These Girls (8 page)

“Damn it,” Timothy said. He let go of Cate and ran his hands through his hair.

“School is over in two months,” she said quickly.

Timothy didn’t seem to hear her. He began packing up his bag, cramming papers and his grading book into it. “You should go,” he said.

Cate’s heart was pounding again, this time from fear. She decided he was right; the student might come back. She should leave. But before she left, she promised, “He won’t tell.”

But even she didn’t believe it.

By the time Cate walked into Deviant Psychology the next
Monday morning, the classroom seemed swollen with whispers and nudges. Was the guy ahead of her smirking at her, or trying to catch the attention of someone just behind her? Cate wrapped her sweater more tightly around herself and sank lower in her seat.

She sat frozen throughout the class, barely hearing the lecture, her eyes fixed on Timothy again, but this time because he was the only safe spot in the room where she could look. He didn’t glance her way, not once. The notebook open on the desk before her remained blank.

She called Timothy a dozen times that afternoon and night, but he never answered the phone. And the next day, his office stayed dark and locked. A substitute took over his classes.

Before the week had ended, a school counselor phoned Cate and asked her to come in. “Professor Jones has told us what happened,” she said. “But we’d like to hear your side of things, too.”

Her side? The words were a warning; it was as if the counselor was discussing a court case rather than the happiest time of Cate’s life. Cate didn’t want to do it, but then she thought about Timothy. If he was in trouble, maybe she could help him.

The dean of the school was present, too, although the counselor was the one who conducted the interview. She asked gentle questions about how long the affair had gone on, and who had made the first move.

“Me!” Cate blurted out. “It’s not his fault! Don’t blame him!”

But the counselor just wrote something in her notebook and moved on to her next question. When the dean finally spoke up, it was to ask Cate to retake the midsemester final. Cate stared at him and realized he doubted whether she’d earned the As she’d received in the class.

“Fine,” she finally said, crossing her arms over her chest. She’d do anything for Timothy.

She sat down at a desk in the psychology classroom, and all she could think about was the empty space in front of the lectern. Where was he now? Would he lose his job? There were essay questions on the exam, and her mind wandered. She should have reviewed some of the older terms; they’d slipped out of her mind like silverfish through her fingers.

She managed to answer some questions and take a stab at the essay before time ran out. She never found out her score, but she knew she hadn’t aced it.

Cate’s concentration evaporated. She’d always been able to block out background noises—her roommates joked that she could study in the middle of a Terminator movie, which she actually had, when they’d been blaring it on the television during midterms—but now she couldn’t concentrate at all. She kept calling and e-mailing Timothy, until one day a tersely worded note arrived for her:
Please stop trying to reach me. I’m sorry.

She had to know if he was okay. She couldn’t think, couldn’t study, couldn’t escape the sensation that everyone on campus knew what she’d done. Tears slid from her eyes as she remembered the way his body had curled around hers while they slept, and how he’d brought her coffee in bed in the mornings. She missed a day of classes, then a week. It became easy to pass the morning at a café, sipping one cup of Earl Grey tea after another—she never wanted to drink coffee again—then napping through the afternoon and wasting away the evenings watching mindless sitcoms.

She lost six pounds those first two weeks. She’d never needed more than seven hours of sleep a night, but now, even with her naps, she was dozing nine or ten hours at a stretch. A warning e-mail arrived from her Statistics teacher: She’d missed an exam, an important one. The school counselor called her again, leaving a message on the answering machine in her soft voice, asking Cate to come in.

She knew if she didn’t get it together, it would be worse for Timothy, and that was what finally made her show up at the counselor’s office. Together they worked out a plan. She needed only six credits for graduation. She’d take the rest of the semester off, then knock out those final credits during the first session of summer school. Cate didn’t want to walk across the stage in a blue gown, throwing her cap into the air and cheering. She couldn’t bear the thought of celebrating.

She drank a glass of wine for courage, then called her parents and told them she’d messed up: She’d somehow overlooked the fact that she needed those extra credits to graduate. Her father was apoplectic and wanted to call the dean’s office, but she convinced him she needed to take responsibility for it. “It’s my own fault,” she said.

Where had Timothy gone? She rang his doorbell over and over again at odd times—one o’clock in the afternoon, 6:00
A.M.
, midnight—wondering, if now that she’d dropped out of school, they could resume their relationship. But no one answered. She kept an eye out for his VW Bug all over campus, but she never once saw it.

Then one day another woman answered his door.

Cate stared at her blankly.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

She was as young as Cate—younger!

“Rhonda, is someone there?” An older woman rounded the corner and looked out at Cate. “Yes?”

Cate stared past her, at the stacks of brown moving boxes lining the partially unpacked living room, and shook her head.

“I . . . I have the wrong apartment,” she said.

Two classes left—easy, summer school classes that would wrap up by the end of July. They should’ve been a snap. But Cate never attended them. She spent the morning of graduation watching
The Price Is Right,
and when her roommate Chandra,
who dreamed of starring on Broadway, packed up her car to drive to New York City a few days later, Cate tagged along. She never told her parents what she’d done. When they called her cell phone or e-mailed her, they had no idea they were reaching her in New York instead of Ohio. One lie spawned dozens of others, like a mirror shattering and creating replicas of itself.

It was easy to let her parents think she’d graduated, especially since there wasn’t a ceremony to attend in the summer. Her mother offered to come to Ohio to help her pack up her things, but Cate told her she was shipping them directly to Manhattan, where she’d located a sublet studio apartment (that part, at least, was true. Cate had found one on the Lower West Side after combing through the classified ads, and she was working as a waitress in a diner to cover the rent). The day after summer school supposedly ended, Cate traded a few shifts at the diner and went home to Philly, where she talked about the big life she planned to lead in New York, camouflaging the fact that she’d already embarked upon it.

At the time she’d been surprised her parents hadn’t questioned her more closely, especially after she slipped up and mentioned how much she loved to jog in Central Park. “I mean, I
think
I’ll love it.” She’d laughed awkwardly. It wasn’t until much later that she realized her parents were in the beginning stages of splitting up and their main focus wasn’t on her for once.

Cate had adored New York from the moment she arrived, had known this was where she was meant to be. This was a city for fresh starts, the perfect place to reinvent yourself. New beginnings could be discovered around every corner.

Although Cate didn’t love waitressing, she had a knack for it. Most of her co-workers were struggling actors or models who sometimes stumbled into work hungover or tried to ham it up with busy customers, but Cate treated her job respectfully. She kept her uniform neat, never took away a plate until she was
sure a diner was finished eating, and—she credited the generous tips she always received to this habit—she kept a close eye on coffee cups, offering refills the moment they dipped below half full. She’d learned early on never to get between New Yorkers and their morning coffee.

She’d been in the city for several months when one of her regular customers gave her a tip that was far more valuable than money. When Cate had hurried over with a clean fork to replace the one he’d dropped under the booth, he’d mentioned an opening for a temporary receptionist at the Hudson Corporation, which owned a half dozen magazines. “Interested?” he’d asked. “I work in the ad department there, and I can put in a good word if you want to give me your résumé.”

“Yes,” Cate had said instantly. A week later, she got a call to come in for an interview.

“I see you went to college at Ohio State University?” the human resources director had said, turning the statement into a question as she peered through gold-tipped reading glasses at Cate’s résumé.

“Yes, I did,” Cate had answered, feeling as if the temperature in the room had suddenly plummeted. She’d carefully ironed her best white blouse, she’d gone to the library to read past issues of all of the magazines the Hudson company published, and she’d arrived an hour early for the interview and paced the block to pass time. She’d agonized over her résumé, detailing her four years of attendance at college and her admirable GPA, hoping a cursory skimming of the page would leave the impression that she’d graduated. But the human resources director had allowed a pause to stretch out, and Cate had finally filled it.

“I had to leave before the end of my senior year because of a family crisis.” More shards splintering off the mirror. “I’m currently six credits shy of my degree, and I’m, uh, working out an
agreement with the college to fulfill those requirements by the end of the year.”

The human resources director had nodded, but Cate couldn’t tell whether she accepted the lies. Would she check?

“I’m a hard worker,” Cate had said, her mind scrambling as she tried to think of employable assets. “And I’ll never be late.”

The human resources director had laughed. “Never? Really? You can promise that?”

“Actually I can,” Cate had said.
Please believe me,
she’d thought.
I’m not lying now.
She’d blinked hard as she felt tears burn her eyes. “I’m an early riser. I go running every morning around six.”

The woman had put down her pen and leaned back in her chair. “You’re a runner?”

That was the detail that had spun around the interview; they’d chatted for ten minutes about the upcoming 10K they were both planning to race in, and when Cate had left, she’d felt buoyed by hope. This was just a temporary, low-level position, but it could be a toehold in the magazine world. If she was lucky, the human resource director might have already forgotten the gap in her résumé.

Cate never knew if it was the recommendation from the ad guy or her love of jogging that got her the job, but within a few weeks, she was answering phones and signing for messenger deliveries for
Gloss.
Then, when the receptionist who was out on maternity leave decided not to come back, the temp position flowed into a permanent one. Two years after that—long, lean years in which Cate made herself indispensable to the magazine’s editors by seeking out work that fell far beyond her job description—she was rewarded with an editorial assistant job. Although she dated occasionally, she never felt anything close to what she’d experienced with Timothy. It was easy to pour all her energy into work.

No one asked to see her résumé when an associate editor job opened up or, a few years later, when the features editor position became available. Cate was offered the promotions on the strength of her track record. Although that ambiguous piece of paper was still buried somewhere deep in the human resources office, the woman who’d interviewed her had left long ago.

And now here she was, in her first month as features editor, carrying around a lie that felt like it had been steadily gaining strength during all these years, like a tumor. She wasn’t good enough. She hadn’t even graduated from college, yet she had editorial assistants with grad degrees from top schools. And in the back of her mind, she realized she’d been waiting for someone to come along and point a finger at her and shout out her inadequacies to the world.

She chanced another look down the sidewalk at Brian Anthony and realized she’d lost sight of him.

He couldn’t have gone into the Hudson building; it wasn’t possible. Oh, God, what if he’d been hired? Could she endure having to see him every day, wondering if he knew the truth?

Their school was a big one, but he’d lived on her floor. Everyone knew she was withdrawing, and the reason why . . . And anyone who’d been in touch with Chandra would know Cate had blown off summer school to move to New York.

She had to stop torturing herself, Cate thought as she walked across the lobby and flashed her ID to pass through the electronic gate. Especially because, right now, she needed to go into a meeting and stare Sam down as they discussed the polygamy story. She was going to demand that he make it more personal. It didn’t matter if Cate was wrong or right; if she didn’t show strength now, no one would ever respect her.

Then, somehow, she had to get to Trey. She needed him to write the celebrity cover feature on Reece Moss, the piece that would prove Cate was good enough to lead the issue. Should
she just call him and ask? But if he said no, she didn’t have a backup plan. How could she possibly convince him?

Just then Cate’s cell phone rang. She looked down and saw Renee’s name flashing.

“Hey, where are you? I think we’ve got ourselves a new roommate, as long as you’re okay with it.”

As she listened, tension drained from Cate’s body and she began to smile.

Five

ABBY LAY IN BED,
scenes from her life running through her mind. The most important scenes, the ones people were always said to come back to on their deathbeds.

She saw herself falling in love with Annabelle first, that sweet little bald baby with big blue eyes. Annabelle was small and thin, with legs that seemed as fragile as chicken wings. She smelled like lavender from her scented baby lotion, and she didn’t like pacifiers, which made her look more intelligent to Abby than other babies, with those plastic rings hanging out of their mouths.