Page 50 of The Someday Daughter
The seat belt light plinks on, and Sadie glances up at it before answering. “Yeah,” she says. “I would say so, yes.”
I press my thumb to my pinky, counting down from four. “How do you know?”
“What do you mean?”
I draw another breath. “What does it feel like? How do you know you’re close to each other?”
Sadie’s eyes slant with something so close to sympathy I have to look straight down at my lap.
“I’m sure you’ve caught on by now,” I say. “That Camilla and I aren’t, exactly. Close.”
She’s quiet for so long that I finally look up at her. But she doesn’t look sympathetic—she looks uncomfortable. Like it’s as awkward for me to admit the truth as it’s felt for me to live it. Like she doesn’t want to hear this, just like the rest of the world. Like we’ll all be better off if we just keep living the fiction.
“Never mind,” I say quickly. The sear of rejection is hot and black, liquid tar over my shoulders.
“Audrey—” Sadie tries, but I stick my earbuds in and wave her off. What do I think I’m doing, anyways? I’m thesomeday daughter. No one wants to consider that I might be anything else.
We’re silent for the rest of the flight, for the wait in baggageclaim, for the drive from the airport to our hotel in downtown Nashville. I keep my sunglasses on and my headphones in so no one will bother talking to me. I know I’m stewing, absolutely languishing in the mud pit of my own feelings.
I’m staring out the tinted window when we pull up to the hotel. When my phone pings with an email notification. When I get news that’s two days early.
Dear Audrey, the email begins.Thank you for your recent application to the Fall Semester Freshman ICU Shadowing Program.We sincerely appreciate your interest and regret to inform you that we’re moving ahead with another student at this time.
I’m going dark before I’ve even finished the first sentence.
34
NASHVILLE
The last time this happened, I had a dorm room. I had a place to tuck myself away, a twin XL bed with white cotton sheets, a heavy comforter to pull up and over my head.
This time I’m strapped into a shared van. I’m surrounded. I have no way to make myself invisible.
Shame claws through me, screaming at the pace of my heartbeats, and when the van stops in front of the hotel lobby I slam open the sliding door so fast it jams my elbow. I run for the lobby bathroom and someone—Camilla, maybe—shouts my name.
The lobby is cavernous and cool, aggressively southern. Ornate carved arches from the floor to the towering ceiling; plush velvet furniture; elaborate chandeliers. It’s like stepping back in time. I think, distantly, that if I’d existed in the Gilded Age, I wouldn’t have even wanted to be a doctor. I wouldn’t be failing, because I wouldn’t be trying to do this at all.
The bathroom is empty. When I beeline for one of the enormous stalls I break out in full-body goose bumps; I am simultaneously freezing and on fire. I close the heavy wooden door behind me and click the lock and slide to the floor with my back against it. I pull my legs to my chest and jam my cheeks into my kneecaps until my bones hurt. The breath is rushing into and out of meso erratically that my ribs ache, those five finger-shaped bruises. Panic floods me like the lake all over again, hot down my throat, drowning me alive.
My fingers tingle, numbing. I wrap them around my forearms and dig my nails into the skin until it breaks. A logical pain, and one I deserve. Sweat prickles at my forehead. I’m so hunched over my spine is digging into the wooden door. It hurts, and I press back even harder.
The person I knew I’d be this fall recedes, like a specter or a stranger. The best in her class, the one with the job everyone else wanted. The one with the perfect setup for her college career, ahead of the pack from the moment she set foot on campus. I’ve been her for so long in my own mind that now I feel hollowed out, hardly human at all. That person will be someone else. And I will be me, less than.
I think of Ethan, convincing me to stay on this tour to bolster my application. How I’ve oriented my entire awful summer around this one thing and it didn’t even work. How maybe if I’d gone to Penn like I was supposed to we’d be celebrating right now—we’d be in the dorm room I’ve only ever seen through video chat and he’d be wrapping his arms around me. The familiarity of him. The relief of being the person he knows me to be.
I need a bed. I need a room with curtains to draw and a door to lock and the promise of isolation.
I wait long enough that no one who knows me will still be in the lobby. And then I wipe the blood off my forearm with toilet paper and go in search of my room key.
I hold the key to the reader and it hesitates, blinks red. I’ve got the key card in my right hand and I’m counting my fingers on my left,low and breathless, so fast I’m not even processing the numbers. I try the key again—red. I need to get behind this door before anyone sees me, before I’m swallowed by myself in the middle of this hallway. There are tears pressed against the backs of my eyes. I know they’re coming.
“Please,” I whisper, trying the key again. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “Pleasepleaseplease.”
Red light. I tap the card again, jiggle the lock, counting out loud. Again. Red light. Door handle digging into my palm I’m pulling it so hard. Red light, angry beep, and I’m about to sit down on the floor when the door opens inward. I almost fall into the room, right into Silas.
“Audrey.” He breathes my name, his whole face broken open with shock.
“Oh my god,” I hear myself say. My eyes dart around—his suitcase, open on the foot of one bed. Puddles, peering at me from the ottoman of a mustard velvet chair by the window. And the room number, on the wall right next to the door: 407. I’m 408. I’m 408 and I’m so, so intolerably stupid.
