greenpoint, where this awesome band is playing. Or we
could go to the last-minute tickets place in Times Square and see a Broadway show.”

“I don’t care. I’m just here to see you.”

I feel the slightest pang when I say that. Even though it is technically true that
I’m here to see her, it’s not the whole story. I was going to see Melanie at home
for Thanksgiving in a few days anyway, but when my parents booked my tickets, they
said I had to take the train because flights were too unreliable and expensive on
a holiday weekend.

When I imagined six hours on a train, I almost felt sick. Six hours of pushing back
memories. Then Melanie mentioned that her parents were driving down the Tuesday before
Thanksgiving to do some shopping and driving her back, so I got the brilliant idea
to take the cheap Chinatown bus to New York and catch a lift back home with Melanie.
I’ll get the bus back to Boston too.

“Aww, I’m happy to see you as well. Have we ever gone this long without seeing each
other?”

I shake my head. Not since we met.

“Okay, so dorm party, Broadway show, club, or really kick-ass band in Brooklyn?”

What I really want to do is go back to her room and watch movies and hang out like
in the old days, but I suspect that if I suggested that, Melanie would accuse me of
being adventure averse. The party in Brooklyn sounds the least appealing, and is probably
what Melanie wants to do, so it’s probably what I should choose. So I do.

It’s like I picked the right answer on a test, the way her eyes light up. “Excellent!
Some of my friends from school are going. We’ll eat first, then go back and drop your
stuff and get ready and trek out together. Sound good?”

“Great!”

“We’re already in Chinatown, and my favorite Vietnamese place is nearby.”

As we wind through the twisty, crowded streets, full of red lanterns and paper umbrellas
and fake pagodas, I try to keep my eyes on the sidewalk. There are signs everywhere.
One of them will inevitably say double happiness. Paris is more than three thousand
miles away, but the memories . . . One pops up, I push it away. But then another appears.
I never know when one is going to jump out at me. They are buried everywhere, like
land mines.

We go into a tiny restaurant, all fluorescent lights and Formica tables, and sit down
at a corner table. Melanie orders us some spring rolls and a chicken dish and tea
and then she folds up her glasses and puts them into a case (to better protect the
imaginary lenses?). After she pours us each a cup of tea, she looks at me and says,
“So, you’re doing better?”

It’s not so much a question as a command. Melanie saw me at my absolute lowest. When
I got back from Paris and completely lost it, she let me cry all night long, cursing
Willem for being a sleazy scoundrel just like she’d suspected all along. On the flight
home, she cast scathing looks at anyone on the plane who looked at me funny when I
kept crying for the entire eight-hour trip. When, somewhere over Greenland, I started
hyperventilating, wondering if maybe I hadn’t made an epic mistake, if maybe something
hadn’t happened, if maybe he hadn’t got waylaid, she’d set me straight.

“Yeah. He did. He got
way
laid
. By you! And then he got the hell out of Dodge.”

“But what if . . . ” I’d begun.

“Allyson, come on. In one day, you saw him get undressed by one girl, take a secret
note from another, and God knows what happened on the train with those other girls;
how you think he really got that stain on his jeans?”

I hadn’t even thought of that.

She’d taken me into the tiny airplane bathroom and shoved the Sous ou Sur T-shirt
in the garbage. Then we’d flushed the coin he’d given me down the toilet, where I
imagined it falling all those thousands of feet, sinking into the ocean below.

“There, we’ve destroyed all evidence of him,” she’d said.

Well, almost. I hadn’t told her about the photo on my phone, the one Agnethe took
of the two of us. I still haven’t deleted it, though I haven’t looked at it, not even
once.

When we got back home, Melanie was ready to put the trip behind her and turn her attention
to our next chapter: college. I understood. I should’ve been excited too. I just wasn’t.
Every day we schlepped to IKEA and Bed, Bath & Beyond, to American Apparel and J.
Crew with our moms. But it was like I had a permanent case of jet lag; all I wanted
to do was take naps on the display beds. When Melanie left for school two days before
me, I burst into tears. Everyone else thought I was crying for the pending separation
from my best friend, but Melanie knew better, which was maybe why she sounded a little
impatient when she hugged me and whispered into my ear, “It was just one day, Allyson.
You’ll get over it.”

So when Melanie asks me now if I’m better, I can’t let her down. “Yes,” I tell her.
“I’m great.”

“Good.” She claps her hands together and pulls out her phone. She fires off a text.
“There’s a guy going tonight, a friend of my friend Trevor. I think you’ll like him.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so.”

“You just said you’re over the Dutch dickwad.”

“I am.”

She stares at me. “The first three months of college are the most action you’re supposed
to get in your life. Have you so much as blinked at a guy?”

“I’ve mostly kept my eyes closed during all the wild orgies.”

“Ha! Nice try. You forget I know you better than anyone. I’ll bet you haven’t even
kissed anyone.”

I pull the weird innardy parts out of the spring roll, wiping the excess grease on
a paper napkin. “So?”

“So the guy I want you to meet tonight. He’s way more your type.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Though I know what it means. It was absurd to think
that
he
was ever my type. Or I his.

“Nice. Normal. I showed him your picture and he said you looked dark and mysterious.”
She reaches out to touch my hair. “Though you should cut your hair into the bob again.
Right now it’s more of a blob.”

I haven’t cut my hair since London, and it hangs down my neck in a messy curtain.

“That’s the look I’m going for.”

“Well, you’re achieving it. But anyhow he’s really nice, Mason—”

“Mason? What kind of name is that?”

“You’re getting hung up on a name? You sound just like your mother.”

I resist the urge to stab her through the eye with a chopstick.

“Anyhow, who cares? Maybe his name is really Jason but he just wanted to call himself
Mason,” Melanie continues. “Speaking of, no one calls me Melanie here. They call me
Mel or Lainie.”

“Two names for the price of one.”

“It’s college, Allyson. No one knows who you were. There’s never a better time to
reinvent yourself. You should try it.” She gives me a pointed look.

I want to tell her that I did. It just didn’t take.

_ _ _

Mason actually turns out to be not that bad. He’s smart and slightly nerdy, and from
the South, which explains the name, I guess, and he speaks in a lilting accent, which
he makes fun of. When we get to the party on a desolate stretch of windblown street,
miles from the subway stop, he jokes that he’s from the hipster police and do I have
enough tattoos to be in this part of town. At which point Trevor shows off his tribal
armband and Melanie starts talking about the “tat” she’s thinking of getting on her
ankle or butt or other places girls get them, and Mason looks at me and rolls his
eyes a little.

At the party, an elevator opens up directly into a loft, which is both huge and decrepit,
with giant canvases all over the walls and the smell of oil paint and turpentine.
It smelled like this in the squat. Another land mine. I kick it away before it explodes.

Melanie and Trevor are going on and on about this kick-ass band, whose grainy video
they show me on Melanie’s phone. They’re congratulating themselves on seeing them
at a place like this, before the whole world discovers them. When the band fires up,
Melanie—Mel, Lainie, whoever—and Trevor hop to the front and start dancing like crazy.
Mason hangs back with me. It’s too loud to attempt conversation, which I’m glad about,
but I’m also glad that someone stayed with me. I feel my tourist sign flashing, and
I’m on native soil.

After what seems like forever, the band finally takes a break; the ringing in my ears
is so loud it’s like they’re still playing.

“Care for a libation?” Mason asks me.

“Huh?” I’m still half deaf.

He mimes drinking something.

“Oh, no thanks.”

“I’ll. Be. Right. Back,” he says, exaggerating the words like we’re lip-reading.

Meanwhile, Melanie and Trevor are doing a kind of lip-reading of their own. They’re
in a corner on a couch, making out. It’s like they don’t notice anyone else in the
room. I don’t want to watch them, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Seeing them kiss
makes me physically ill. It’s hard to push that memory down. The hardest. It’s why
I keep it buried the deepest.

Mason comes back with a beer for himself and a water for me. He sees Melanie and Trevor.
“It was bound to happen,” he tells me. “Those two have been circling each other for
weeks like a pair of dogs in heat. I wondered what was going to trip the wire.”

“Alcohol and ‘kick-ass’ music,” I say, making air quotes.

“Vacations. Easier to start something up when you know you don’t have to see someone
for a while. Takes the pressure off.” He glances at them. “I give them two weeks,
tops.”

“Two weeks? That’s pretty generous. Some guys wouldn’t give it more than a night.”
Even over the din, I can hear my bitterness. I can taste it in my mouth.

“I’d give you more than a night,” Mason says.

And, oh, it is so the right thing to say. And who knows? Maybe he’s even sincere,
though by now I know that I cannot be trusted to discern sincerity from fakery.

But still, I want to be over this. I want all those memories to disappear or to be
supplanted with something else, to stop haunting me. So when Mason leans in to kiss
me, I close my eyes, and I let him. I try to lose myself in it, try not to worry if
the bitterness in my mouth has actually given me bad breath. I try to be kissed by
someone else, try to
be
someone else.

But then Mason touches my neck, to the spot on it where the cut from that night has
since healed, and I pull away.

He was right, after all; it didn’t leave a scar, though part of me wishes it had.
At least I’d have some evidence, some justification of this permanence. Stains are
even worse when you’re the only one who can see them.

Seventeen

DECEMBER

Cancún, Mexico

I
t has become tradition when we arrive in Cancún for Melanie and me to strip to our
bathing suits as soon as we get into the condo and run to the beach for an inaugural
swim. It’s like our vacation baptism. We’ve done it for every one of the last nine
years we’ve come down here.

But this year, when Melanie digs through her suitcase for a bikini, I go to the little
desk next to the kitchen that normally holds nothing but cookbooks and prop open my
textbooks. Every day, from four to six, I am to have study hall. I get New Year’s
Day off, but that’s it. These are the terms of my parole.

I kept my grades a secret throughout the entire semester, so when the report cards
showed up at the end of the term, it was kind of a shocker. I’d tried. I really had.
After my midterms were so dismal, I’d tried harder, but it wasn’t like my bad grades
were a result of slacking off. Or skipping classes. Or partying.

But I might as well have been partying, given how tired I was all the time. It didn’t
matter if I got ten hours of sleep the night before—once I set foot in the lecture
hall and the professor started droning on about wave motion, writing up equations
on the monitor, the numbers would start dancing before my eyes and then I’d feel my
lids grow heavy, and I’d wake to other students tripping over my legs to get to their
next class.

During Reading Week, I drank so much espresso that I got no sleep at all, as if I
was using up all the credits from the class naps. I crammed as hard as I could, but
by that point, I’d fallen so behind, I was beyond help.

Given all that, I thought it was miraculous I finished the semester with a 2.7.

Needless to say, my parents thought otherwise.

When my grades came through last week, they flipped out. And when my parents flip
out, they don’t yell—they get quiet. But their disappointment and anger is deafening.

“What do you think we should do about this, Allyson?” they asked me as we sat at the
dining room table, as if they were truly soliciting my opinion. Then they presented
two options. We could cancel the trip, which would be terribly unfair for the rest
of them, or I could agree to go under certain conditions.

Melanie shoots me sympathy looks as she disappears to change into her suit. Part of
me wishes she’d boycott the beach in solidarity, though I know that’s selfish, but
it seems like something the old Melanie would’ve done.

But this is the new Melanie. Or the new, new Melanie. In the month since Thanksgiving,
she looks totally different. Again. She cut her hair all asymmetrical and fringy,
and she got a nose ring, which her parents gave her crap about until she told them
it was between that and a tattoo. Now that she’s changed into a bikini, I see that
she’s let her armpit hair grow, though her hair is so fine and blond, it barely shows.

“Bye,” she mouths as she slips out the front door, her mom, Susan, thrusting a tube
of SPF-40 into her hands. My mom is digging through a suitcase for her special magnifying
glass so she can check all mattresses for bedbugs. When she finds it, she walks by
me and pretends to look at my chem book with it. I snap the book shut. She gives me
a pissy look.

“You think I want to be your warden? I thought I’d have all this free time now that
you’re in college, but it’s like keeping you on track is its own full-time job.”

Who asked you to keep me on track?
I fume. In my head. But I bite my lip and open the chemistry textbook out and dutifully
reread the first chapters as Mom has instructed me to do for catch-up. They make no
more sense to me now than they did the first time I attempted them.

That night, we all six go out to dinner at the Mexican restaurant, one of the eight
restaurants attached to the resort. We go here every year for our first night out.
The waiters wear giant sombreros, and there’s a traveling mariachi band, but the food
tastes the same as it does at El Torrito back home. When the waiter takes our drink
orders, Melanie asks for a beer.

The parents gawk at her.

“We’re legal to drink here,” she says casually.

Mom gives Susan a look. “I don’t think that’s wise,” Mom says.

“Why not?” I challenge.

“If you want my opinion, it has to less to do with the age than the expectation. You’ve
grown up with a drinking age of twenty-one, so you’re not necessarily prepared for
drinking now,” is Susan’s therapist answer.

“I’m sorry, but did you not go to college?” I ask. “I can’t imagine it’s changed that
much. Do you not remember how all anyone does is drink?”

My parents look at each other, then at Susan and Steve.

“Is that’s what going on with you? Have you been drinking too much at school?” Dad
asks.

Melanie laughs so hard that the special bottled water Mom brings sprays through her
nose. “I’m sorry, Frank, but do you not even know Allyson?” They continue to stare.
“On the tour last summer, everyone drank.” There is a moment of shocked silence. “Oh,
spare me! The legal drinking age in Europe is eighteen! Anyhow, everyone drank but
Allyson. She’s totally straight and narrow. And you’re asking if she’s boozing it
up at college? That’s ludicrous.”

My dad stares at me, then at Melanie. “We’re just trying to understand what’s going
on with her. Why she got a two-seven GPA.”

Now it’s Melanie’s turn to gawk.
“You got a two-seven?”
She clamps her hand over her lips and mouths, “Sorry.” The look she gives me is one
part surprise, one part respect.

“Melanie got a three-point-eight,” Mom brags.

“Yes, Melanie is a genius, and I am an idiot. It’s official.”

Melanie looks wounded. “I go to the Gallatin School. Everyone gets As,” she says apologetically.

“And Melanie probably drinks,” I say, knowing full well she does.

She looks nervous for a second. “Of course I do. I don’t pass out or anything. But
it’s college. I drink. Everyone drinks.”

“I don’t,” I say. “And Melanie has the A average, and I have the C, so maybe I should
go on a few benders and things will even out. Maybe that’s a much better idea than
this stupid study hall you have me in.”

I’m really into this now, which is kind of crazy, because I don’t even want a beer.
One of the few things I like about this restaurant is the virgin margaritas—they’re
made with fresh fruit.

Mom turns to me, her mouth ready to catch some flies. “Allyson, do you have a drinking
problem?”

I smack my hand to my head. “Mother, do you have a hearing problem? Because I don’t
know that you heard a word I said.”

“I think she’s saying that you might ease up a little and let them have a beer with
dinner,” Susan says.

“Thank you!” I say to Susan.

My mom looks to my dad. “Let the girls have a beer,” he says expansively as he waves
the waiter back over and asks for a couple of Tecates.

It’s a victory of sorts. Except that I don’t actually like beer, so in the end, I
have to pretend to sip from mine as it grows sweaty on the table, and I don’t order
the virgin margarita I really wanted.

_ _ _

The next day, Melanie and I are sitting at the giant pool together. It’s the first
time we’ve managed to be alone since we got here.

“I think we should do something different,” she says.

“Me too,” I say. “Every year we come down here and we do the same things. We go to
the same frigging ruins, even. Tulum is nice, but I was thinking we could branch out.
Talk our parents into going somewhere new.”

“Like swimming with the dolphins?” Melanie asks.

Dolphin swimming is different, but it’s not what I’m after. Yesterday, I was looking
at the map of the Yucatán Peninsula in the lobby, and some of the ruins are inland,
more off the beaten path. Maybe we’d find a bit more of the real Mexico. “I was thinking
we could go to Coba or Chichén Itzá. Different ruins.”

“Oh, you’re so wild,” Melanie teases. She takes a slurp of iced tea. “Anyhow, I’m
talking about New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh. You mean you don’t want to do the Macarena with Johnny Maximo?” Johnny Maximo
is this washed-up Mexican movie star who now has some job with the resort. All the
mothers love him because he’s handsome and macho and is always pretending to mistake
them for our sisters.

“Anything but the Macarena!” Melanie puts down her book, something by Rita Mae Brown
that looks like it’s for school but Melanie says is not. “One of the bartenders told
me about some big party on the beach in Puerto Morelos. It’s a local thing, though
he says lots of tourists come, but people like us. Young people. There’s going to
be a Mexican reggae band, which sounds bizarre. In a good way.”

“You’re just looking for a guy under sixty to make out with come midnight.”

Melanie shrugs. “Under sixty, yes. A guy? Maybe not.” She gives me a look.

“What?”

“I’ve sort of being doing the girl thing.”

“What?!” It comes out a shout. “Sorry. Since when?”

“Since right after Thanksgiving. There was this one girl and we met in film theory
class and we were friends and one night we went out and it just happened.”

I look at the new haircut, the nose ring, the hairy armpits. It all makes sense. “So,
are you a lesbian now?”

“I prefer not to label it,” she says, somewhat sanctimoniously, the implication being
that
I
need to label everything.
She’s
the one who’s constantly branding herself: Mel, Mel 2.0. Punk-rock librarian. I ask
her girlfriend’s name. She tells me they’re not into defining it like that, but her
name is Zanne.

“Is that with an
X
?”

“
Z.
Short for Suzanne.”

Doesn’t anybody use a real name anymore?

“Don’t tell my parents, okay? You know my mom. She’d make us process it and talk about
it as a phase of my development. I want to make sure this is more than a fling before
I subject myself to that.”

“Please, you don’t have to tell me about parental overanalysis.”

She pushes her sunglasses up her nose and turns to me. “Yeah, so what’s that all about?”

“What do you mean? You’ve met my parents. Is there a part of my life they’re
not
involved in? They must be freaking out to not have their fingers literally in every
aspect of what I’m doing.”

“I know. And when I heard about the study hall, I figured it was that. I thought maybe
you had a low B average. But a two—point—seven? Really?”

“Don’t
you
start on me.”

“I’m not. I’m just surprised. You’ve always been such a kick-ass student. I don’t
get it.” She takes a loud slurp of her mostly melted iced tea. “The Therapist says
you’re depressed.”

“Your mom? She told you that?”

“I heard her mention it to your mom.”

“What did my mom say?”

“That you weren’t depressed. That you were pouting because you weren’t used to being
punished. Sometimes I really want to smack your mom.”

“You and me both.”

“Anyhow, later on my mom asked me if
I
thought you were depressed.”

“And what’d you tell her?”

“I said lots of people have a hard time freshman year.” She gives me a sharp look
from behind her dark glasses. “I couldn’t tell her the truth, could I? That I thought
you were still pining for some guy you had a one-night stand with in Paris.”

I pause, listening to the shriek of a little kid jumping off the high dive. When Melanie
and I were little, we used to hold hands and jump together, over and over again.

“But what if it’s not him? Not Willem.” It’s weird saying his name out loud. Here.
After embargoing it for so long.
Willem
. I scarcely even allow myself to think it in my head.

“Don’t tell me another guy dicked you over!”

“No! I’m talking about
me
.”

“You?”

“It’s, like, the me I was that day. I was different somehow.”

“Different? How?”

“I was Lulu.”

“But that was just a name. Just pretend.”

Maybe it was. But still, that whole day, being with Willem, being Lulu, it made me
realize that all my life I’ve been living in a small, square room, with no windows
and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along
and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I’d never even seen before. Then
he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day,
I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone,
and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can’t seem
to find that door.

“It didn’t feel pretend,” I tell Melanie.

Melanie arranges her face in sympathy. “Oh, sweetie. It’s because you were all hopped
up on the fumes of infatuation. And Paris. But people don’t change overnight. Especially
you. You’re Allyson. You’re so solid. It’s one of the things I love about you—how
reliably
you
are.”

I want to protest. What about transformations? What about the reinvention she’s always
going on about? Are those only reserved for her? Is there a different standard for
me?

“You know what you need? Some Ani DeFranco.” She pulls out her iPhone and shoves the
buds in my ears, and as Ani goes on about finding your voice and making it heard,
I feel so frustrated with myself. Like I want to pull my skin wide open and step out
of it. I scrape my feet against the hot cement floor and sigh, wishing there was someone
I could explain this to. Someone who might understand what I’m feeling.

And for one small second, I do imagine the person I could talk to, about finding this
door, and losing it. He would understand.

But that’s the one door that needs to stay shut.