Sweet Nothing(7)

“Cool.” Gwen’s eyes flicker over my face. “Elle, did you say?” She pauses, squints at me. Is that a flash of recognition in her eyes? Not possible. I’m just tired. Paranoid.

“Yeah.” I reach for my glasses.

“Gwen lives in the other room down the hall,” Waverly informs me. She unloads the contents of her grocery bags onto my dresser: bagels, cream cheese, and plastic knives. Then orange juice and cheap champagne. My head starts to pound again.

“We got paired together last year when we were both new teachers,” Waverly continues. “And at first, I was thinking we might not get along all that well, you know? Because it’s not like Gwen was somebody I would have hung out with in college.” She whirls around. “No offense, Gwennie.”

“None taken, bitch.” Gwen rolls her eyes at me.

“But then I told myself, ‘Waverly, you have to work on expanding your horizons’. And it actually worked out, and we requested to live together again this year.”

“It’s been magical,” Gwen deadpans.

“Please. You love me.” Waverly mixes mimosas in plastic flutes, then hands us each a drink.

“Thanks.” I accept mine gratefully and take a long sip. It’s strong. My headache evaporates.

“So I saw you at the reception last night but didn’t get to say hi.” Gwen kicks off her sneakers and settles into a cross-legged stance on my bed. “Have a good time?”

“Definitely,” I nod. Instantly, my thoughts find Luke, the musician. I’ve never met a guy who knew that much about art before, and was still all man. He’d looked like he could sit on Dr. Goodwin’s loveseat and talk about Monet over cocktails one second, then rip your clothes off and pin you down on that same loveseat the next. The thought makes my skin tingle.

None of the guys I knew in Manhattan cared anything about art. Aria and I had a name for the type of guy who ran in our social circle: PERVs. Pretty. Entitled. Rich. And Vapid. The kind of guy who asks for your number while searching the crowd for someone better.

But Luke seemed different from the kind of guy I knew back home. Stronger. Definitely smarter. And when we’d talked, he’d actually looked at me. With those piercing eyes, it had felt like he was looking into me, like he could see through me.

I shake the thoughts from my head. Thinking about him, about the way he’d felt familiar and exciting at the same time, is useless. I’ll never see the guy again. And staying unattached is vital in my situation.

“—remember I was pretty blown away by the way they do things at Allford,” Gwen is saying. “I mean, I spent two years with Teach for America before this.” Her eyes darken for a brief moment. “In a really poor school where I barely had the supplies I needed, and then I get down here and it’s like, Surprise! Johnny’s dad is actually a direct descendent of Shakespeare, so if you want to take a field trip to the Globe, you can just hop Johnny’s private jet!” She looks impressed and disgusted at the same time.

“So, the school has resources. The families have resources. That doesn’t mean teaching here is any less important than teaching up there,” Waverly argues, passing out paper plates piled with bagels. “You can’t blame people for being rich.”

“Did I say that?” Gwen squints at me. “Ellie. Did you hear me say that?”

“Up where?” It’s sweet, the way she slips so easily into a nickname. Like we’ve known each other forever. I swipe a bagel half and take a giant bite. Warm blueberry with honey cream cheese. “Where were you teaching?”

“New York. Queens.”

Queens. I swallow, almost choking on my bagel. At least choking would be an effective subject change.

“Ever been up there?” Gwen asks me.

“Not Queens, really.” I shake my head. Don’t screw this up, Elle. “I went to NYU for undergrad, though. I graduated this year.”

“Ohhh. Okay.” Gwen nods. “I know this sounds weird, but I was thinking you looked familiar. I lived in the city for a summer. Maybe we had a mutual friend or something.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I can feel the heat in my face, on the back of my neck, spreading through my body. I’m jittery; restless. Does she know? Maybe not. Maybe it will come later, when she’s in the middle of teaching a Dickenson poem, or about to fall asleep. Suddenly, she’ll realize why I look so familiar. She’ll remember my picture from The Times, or recall a news clip of me headed up the courtroom steps, head bowed, trying to avoid the lightening strike of flashbulbs. And everything will fall apart.