The Edge of Falling (7 page)

Trevor throws his hands up, the way he does when he’s watching a soccer game that’s going particularly badly. “You forced me to. After your sister died—”

“Don’t do that,” I say. “Don’t bring her into it.”

Trevor softens. He reaches for me. His hand grazes my arm. “I was just going to say you let me be there, in the beginning . . .” His voice trails off. “It got worse, not better.”

I close my eyes. His touch, his words, are overwhelming. Having him this close makes me feel more than I have in months. I’m not sure I like it. Feeling too much is dangerous.
It makes me want things I can no longer have. It’s what led me up to that rooftop. “She didn’t come back,” I say. “How could it have gotten better?” I shake my head, take my arm back from his grasp.

“All I ever wanted was to be there for you,” he says, his gaze dropping to the ground beneath us. “I didn’t know how to do that. I left, and I should have stayed. I should have forced you to—” His voice breaks. Trevor has never been shy about his emotions. He cried watching
The Notebook
. I think it was his suggestion to download it too.

I know my resolve has cracked somewhere in the course of this conversation. I need to get out of here before I break open completely. I cut him off. “Are we done?”

He looks at me, his blue eyes pierced, but when I turn back around and start walking, he doesn’t follow.

I walk all the way home. I know he isn’t behind me, I can sense it, but I want to turn around anyway. I have to fight the urge all the way to my front door.

When I get inside, my mother is contorted on a mat in the living room, her Pilates instructor standing over her. “Claire called,” she says, her leg making circles in the air.

I’m surprised, because usually she doesn’t remember messages. These days she doesn’t answer the phone too often, and Claire always calls on my cell, anyway.

“When?” I ask.

Her Pilates instructor, some guy named Leaf or Tree or River, gives me a pointed look.

“No problem,” I conclude for myself. “I’ll call her back.”

I leave them and head into the kitchen. I’m struck by how much I miss Peter, just knowing he’s not here. It’s weird: He was gone all summer, but having him back yesterday made me get used to his being around. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall back into old habits, how just a few hours is enough to catapult you backward, at least emotionally. But emotions don’t matter. They aren’t fact. Peter is at school, where he lives now. Things aren’t the same. I push Trevor out of my head as I reach for the phone.

“Caggs,” Claire says when she picks up.

“Yes, Claire Bear. You rang?” I can hear her plodding around her bedroom, opening and closing drawers. I know what those discontented closet sounds mean.

“Max called,” she says.

“Who’s—” But I catch myself. “Band Guy. Right.”

She makes a noise somewhere between a sigh and a grunt.

“So what’s up?” I stand in front of the refrigerator and contemplate getting a snack. It takes me at least thirty seconds to notice the fridge has been replaced. It was stainless steel this morning; now it’s all glass. You can see right through. Count how many apples are in the bin without even opening the thing.

“He invited me to some gig in Williamsburg.”

“Mm-hmm.” I’m staring at a bunch of grapes and the nectarines. My mother has belonged to a fruit-of-the-month club since before I was born. Once a month piles of pears or kiwis or pomegranates show up on our doorstep. She never eats them, and they usually just sit there until they turn and someone has to throw them away.

“Jesus, Caggs, do I have to beg? You’re coming with me.”

I open my mouth to protest, but I honestly can’t think of a single excuse. I have too much homework? Not true: I have none. I have to spend time with Trevor? That go-to has definitely expired. I’ve been working on my honesty this summer. I’ve told such a big lie, such a massively irreversible one, that I figure I need to somehow even the score. But the thing about lying is that it’s not so easy to stop. Lies need one another, like a school of fish. If you start to separate them, they’ll be killed off one by one. Sometimes the only way to keep lies alive is to tell more of them.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll come.”

Claire screeches, victorious. It’s obvious she thought she was going to have to gun way harder for me to come out tonight.

“I’ll be down at like six.” I say.

“Can you wear your red bandage dress?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. Claire gave me this Hervé Léger fire-engine-red, skin-tight dress for my birthday. I’m born on
the Fourth of July, so her reasoning was incredibly specific: “Your attitude is blue, your skin is white, and this dress is red. It’s perfect.” But it’s so tight it makes me feel like I’m being put through a juicer. There’s no way I’m putting that thing on.

“Are we going to have fun tonight?” Her tone is pointed, and I can’t help but smile. This is Claire’s role. Throughout last year, through the spring, Claire was always the one who didn’t take BS. Trevor, he was the one who held me when I cried, and asked me how I was doing, and tucked my chin against his chest, but not Claire. Claire’s job has always been to remind me that life moves on. To keep heading forward. And she takes it pretty seriously.

“Damn straight,” I say, which makes her laugh.

“Six!” she calls, and hangs up.

I take the grapes out. I was right—there are twenty-six.

*    *    *

I get to Claire’s at six thirty. Usually she feels I am not wearing enough makeup or my clothes aren’t “fun” enough and we have to go through the process of making both me and her happy (not the easiest of tasks). So it’s best to show up late to avoid as much of this as possible.

“I didn’t know we were swinging by church first. Excellent.” Claire scans my outfit—dark jeans, white tank top and this Native American necklace my mom bought me on a
trip to Paris. My mom is always doing things like purchasing Native American necklaces in
Paris
.

I push past her. The inside of their apartment smells like garlic and wine. I can hear water being drained in the kitchen and the soft sounds of Etta James.

“Hey, Mrs. Howard,” I call out.

“Darling!” Claire’s mom comes around the corner, a dish towel in hand. She’s a small woman with jet-black hair that she keeps in this longish bob. Today she looks like Audrey Hepburn: cigarette pants, white button-down, and neck scarf.

“How are you doing, sweetheart?” She pulls me into a hug, and I let myself get wrapped up in her smell—garlic and ginger and the faint hints of vanilla perfume.

“I’m good,” I say. “You know, same old.”

She eyes me. “Your mother?”

I shrug. “The usual.”

She nods and flips the dish towel over her shoulder. She looks at Claire—Claire in her leather vest and cutoff denim shorts. “I’m taking it you’re not staying for dinner?”

“We can’t,” Claire says, snatching my hand and dragging me toward the door. “We have to support Max.”

I glance back apologetically at Mrs. Howard.

Max?
she mouths to me.

I roll my eyes:
No big deal. Who knows. Claire.

“Ten!” she calls after us.

The elevator delivers us downstairs and Claire puts up her hand to hail a cab. “No L train?” I ask, half kidding. Claire never takes the subway.

“Not in heels,” she says.

A yellow cab slows and she ushers me inside. “Grand and Roebling,” she says. “Williamsburg.”

Claire starts prattling about how DJs are the new chefs, or something, and I lean back on the black plastic of the cab. I love the drive from Manhattan to Brooklyn, when the city is behind you, and you can appreciate it as this singular thing, this unit: Manhattan. It’s pretty astounding. Even for someone like me, who’s lived here her whole life. I know people joke that New York is the center of the world, but sometimes, on the bridge, it feels true. Like everything and anything of significance takes place right here in my hometown.

The entrance to the bar is hidden. It’s sandwiched between a nail salon and a deli, and the door is plain wood, unmarked. Claire opens it and we walk down a hallway and then a small flight of stairs. It’s not until we’re on the stairs that I begin to hear the music—or maybe not so much hear as feel. The ground hums and vibrates below us like there’s a locked dragon who is growing restless in his dungeon.

The bouncer eyes us and we flash our driver’s licenses. They’re fake, but we’ve had them for two years and they work pretty well. We rarely get turned away, which I think has more
to do with Claire’s connections—and legs—than the quality of our IDs. I bought them in Rhode Island when we went with Peter to look at Brown years ago. All I remember from that trip is that the three of us went to Start, this crazy dance party, and that we came home with these.

Whether it’s Claire’s legs or the IDs’ appearance of validity I don’t know, but they work again tonight. The bouncer nods us through.

When we get inside, it’s dark and loud, but not loud enough that you have to scream to talk. It’s still early. Max is onstage already, but Claire wants to get a drink. We slide our way to the bar. It’s funny, I’ve had a fake ID since I was fifteen, but I’ve never used it for anything besides getting into places. Drinking really isn’t my thing. I got drunk with Claire once, last summer at the beach house. Everyone was away and it was just the two of us. Trevor was supposed to come up, but he got stuck babysitting his little brother. My sister was in the city with my mom, Peter was on some postgrad safari, and my dad was probably away on business, I don’t remember.

Anyway, we got bombed. We drank champagne straight from the bottle. We had like one each, I think. At a certain point it got a little fuzzy. I woke up on the sofa in the morning and my head felt like it had been hammered with an iron rod. I could barely even see.

“Why did we do that?” I remember asking Claire.

She just shrugged. “Because we did.”

Claire doesn’t spend too much time considering consequences, but this quality isn’t incongruent with the rest of her. She’s all angles—sharp elbows, cheekbones, and the point where adventure meets danger—like two walls of the same room. Nothing is cloudy with her. Nothing is round. Nothing needs too much time to decide. She’s like a dart shot right through the bull’s eye—if she’s playing, it’s all or nothing.

“Orange juice.” Claire hands me a cup and takes a sip of hers—cranberry vodka, her usual drink.

She starts bobbing to the music. “They’re pretty good, right?” she says to me.

I smile to say yes, but the truth is I don’t know. I have no idea what makes good music. My iTunes collection is embarrassingly dated—some classics and Top 40 stuff. Whatever I end up stumbling into on Spotify and whatever Trevor introduced me to. The indie music scene is totally above my head. I just don’t have the sensitivity for it. Or the ear. Most of it sounds the same to me. Claire and Trevor are always saying things like music is poetry—you’re not supposed to dissect its meaning; you’re just supposed to feel it—but that’s my problem: I can’t feel it. Or if I do, I’m never sure I’m having the right reaction.

“You’re oblivious,” Claire says to me.

I roll my eyes.

She repeats it, so close I can feel the words traveling down my ear canal, bouncing around on the walls.

I mock glare at her. “Just because I don’t appreciate these hipsters the same way you do . . .”

She shakes her head and grabs my shoulders, turning me fifteen degrees to the left.

“What?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes and points to a guy at the end of the bar. He’s leaning against the counter, like he’s having a conversation with the bartender, but it’s obvious he’s looking at us. He raises his glass and eyebrows at the same time when we look over.

“Gross,” I say. “He’s old.”

It’s not true; he’s probably no older than twenty. In fact, he might even be our age, but he’s got that air. I know it. A lot of guys at Kensington have it. It’s what happens when you spend your childhood being raised by a nanny, taking a car service by yourself at eight. It’s what happens when your parents let you wander the city alone at ten, send you on a plane to visit your grandmother in the South of France or your father in Italy. You grow up faster. Not maturitywise, not at all, but something in the way you move. Those experiences age you. Seeing things, even bad things—especially bad things—that ages you.

Claire bites her lip and tosses her shoulders back. I grab her arm. “What are you doing?”

I’ve been the victim of Claire’s flirtations before, and it’s never something I wind up loving. One particular incident in Cabo comes to mind. We were on vacation with her parents in the spring of our sophomore year. After a night at our hotel, we ended up back at the villa of these two college guys. University of Wisconsin, classic frat boys. Popped collars, crew cuts, the whole bit. I hadn’t wanted to go, but Claire had begged me, and as soon as we got there, she disappeared with one, the one she had been flirting with all night. I was stuck out on some lawn chairs with the other one. He was nice—I was lucky; he didn’t even try to kiss me—but I was still so angry at Claire. I was with Trevor at the time, and I was so pissed at her for putting me in that position that I didn’t talk to her the entire rest of the trip. It was only when we were headed home, on the plane, that she turned to me, these pink sparkly sunglasses on. They were bedazzled, and across the top were the words “I LOVE CAGGIE.” It was an impressive feat, for being in Mexico, and I couldn’t help myself—I popped them off her face and onto mine.

“We’re here for Band Guy, remember?” I say to her.

“This isn’t for me; it’s for you,” she says, still smiling at the bar guy.

“I doubt he’s going to come over for me,” I say. “You’re practically giving him a lap dance from across the room.”

Claire’s head snaps around to look at me. “I’ve had it,” she says.

“What?”

“This.” She contorts her face, sticking her bottom lip out and making her eyes big like puppies’.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

She slings her arm over my shoulder. “Come on, Caggs, it’s time to move on. Trevor was great, and totally adorable in that clueless kind of way”—she tilts her head to the side, like she’s pulling up his image in her mind’s eye—“but he’s old news. Kaput.
Finito.
Ex
travaganza
. You dig me?”