Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

Now Katy was talking to Ignacio the bartender, who was pointing to the alcove where Lily was standing. She looked down and busied herself with some silverware until she felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Oh, hey,” she shouted at Katy, trying to look surprised. “What are you doing here?”

Katy shouted something back.

“What?” said Lily. She really couldn’t hear over the music. Me gusta marihuana, me gustas tú , sang somebody or other. The song was pretty old. Lily thought she’d heard it first in college, freshman year, at a frat party. Middlebury didn’t admit to having frats, but they did, and it was a frat where she first heard this song. Lily glanced around the club and noticed Ignacio staring at Katy with a frankly hungry look. When Lily caught his gaze he raised his eyebrows at her inquisitively and nodded his head in Katy’s direction. Lily made a face at him and pulled Katy farther into the alcove, where they were partially obscured. Katy said something else that Lily couldn’t hear.

“What?” Lily hollered again.

“I said, what?”

“The bartender is checking you out.”

Katy looked quizzical. Lily cocked her head in Ignacio’s direction and gave a cartoon leer. Katy peered around the corner and waggled her hand in a semi-thumbs-up.

“Ew,” said Lily, wrinkling her nose. “Really?”

“What?”

“What?”

“You are late,” shouted Katy. “Come home.”

“I can’t,” shouted Lily. “I am working till two.”

Javier came over then, suave in a blue tie, and pointed at Katy. “Your friend can’t be back here,” he shouted to Lily. “Unless she wants to put on an apron.”

“Two,” said Lily again, holding up two greasy index fingers. Katy turned to go, and Lily noticed Ignacio’s noticing her leaving. There was something strange about a look of such appetite on a face so reptilian—though, of course, poor Ignacio couldn’t help his face. Still, Lily felt a cold paranoia cauliflower along her spine for a moment before Javier clapped her on the back and suggested that now would be a good time for her to think about trying to at least pretend to do her job.

That night, Sebastien sent a text at four a.m. and Lily woke up to read it but forgot to answer. She forgot the next day, too, and the next day, and by the third day responding seemed fake and forced, but she made herself do it, and she tried to sound as unself-conscious and breezy as possible—“Hey SLC, sorry I’ve been MIA, wanna hang out tonight?”—as though she was a very popular girl and he was one of her many, many, many friends, no less precious to her because he was one of so many. His response came a day later, flinty and stiff—“I’d hardly noticed. You know where to find me”—and Lily knew that she’d done the wrong thing again, that she always did the wrong thing. Sometimes Lily wished she could float along in the kind of lighthearted solipsism that prevented grudges and bad feelings and lingering entanglements, that made it impossible to take anything too hard. But things in Lily’s life never worked out this way. Sebastien’s attempted gift of the bracelet weighed on her heavily, as did the sex, though she hated to admit it. She felt somehow obligated to him now; she felt that she’d treated him carelessly, and though she knew she’d treated him no differently from the way that many boys had treated her—no differently from the way that Sebastien himself would likely have treated her, if she’d let him—she still couldn’t shake the acrid feeling behind her heart, the queasy sense of revolving guilt.

She called Sebastien the next morning and proposed dinner. She would bring it, she said. Her treat. He assented.

At least, Lily told herself, Sebastien was unlikely to bring up her recent absence. That was something she liked about him. Stoicism was not valued at Middlebury, where everyone wanted to endlessly talk and process and expurgate every little thing. If you hooked up with a boy he seemed to feel he owed you a real-time narration of his entire life, a live-blogging of his every emotional memory. If Sebastien LeCompte had been a Middlebury boy, he and Lily would already have agonized ceaselessly over the nature of their relationship, the question of monogamy, the issue of forward momentum, the prospect of looming distance and separation, the meaning of things, the meaningless of things. What a relief it was to be excused from all of that, anyway.

“I think old Sebastien’s mad at me,” Lily said to Katy that afternoon. She and Katy talked about Sebastien a lot, partly because they couldn’t find much else to talk about. Katy’s family, apparently, was too loving and functional to merit discussion. On the question of politics, Lily sensed a level of conflict aversion in Katy that suggested that there might be conflict to be had if Lily pushed it, which, of course, she tried very hard to do—making flamboyant assertions, quoting outrageous statistics. But Katy proved impossible to rouse; she never agreed nor disagreed, only asked questions aimed at making Lily clarify whatever she’d just said. So Katy and Lily spoke most often of men, and they spoke of Sebastien most often of all.

“Oh?” said Katy. She was sitting on her bed and rubbing silver-dollar-sized globs of sunscreen around her eyes and chin and onto her breastbone. The smell of coconut filled the room. “And why’s that?”

Lily shrugged. “I think he’s on his period.”

Katy nodded. “How’s the sex these days?”

Lily was surprised that Katy would ask, but did not want to seem surprised. She wobbled her hand. “So-so,” she said. “Are you going to the beach or something?”

Katy looked embarrassed. “It prevents wrinkles.”

“Aren’t you twenty-one?”

Katy hung her head. “I’m paranoid.”

“Oh,” said Lily. “Can I have some?”

“Sure.” She tossed the bottle to Lily. “You want to do your hands, too.”

Obediently, Lily rubbed the lotion into her hands.

“Do you think you guys will keep up after you leave?” said Katy, and Lily felt the flicker of nervousness that always came when Katy was inquisitive about Sebastien. It was possible that Katy still felt bad about calling Sebastien a bore, now that it was clear that Lily was going to keep seeing him. But somehow Lily suspected that there was more to it than that—that these conversations were Katy’s way of being elaborately careful with her, as though Katy had decided that Lily was a person who required special handling, or special patience—and Lily did not like the thought of this one bit.

“Oh, who knows,” said Lily. “Probably not, I guess.”

Above them, Lily could hear the satisfying whir of Beatriz running the vacuum cleaner. This was one of Lily’s favorite sounds of domestic life, alongside the sound of coffee brewing: It made her think of mornings, of getting the house ready for company. She closed her eyes for a moment to listen.

“No?” said Katy.

Lily opened her eyes. “I mean, let’s be realistic.”

Upstairs, the phone rang.

“He could visit you,” said Katy. “It’s not like he can’t afford it.”

Lily shrugged and scrunched her nose. The phone rang again. “I think I’ll grab that,” she said. She ran up the stairs, Katy following behind her.

Upstairs, the living room was flooded with light; the red curtains were waving slightly in the breeze, revealing and then obscuring a faint weal of cloud in the sky. The vacuum cleaner stopped, and Lily heard the distant, plangent sound of cathedral bells. The life these people had! She could stay here forever. She took a breath. The phone rang a third time.

“Sí?” said Lily, nearly breathless.