A week before I boarded the plane, Lila called. After that phone call, I felt an actual pulse of worry, a skitter of anxiety under my skin, something more definite than the ghost whisper. I almost didn’t answer. The Mayor’s Cup Regatta was in two days, and I was about to go to practice. Coach Dave gave extra crunches if you were late. The Mayor’s Cup was supposed to be just a fun, end-of-the-season thing, but Academy was always competitive. We were good, and being on that team mattered to me, like it mattered to all of us.
“Baby!” Lila sang. “So, here’s the deal. Don’t be mad. I know I promised it would be just us, but Jake wants to come when I pick you up at the airport.”
“Liiiii-laaa,” I groaned, because, well, typical Lila. A man, a lie. “I haven’t seen you in months. And I don’t even know the guy. It’ll be weird.”
“We’ll have plenty of time alone. Plus, you two need to meet! You’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.”
She’d just contradicted herself, but whatever. The more important thing was, my head began to throb with tension. History was flashing before my eyes. The bad kind of history, where people do horrible stuff for generations, not the good kind where they learn and do better. “Just don’t marry him before I get there.”
“Oh, baby, don’t. Come on.”
She was exasperated. I could hear her nails clicking against a hard surface. It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to say. As you know, she’d done that before. Lila and men—ugh. Of course I felt uneasy.
There was a long, strained silence. I looked out my window toward the Montlake Cut, the slender neck of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, where the crew team was already gathering. I could see the satiny blue and yellow of their uniforms, the same satiny blue and yellow I was wearing. Meredith would be knocking at my door any second.
“I’ve got to go. Practice is about to start.”
“Oh, not yet! Don’t leave mad. Please. Talk to me some more.”
Lila, well, she could be a conversational hostage-taker, letting you free only after you met her demands.
“I can’t.”
“Syd! Don’t be like that. Stay. Let me just read you this letter I got today. You’ll laugh your head off. An actual letter. Who writes letters anymore? A seventeen-year-old boy, that’s who.”
She laughed, because we always laughed at mail like this. It was one of our things. But I didn’t feel like laughing. I was fifteen, almost sixteen. I went to school with seventeen-year-old boys. I mean, yeah, the whole world watched her, but seventeen-year-old boys were sort of mine.
Right then, Meredith popped her head into my room, and I was so glad to see her, it was like I’d been stranded at sea for years and she was the captain of the tanker who spotted me. I waved madly and gestured for her to come in. Meredith had her Academy crew bag over her shoulder. She tapped her wrist where a watch would be if people wore watches anymore. “We’re late,” she mouthed.
“Meredith’s here. I need to go.”
“She can wait! What have I told you a million times?”
“Don’t be the first one anywhere.”
Meredith pretended to gag.
“Precisely. Oh, you should see the handwriting on this thing! So tiny and restrained! ‘Dear Ms. Shore: I’ve never written anyone a fan letter, but ever since I saw Nefarious, you’ve tormented my imagination. That scene where you’re on the ladder and Brandon Searing lifts your skirt and we see your legs and the white lace of your—’ ”
“Lila, I’m hanging up.”
“Tormented his imagination! Isn’t that a riot? I think he’s got his anatomy mixed up.”
“Stop.” I was pleading by that point.
“Oh my God! I’m late for my manicure. Baby, I have to rush out of here. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She waited for me to say it back. But I was irritated, plus all kinds of other things jumbled together like the pile of dirty laundry in the corner of my room. I didn’t want to say it. I could hear what I owed just sitting in the silence.
“I love you, Lila.”
Ugh! Whatever. I hung up. Meredith and I took the steps out of Montgomery Hall. “We better hurry,” I said.
“You okay?” she asked. Mer was my best friend. She knew me. She knew the me I was then.
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t, not by a long shot. And that irritation I felt? It was going to get worse. A lot worse. Outright fury. “Hey, cute hair.”
Meredith made the ends of her braids dance. And then we heard Coach Dave’s whistle and had to run.
In the boat, out on the water, I looked down at my own, regular legs. I remember this so clearly, how I examined this one body part like it was the malfunctioning O-ring that might make the whole ship blow up. Those legs were long and skinny and ended with my feet in a pair of Nikes. My knees were as knobby as a couple of oranges. I had a scratch on my calf from when I missed the hurdle during the track unit in PE the week before. There were little golden hairs that shimmered in the sun.
The thing was, my legs were just plain old things to walk on. They had regular jobs. Like running to catch up. Like riding a bike. Like screaming in pain when they hit the sun-hot seat of Meredith’s mom’s car. Those legs would never torment anyone, I was pretty sure.
Here was my experience with desire right then: picking out the cutest boy in my class on every first day of school since I was five and admiring him from afar. That thrilling note-passing in the sixth grade, when Emma English told me that Jeremy Wykowski liked me. Middle school slow dancing, a probably-not-accidental boob touch. That boy from another school who suddenly entwined his fingers with mine at a basketball game, who I fantasized about for months afterward, probably because his real self wasn’t there to mess things up. The last six months with Samuel Crane, involving phone conversations about stuff that seemed deep, kissing behind the metal shop building and a few times in his parents’ basement, hands up a shirt, hands down pants, more like hunting around in your backpack for your phone than anything else. And most recently: the men looking up from their laptops in Victrola. A boy twining my hair around his finger, the smell of hot dogs and mustard around us.
Torment—I had no real idea about any of that, honestly. I wasn’t sure I even liked Samuel Crane the way I should. He liked me, and it seemed like reason enough to kiss back. Obviously, there was some hidden door to the bigger world that I hadn’t walked through yet. I heard about that world in songs and saw it in movies, but it wasn’t mine. It was an intriguing mystery, or maybe an outright lie.
I could feel it stirring around in there, though. Desire. Or desire for desire. I wanted to feel deep, aching want, but I wanted to make someone else feel it too. That was maybe even more appealing—the power to make a guy want me, badly. I would never have admitted this. It seemed wrong, especially since my own mother had made a career out of being a sex object. It was a truth I kept buried, like a secret from myself.
“Syd-Syd!” Meredith called from her seat behind me in the boat. I looked over my shoulder. Meredith made a face, and I made one back.
“Sit ready!” the coxswain called. My hands gripped the oar and I buried the blade in the water. This was the moment we steadied the boat before we rowed like crazy, deep in the intensity and the speed and the high of the race. And these were the moments before I found the hidden door. Right then, I didn’t have a clue where it was.
I would find it, though, as you know. Along with everything that lay behind it. And sixth grade was like two seconds ago, and my hands still had pastel dust on them, and Samuel Crane couldn’t even drive yet.
One last thing. I should also tell you this:
We won the Mayor’s Cup Regatta. And afterward, we squirted juice packs at each other and ran around screaming. We were excited to win, but even more, school was almost out, and that’s the best feeling there is.
I was so tired that night that I conked right off. That dark sense of being haunted, the ghost—there was no way she was going to keep me awake. So of course I had a horrible dream instead. Warnings are persistent, until they just plain give up on you.
I realize this sounds like something out of one of Lila’s films, one of the scenes where a woman walks into a couple’s shadowy bedroom and you see the glint of silver in the moonlight. But this is the truth: I had a dream about a knife. I woke up and my heart was pounding. It was the kind of terrifying dream that feels so real your hands shake. When I tried to explain it in the morning, though, it seemed silly.
“A horrible person got stabbed in the chest. It was you but it wasn’t you,” Cora repeated in the dining hall, as she chased some Cheerios with her spoon.
“It was so real,” I said, but I could see the little smile at the corner of Cora’s mouth.