I SAW DAD’S MOVIE THREE times in a row. It was Friday, and since I’d just done a sift I had the night off. The film was playing at the Angelika, which just happened to be my favorite movie theater in all of Manhattan, and, not so coincidentally, it was super close to my apartment, and it had an air-conditioning system that worked, hooray. I went to the earliest two showings of Evangeline’s Well back to back. The first time I watched it like I was receiving a message straight from my dad—I sat with my eyes wide open, not wanting to blink and miss a single frame. The second time I relaxed and enjoyed the story more. I noticed the finer details and formed opinions about the actors’ performances and the costumes and the music that played behind their words. I watched it like a movie, the way it was meant to be watched. Then my back was stiff, and I went out to get some newspapers and read the reviews while I had dinner. Then I planned to return for the evening show.
Evangeline’s Well was about a man who saves his daughter from a monster. The critics likened it to those dark, imaginative films like Pan’s Labyrinth where you feel like you’re becoming part of some vivid, intense nightmare. And it had more heart, the critics said, than Gideon Chase’s other recent films.
The story goes like this: There’s an old well in the center of town, and at a certain time of day, when the sun is overhead just right, a person can see the future in the reflection of the water in the well. The daughter of the town’s mayor goes to look at her future more than anyone else. She’s a pretty girl—a life-of-the-party kind of girl—and when she gazes into the well she sees herself on the arm of the richest boy in town or something equally promising. But one day as she leans over to peer at her reflection, a monster reaches up from the depths of the water and pulls her in. Then her father must go after her into the well, which turns out to be a dark and mystical world underneath our own. He fights his way through a tangled maze and defeats the shadow creatures that run wild in the forgotten land, all to rescue his missing daughter.
If it sounds lame, well, I guess it should have been. But the critics were right—it was beautifully imagined and horribly, horribly sad.
When it was over the third time, I wiped my eyes and looked around. I was wearing the Hoodie and nobody else could see me, but I was still embarrassed by how hard I’d been crying at the end, even this third time through. The theater was about half full—a good turnout, I thought, for a lower-budget film like this, and the audience was made up almost entirely of people on dates.
There’s nothing like being surrounded by couples to call attention to the fact that you’re alone.
One couple two rows behind me caught my attention. The woman was sitting back with a thoughtful expression, tears on her face but also a quiet smile, still watching the credits move up the screen.
“So was it as good as you thought it would be?” the guy sitting next to her asked.
She gave a satisfied sigh. “It was better.”
It felt like time stopped and then started again with a heave, and then the theater was spinning all around me. I knew that mouth forming those words, that voice—although her voice was slightly different now, lower. I knew those freckles across her nose, visible even in the dim theater. She was older, so much older than the last time I’d seen her, but I would have known her anywhere.
The woman sitting two rows behind me was Rosie Alvarez.
Ro.
My ex-best friend.
She was on a blind date, it turned out. After the movie they walked around for a while, making small talk as I followed in the Hoodie. Then they stopped at a frozen yogurt shop. I sat one table over and shamelessly listened to everything they said.
Ro loved my dad’s movie. That was the first thing they discussed.
“My favorite part was how the man offered up his own soul to save Evangeline,” she said. “Even though he knew the Shadow King would trap them both, he couldn’t just leave her to her fate. He still sacrificed himself, knowing how things would end. There’s such a beauty in that. Choosing love, no matter what it costs.”
She’d said the L-word, which kind of flustered her date, because they’d never been out together before, and here was this girl talking about beauty and love with such passion in her voice. He was sort of cute, this guy, blond-haired and blue-eyed and extra super dull. But he knew how to dress at least—a simple button-up black dress shirt and dark-wash jeans. Nice watch. Quality shoes. She could do worse.
“So you actually know the director?” he asked.
Ro nodded. “My mom was his first wife’s makeup artist for years. I was over at his house all the time when I was a kid.”
I waited for her to tell him about me.
“I owe that man a lot,” she said instead.
I’d never thought about my dad and Ro even knowing each other that well.
“He has a huge study where he keeps all his own books and the ones people send him when they’re trying to get him to make their novels into films,” Ro continued. “When my mom was working, getting his wife ready for some event, I used to sneak inside the study. I had trouble with reading at first, dyslexic, you know, but here was this . . . feast of wonderful, exciting books, right within my reach. One time he caught me in there, all curled up with a novel. I was scared, but he just laughed and told me I could go in anytime, borrow any book I wanted.”
I didn’t remember anything about that. I knew Ro was sometimes in the house while my mom was getting ready, nights I usually spent at my grandma’s so my parents could go out together. I knew that Ro had dyslexia. She had a favorite tee that read, “Dyslexics of the world untie,” that she wore, like, once a week when we were freshmen. And I knew she loved books, and she was always reading something or other, but I never knew where her books came from. She never told me.
“He’d ask me about the things I read, too,” Ro said. “Later, there was a period at the end of high school when he became a bit of a shut-in. I’d go and visit him, and we’d have these amazing conversations. About philosophy. Religion. Art. Once he said something about the nature of stories that I never forgot. He said, Without stories, we’re all just lonely islands.”
Her date looked at her blankly.
“Stories let us see and hear and feel what someone else does,” she explained. “They build bridges to the other islands. That’s why stories are so important. They create true empathy.”
She glanced away for a second, embarrassed to be going on and on about this. “Anyway. Gideon Chase is a big part of why I wanted to become a writer. He made the telling of stories sound like a sacred calling.”
Wait, Ro wanted to be a writer? When had that happened?
Wonderful, said the Inner Yvonne wryly. Just what the world needs. Another writer.
“It must have been inspiring to get to know him,” said Captain Bland. “It sounds like he was a good mentor to you, for sure.”
“He’s more like my friend than a mentor. I talked to him on the phone last week. He’s a quiet man, but he’s really funny, actually. He’s just very private now, especially after . . .” She stopped.
After his daughter died, I filled in for her. Again, I waited for her to say it, to tell him all about the daughter of Gideon Chase, her best friend in the world for years and years, and how she’d died in a tragic accident. Or for her date to bring it up, because if he knew anything about Gideon Chase, he’d probably heard of me. I’d been famous, after all. A little bit famous, anyway. I had fans.
“Like I said, I owe him a lot,” Ro said. “He wrote me a letter of recommendation for USC.” She took a bite of her frozen yogurt. “But I’ve been talking way too much about me. Tell me about you.”
Blah blah blah, said her date. Blah. Blah. Blah. He clearly loved to talk about himself. It took forever for the conversation to come back around to Ro.
“So, you’re a writer,” he finally said. “What kinds of things do you write?”
Plays, she told him. Short stories. Poems. The occasional screenplay. And then she talked about how she was a bartender, which she enjoyed because she got to hear so many interesting stories. She liked New York, but she missed California. The beach. Her parents and her friends. She missed the sunny days.
She talked and talked, but she never mentioned me.
Not one word.
You expect her to talk about her dead friend when she’s out on a blind date? asked the Yvonne in my head. She probably barely remembers you. You should go home now. What happens to Ro doesn’t concern you anymore.
Yvonne was right. I knew she was right. But Ro had been my very best friend, the person I used to think knew me better than anyone else.
I had to see what her life was like without me.
I followed Ro home and then came back and spent the rest of the weekend basically stalking her.
She lived in the Bronx with her great-aunt, a sweet old lady who went to mass at a church down the street twice a day. Ro called her Gran Tía, and she washed the dishes and took out the trash and carried groceries into the house, ever the dutiful niece. Her room was on the top floor of her aunt’s house, and once I saw her up there at her desk in front of the window, writing.
I wondered if she ever wrote about me. If she still thought about me sometimes, and felt sad that I had died.
Her date’s name had been David, by the way. When she’d gone home that night, her aunt had come out to meet her in the yard and asked her about how her date had gone, and she’d said (and I quote), “It went fine. David’s fine,” and when her aunt laughed and poked her in the ribs and asked, “So you’ll be seeing more of this fine guy?” she’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
I couldn’t stop peeking in the windows at her—I couldn’t stop staring—noticing all the ways that she was different and all the ways that she was exactly the same. Her hair was long again, for instance. It was black and wavy and she wore it braided over one shoulder most of the time. Her face was slightly longer and leaner than it had been, but her body had filled out. She actually had breasts. And hips. She was so . . . old. Twenty-three, I calculated. A college graduate. Old enough to hold down a full-time job and be out there in the city on her own.
She’d grown up.
Still, her laugh was the same, and I recognized the scar above her left eyebrow from where something had flown out of the lawn mower one time and clipped her, and she had needed stitches to close up the gash. Her freckles were still there. Her dark eyes still had that sparkly quality, that mischievous expression that always used to make me giggle.
She was still Ro.
So many times that weekend I thought about showing myself to her. It would have been so easy to slide the hood off, step out from the shadows where she could see me, and call her name. I imagined over and over what would happen then. She’d stare at me, her face all disbelieving, and she’d come closer, and she’d say, “Holly? Oh my God, Holly?” And I would smile and nod and maybe cry, and then she’d probably hug me.
But then what? How could I tell her what had happened to me? How could explain why I still looked like a seventeen-year-old girl when I was supposed to be in my twenties? How could I make her understand why I wasn’t actually buried in the Forest Lawn cemetery?
It was Sunday morning when I finally tore myself away, when I made myself face the truth. I was dead to Ro. There was nothing for me to give her, or for her to give me. Besides, she’d dumped me long before I’d died. She had a life, a life where she could apparently just call up my dad and talk to him anytime she wanted. A life filled with people to meet and places to explore. Where she had a future.
She had a life. I didn’t.
I almost got all the way home before I decided I couldn’t stand to be in my apartment, so I walked. I walked and walked and walked. Alone. I was always alone. I was always going to be alone, I realized.
Not going anywhere anytime soon.
Stuck, forever.
Lost.
I could see them, right there in front of me—the people and places and things that other people saw. But I couldn’t touch their world. I couldn’t be a real part of it. I was just a ghost.
Eventually I stopped walking. I’d been wandering for hours, not paying attention to where my feet were taking me. I didn’t even know where I was.
I turned in a slow circle, looking around. On one side of me was Central Park, the south end. I recognized the rows of horses pulling carriages and food vendors and foot taxis. God. My apartment was at Eighth and Third. It was going to take me forever to get home. I glanced across the street. The building on the corner with the black awning looked familiar. There was an American flag posted on the left side of the door, and a red-and-white flag with a winged foot in the center of it on the right. This, too, felt super familiar.
I squinted to read the gold lettering on the awning.
New York Athletic Club.
That’s why it was familiar. That’s where Ethan’s pool was.
The pool.
The one I’d seen only in his dreams.