2. Serena
Serena
“…just take the freaking Uber, Ser.”
“I’d rather save the twenty bucks,” I mutter, even as the first drops of rain hit my arms. I walk down the street in the vibrant, wealthy neighborhood in which Alex and I currently live.
It’s like a beautiful screensaver, all pruned rose bushes and cobblestone driveways.
The kind of place I would have dreamed about living when I was a kid, getting shuffled around from home to home.
Sometimes they were nice, suburban houses like this. Sometimes they were trailers, farmhouses. Sometimes the nice houses had bad people, and sometimes the other way around.
Usually, I love doing photoshoots in May, especially with the lilacs blooming, but today I spent a lot of time thinking about that townhouse.
I was a little distracted as I repositioned the gangly teen, and assured the grad’s mother I could definitely replace the gray lid of a sky with blue and puffy clouds.
“I do not understand you,” Bianca mutters on the other end of the line, pulling me from my thoughts. “It’s not worth twenty bucks to stay dry?”
Just from the shifting in the background, I can picture where she is—sitting on her dusty rose duvet, leaning against the wall plastered with Polaroids and magazine clippings. Her room is small, but mine was the smallest in our house.
Well, not my house anymore. When I met Alex, I was living in a gorgeous old Victorian with what felt like a dozen roommates. Sometimes, like now, I still feel a pang of jealousy for what I left behind. Especially when I can practically smell whatever Lillie is cooking right now through the line.
“It’s twenty bucks plus tip. Besides, I’ll make it home just before the rain really starts coming down,” I say, my voice sounding far more confident than it should. The sky above me has darkened from a placid, flat gray to something heavier, darker. Clouds pregnant with the promise of a storm.
“Is that your last grad shoot? Like, of the season?”
“Yes.”
Bianca hesitates, “…well, did you have any ideas for a new project? We could take the train to Coney Island like we did that one time.” When I say nothing, just listen to the thump, thump of my feet against the sidewalk, Bianca goes on, “I know you hate it when I push but you’re always working, Ser. ”
“I have my whole life in front of me,” I say, catching myself thinking about that townhouse again.
My whole life is ahead of me, but it won’t take place in Gramercy Park.
Instead, it will be in some polished chrome box outside the city with tall, shining gates and a perfectly manicured lawn.
“After Alex and I settle on a place, I’ll think about doing another project.
But right now, I’m just trying to… pull my weight. ”
Bianca is quiet again. We’ve been friends since college, but the whole “rich-girl, poor-girl” thing has always been a quiet, persistent barrier between us.
She grew up like Alex—beautiful homes and so many expensive vacations.
I didn’t know her back then, but I visited her house once when we were in college.
Thinking back, I could picture it. Could hear the swift zip of a school uniform’s skirt, feel the pad of freshly vacuumed carpet under her feet, see the glow of her MacBook Pro as she did homework, clicking and typing.
The gentle knock on the door from her mom, bringing her a plate of carrot chips and organic vegetable dip.
Needless to say, my childhood was nothing like that.
“But you shouldn’t have to pull your weight.”
I sigh. This is another conversation Bianca and I have had at length, and another perspective of mine that she just doesn’t understand. “Alex is loaded. The kind of money he has? From his dad? There’s like, no reason why you should have to contribute at all.”
From the moment I mentioned Alex’s last name, Bianca has acted a little like a fangirl. Are you talking about the Oakleys? Like Stephen Oakley? Seriously, Serena, how do you not recognize that name? Can you set me up with one of his brothers?
“Gee, thanks, Bianca, I should throw away my dreams, just resign myself to the life of a little housewife and?—”
“—no, I didn’t say that.” A pause, then, “He can afford a housekeeper, too. What’s the point in being with someone rich just to keep living like you did before?”
“Maybe I didn’t get together with him for his money. Maybe that’s the point you’re missing, B.”
“I’m not saying you did! But it’s like, a perk, right?
” There’s more rustling on her end of the line, and now I know she’s pacing back and forth in her room, socks shuffling against the vintage rug laid over scuffed hardwood.
“Like, you don’t get with a guy who’s well-endowed just to be content with oral! ”
“Yu-ck,” I laugh, and it breaks through the tension. Bianca laughs, too, snorting a little at the end, and I’m reminded of the reason she and I are friends. Because even in conversations like this, we know how to pull it back. How to be insistent and gentle at the same time.
She learned it from navigating her strict family life. I learned it from navigating all aspects of mine.
There’s a moment of quiet, nothing but shuffling on Bianca’s end and the hollow sound of my footfalls against the sidewalk in my head, muffled by my earbuds.
Then, as seriously as I can, I say, “It’s important to me that whatever place we pick is mine, too.
Obviously, I can’t put in as much as Alex.
But I’m working so my name can go on the deed, and I can feel like it belongs to me. ”
I don’t need to elaborate on why that’s important to me. Why I would never do all this just for Alex to “take care of things” and have only his name on our place.
That’s how we’re operating right now, just because Alex didn’t want to tell his landlord about me moving in. “He’s kind of a tight-ass,” he’d said, brushing off my concerns. “But he won’t ever come by. Don’t worry about it.”
But chipping in with rent is a little different than sinking my money into a house. I’ve been working on trust. Our relationship counselor helped me identify it as one of my key issues. That’s why we opened a joint savings account to save up for the house.
“I know,” Bianca says, and there’s something small about her voice that I can’t quite put my finger on. “I’m just…worried. Maybe it would be a good idea for you to slow down with Alex? Especially with everything the two of you have been through. He might…”
But I don’t hear the rest of what she says because I turn the corner onto our street, and my mind stalls out.
The rain is coming down pretty hard now, so at first I think that must be what’s causing the illusion. That I must be hallucinating.
Then I pick up the pace, feet clomping against the sidewalk, camera bag thumping against my hip. I get close enough to our house and realize I’m not imagining anything.
There’s stuff on the lawn.
Not just stuff. My stuff.
The lawn is littered with mounds of shiny black plastic and some items that are not in bags, everything slicked with rain. They’re scattered like someone stood on the top step and launched them, not caring about where they landed.
The rain comes down harder as I walk up the sidewalk, the rain coming down even harder now. It plays a pretty staccato against the dark, shining trashbags that contain my entire life.
“Serena. Are you there? What’s happening?” Bianca’s voice is a little shrill, and I think she might have said my name quite a few times before I finally heard her.
“He threw my things on the lawn,” I say, my voice catching on lawn when I realize that, while my clothes are bagged up and safe from the rain, my record player is sitting on the bottom step, decidedly wet, and likely ruined.
Growling, I grab the record player—hefty and uneven, the brass horn rubbing against my cheek—and haul it up under the overhang of the front porch. I set it down as gently as I can, then straighten up and face the front door.
And somehow, I have enough hope left inside me to think that the door might open. That there’s some explanation for this. Maybe there was an ant infestation or something. Maybe someone was robbing us, and he fought to save my things.
An argument wages internally. One part of me insists that Alex wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t throw my things on the front lawn. Wouldn’t stuff my hoodies and fleeces, jeans and underwear, shirts and jackets, into black garbage bags.
Not after sitting in counseling with me, listening to me grind out the stories, pry them up from the deepest parts of myself. Not after I explained, in detail, the particular embarrassment of moving your things from foster home to foster home, all tied up in ugly black bags.
My life, nothing more than rubbish. Like they could have rolled me right up in the bag, too. Forget the stork, kids like me were dropped off by the trash man.
Letting out a low growl, I surge forward and grab the door handle, depressing the thumb lever and pushing.
It doesn’t budge.
“No,” I mutter, shaking my head, pushing my wet hair out of my face. “No.”
Like me denying it can stop it from happening. Like this is my delusion, instead of Alex’s cruelty.
Fingers trembling, I punch in the code for the deadbolt, wait for a moment as my throat squeezes painfully. It responds with three disappointed beeps and a little red, blinking light.
Denied.
He changed the code. Even though I know it’s useless, I drop my camera bag on the porch, dig into the very bottom of it to find the keys I never use—Alex had the keypad installed when we first moved in—and drag them out.
Of course, when I try to slide a key into the deadbolt, it stops halfway inside.
“Serena, what the hell is going on?” I can only barely hear Bianca through the roaring in my head. Her voice is muffled and tinny, like a hand reaching out to me through the haze.
Turning, I stand at the top of the stairs and stare out at the rest of my belongings—vintage records, old cameras, bags and bags of clothes—sitting out in the rain.
I open my mouth to tell her, to calmly explain that it’s happened again. That I thought I found a home, and somehow it’s been ripped away from me.
But instead of words, the only thing I manage to release is a broken, wounded sob.