Page 57 of The Someday Daughter
More silence. “I thought you were at dinner with your mom?”
I watch Silas’s heels ahead of me, the even pace of his footsteps. Ethan’s caught me in the lie but I can’t make myself give it to him. “And now,” I say, “it’s one in the morning.”
“I don’t understand,” Ethan says. “We don’t drink. I didn’tthink you—I thought. I thought you’d be trying to find another position for the fall.”
There it is. Something sours at the back of my throat and I swallow it down. For a few fleeting moments I’d actually forgotten.
“Tonight?” I say, and I know I sound mad. Know, too, that I’ve never been mad at Ethan. “You thought I’d be doing that tonight?”
“When else?” Ethan says. His voice rises to match mine. “I called because I found something I thought you might be interested in. It’s only lab work but it starts in September and they’re still—”
“Ethan,” I say, and this time when Silas turns to look at me Mick and Cleo do, too. “Please stop trying to fix me.”
“Fix you?” His voice is immediate in my ear, incredulous. “I’m trying to help you, Audrey. This is what we do. If you don’t want my help, just say it.”
It’s the beer, maybe. It’s the way Cleo is looking at me, open-mouthed. It’s that Ethan has reached inside this moment and reminded me of my shame—of who I really am when this night is over. And it’s the fact that I’m so, so excruciatingly sick of myself.
I say, “I don’t want your help.”
Ethan’s quiet for too long. It’s unlike him, to be at a loss for words. I know I’ve fucked up as soon as the words are out, and I know it more when he draws a breath so sharp it’s audible.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll just see you in Miami, then.”
37
But I do need help, is the thing.
In the crowd at Lady June’s it felt like morning wouldn’t come. That’s the lure of it, I understand now—a suspended moment, colored lights, how a night like that makes a world of itself. It convinces you it’ll last forever. But it’s so short, and then it’s morning.
When I wake up, life feels nothing like it did last night, dancing anonymously in the dark. It feels realer. And much, much worse.
There’s the email, for one thing. No subject line, just a blue hyperlink to the research position Ethan brought up on the phone. The line of text beneath it:I think we should take a break until Miami so we have space to think about what we both want from this.The way I read it as:I don’t want this.And the white-hot humiliation of how quickly I click the link anyways, apply for the job, wait for it to take some kind of edge off.
There’s Sadie knocking on my door at ten o’clock. The epidemiology lab we’re supposed to visit at Vanderbilt. The way I can’t get out of bed to speak and how I text her instead. The fictional fever I fabricate. How every time I breathe, I feel more like a coward.
The day seeps darkly by: the shades drawn, the sheets at my chin, my eyes dry and bloodshot. The clack of my laptop keys and the ache blooming in my lower back from how my body’s twisted, propped awkwardly on one elbow as I submit the lonely PDF of my résumé over and over and over. I apply to six more on-campus jobs and I get up to pee and I mouth tap water from my cupped hand in the bathroom.
Food?Silas texts me at two, and the hot shock of shame sucks my lips between my teeth. It’s day now: stark and sure and indisputable. This isn’t Broadway at midnight. This is the world I need to occupy forever, the one where I let him see me the way that he did. I keep my eyes closed for thirteen whole, slow minutes. When I open them I can’t even read the one word of his text message through the blur of my tears. Later, when he knocks on the door, I pretend to be sleeping.
I run the hotel room TV all night long. Every time I wake up someone’s talking: strangers playing out fictions who have no idea who I am or the depth of my humiliation. I order room service when they open at six o’clock in the morning and pick at cooled, rubbery eggs from under the comforter, the fork feeling foreign in my hand.
When Cleo slips the ice eye mask under the crack of my door I’m on a deep dive of the Hopkins ICU website, searching for any crumb that’ll tell me who they picked. I can’t find anything, any evidence of what this person has that I lack. Cleo doesn’t say anything; I watch the shadows of her feet disappear and finally pull myself out of bed. There’s a handwritten note on top of the mask, instructions for how to use it scribbled on a Post-it. She’s drawn a little lopsided heart. I stare at it until the AC kicks on and my legs get cold.
It’s nearly evening again when Camilla knocks on the door. Ten minutes to five, still hours from that safe zone when the sun sets and it makes sense for me to be in here like this.
“Audrey,” she says. We’re due at the War Memorial Auditorium in thirty minutes, I know. All two thousand sold-out seats.Camilla St. Vrain’s Valedictorian Daughter.
I say nothing, and she says my name one more time. And then the door clicks open.
I have my laptop next to me, power cord draped over the lump of my body under the covers. I haven’t changed my clothes or run a hand through my hair since Sunday night, nearly forty-eight hours ago. The ice eye mask is pushed up onto my forehead, room temperature and useless. I’m disgusting. She doesn’t flinch.
“Have you eaten?”
I gesture to the room service cart, motionless at the end of my bed, silver dome covering the picked-over remains of the breakfast I barely ate twelve hours ago.
“Can you eat now?”
I shake my head. When I pull up the words they scrape my throat; I’ve hardly spoken since Sunday, either. “I’m sick.”
