Chapter 7 Marigold
Marigold
“Jacob Gensler does it again.” Cessy sighs, dropping back onto my bed with dramatic flourish.
I’m huddled up by the headboard with my knees drawn to my chest, trying to figure out just how I ended up in this reality TV show of a situation.
Should I have mentioned to my dad at some point how much Jamie Larson hates me?
Was that something that never came up? The universe has got to be out to get me at this point. It’s just comical.
At least our capstone practice hasn’t been a complete disaster so far. All those endless hours sharing a practice room, and our music has finally started to flow together like we were born to be partners, an invisible thread tying my heart to his.
Which is really the last thing I need, emotionally, but if it gets us an A, I’ll take it.
“I love your dad,” Cessy goes on, “but sometimes he’s like…
too nice. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it when it’s him bringing me cardamom buns just because he thought I’d like them.
But literally pawning out rooms in your house to random classmates like they’re lost little puppies?
And I can’t believe Jamie said yes. I don’t get it. Why? Does he enjoy torturing himself?”
I’ve spent the past several hours imagining what it’s going to be like orbiting each other in a New York City apartment. Yes, our apartment is larger than most. But it’s still New York, and there’s not a lot of space to hide.
“I think he just wants to use our piano,” I say honestly. “He can’t practice for Stockholm on some shitty Casio. There’s only a few weeks left to go.”
“You’re probably right,” Cessy says with a sigh, and finally pushes herself back up to a proper seated position. “I don’t know what Shrishti sees in him, I swear.”
I busy myself with picking a loose thread out of my duvet.
I’ve never admitted to Cessy that my crush on Jamie didn’t exactly disappear after our falling-out.
Even when he was trying his best to be an asshole, I still remembered how he used to be.
How he—at least, as I told myself—really was.
It wasn’t that hard for me to believe that my favorite human might get along with his favorite human, even if Cessy and Shrishti’s relationship was perennially on-again, off-again.
Jamie isn’t a bad person. He just hates me, specifically.
Three Years Ago
My first college party, and I already felt out of place.
It wasn’t that Juilliard didn’t have parties.
Same with my performing arts high school.
But we were all nerds in the most extreme sense of the word, whereas Parker had enough edgy visual arts students and hypercool modern dancers that I couldn’t help but feel like an uninvited twelve-year-old.
Some prudish part of my brain kept screaming, They’re drinking alcohol!
They’re drinking alcohol—like my dad hadn’t been letting me sip wine at Passover seder since I was ten.
Cessy, meanwhile, slid into the milieu like she was born to be here with a White Claw in one hand and her phone in the other, taking reel after Instagram reel of everyone dancing and screeching and playing messy games of beer pong.
“Seriously, nobody is watching you,” she urged me after half an hour putting up with my curmudgeonliness.
You’re watching me, I thought, which still felt high stakes, because it was freshman year and I hadn’t gotten to the point where I’d seen Cessy belting out Dora the Explorer songs in her bra like a drunk rock goddess.
She was still cooler than me. She was still someone I desperately wanted to impress.
I grabbed a Miller High Life and took several gulps in quick succession. Maybe if I got myself a little tipsy, I’d feel less awkward?
This all felt incredibly high stakes in a way that made about zero sense in objective reality. I was pretty sure that never in my life had I made a new bestie from some random house party…but hey, there was a first time for everything, right?
“Cessy!” someone shrieked, and I barely had time to turn toward the voice before a short girl with wild black curls all but barreled into Cessy, flinging both arms around her neck. “You made it!”
Oh god. Just what I needed: to be the third wheel.
“Hey, Shrishti.” Cessy was grinning when the girl finally pulled away, the kind of grin that took up her entire face. “I didn’t realize you were coming! I would have dressed up.”
Shrishti rolled her eyes, but the tiny smirk that tugged at the corners of her purple-lipsticked mouth gave her away. “Hush. You look great. The nineties vest is particularly—” She made a gesture evoking a chef’s kiss.
“Thank you. Oh—you remember Goldie, right?”
It was more of a reminder for Shrishti to follow social norms than anything else, because Shrishti and I had hung out at least five times at this point.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. “Wait, who are you?” She gave me one reeling second before laughing and shaking her head. “No, I’m just kidding. Although it’s true that I can’t recognize faces to save my life.”
“Fair. We’ll pretend this is the very first time we’ve met,” I said. “Just to make it easier.”
“Cheers to that.” She clinked her beer can against mine and smiled.
Then she made a face and pulled a buzzing phone out of her back pocket, peering down at the screen.
“Hold on,” she said, and picked up. “Hey. Yeah. No, I’m over by the window—the back window, the one looking out toward the—yeah.
With the stupid curtains. Okay. See you in a sec. ”
“Who was that?” Cessy said, clearly because she very much hoped to keep Shrishti to herself all night. Probably already planning their disappearance into some unused bedroom, abandoning me to bop around the room to awful top-forty music, pretending I knew anyone here.
“Nobody,” Shrishti said. “Well, not nobody. Here he—hey! Jamie! Over here!”
And suddenly, I was staring Jamie Larson straight in his perfect sea-glass eyes.
Shit. Be cool, be cool, I told myself, but it was too late; the back of my neck felt like it was on fire, and Jamie was staring me down as if daring me to look away first.
Which I definitely did.
“Hi, Jamie,” said Cessy, all chipper, which made me regret not telling her about the whole Jamie ghosting disaster.
At the time, I’d been too embarrassed—me personally knowing I didn’t skip the date on purpose didn’t make me feel less shitty about it.
“I didn’t know you were coming to this. Shrishti said you usually hide in the practice rooms during parties. ”
“What can I say? I live to defy expectation.”
He was glaring daggers at me, like he wanted to pin me to the wall and use my body as a dartboard. I’d already suffered through four very awkward classes with him since ghosting him on that date. And I’d tried to explain, I really had—but he simply wasn’t interested.
And things had only escalated since then. That horrible DM he sent me after I missed our date lived in my mind rent-free. I could only aspire to be so sociopathically cutting over text.
“Defy what expectations?” I said. “You’re wearing a baseball cap and basketball shorts. You’re the blueprint for every cis straight guy here.”
“Wow,” Cessy said. “Is it just me, or is it getting chilly in here?”
“I think the temperature’s perfect,” Jamie said, all but biting off the words, and I turned my gaze toward the ceiling and prayed to disappear.
It very belatedly occurred to me that he’d probably told Shrishti about all this. Which made the whole situation five hundred times worse, because I was now the villain to at least 50 percent of people present, and I never should have come to this fucking party.
“Right,” I said, “well, maybe you should have stayed in the practice room after all. Saved all of us from this truly invigorating conversation.”
Sometimes I astonished myself with my capacity for sheer bitchiness. But fuck it, he kind of deserved it at this point. I’d told him six billion times that me ghosting him wasn’t personal, and if he wanted to act shitty about it, well, that was on him.
“I’m going to go get another drink,” I declared, even though I still had my unfinished beer in one hand, and escaped before I could hear anyone’s response.
My entire body felt overheated, buzzing with the adrenaline of that whole…interaction. Confrontation? There needed to be a better word for an unanticipated and subtly antagonistic encounter with someone you’re trying very hard to pretend to like.
Cessy found me fifteen minutes later, stewing in the corner over my third beer—wow, I’d really downed those—and slid her arm around my waist, tugging me in tight.
“Hey,” she said. “So…what the fuck?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, embarrassment finally catching up with me now that I was out of Jamie’s sight and my heart rate had gone down a couple dozen beats per minute. “So…yeah. Jamie and I…well, he asked me out.”
“What!” Cessy shrieked, but I was already shaking my head and shoving her in the elbow.
“Yeah, well, it didn’t go well. I mean…I said yes, but then I kind of…ghosted him? Not on purpose,” I added quickly, before Cessy could start drawing any unsavory conclusions about me. “I had something come up. With my mom. Something urgent. And I kind of forgot to update him.”
The truth was, that was the day after my mom decided to stop treatment.
The day after I learned for sure that my time with my mother was officially on a countdown.
My coffee date with some guy from class was the last thing on my mind.
And maybe that should have been easy to explain to him…
only I wasn’t ready to tell anyone the truth yet. I didn’t want pity.
You’d think a reasonable person would have cut me some slack and trusted that I meant it when I said there’d been a family emergency, that I wasn’t just trotting out the same tired sick-day bullshit used by skiving students everywhere. But apparently that was too much to ask.