“Okay,” she says twenty minutes later, laughing at him over the bowl of her wineglass, “that’s not real.” She’s perched on his kitchen counter in ripped jeans and a tank top, the heels of her bare feet bumping lightly against the cabinet doors. “I refuse to believe that even you would—”
“The ad said they needed an actor!” Will defends himself, arm brushing hers as he reaches for the bottle. “Technically, I was acting.”
Lilly snorts. “Standing outside a tax place dressed as the Statue of Liberty is not acting.”
“Says you, maybe.” Will grins, ducking his head a little. “Anyway, that was how I learned that one cannot circumvent the need for an agent by booking one’s own jobs on Craigslist dot org.”
“A real coming-of-age moment for you.” Lilly’s lips twist.
“Basically the plot of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ yes.”
“Is that your karaoke song?”
“Uh, sure is not.” Will snorts. “I’d rather shave off both my eyebrows than sing karaoke.”
“Oh, right,” Lilly says, nodding seriously. “Sorry, I forgot for a second how terminally opposed to a good time you are.”
“I’m not opposed to a good time,” Will protests, leaning back against the island with his ankles crossed. “I just, as a general rule, prefer to humiliate myself accidentally instead of on purpose.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“I mean, nobody’s going to accuse me of not being committed to the bit.” He lifts an eyebrow. “What’s yours?” he asks, lifting his chin in her direction. “Your karaoke song, I mean.”
Lilly doesn’t hesitate. “‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.’”
Will laughs, then realizes she’s serious. “Wait, really?” he asks. “That song is, like, twelve minutes long.”
“Seven and a half,” Lilly corrects him. “It’s actually my favorite song of all time, period. My mom used to sing it to us all the time when we were kids.”
“That . . . tracks,” Will says, then catches himself, remembering what happened at the movie premiere: the angry flash of her expression, the stubborn set of her jaw. “I just mean—”
Lilly cuts him off. “Fuck you,” she says, but there’s no heat behind it. “I know everybody thinks my mother is warped, and, like, fine, she is, but she was a good mom when we were kids.”
Will nods. “I can see that,” he says, and he’s surprised to discover he actually means it. “I bet she was fun.”
“She was.” Lilly shakes her head. “Anyway. That song always makes me want to cry a little bit, honestly, even though it’s not actually sad. Or maybe it is a sad song, and people just don’t realize that because it’s so fast? I don’t know.”
Will thinks about it for a minute, trying to remember the words. “‘Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive’?”
“Exactly.” Lilly’s smile is slow and luminous. “Equal parts delusion and grit, that’s what I always say.”
He’s not sure who she’s talking about, the people in the song or her own mother, but either way Will nods. “She must have done something right,” he says. “Your mom, I mean. Look how close you and your sisters are. How much you all—” He breaks off, gesturing vaguely. “You know.”
Lilly makes a face. “Are obsessed with each other?” she supplies.
“I’m serious!” Will defends himself. “I do actually think it’s nice, the way you guys are. It’s not like that with Georgia and me. It never has been.”
“You don’t keep each other company while you pee?”
“Only on special occasions.” Will shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m just . . . not a very good brother, I guess.”
“Well, that’s bullshit,” Lilly says immediately.
Will blinks, caught up short by the baldness of it. “Excuse me?”
“I said,” she repeats, hopping down off the counter and splashing more wine into both their glasses, “it’s bullshit. I hate when people say things like that, like the way you act as a human is some binary thing you’re born with or not. You want to be a good brother, just . . . be a good brother.” She shrugs, gesturing in his direction with her wineglass as she walks backward in the direction of the living room. “Call her up and ask her how she’s doing. Invite her out here. Reassure her that she doesn’t need to have her buccal fat remediated by a professional.”
“It’s not like that for me, though,” Will protests. “Also, I don’t know what that last thing is.”
Lilly ignores him. “You don’t know how to use the telephone?” she asks, sweeping an armful of throw pillows off the sofa before curling up at one end of it. “You have way too many of those, PS.”
“I didn’t buy them,” he says, following her into the living room. “They came with the—whatever. The point is, I’m not the kind of person people trust with their secrets. And I don’t always know how to trust people with mine.”
Lilly shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s true,” she insists, tucking her long legs underneath her. “You told me about what happened back in New York, right?”
“Yeah, well.” Will watches her for a moment, feeling the back of his neck get warm. He likes seeing her here, is the truth—likes how comfortable she looks, the way she has of making herself at home wherever she goes. His heart has been thrumming since the moment he saw her outside, a feeling like a curtain rising. “You’re a special case.”
“Because it doesn’t actually matter what I think of you?”
“That’s not what I—” Will shakes his head as he sits down beside her, his knee just bumping hers. “Can I ask you a question? Why do you always have to immediately jump to the most dickish possible interpretation of whatever it is I’m saying?”
“Habit,” Lilly says immediately, mouth curving as she turns to face him. “Experience.”
“Rude.”
“Yeah, well.” She knocks her knee against his one more time, not quite gentle. “I’m rude.” She grins. “Is that what happened with you and Nick, in the end?” she teases. “He wanted you to bare your soul to him, and you were too emotionally unavailable?”
“Me and Nick?” That surprises him, and not in a good way; all at once, Will’s whole body goes tense. “What does Nick have to do with anything?”
“No,” Lilly says quickly, “nothing. I’m curious, that’s all. You’re saying you’re not good in relationships, and you guys obviously had some kind of”—she waves her hand—“intense relational malfunction, so—”
“Why is that something you care about?”
Lilly lifts an eyebrow. “Easy,” she says, laughing a little. “It’s not, particularly.”
“It sounds like it is.” At the very back of his head he knows he’s probably overreacting, that the very mention of Nick’s name turns him hotheaded and irrational; still, he can’t quite turn it around. “Like, is that why you came over here? To pump me for information about Nick? Because that’s cheap, Lilly. Even for—” He breaks off.
“Watch yourself.” Lilly’s eyes narrow, her own temper flaring. “I’m just saying, if you’re going to go around making vague insinuations that someone is a dirtbag—particularly if you’re going to get him fired from his job—at the very least you ought to be able to back it up with some data.”
“Fired from his—” Will has no fucking idea what she’s talking about. “Are you sleeping with him?” he blurts, then immediately wishes he hadn’t. “Is that what’s going on here?”
“Wow.” Lilly barks a laugh. “That is emphatically none of your business.”
“You make it my business when you show up at my house in the middle of the night to grill me—”
“It’s like nine thirty p.m., Will!” Lilly throws her hands up. “How old are you, a hundred?”
“That’s not the point. The point is—” Fuck, he can’t think. He can never think, when it’s her. “The point is—”
“The point is you talk a big game about who I might or might not be sleeping with when you’re hooking up with your literal best friend’s sister,” Lilly interrupts. “And I’ll tell you, Will: I’m not really interested in hearing it.”
All the blood drains out of Will’s face at once. “How did you—how do you know about that?” he asks, then realizes half a second too late that she didn’t; she was fishing, that’s all, and there he was openmouthed at the other end of the line. “There’s not—I mean, we aren’t—” He winces. “I ended it.”
Lilly rolls her eyes. “Uh-huh,” she says primly. “I’m sure you did.” She sets her wineglass down on the coffee table, then stands up and brushes her hands off on the seat of her jeans. “I should get going,” she announces. He can’t decide whether or not she looks hurt. “I’m leaving for Palm Springs tomorrow, so. I won’t see you.”
“No,” he agrees, which isn’t what he means to say at all. “I guess you won’t.”
Lilly sighs. “You know what, Will?” she starts, then seems to think better of it. The door slams shut behind her as she goes.
Once he’s alone again Will forces himself to finish what he was doing before he saw her out there in the darkness: loading the dishwasher, making his coffee for tomorrow morning. Finally he picks up the phone. You had no idea what you were talking about, he starts, then deletes it.
I think we misunderstood each other— No, that’s not right, either.
He flops down onto the couch, closing his eyes for a moment. Listens to the fridge clicking on and off.
He met Nick his last year at Juilliard, at a bar on 71st Street with a dart board and a perpetually burned-out neon sign. It was Charlie’s favorite bar and eventually it became Will’s favorite bar, too—the dark paneling and the high-backed wooden booths with thirty years’ worth of names and numbers carved into the seats, cheap beer and endless pickles and enormous baskets of fries. They closed it down after every performance, spilling out onto the sidewalk as the sky turned gray over Amsterdam.
Georgia came to stay with him the March of his senior year. She’d graduated early from boarding school in Connecticut and was taking a year off before she started at Princeton to do an internship with a cousin of theirs at Wells Fargo; she stayed at his apartment near Lincoln Center, almond milk and Greek yogurt and three different kinds of hot sauce appearing in his fridge overnight. Charlie was living with a girlfriend that year and Will was surprised by how much he liked having someone else around again: the sound of the coffee grinder in the morning, someone to watch TV with on the weekends. They hadn’t lived in the same place in years. She’d found an old Polaroid camera at a thrift store in Brooklyn and ordered a bunch of film for it online; when Will thinks of that spring he can hear the whir as the camera spit out its pictures, the way Georgia pinned them to the walls of the bathroom and the hallway. She wanted to go to warehouse parties in Bushwick. She wanted him to take her out to bars.
“You’re seventeen,” he said, and she laughed, not unkindly.
“I’ve had a fake ID for three years,” she informed him. “Let’s go.”
So. They went. A decade and a half later and Will still blames himself for this part—that he let his guard down, didn’t pay closer attention. That he didn’t take her to Shake Shack instead. That when she started hanging around near the bar, head tipped close to the wry, wisecracking bartender, he didn’t put a stop to it then and there. Families look out for each other—at least, they’re supposed to. And Will is the one who dropped the ball.
It was Charlie who told him. He did it as delicately as possible: Polaroids, he explained. Half a dozen of them, tacked to the wall in the men’s room at the bar. “I took them down, obviously,” he reported, looking extremely miserable. “Threw them in a trash can a few blocks away. But I just . . . thought you’d probably want to know.”
He was hoping that Georgia didn’t know anything about it but when he got back to the apartment he found her sitting on the couch watching reruns in a pair of grubby sweatpants. The camera was sitting broken in the trash.
“Georgia,” he said. Even as the words were coming out of his mouth it was like he couldn’t help himself. “I mean, did you give him—”
But Georgia shook her head. “I swear to god, Will, if you lecture me about this I’m going to walk out of this apartment and you’re not my brother anymore.”
Right away, Will held his hands up. “I’m not going to lecture you,” he promised. “I’m going to take care of it.”
When Nick got off work the following night, Will was waiting for him. He can remember how cold his feet were inside his boots, the faint smell of garbage from the alley. A yellow cab speeding by. He remembers feeling faintly ridiculous: he was an actor, for fuck’s sake. Not even an actor, an acting student. He’d never been in a fight that wasn’t staged.
Nick, for his part, didn’t even have the decency to look surprised: “Dude,” he said, his smug face twisted in lazy self-satisfaction. “Relax. It was a joke.”
Will’s never admitted this part to anyone, but it felt good to hit him, years of pent-up anger and loneliness in a mess of spit and blood. It was about Nick and what he’d done to his sister, yeah. But there’s a shameful part of him that knows it wasn’t ever only about that.
Somebody called the cops, in the end; Will performed the second week of Orpheus Descending with pancake makeup thick enough to cover the black eye and split lip. When he walked back into the apartment Georgia looked at him for a moment, then shook her head slightly. “You are so fucking dumb,” she said, but she went to the freezer and got him a box of Eggo waffles to put on his face, and they sat and watched Criminal Minds on her laptop and didn’t talk about it again after that.
They still haven’t, even all these years later: it’s in a locked box with their parents, he guesses, and the morning Georgia found him on his bathroom floor. Some things don’t need to be opened up again. Some things don’t need to be shared.
Now Will gazes out the living room window in the direction of the Benedettos’, his whole body restless and achy. Then he goes upstairs and puts himself to bed.