Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

On Sundays, Lily and Katy attended church with the Carrizos. Though Lily scorned church with her own family—Maureen attended a milquetoast Unitarian institution where all possible modes of being were enthusiastically and cloyingly affirmed —she felt that church in a foreign country was a different matter altogether, more along the lines of an anthropological investigation, even if it was uncomfortably situated, broadly, within her own abandoned tradition. After all, she wouldn’t not go to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, she wouldn’t not go to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, just because she didn’t believe these sites were actually sacred. In church, of course, she didn’t cross herself and didn’t take Communion, but this was, in fact, a reflection of her profound respect for the religious beliefs of others. Lily tried to explain all of this to Katy on their second Sunday in Buenos Aires.

“I’m just saying,” said Katy. “A bite of toast, a swallow of wine, and they’re happy. Who cares?”

They were standing over the sink in the bathroom, and Lily was trying to somehow pluck her eyebrows without seeing Katy’s image in the mirror next to hers. Lily and Katy didn’t usually wash up together, but it was the first night they were alone in the house—Carlos was out with his friends, and Beatriz was visiting her sister—and a temporary, lukewarm camaraderie seemed to have grown between them.

“But do you believe that stuff?” said Lily.

Katy made a face and spat a mass of mint toothpaste into the sink. Somehow she did this, as all things, daintily. Lily could not get used to the way Katy seemed to move through the physical world while remaining utterly untouched by it: her hair never discernibly disturbed by wind, her lips never discernibly stained by wine, her clothes never discernibly wrinkled by any amount of movement or exertion. “That’s not even the point,” Katy said. “It costs you nothing.”

“I think it’s really despicable to pretend to believe in it if you don’t.”

“But if you don’t believe it, why do you care? If there is no God, it’s not like He’s gonna know.”

“But you’re gonna know,” said Lily. She rapped her tweezers against the sink conclusively and then went to stand at the window. All the windows in the basement looked out at ground level, which made Lily feel like she lived in the steerage section of a ship. She looked up and across the yard. Next door, all the lights in the mansion were out. “Do you know who lives over there?”

“A young guy. Our age.” Katy joined Lily at the window. Lily could smell her citrus shampoo. “Haven’t you seen him?”

“No.” Lily squinted. “His lights are never on, are they?”

“You’d think he could afford lights. Beatriz says he’s very rich.”

Lily was about to ask how rich, exactly, when a spectacular crash—echoing, multidimensional, seeming to involve many kinds of different materials—issued from somewhere upstairs.

“Jesus,” said Katy.

“Is it a robbery?”

“Did you lock the door when you came in?”

“Shit.”

“Did you?”

“We should go up there.”

They crept upstairs, their cell phones casting neon squares of light onto the stairs. Lily tapped Katy on the shoulder and pointed questioningly to the light switch; Katy shook her head. When they reached the top of the stairs, Lily flung the door open, ready to scream. But in the living room, it was only Carlos, and he was, it seemed, only drunk: He was staggering about, his center of gravity askew, pantomiming the kind of exaggerated inebriation that would be comic in a movie but was somehow frightening—then sad, then frightening once more—in real life. In the corner of the room, one of Beatriz’s potted plants had been knocked over, leaving an escarpment of dirt on the rug.

“Girls,” said Carlos, issuing a bipolar laugh that turned into the first fragment of a sob. He grabbed at the wall, and one of the framed photographs—of Beatriz in a graduation gown—fell to the ground and shattered. “Girls.”

“What should we do?” hissed Katy.

“What do you mean, ‘do’?” said Lily.

“Should we call someone?”

“Call someone, please. We should go back to our room.”

“What if he hits his head or something?”

“He’s not going to.”

“What are we going to tell Beatriz?”

“We’re not going to tell her anything.”

“What about the picture?”

“What about it?”

“Should we try to fix it, or what?”

“Just leave it.”

They went back downstairs, the crashing continuing above them. Lily felt a minor, untraceable thrill with every bang, but Katy seemed not to want to listen. Instead, she pulled out her iPod and sanctimoniously turned up the volume until the bass lines began rattling around the room, like the skeletons of songs. Lily, who could never bear to tell anyone to turn down music, said nothing.

After a while, the sounds stopped, and Katy got up and produced some Neutrogena from her bag, even though Lily could have sworn she’d already washed her face. “You need to remember to lock that door,” she said on her way out of the room. Lily stared at her: She was standing in a bedroom doorway, holding a domestic object, and issuing a directive. Did she not realize how weirdly old, how fussily maternal, she seemed?

“It was only Carlos!” said Lily. “He lives here!”

The next day over breakfast, Carlos was swollen-eyed and chagrined; Katy chattered about her classes, her voice a half an octave higher than normal, until he went to work early. Beatriz had not emerged by the time Lily left for class. But when Lily came back to the house at lunch, she was standing in the kitchen, as though she’d been lying in wait.

“Lily,” said Beatriz. She looked serious, but then she always looked serious. “I want to talk to you about last night.”

“It’s okay.” Lily laughed—an indulgent, knowing sort of chuckle—to show Beatriz that it was not a big deal. “Don’t worry about it at all.”

“Lily,” said Beatriz. She wasn’t smiling. “Do you understand the word ‘depressed’?”

Lily felt a sliver of cold in her sternum. She was doing the wrong thing, the exact wrong thing, by laughing. “Oh. Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. Yes.”

“Do you understand?”

“I’m sorry. I do understand. Yes.”

Beatriz nodded as though an agreement had been reached, then bent and began unloading the dishwasher. “We’d like to have a dinner Friday night,” she said. “To welcome you girls properly. We thought maybe you’d like to invite the boy next door? Katy was asking about him.”

“Oh,” said Lily. “I suppose so, sure.”

Beatriz frowned. “We’ve been meaning to ask him around since we moved here. But it’ll be more fun for him, anyway, now that we’ve got young people around.”

Later, in the bunk beds, Lily asked Katy if she thought the dinner offer was an attempt to get them not to tell the program about Carlos’s drunkenness. Katy was reading some punishing textbook by flashlight; outside, Lily could hear people laughing on the street. They were probably headed out to dinner. It was only eleven o’clock.

“Like a bribe,” said Lily. “Maybe.”

“No,” said Katy. “I think they’re probably just trying to be nice.”

“It’s odd timing, though, don’t you think?”

“You’re so conspiracy minded.”

A bar of weak light flashed up the wall and onto Lily’s comforter. She could hear the whisk of Katy’s pages, the efficient squeak of her pen.

“I had no idea this was going on with Carlos,” said Lily a little while later. “I mean, they seemed so happy. Their lives seemed really perfect.”