I think we misunderstood each other— No, that’s not right, either.
He flops down onto the couch, closing his eyes for a moment. Listens to the fridge clicking on and off.
He met Nick his last year at Juilliard, at a bar on 71st Street with a dart board and a perpetually burned-out neon sign. It was Charlie’s favorite bar and eventually it became Will’s favorite bar, too—the dark paneling and the high-backed wooden booths with thirty years’ worth of names and numbers carved into the seats, cheap beer and endless pickles and enormous baskets of fries. They closed it down after every performance, spilling out onto the sidewalk as the sky turned gray over Amsterdam.
Georgia came to stay with him the March of his senior year. She’d graduated early from boarding school in Connecticut and was taking a year off before she started at Princeton to do an internship with a cousin of theirs at Wells Fargo; she stayed at his apartment near Lincoln Center, almond milk and Greek yogurt and three different kinds of hot sauce appearing in his fridge overnight. Charlie was living with a girlfriend that year and Will was surprised by how much he liked having someone else around again: the sound of the coffee grinder in the morning, someone to watch TV with on the weekends. They hadn’t lived in the same place in years. She’d found an old Polaroid camera at a thrift store in Brooklyn and ordered a bunch of film for it online; when Will thinks of that spring he can hear the whir as the camera spit out its pictures, the way Georgia pinned them to the walls of the bathroom and the hallway. She wanted to go to warehouse parties in Bushwick. She wanted him to take her out to bars.
“You’re seventeen,” he said, and she laughed, not unkindly.
“I’ve had a fake ID for three years,” she informed him. “Let’s go.”
So. They went. A decade and a half later and Will still blames himself for this part—that he let his guard down, didn’t pay closer attention. That he didn’t take her to Shake Shack instead. That when she started hanging around near the bar, head tipped close to the wry, wisecracking bartender, he didn’t put a stop to it then and there.Families look out for each other—at least, they’re supposed to. And Will is the one who dropped the ball.
It was Charlie who told him. He did it as delicately as possible: Polaroids, he explained. Half a dozen of them, tacked to the wall in the men’s room at the bar. “I took them down, obviously,”he reported, looking extremely miserable. “Threw them in a trash can a few blocks away. But I just... thought you’d probably want to know.”
He was hoping that Georgia didn’t know anything about it but when he got back to the apartment he found her sitting on the couch watching reruns in a pair of grubby sweatpants. The camera was sitting broken in the trash.
“Georgia,” he said. Even as the words were coming out of his mouth it was like he couldn’t help himself. “I mean, did yougivehim—”
But Georgia shook her head. “I swear to god, Will, if you lecture me about this I’m going to walk out of this apartment and you’re not my brother anymore.”
Right away, Will held his hands up. “I’m not going to lecture you,” he promised. “I’m going to take care of it.”
When Nick got off work the following night, Will was waiting for him. He can remember how cold his feet were inside his boots, the faint smell of garbage from the alley. A yellow cab speeding by. He remembers feeling faintly ridiculous: he was an actor, for fuck’s sake. Not even an actor, an acting student. He’d never been in a fight that wasn’t staged.
Nick, for his part, didn’t even have the decency to look surprised: “Dude,” he said, his smug face twisted in lazy self-satisfaction. “Relax. It was a joke.”
Will’s never admitted this part to anyone, but it felt good to hit him, years of pent-up anger and loneliness in a mess of spit and blood. It was about Nick and what he’d done to his sister, yeah. But there’s a shameful part of him that knows it wasn’t ever only about that.
Somebody called the cops, in the end; Will performed thesecond week ofOrpheus Descendingwith pancake makeup thick enough to cover the black eye and split lip. When he walked back into the apartment Georgia looked at him for a moment, then shook her head slightly. “You are so fucking dumb,” she said, but she went to the freezer and got him a box of Eggo waffles to put on his face, and they sat and watchedCriminal Mindson her laptop and didn’t talk about it again after that.
They still haven’t, even all these years later: it’s in a locked box with their parents, he guesses, and the morning Georgia found him on his bathroom floor. Some things don’t need to be opened up again. Some things don’t need to be shared.
Now Will gazes out the living room window in the direction of the Benedettos’, his whole body restless and achy. Then he goes upstairs and puts himself to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lilly
She speeds south toward Joshua Tree the following afternoon, salty and seething: At Charlie Bingley, who was photographed canoodling with Sera Foye at a club last night in Paris. At Olivia, who’s on her way to Moon Landing in stubborn defiance of all good sense and judgment. At her parents, for every financial decision they’ve made since 1994.
At Will most of all.
Lilly lay in bed all night replaying their argument over and over, something about it snagging like a pair of cheap tights in the very back of her brain. He was wrong that she showed up at his place sniffing around for gossip. He was wrong that she didn’t want anything more.
Charlotte comes running out of the house as Lilly pulls the brake at the end of the long, winding driveway, her red hair streaming behind her like a flag. “You’re here!” she hollers delightedly, and when they hug Lilly kind of forgets all the weirdness that’s been calcifying between them lately, the feeling of squeezing into shapewear a full size too small. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course I came,” Lilly says, breathing in the vanilla-jasmine smell of the same shampoo Charlotte has been using since high school and feeling 100 percent like a jerk. So what if Charlotte is dating someone Lilly herself finds deeply irritating? If she’s happy—and, god love her, she keeps saying she is—isn’t that all that matters? Lilly wants to be the kind of friend Charlotte can count on. She wants to be the kind of friend Charlotte deserves.
Then Colin comes strolling out the side door in a pair of skinny jeans and an oversized, short-sleeve button-down shirt screenprinted with a neon rendering of the Notorious B.I.G., clutching a Karl Ove Knausgård novel in one pale hand, and Lilly has to give herself the entire fucking pep talk all over again.
“Lil!” he says, opening his arms magnanimously. “Welcome to our humble abode.”
Lilly plasters a smile onto her face. “Thanks for having me,cugino.”
Charlotte beams at them. “Come on,” she says, swinging an arm around Lilly’s shoulders and steering her across the driveway. “Let me give you the tour.”
Colin’s got a work deadline, and he makes himself gratifyingly scarce while Lilly and Charlotte spend the better part of the next two days lying by the pool, gossiping and reading magazines like they did back when they were teenagers. The property is incredible: the trees and the garden and the mountains soaring high in the distance, the sky clear and blue and enormous overhead. Lilly is staying in a tiny guest cottage that’s connected to the main house by a covered breezeway, the bright white walls hung with neon posters advertising the Rolling Stones at the Greek and Stevie Nicks at the Hollywood Bowl. The whole place smells like oranges and sandalwood, the tile baked warm under Lilly’s feet.
