“No,” he says, sighing. “She just stopped working. One night I went and she wasn’t there. And then she never came back again.”
“It was a tragedy,” Dylan says. “He’s never gotten over it.” She smirks at him and he swats her leg with his sweater.
They start another story. This one is about the couple, who have been together for almost a year, and the way the girl followed the guy for two quarters before finally having the courage to introduce herself. I lie on the grass with my head propped on my backpack and watch all the people walking by us on the grass. I imagine what it would be like to go to a school so big that people don’t know one another.
After a while it’s time to go meet Maddy at her job. We all stand up and walk to the edge of the park. They hug one another as I stand aside, and then they wave to me and we break off into three directions.
It’s just Dylan and me again. She rocks backward and then forward on her feet, puts her hands through her messy hair, and says, “We need coffee, right?”
Inside the café, Dylan pulls a silver cigarette holder from her back pocket. She snaps it open and I see a few rolled-up bills between its mirrored sides. She pays for her coffee and I buy a cookie, turn, and see her at a table peering into the cigarette case. She squints her eyes, opens them wide, and smears some black stuff around them. Then she snaps the case shut and starts tapping nervously against the table.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Me? Yeah. Let’s walk.” She’s up and out the door in seconds and I’m dodging bicyclists and strollers trying to keep up.
We walk for a million sunny blocks, past palm trees and cafés and Laundromats, until we reach a small store on a corner. It’s red-and-white-striped, like an oversize, square candy cane with the words COPY cat painted on the front. We stop outside and Dylan looks at her reflection in the window. She moves a strand of hair away from her face and then moves it back. She turns around and announces, in a louder voice than usual, “Maddy’s shift should be over in two minutes.” She says this like I am part of a walking tour and Maddy is the most important of landmarks.
I start to think of how I could tease her about this, when the glass door opens and a girl with light, wavy hair walks out of the store. She has big dark eyes, and when she sees us a smile blooms across her face. And as Dylan turns to look at her, I watch this amazing thing happen. Dylan, in her skintight black jeans, safety-pinned shirt, and bulky armbands, with her hair sticking out in every direction and that black freshly smeared around her eyes, doesn’t just smile, doesn’t just walk toward Maddy and put her arms around her. No. Instead, every muscle in her whole body seems to lose all tension, her step forward resembles a skip, and she lets out a hey that might as well say, I love you, you are so beautiful, no one in the world is as amazing as you are.
32
Sitting at an outdoor table at a café a few blocks from Copy Cat, Maddy leans over the round, green tabletop and says, “Caitlin, tell me about yourself. What do you enjoy doing?”
It’s the kind of question I’d expect parents to ask a guy you wanted to date. It sounds so adult, but for some reason I kind of like it. She cocks her head and waits for an answer. Dylan is leaning back in her metal chair, rubbing her finger against the snaps of her leather bracelet.
Maddy looks at me as intently as Dylan does, but in a different way. When Dylan stares at me it’s like she’s looking through me, learning all the things about me that I don’t even know. Maddy just looks focused. It makes me think for a second. I want to say photography, but it’s only been a day since Dylan watched as I took the worst photograph imaginable. How would I look if I admitted that I was purposely failing at something I loved?
So I say, “I like building things.” I listen to the words as they come out, testing how they make me sound.
Maddy looks interested and Dylan glances up from her bracelet.
“Out of wood,” I add.
“So you’re an artist,” Maddy says. “That’s fantastic. What do you build?”
I try to figure out how to tell the truth without making myself sound really lame. I decide to focus on the future. “I’m about to build a treehouse,” I say. “But not like a kid one.”
“Like the ones in that book you just checked out?” Dylan asks. She sips her coffee—her third refill of the afternoon.
“Yeah,” I say. “I have this great tree in my backyard I’m going to use.”
Maddy looks excited. “My parents have a friend in Oregon who has a treehouse on his property. It’s so beautiful. I sit up there all the time when we visit him. I’d love to see yours when you finish it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Definitely, you should.”
“Maddy’s an actor,” Dylan tells me, resting her hand on Maddy’s back.
“That’s so cool,” I say. “I took drama one semester but I wasn’t that good. I got stage fright.”
Maddy says, “I used to get nervous before performances, too, but it went away. Now I have a ritual that I do before the production starts where I imagine a light around me, protecting me from what everyone in the audience thinks. It sounds strange, but it works.”
She explains this so confidently that I’m convinced. I ask, “So are you going to move to L.A. after you graduate?”
“Oh, no,” Maddy says. She shakes her head, and her white shell earrings sway back and forth. “I’m only interested in theater.”