I shake my head. “It’s fine. I’m tired.”
Charlie nods, and Olivia squeezes my shoulder from the back seat. “We’re here,” she says. “We love you.”
“Yeah.”
“You have to let us help,” Charlie says. “Please.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Talk tomorrow.”
I unbuckle my seat belt and grab my purse. I slide out of the car and shut the door.
“I’ll miss practice today,” Charlie calls through the window. She’s smiling, her red hair catching the last sinking rays of sun.
“You’re a stalker,” I say.
“And you’re really good, Rosie. You know I wouldn’t sit around and listen to half-baked talent.” Her lips blow kisses as she swings out of the driveway, chauffeuring Olivia home.
I see a letter on the porch when I get closer. My mom has sorted the mail and left it out. I pick it up and walk inside. There is no return address, but the handwriting is familiar. I sit down on the stairs and thread my finger under the envelope flap, wiggling it from side to side until the seal pops. A photo slides out. It’s yellowed on the back, and the corner is ripped off, like it’s been torn out of an album.
It’s a picture of two children, a boy and a girl, sitting at a piano. They are seated on the bench, facing away from the instrument. She’s wearing a pink-and-white dress and he has on khakis and a collared shirt. The two children aren’t looking at the camera but instead at each other, oblivious, lost in their own conversation.And they each have a Twizzler dangling out of their mouths. The little girl is me and the little boy is Len. It’s a picture from a recital at Famke’s.
I turn the photo over, and there is a note on the back, scrawled in the same handwriting I now know so well. From hours spent in the bio lab, homework assignments, and corrected quizzes.
Rosaline,
I’m sorry for those things I said. I meant some of them, but not all. I still care about you. I’m here, whenever you want me to be.
—Len
I take the picture and stand up. Then I climb the stairs, walk down the hallway, and go into my room. It’s not until I’m in bed that I realize I have the picture pressed up against my heart.
Scene Four
My birthday this year comestoo quickly. It’s January first before the calendar can right itself from stumbling over Christmas. The morning usually begins with my mom making pancakes in the kitchen. Banana and chocolate chip. We’ve been having them since before I can remember. She makes hot cocoa with espresso and we all sit around in our bathrobes and pretend it’s snowing outside, which it never is.
“Just once, I’d love to have a white Christmas,” my dad says every year, “but I’d be just as happy for it to show up on your birthday.”
That’s how I feel about Rob. I half expected him to come over on Christmas. Usually I wake up before six. It’s one of those habits left over from childhood. The excitement to see what I’ve gottenand what kind of gifts are under the tree. I went downstairs and just stood in the living room, looking out to our lawn through the double glass doors over toward his house. I stood there for hours, until my mom came and wrapped a blanket around me and forced me back to the couch. I was convinced, somehow, that if I stared long enough, I’d see him. That if I waited long enough, the universe would get tired and let him slip back to me.
I have a habit of waking up early on my birthday, too, but today I wake up at nine. It’s dark in my room, and if it wasn’t for my clock on my nightstand, I’d have no idea what time it is at all. My phone is flashing on the floor beneath me—three new text messages.
Two are from Olivia. She wrote the text of a birthday card and got cut off. The third, I know before I read it, will be from Charlie. She always sends me the same thing every birthday morning:Happy birthday, bisnatch. Time to party.
The familiarity of the text sends me back flat against my pillows. Previous birthdays come sweeping in like leaves blown in the wind. Images and memories swirling around me. Charlie’s text and Rob’s visit, always in time for pancakes. Hot cocoa with my family. Presents and laughter and always the promise of more. Playing with our Christmas gifts from the previous week and running around on full stomachs. Dinner together and sometimes even the slight champagne headache from New Year’s Evethe night before. A new semester of school. Times in which forever just seemed like a given. In which time seemed like a stroll on Olivia’s beach in Malibu: casual and unrushed.
Last year on my birthday Rob came over for brunch. My mom made her traditional pancakes, and we all sat around and joked about how long it would take my dad to set up the new DVR my mom had bought him for Christmas. Afterward my parents started cooking some elaborate birthday dinner, and Rob and I drove over to Olivia’s house. Charlie and Ben were there, and Jake, too, and the six of us spent the afternoon baking brownies and watchingCasablanca. We ended up burning the first batch because we forgot about them in the oven, but the house smelled like chocolate for the rest of the day. I remember lying on Olivia’s couch and thinking there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be. It was perfect.
My mom knocks softly on my door and comes inside. She sits down on the edge of my bed and then moves closer, placing one hand on my forehead.
“Happy birthday, baby. Are you coming down?” She starts running her hand through my hair the way she used to do when I was little and sick.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just thinking.”
She nods and motions for me to sit up. I slide until my back is flat against my headboard.
“Look, Rosaline.” Usually my mom only uses my full name like that when she’s mad at me, but it’s my birthday, and something about the way she says it makes me think of Len.
“You never call me that.”
