The Edge of Falling (11 page)

“What really happened?” I ask, twirling some spaghetti around a fork. “With school, I mean. How come you got kicked out? At Kensington you have to basically commit murder for them to even consider making someone leave. It taints their perfect record.”

He folds his napkin onto the table and leans back in his chair. “I guess London rolls different. It wasn’t anything glamorous; I just didn’t show up.” He holds up his hands. “Okay, also, I may have called a teacher something I shouldn’t have.”

I imagine Astor having it out with Principal Calleher. It makes me snort with laugher.

“Oh, good,” he says. “You think it’s funny. Most people just think I’m a delinquent.”

“You’re not a delinquent,” I say automatically.

He raises his eyebrows. The flame from a candle on the table dances across his face.

“I just mean,” I continue, “I’m not one to judge.”

He runs his eyes over my face, like he’s trying to read something there. Then he drops his gaze to his water glass. “Anyway, as long as I don’t miss seven classes or get below a C here, I’ll graduate.”

“Seems easy enough.”

“Especially if you’re there.” He takes my hand. He just reaches across the table and loops his fingers through mine.

I’ve never been out with anyone but Trevor. Well, there was Harrington freshman year, but that hardly counts because we saw a movie with seven other people and he didn’t kiss me. He did hold my hand, though. I remember his palms were sweaty and clammy, and when he finally released my hand, I had to focus so hard on not wiping it on my jeans I missed the end of the movie. Then there was Trevor. Trevor’s hands were always warm. Even in the dead of winter, when it was too cold to snow, his palms would be toasty. “It’s just a biological necessity,” he’d say. “To ensure you always need me to keep you warm.”

Some instinct takes over and I pull away.

“What’s wrong?” Astor asks.

“Nothing,” I say, picking up my water glass. I take a small sip, keeping my eyes on the table.

“Caggie?” He sets his elbows on the table and leans forward.

“I don’t know you,” I say. I’m talking to my plate.

“But you could.” I look up and he’s staring at me again. I see something in his eyes I haven’t seen in a long time. Something that reminds me of things I’ve been trying to forget. But what’s strange is that it doesn’t make me cower, like I expect it to. It makes me lean a little bit closer.

“Why me?” I ask.

He shakes his head slowly. He picks up his knife and threads it between two fingers. “I think we’re alike. I told you that before.” He sets the knife down, glances up at me.

The night Trevor broke up with me, we were in my room. We were trying to decide whether to watch a movie, order in, or go out to eat. Well, he was, anyway. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was focused on what I was always focused on—this lump in my stomach, a stone sinking through water. I kept waiting for it to hit the bottom, but it never did.

He must have asked me what I wanted to do at least five times, but I don’t remember. Finally he stood up. I could see he was annoyed, which was unusual for Trevor. Trevor could spend the entire day filing paperwork or doing the same math problem and not get bored. It’s just his nature. But that night was different.

“This isn’t working,” he said.

“What?” I remember looking, stupidly, for some kind of appliance. I remember thinking maybe he was talking about the television or his cell phone.

“Us.” He looked at me when he said it, and I could see how much the one word hurt him. More, maybe, than it even hurt me.

I stayed on the floor and pulled my legs up to my chest. “It’s fine,” I said. “I get it.”

He shook his head. “You don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I’m not the same person I was before. You don’t want to be with this girl. It’s okay. I understand.”

He sank down to his knees then. I thought maybe he was going to start praying. “I don’t think you want me to help,” he said. “I just think it might be easier for you if I wasn’t here.”

I wanted to tell him how wrong he was. That this wasn’t about him helping; there was nothing he could do. He didn’t understand that when your sister dies there isn’t anything anyone can do. And I was mad at him. I was angry that it was his bracelet, his piece of protection, I kept seeing at the bottom of the pool. It was supposed to keep me safe, and instead it had killed her. It was at that moment, with him on his knees, that I understood something had been broken in me that was still whole in him. That I understood that we were nothing alike at all.

I blink and look at Astor. “It’s just . . . my life for the last eight months has been pretty unrecognizable. It’s hard to know what I am anymore.”

“You’re real,” he says. “You’re not a fake like those girls Abigail and Constance.” He leans forward, stretches his fingertips across the table toward mine for a second time. “I just know. I could tell the moment I met you.”

Something about the way he says the last word, “you,” like it’s chocolate on his tongue, like he’s reveling in it, makes me take his hand. I want to believe him. To see what he sees in me. In fact, for the first time since January, I feel understood.

We stay that way, our fingers looped together over the linen tablecloth, for what feels like a long time. Time passes differently when really terrible things happen. It glides out, stops short, hurtles itself backward. It’s hard to mark the moments. They don’t follow any kind of linear trajectory. But sitting with Astor in that bistro downtown something shifts, like a tectonic plate clicking into place underneath us. Time stops entirely. I’m not trying to go back to before Hayley and I’m not trying to push forward, to figure out a way to “move on.” I’m just here, now. I don’t have to carry the same burden with Astor. I don’t have to pretend I’m capable of anything I’m not.

He doesn’t need me to be different.

“Be careful—it’s Ming,” my mother says as an assistant takes a vase down from the bookcase in our living room.
Vanity Fair
is here, and they’re doing a piece on us for their “New York Royalty” issue. It will come out in three months.

We’re taking a family portrait that will go next to the one of my grandfather that hangs above the mantel. My mother is micromanaging the situation, and my dad and Peter are in a corner, checking sports scores.

Hayley runs between my mother and Peter. She’s refusing to change out of her dress—the white-and-blue one she calls her Alice in Wonderland. It has some paint splattered on it from this morning’s activity, an imperfection our mother is
refusing to overlook. She’s not in a good mood—my uncle hasn’t shown up.

My dad looks up from his phone just in time to catch Hayley as she saunters over. She seems to be showing off the paint stain like an award.

“Hi, baby,” Dad says.

Hayley sticks her hands right on her hips. She knows what he’s up to.

“You think you could do this one thing for your mother?” he asks, pointing to the crusted fuchsia marks.

Hayley has been screaming no at Mom, but for Dad she stops. I can see her thinking. So can Mom, but she pretends not to be listening.

“Okay,” Hayley says. “But then we go to Sherman’s.”

Sherman’s is her paint-supply store on Madison. My father holds up his hands in victory.

“Of course,” he tells her. “Right after we take this picture.”

She nods, and runs from the room. But then she turns back. She runs straight at my dad, gives him a kiss on the cheek.

“Knew that would cost me,” he says when she’s left.

“But worth it,” I say.

My dad glances at my mom, who is back to business, refluffing throw pillows. He doesn’t say it, but I can tell he’s thinking the same thing.

*  *  *

I roll over in bed, the last remnants of dream memory dissolving into the morning sun streaming through my window. That afternoon, almost two years ago now. It was the start of so much. My parents have always been high in New York social circles—old money, etc.—but that
Vanity Fair
piece skyrocketed things. It made us seem like we were folklore, fantasy. It made us seem great. I remember Hayley coming home from school asking why people kept bugging her about Granddad. “Did he do something bad?” she asked.

I told her no, of course not, he was just a very talked-about man. Sometimes people said nice things, and sometimes they said things that weren’t very kind at all. The truth is he was strict. He was severe. He didn’t even stay married too long. He didn’t really get along well with anyone.

Well, anyone besides me. He liked me. My mom said right away. Children weren’t really his thing—he barely once picked Peter up—but it was different with me.

I remember hours spent on my father’s study floor playing horsie with him, or reading bedtime stories at my uncle’s house in California.

There was one trip when we were walking on the beach in Malibu, just he and I. We would do that sometimes—
duck out of the house and have beach dates together.

I remember I bent to pick up a shell. It wasn’t anything special. Just one of those white ones with the ridges that line any beach. It was whole, though. That part was unusual. I handed it to him and he gave it back to me. “You keep it,” he said. He put his arm around me then, and we faced toward the ocean. I don’t remember how long we stood there, but it was a while. Long enough for me to watch a boat disappear out to sea. “You’re really mine,” he said. It was soft, but I heard him. “Your father never was, but you are.”

I never felt like I fit with my family. Not my mom or my dad, not even Peter—he’s way too self-assured. But Hayley was mine, just like I was my grandfather’s.

Sometimes I still can’t believe they are both gone.

I throw back the covers and head into the bathroom. I splash some water on my face, apply cream, change into my uniform. The kitchen is quiet. My mother is already gone. I see Peter’s baseball cap on the kitchen table,
METS
stenciled across the top. I pick it up. I know he’s not here—my mother was probably cleaning out some drawer or closet or something—but I still press it up against my chest before I set it back down. Like maybe there is a little of him in there. A little bit of some kind of home still stored inside the brim.

I keep my eyes trained off the family portrait—the one
that still hangs in our sitting room—as I leave for school. I know I’ll see Hayley, front and center. Smiling wide, new dress on, hands on her hips. Alive.

*    *    *

“Hey, wait up.”

I turn around to see Trevor jogging behind me. School has just ended, and I’m trying to hightail it home. Astor and I are going to see a movie tonight—something with sunflowers in the title, at the Angelika—and I want to change first. It’s only been three days since our dinner, but I’m anxious to see him. Some time between classes at school hasn’t really been much. Or enough.

“What?” I snap.

Trevor takes a step back. “You didn’t show up yesterday.”

“For what?” I ask. I blow some stray hair off my forehead.

He just keeps looking at me. “The first day of the
Journal
.”

The
Journal
is a creative-writing magazine that Kensington funds and puts out. Getting to be a part of it is a big deal. It’s actually published and available to the public, unlike the paper, that is just for us. Getting elected is this ridiculously rigorous process whereby you have to sign up and then be nominated and then go before a board and present your creative vision. Trevor and I got elected last year, way back in December. They plan early. I think we had the upper hand all along, though. It’s pretty common knowledge that Mrs.
Lancaster, the faculty point person, has a crush on Trevor. She’s in her sixties, probably, and she’s always saying things to Trevor like “If I were a lifetime younger, you’d have to watch out.”

Anyway, the
Journal
publishes students’ writing pieces and some printed artwork, as well as general submissions. It’s really well respected. Jonathan Franzen once had a piece published in it. A bunch of
New Yorker
contributors too. Being the school paper editor helped me, and Trevor and I landed ourselves the positions of coeditors along with a faculty member and a creative-writing professor from Columbia. We went out to our favorite diner, Big Daddy’s, to celebrate after we found out. Trevor ordered us both chocolate shakes, and we sat in the booth for hours pouring over old copies of the
Journal
and talking about how we were going to change it once it was in our hands.

“I forgot,” I say. “Sorry.” I drop my hands down by my sides. I try not to look him in the eye.

Trevor folds his arms across his chest. His school blazer is off, and he’s wearing a blue T-shirt, one I know well. It has a small ink stain at the bottom left corner, right by the seam, from the night I chewed through a pen studying for a calculus exam. When I asked him why he didn’t throw it away, he told me he liked it even more now. “It has your mark on it,” he said. “Just like I do.”

Trevor shakes his head. “I covered for you, but they weren’t happy. It’s a big deal, Caggs.”

“I’m aware,” I say.

“Our next meeting is tomorrow,” he says, taking a step closer to me. “Here.” He hands me a piece of paper with a schedule on it. “That has all the information.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.” He opens his mouth again, like he’s going to say something, but instead he just lets his arms swing to the side.

“I gotta go,” I say. I take off before either one us has the chance to say good-bye.

Seeing Trevor, talking about the
Journal
, makes me want to get to Astor even faster. When he rings the doorbell an hour later, it feels like it’s been a month.

“Miss me?” He’s leaning against the door, and he’s changed from school. He’s now wearing a blue button-down and jeans, and I can tell he’s showered from the way his hair looks—newly done. A tiny bit crunchy at the ends.

“I just saw you at school,” I say. I keep my hands by my sides. I try not to let my impatience show, although I don’t think I’m doing too good a job.