Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

There was a pause.

“Ah, is Carlos Carrizo available?”

“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now,” said Lily. “May I take a message?”

There was another pause, and Lily reached down to the side table drawer to find a pen. When she opened it, she saw an ominous pile of paper: heavy documents and folders covered in what looked like some tedious bureaucratese. She didn’t recognize the words, but something about them seemed heavy, resonant. Spanish, she decided, was too lovely a language for such matters. She shrugged the phone into the crook of her neck and motioned for Katy to come look.

“What?” Katy mouthed, but she didn’t come over.

The man on the phone was giving his name and number, and Lily scrambled to grab a pen. She was writing the number on her hand as Beatriz appeared at the top of the stairs, a basket of laundry on her hip. The man hung up.

“What are you doing?” said Beatriz. Her face was frozen, her eyes lightless, her hair pulled back very tight. Lily was still holding the phone, and she placed it back in its receiver overly carefully, as though she might now earn some belated credit for conscientiousness.

“I was just taking a message for you,” she said.

Beatriz began to descend the stairs slowly, and Lily knew that the coming conversation was not going to be a good one. She wanted to turn around and catch Katy’s eye, but she was somehow afraid; there was something so uniquely awful about the anger of an adult you did not know well. When did adult strangers ever get mad at you? Never in real life—only on the road or on the Internet. Lily flashed to an image of herself as a small child, being yelled at by a friend’s mother for some infraction that was too abstract to be comprehended at the time. She remembered her terror; her strange distorting sense that the universe was actually aligned against her, and that maybe it always had been and she just hadn’t noticed until then. Beatriz reached the bottom of the stairs and put down the laundry basket.

“Why did you answer our phone?” she said. She was not yelling.

“You weren’t answering it.”

“I was vacuuming.”

“I was just taking a message for you.”

“Do not answer our phone in the future. Do you understand? I assure you, the calls coming in are not for you.”

Lily felt the strange cresting behind her nose that sometimes meant she was about to cry. “I didn’t think they were,” she whispered. She didn’t understand why she felt so terrible. She hadn’t done anything wrong. “I was only trying to help.”

“And those?” Beatriz pointed to the disordered documents, still poking out of the open drawer. “What did you think you were doing with those? Helping?”

“Nothing!” Lily slammed the drawer shut. “I was just looking for some paper. I didn’t see anything, I promise.”

Beatriz moved back a step and took a deep breath. Lily could tell from her expression that she must look terrified, and she watched Beatriz decide to take things down a notch.

“In the future, please be respectful of our privacy and our home.” Beatriz’s voice was softer now, but Lily could hear how hard she was trying to make it that way, which was almost worse than if she’d sounded as angry as she actually was. Lily finally turned and looked at Katy for backup, but Katy’s face remained open and neutral, ready to believe and be believed. If Beatriz had come down thirty seconds later, she would have found both of them looking at those papers. Katy would have come over to look. She would have. Lily was sure of it.

“You have a very lovely room downstairs,” said Beatriz, picking up the laundry basket. “You should have everything there that you need. If you require something else, please ask me first.”

With that, Beatriz took the basket down to the basement, and in a moment Lily could hear the washing machine.

Katy made a whistling sound. “Yikes,” she said. “That was bad luck.”

Lily dragged her thumb along the table near the phone. She wished there was some dust to pretend to brush off, some minor disorganization to feign absorption in, but the Carrizo house was always so spotless.

“What did those papers say?” said Katy after a moment.

“That’s the thing,” Lily said. “I don’t even know.”

By the time Lily hurried up the path to Sebastien’s that night, pizza wedged on her forearm, she was already in a terrible mood. She had disappointed Beatriz, and now she was bound to disappoint Sebastien. It was a simple inevitability. She rang the doorbell and waited.

But really, she told herself, it was okay to try a little less hard for a boy. Sometimes when she thought about all the work she’d done in her life to make sure the men she knew were having a comfortable enough time—the vast amounts of effort she’d spent on this!—she had to cringe. With boys who were particularly recalcitrant on the phone, she’d sometimes actually written out questions to ask them before calling them up. Had anyone ever gone to such lengths for her? Would she have even wanted them to? Lily had earned a certain amount of disregard, she figured, and now was the time to extend it.

Sebastien appeared at the door after a moment. He was wearing a chestnut-colored waistcoat, the kind of thing you saw on academics in movies though never, in Lily’s experience, in real life. His hair was appealingly mussed—it was growing out a little, which she loved, though she didn’t dare tell him that for fear he would cut it out of spite. She smiled her friendliest smile. “Hello,” she said. “Aren’t you warm in that coat?”

“It’s the mythical Lily Hayes! Goodness gracious!” he said, throwing his arms up and pretending to fan himself. “To what do I owe this rare honor?”

“I brought pizza,” said Lily, still smiling. “Do you like pizza? You were an American teenager once.”

“I was never an American. Nor, in the strictest sense, a teenager.”

Lily gritted her teeth. “Can you forgive me nonetheless? And could you let me in, maybe? I want to set this down.”

“Forgiveness is tedious,” said Sebastien, ushering her through the door. Inside, the house was sweltering, lit by a bunch of candles that seemed now to have mostly burned down, making the room look wavering and medieval. Lily set the pizza on the dining table.

“You and your proto-Christianity, your Neoplatonism,” Sebastien was saying. He opened the box and eyed the pepperoni skeptically. “Ah, and your pork products. Well, I guess living in a constant state of smug forgiveness is fair compensation for the freedom to consume unclean animals on your pizza. That’s the great and central trade-off of the Abrahamic faiths, I’ve always thought.”

“We can pick them off if you don’t like them. And I already know you’re angry with me, so you don’t have to make quite so many allusions. And, I mean, you’re not even making sense, even in terms of just your own internal logic, right now.”

“Angry with you, my jonquil! Perish the thought.”

“I’m sorry I was so out of touch this week,” said Lily carefully. “I was busy.”

“I understand. I’ve been swamped with a million and ten things myself. The kids and their interminable soccer practices, don’t you know.”

“Sebastien. I said I was sorry.”

“And I said I was indifferent.”

For some reason, Lily didn’t want Sebastien to know how tiresome she was beginning to find him. She didn’t want to admit it entirely to herself, either; she felt premature nostalgia (already!) for the way she’d felt about him in those first few weeks, and she still held out some slim hope that the feeling might return. There were moments, after all—there was a certain way Sebastien had of looking at her when she first arrived at his house, his face open and unguarded and so beautiful in its architecture and its youth—that still made her stomach flip. But then he’d begin to talk; invariably at length, invariably ironically, and Lily would feel herself drifting off somewhere. One time Katy had compared Sebastien to a dead fly frozen in the amber of his house, and this image, worryingly, had stuck with Lily.