Page 29 of The Someday Daughter
“It’s just, my boyfriend sent it to me.”
Silas’s eyes move over mine, back and forth just once before he looks out over the river. “Ah,” he says. One syllable, the smallest noise I’ve ever heard him make. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry—”
He turns back to me, smiling again. “At least they got a good photo of Puddles, right?” When he lifts her between us, bringing her nose to his, I see this for what it is. A pivot, the closing of a door.
And I don’t know what to say, either—how we’ve wound up here—so I just reach out and smooth one hand over the top of her head. Warm from the sun. Softer than I expected.
She turns toward me, panting in a way that makes it look like she’s smiling.
“They did,” I say quietly. “At least there’s that.”
21
The AustinLettersshow is at the university’s auditorium, which means “backstage” is a classroom. Two classrooms, really—my mother with Mags in one, me with the interns in another. Mick is hunched over his phone in the corner of the room, replying to DMs on Camilla’s accounts, mumbling to himself at regular intervals. Cleo’s drawing on the massive chalkboard, standing on a maroon chair. And Silas—well. I’m actively trying not to be aware of what he’s doing. (He’s cross-legged on the floor in front of his video camera, fiddling with a memory card.)
Good luck tonight, Ethan has sent me.I’ll call youafter?I respondyesand add a heart emoji for good measure. We’ve been talking every day since he sent me the paparazzi photo—I’m back up to speed with the Penn coursework, and when I told him about visiting Dr. Kowalski with Sadie his eyes lit up over video chat, rapt and round and hungry for every detail. It was there, the Ethan I knew: fascinated by the same things that fascinate me. Eager to share all of it. I think of that flicker of doubt, back at breakfast with my dad—the soft whisper that stopped me from telling Ethan I loved him. As my phone pings with another text, I shove the memory away.
imade this, Fallon says, alongside a photo of a well—a metal spigot rising from a circular concrete pad.meet my firstbornchild
They’re beautiful, I reply.What was it like giving birth?
dirty, she says.and wet
That tracks, I send, and she says:how are youaud
I stare at the words, finding myself at a full-body loss for how to respond. How am I? I have no idea. Cleo calls for Silas across the room, and I watch him look up at her. His eyebrows arched, his hair tied into a messy bun, his standard show outfit: black jeans, black Henley, black Converse. So he blends into the background while he’s filming, surely. Not so that he looks like a brooding artist, and definitely not so the green in his brown eyes becomes so bright by contrast that it’s striking. Striking to someone else—not to me, when his gaze flickers in my direction before he crosses the room toward Cleo.
I’m losing my grip on reality, I could tell Fallon. But instead I just watch Cleo and Silas: the way she grabs his elbow once he’s next to her, their heads level with her standing on the chair. She points up at the top of her drawing—an enormous dragon, its shingled scales formed into points. She hops down from the chair and Silas climbs onto it, reaching down for her chalk. With Cleo directing him from below, he extends a long arm upward and finishes the few lines at the top of the drawing she couldn’t reach—the dragon’s head, the steam billowing from its nostrils. They grin at each other and I look away, back down at my phone. This is none of my business.Noneof it.
“Audrey,” Cleo calls, motioning me toward her. Her eye shadow’s rainbow tonight, solid lines of color striping up toward her eyebrows. “Come here a sec.”
Silas and I meet eyes, so briefly, before he ducks his chin and crosses the room back toward his camera. When I come to stand next to Cleo she hands me a piece of chalk. “Help me color in the scales? Every other, I think.”
I can’t remember the last time I drew something, but shading in the scales is weirdly soothing—every time I finish one it feels disproportionately fulfilling.
“Fun, right?” Cleo looks down at me from her perch on the chair, and I nod. “Can’t believe I’ve got Audrey St. Vrain doing somethingfun.” She holds up her fingers, faking a camera and snapping a photo of me. “This is one for the scrapbook.”
I sigh harshly. “Am I really so horrible?”
“Yeah,” Cleo says, but when I jerk back to look at her she smiles and nudges me with her knee. “You’re, like, borderline horrible. How about that?”
“Great,” I mutter, and she laughs.
“You’re growing on me, though.” I look up at Cleo, watch her swooping white lines of chalk across her dragon’s torso. “Like a fungus.” She glances down at me. “On all of us, I think.”
I swallow, pressing my chalk into the board. I don’t meet her eyes when I whisper, “Is there, um. Something? Between you and Silas.”
She’s quiet for so long that I finally have to look up at her. When I do, she bursts out laughing. “Silas?” She says it so loudly that when I risk a glance at him, he’s looking over at us. When our eyes meet, he immediately looks back down at his camera. “No.”
Cleo drops into the chair next to me and I crouch to fill in some of the dragon’s leg scales, bringing our heads close together so she doesn’t have to keep shouting.
“Silas and I made out at a party during O week in atrulydisastrous frat house basement—like, I think this place has since been condemned. We both have black mold poisoning, probably.” I don’t want to picture it, but I do: tall, lanky Silas with his easy smile and his jangling laugh. Cleo in some colorful leather outfit and immaculate eyeliner, her obsidian hair cascading over one shoulder. Silas reaching toward her, smoothing it out of the way, leaning close to—
“It was the stupidest thing either of us have ever done,” she says, snapping me out of it.Whatis my malfunction? “The next morning we ate stale bagels in the dining hall, hungover as all hell, and it was like—oh, you are my literal brother. We came from the same womb. Kissing Silas was like being one of those twins that eats the other one in utero. That’s how fucked up it was.”
I grimace, and she laughs. “Anyway, we wound up in the same media program and we’ve been friends ever since, but the kiss was an idiot move. College is wild.” She looks at me. “You’re gonna end up doing some weird shit you won’t be able to explain later. You’ll see.”
