Kissing in America (24 page)

“Eva Roth.”

He eyed me warily. I knew I probably looked like a crazy person, my eyes red, makeup smeared, dirt under my fingernails. I wiped my eyes and tried to look normal.

He took a long time going through forms, lists of paper in front of him. “Don't see an Eva Roth here.”

“I'm on it.
The Smartest Girl in America
. Look—I spoke to the other guard, Eddie—can't you call him, please? He'll let me back in, he promised—”

He picked up his walkie-talkie and mumbled a few things
to someone on the other end.

“Set's closed,” he said. “They're not letting anybody in.”

“They have to.”

My stomach twisted. This could not be happening. He had to let me in. I couldn't let Annie down. I couldn't not be there for her. That wasn't possible.

“Listen,” I said, and I tried to explain again. He shook his head. The more I pleaded, the more tired and exasperated he became, as if he dealt with crying girls outside the studio all the time, and I was the last straw. He told me I had to exit the gate or security would escort me out.

My chest thickened as if it was filling with water.

All Annie wanted was the scholarship—she had to win the scholarship. I stared at the gate again. Could I run through it? Knock the guard over? How had this happened? I'd thrown everything important away. All for a guy who didn't love me.

What had I done? Who was I? Who had I become?

“Please,” I pleaded with the guard one more time.

“Sorry, kid,” he said.

I went out the gate and sat back down on the grass. My hands lay in my lap. I rubbed them to get the dirt off, but it was stuck on. It seemed embedded permanently.

I thought of Freda. Scrubbing. The nonstop cleaning that had seemed so weird to me all my life now made perfect sense. She was trying to scrub off the grief. You could see it on her skin, the weight of it, in her sagging face and in the deep
furrows under her eyes. And she wasn't the only one in our family to feel its weight—it was there for Janet, too, burying her parents' ashes in purchased plots, and it had been there for my mother in the cemetery. It was there for me. Grief from losing Will, grief from my dad, grief from my mom who didn't even seem to love me. Grief from what I'd done to Annie. A dirty, heavy, permanent weight.

I was afraid that what was inside me wasn't strong enough. This empty fragile nothingness. Worse than nothingness: dark places. Dark places that might never leave.

I saw now how I'd spent so much of the last two years trying to disappear—into romances and websites and movies and TV—and now I wanted to disappear more than ever before, but it felt like the locks had been changed, the keys thrown out.

How do you walk through the world, how do you continue, when you know what a dark place it is? It's like you realize you were hiding beneath a blanket, and now the blanket's blown off and you see the universe for what it really is: a place where terrible things happen, the worst things, a place where your father can fall from the sky, and the romances that saved you are lying fantasies. How do you get up each day, when you know that? When you know the truth?

There's nothing in this world but mad love.

—Mary Oliver

T
he Smartest Girl in America
set was bathed in pink light. The sign on the wall sparkled and flashed; even the podiums glittered like crushed diamonds.

I watched the whole thing from the hotel room as I hid under the covers.

The set looked much fancier and glossier on TV than it had in real life. You couldn't tell that the sign was made of particle board and flimsy plastic.

The host, Rich Cavell, spent a long time getting to know each contestant. He spent the most time with Annie. He leaned against her podium and asked about her parents' laundromat, and how her family had come to America. “And where do you dream of going to college?”

She looked gorgeous in her bright red dress, her black hair perfect; she answered each question so confidently, fearlessly, talking about MIT and microevolution and all her hopes for her future.

“Microevolution? I don't even know what that is! Har har har,” Rich Cavell laughed. His hair looked smooth as melted
wax; his lip curled when he smiled. “Now I hear you traveled all the way here by bus and car because your best friend, your official companion, has a phobia of flying.”

She nodded. He wanted her to elaborate more, but she didn't.

“And there must be some genius genes in your DNA, because here we have your cousin Grace.”

Grace's face was the color of a half-ripe tomato, part red and part green. Sweat patches spread under her arms, darkening her blue dress. Whenever Rich Cavell asked her a question, her lips opened but no sound came out. Her mouth looked like a small empty hollow. It was like watching myself during my dolphin presentation: she was having a panic attack.

“First-time jitters!” said Rich Cavell. The audience laughed.

Grace was the first contestant knocked out. Her father never even got a chance to help her.

Meanwhile, Annie became a force of nature. She kept winning. At the end of each round her eyes narrowed, growing even more focused; she suddenly looked closer to thirty years old than sixteen. Some outside force had taken her over. She must've been filled with adrenaline, or several other brain chemicals that she could surely, easily name. She slapped the buzzer so quickly, the girl beside her actually flinched. (Her mosquito-swatting practice with Janet had paid off.) She obliterated the other girls on almost every single question.

            
Rich Cavell [lip curling]: What are the scientific names for the human tailbone and cheekbone?

            
Annie: Coccyx and zygoma, respectively.

            
RC: Which mathematician discovered logarithms in 1614?

            
A: John Napier.

            
RC: What is the area of a trapezoid with bases of 5 inches and 9 inches, and a height of 8.6 inches?

            
A: 60.2.

            
RC [touches his waxy hair, but hair does not move]: What American sculptor is most famous for his work in South Dakota?

            
A: Gutzon Borglum, creator of Mount Rushmore.

Questions about geography, capitals, desert flora and fauna, reptiles, celebrities and jazz musicians, famous scientists, and what type of soil is created under weather conditions of less than zero degrees Celsius for at least two years (answer: permafrost). She even knew the first female poet laureate: Louise Bogan. “
No woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart”—Louise Bogan.
I'd made a notecard of that quote for her, somewhere in Ohio.

By the final round, Annie was ahead of the other girls by two hundred points. She never even needed the Companion Chamber. Then it was time for the final question.

            
Rich Cavell [in a glacially slow voice]: Who are the four [pause] best-selling [leering expression] writers of fiction [weird eye movements; obviously the man has had botox] in the world?

            
Annie: I know the first is Shakespeare. I'm sure of that. I think the next must be Agatha Christie. I don't know the other two. My best friend knows them. She must. I'm sure they're romance novelists. She'll know this. She'll know!

Annie actually bounced up and down above the podium, like a bobble toy.

They flashed to the Companion Chamber. My seat: empty.

I could see the producers practically cackling, as if they'd planned it like this, all this drama.

The camera zoomed on my empty seat.

Again.

And again.

And again.

In the hotel bed, under the blankets, I say the answer to the TV: “Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel.” Romance novelists. So simple. So perfect. So easy.

The camera switches to the girl from the audition, Lauren, the teen Barbie. She doesn't know the answer, either—but her best friend does: “
Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel!
” the friend chirps.

They flash to Annie's face. Confused. Stricken. Angry.

Even the night's talk shows pick it up. The empty seat where I should've been. They pair it with a dramatic manufactured sound, like an electronic thunderclap.

I am the Worst Friend in America.

L
ulu turned the TV off. She'd stayed in the hotel with me since she'd picked me up in the studio lot. After watching me destroy their lawn, the guard had come over to me and said, “Kid, why don't you call your mama to come get you?” and held out his phone to me. I'd called Lulu instead.

While we'd been at the studio, Lulu had spent the day napping in the hotel room and having lunch with Janet. She'd filled Janet in on everything that had happened since we'd last seen her.

Annie was staying with Janet at the condo. Annie couldn't even stand to see me.

At the hotel, I stayed in bed. Occasionally I checked my messages on Lulu's iPad to see if there was anything from Annie. Nothing. But I got an email from my mother.

You're not answering my calls or texts so I hope you'll at least read this. I called the NTSB and told them I'd changed my mind. I asked them to notify me about their findings. They've identified all the bodies and
Daddy's was not among them. Please call me back, okay? I need to talk to you. I love you. Mommy

I read it twice, three times, four. The words didn't sink in. They seemed muffled, far away. I hid deeper under the covers. I closed my eyes in the darkness, thinking that if I could burrow deep enough, then everything, including myself, would disappear.

When I woke up a while later, Lulu was reading in the chair beside me.

I felt like a shell, my insides scooped out. I didn't want to talk about the email from my mom. I wanted it, and everything, to go away.

Lulu saw that I was awake. “While you were sleeping, I swung by Janet's and got this for you.” She walked over to the doorway and picked up my backpack, which I'd left in the locker during the show. She handed it to me. My phone. My makeup. My change of clothes. I had the pillowcase of my dad's things in the bed with me, and now I put the pillowcase inside my backpack again, for safekeeping.

“Call Annie. She'll understand if you explain it to her,” Lulu said.

What could I say, though?
I'm an idiot and a loser and you're really better off not being my friend. I did something horrible. I'm a horrible person.

“Just apologize. Ask her to forgive you,” Lulu said.

I kept imagining how it could've gone differently: I could've reasoned with the guard more. Fought with him. While I slept, I dreamed about trying to enter the building again and again, until I finally got back in. Then I'd wake up and realize it was only a dream.

There was no way Annie would forgive me. I couldn't even forgive myself. Every time I replayed the show in my mind, I hated myself. She had every reason to hate me.

Lulu adjusted the pillows on her red armchair and looked out at the ocean. She called Michael to check in and left him a voice mail.

“You probably need to get back home,” I said.

“I don't—Michael's gone on his field trip this week, and it's not every day I get to stay at a beachfront hotel. How are you feeling?”

I shook my head. Images of Will in the parking lot kept flashing in front of me. My body hunched with shame. Why had we planned this whole trip? Why had I ever let myself fall in love with him? Why did I get so carried away? What was wrong with me? I knew what was wrong with me: about a thousand different things.

“If I was prettier, this wouldn't have happened. Will wouldn't have said what he said. If I was a better person. My mom is right about me. I'm so stupid. Stupid fantasies.” I shook my head again. “And I'm ugly.”

She put her book down and sat beside me on the bed.
“You're not stupid. You're not ugly. I used to think during all those years I was single—there were
a lot
of them—that I wasn't pretty enough, or thin enough—until I realized I'm just fine. It's that some people don't really know how to love other people. Some bad things happened to Will in his life, and those things maybe kind of screwed him up a bit, too. We all have to cope with so much crap. And we're all kind of screwed up. You have to find someone who, despite all their screwed-up-ness, still knows how to love you the way you need to be loved.”

She glanced down and laughed a little. “Oh, what do I know? I'm just a crazy pregnant lady. A crazy
old
pregnant lady.”

“I like your crazy,” I said, peeking out from under the covers.

As I looked at her, I thought of her husband, Michael, how he made us tea and bought us ice cream, and the way he looked at her with so much love.

She touched my arm. “You might not really fall in love again for years, who knows—and that's okay. If you really want to find love and have a life, go out there and see the world. Travel not to see a guy but for yourself. Learn who you are. How can you love anyone else unless you know who you are? Learn how to be alone.” She pushed up her sleeves. “Think of Elizabeth Bishop, traveling, stopping off in Brazil and staying there fifteen years. And writing some of the most beautiful poems ever written.”

I thought of my father. “What would my dad think if he could see me now? He'd be so disappointed in me. In my mom too. He'd hate how my mom's been since he died. He'd have wanted her to keep his stuff. To talk to me about him. Not to make decisions without me.”

She shook her head. “He'd never be disappointed in you. He loved you. And your mom. He'd know your mom is trying her best, even if she makes lots of mistakes. As we all do.” She paused. “Lord knows I do. My entire first marriage.” She sighed. “Don't turn your dad into someone he wasn't. He wouldn't want his death to have messed up your relationship with your mom.”

I nodded, trying to absorb what she was saying.

“You've worried so much about what he felt in those last minutes before he died—but knowing your dad, he probably wasn't thinking about himself. He was probably thinking of you. Wanting the best for you. Wanting you to be happy. Not wanting to have caused you pain.”

That had never occurred to me before. I'd been so focused on how afraid he must have felt as he died, and whether he felt pain, that I'd never thought he might've been thinking of us, of the people he loved.