Chapter 5 #2
We’ve been talking about this for a while.
It’s been an uncommitted conversation on what I thought was both sides—me mentioning the private student loans I’m still paying down thanks to the predatory interest rates I naively agreed to at age eighteen and my wish to keep living in my small but cheap studio apartment as long as possible.
Her expressing her somewhat frustrating concern that our personal styles might clash in a shared interior space, since she’s spent so long cultivating her perfect two-bedroom condo with just the right amount of furniture and decor, and my penchant for “tacky” knickknacks is not a compatible fit for the vibe.
Since she’s the designer of the two of us, I’ve never felt like I had the better case to make for my belongings, which do tend to veer toward kitschy.
I can see her point, but that doesn’t mean I want to get rid of any of them. They’re mine for a reason.
“C’mon,” she says. She’s reading my silence not as shock, but as me wishing for her to put a little more elbow grease into this makeup. “I’ll even let you dedicate an entire bookshelf to your ceramics collection.”
I can make a cute joke about how I’ll need more than a single bookshelf for all the ceramics I’ve collected over the years. She can pretend to be outraged. We can kiss and make plans for what we’re going to do with all of our free time when the school year is over in a few weeks.
But Dallas has been ripped from my life like a book with pages pulled from the middle of the story, and his absence draws into sharper focus all the other places where I’m missing something.
Like in this relationship. Something between Alice and me has never quite fit right.
Dallas has always known, and I’ve spent almost an entire year ignoring the possibility he might be right.
“I think we should still split up,” I say, spinning Dallas’s office chair around to face her. “I’m sorry. We just…” I search for more words.
I don’t really know how to explain why, other than it bums me out that we’re not right for each other, when everything about her makes for a wonderful partner. Just not the right partner for me.
“We don’t fit,” she finishes.
So she knows it, too. She didn’t break up with me yesterday by accident.
“I thought maybe what I’ve been feeling was wrong,” she admits. “That we should make it work because we get along so well. And it makes sense. We’re both here. We have all this history. We should be right for each other.”
“I thought the same thing,” I say, standing to pull her into a hug that feels both necessary and final.
Even as I breathe in her sweet-smelling shampoo, enjoying her familiarity, I know this is the right thing to do.
I haven’t felt this kind of certainty in so long that I almost forgot I was capable of it.
“If we keep up this calmness, this might be the most civilized breakup I’ve ever had,” she says with a hollow laugh. She pulls away to attempt a smile, but it’s too sad to pass for authentic. “Do you think we could win some kind of award?”
“Best Lesbian Breakup Between Two Teachers Who Share a Job and a Hallway and an Entire Friend Group?”
“Wait.” True worry crosses her face for the first time. “Are we going to need to broker a custody agreement for our friends? I don’t want to lose Tequila Thursdays.”
“No, no,” I assure her. And also myself.
Because I hadn’t thought about this element yet.
I’m the one who created Tequila Thursdays, but Alice has kept it thriving.
We each have equal claim to it. “Carina and Vic still hang out with all of us, and I was there when Carina set Vic’s muscle tees on fire.
If they can tolerate each other on Tequila Thursdays, so can we. ”
“That’s true.” Alice puts her hand on her heart. “I solemnly swear not to touch your ceramics.”
“The fact that my ceramics have come up twice in this conversation leads me to believe you’ve already been wishing them harm,” I say.
Alice mimes zipping her lips. “In order to preserve our Best Breakup award, I don’t think anything further should be said on the subject.”
It’s funny that I once thought it was nice that we didn’t have any of the same problems or even the same approach to our interests.
Now I can see our respective hills for what they are—not places for us to die, but the places where we thrive.
We both love to fixate on the things we care about.
I’ve got theater and nostalgia and an unwavering love of my own routine.
She’s got design and self-improvement and being a social butterfly.
To compromise would be to blunt our favorite parts of ourselves, and the older I get, the less interested I am in dulling myself to fit someone else’s vision for my life.
“Just remember, it was you and I who led the campaign against Mr. Pritcher’s horrible idea to make our yearbook grass themed,” I tell her after rolodexing through the times we’ve shared the same hill, realizing it hasn’t happened since we were teens.
“You were only a freshman then, and you and I still got him to change course. We can do impossible things together. Tequila Thursdays are safe.”
“Oh my god,” she says. “The grass theme. I’d forgotten all about that.”
I put on my best Mr. Pritcher voice. “Varsity volleyball is a cut above the rest.”
“Waving in the wind. Our seniors hedge their bets on the future,” she responds in her own impression of his low, overly serious tone. “We were so bold when we were kids. When did we lose that?”
“Probably when we started paying bills,” I say, grabbing her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Alice. The grass will be greener for us soon.”
It starts as a joke, both of us smiling, but then the contact turns serious.
This is really it. The end of Alice and me.
I plant a kiss on her lips that’s heatless but sweet. A kiss of goodbyes. A kiss of closure. And, maybe, one final test.
There’s no spark that prompts me to deepen the contact. No need for me to tangle my hands in her hair or tug her closer.
When Alice pulls away, she’s looking into my eyes for something. Searching one last time for what we both know isn’t there. “All right, then,” she says.
“That’s all we’ve got,” I confirm.
She heads for the door. “Oh,” she says, turning back on her way out. “I can help with anything for the play today, if you need. I know they want you to hold the rehearsal.”
It’s a musical, dear, I hear Dallas say in my mind, one last reminder that this is the right choice.
“Thanks,” I tell her, knowing it’s a genuine offer but also something she does not actually want to do. “I think we’re okay for now. The problem is, if we’re going to do the show, I have to figure out who can play Dallas’s part.”
Spring Awakening has roles for adults. In a traditional staging, one man and one woman play all the adult men and women in the show. In true Dallas fashion, he’s decided to play all the women himself, and he’s cast one of our students as the man.
“Why not you?” Alice asks.
I set myself up for this, so I take great care when I say, “I’m not an actor,” wanting that to be final but not read as a challenge.
“Got it,” she says. “You know, even Jeannie was nice to me today. She thinks Dallas has done this as a stunt so they will name the theater after him.”
“What a shitty guess,” I say. “Jeannie is the worst.”
“The fucking worst.” Alice has almost closed the door all the way when she remembers something else. “I told them to add an extra pump of lavender to the coffee. I know you like that.”
Two pumps of lavender in my coffee makes it too floral. “Thank you, Alice. For everything.”
“Just text me if you realize there’s anything you need me to do for the…musical.”
“I will.”
She shuts the door softly.
Dallas has left out a stack of papers on his desk.
He likes to write by hand, scrawling his thoughts and ideas and inventions.
The police looked through these this morning, finding nothing worth taking.
There’s no final note here. Nothing beyond the usual half-finished directorial thoughts and ideas.
Still, I comb through it, searching for the answer to what “how to walk through universes” could possibly mean.
When the office door swings open again, an involuntary sigh slips out of my mouth. “Please, I just need some time alone,” I say, looking up to Alice with pleading eyes.
Only it’s not Alice Yeung gazing back.
It’s a pair of sunglasses atop the face of the devil. A walking middle finger to all of us here in Garden Meadows.
Cilla Cove stands with her hands on the hips of a full-length leopard coat, smirking like she’s waiting for the raucous audience applause to die down before she speaks her first line.
This is a far cry from her natural, no-fuss look on the Zoom call.
She’s all spectacle now, cherry-red lips to match her cherry-red nails—black widow markings that flag her as dangerous.
“Hello, Marlowe Jenkins,” she says, relishing every syllable of my name. “Don’t you look nice. Even with the tears. You’ve always had the most incredible face.”
She pulls off her sunglasses and unlassoes the small purse from her shoulder, tossing it all onto Dallas’s desk like she owns the place, plucking the stack of papers I’m still leafing through right out of my hands.
A wave of her perfume follows her movement, and it’s so different from how anyone in Garden Meadows smells—heady and metallic and strangely intoxicating—I feel like she’s cast a spell on me with it.
I can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t even think.
“Yes, yes. It’s a shock I’m here,” she says, leaning against Dallas’s desk and crossing one leg over the other.
She’s in a short black dress, and it slides up to expose so much of her upper thigh that I involuntarily cough at the sight.
“You don’t think I needed to come. You want me to leave already. You wish I never existed at all.”