Paperdoll

She’s leaning against the red brick of the administrative building and she’s smoking, one long inhale, a lowering of the shoulders, a slow breathe out. This is the third cigarette she’s ever had and she’s proud of herself for seemingly perfecting the technique. It’s after school hours, but since Campbell Academy is a boarding school, enough adults are around that there is a decent probability of being caught. The prospect of this thrills her slightly; mostly what thrills her is the idea that she’s doing something worth getting caught for. She sucks on the end again, goes cross-eyed staring at the light at the edge of her fingertips. Smoke wisps curl away into the late autumn afternoon. Everything smells like it’s burning.

She stole the pack from Brian’s room the previous night. They had each smoked one, leaning out his fourth story window, the ash falling through the cool evening air. That was her first cigarette. Her second was after she let him put his hand up her skirt, after staring hard at the ceiling and wondering what she was supposed to be feeling, wondering how she could be doing this so wrong when she wasn’t even doing anything. She smoked it on the boat dock, kicking her feet at the water and checking her watch to make sure she wouldn’t miss check in with her dorm parent. She threw up into the river as she got up to go, disrupting the stars caught in the water.

Now she watches as the end of the cigarette burns closer and closer to her hand. The sun is beginning to set at the edges of her vision. She has a paper due tomorrow, but she hasn’t started it. The door behind her opens and she jumps, stinging her hand with the cigarette.

“Cat?”

  It’s her English teacher, Ms. O’Ryan. Automatically Cat drops the cigarette; it alights on a leaf. Smoke unfurls from her mouth.

Ms. O’Ryan’s eyebrows go up. “Can I bum one off you?”

For a moment they stare at each other; then Cat extends the crumpled pack to her teacher. The wind whistles hard through the trees and Ms. O’Ryan hugs her arms to her chest and nods at Cat. 

“Got a light?”

“Oh. Yeah,” Cat says, and fumbles in her L.L. Bean jacket for a moment. She produces a Bic she bought at the 7-11 on the corner of Grand Street during her lunch period, grabbing croissants with her friend Amy St. Clair. “Here.” She thumbs the lighter, and Ms. O’Ryan leans in to catch the tip in the flames.

“You shouldn’t be smoking, you know,” says the teacher.

Cat shrugs like it couldn’t possibly matter.

Ms. O’Ryan cups her hand around the warmth of the cigarette. “I mean it. It’s awful for you.”

“You’re smoking,” says Cat.

Ms. O’Ryan laughs. “Shh. Don’t tell.”

They stand in silence for a moment. Cat kicks at the leaves on the ground. Beyond them lie the woods, and beyond that, the town of Edmark, as thoroughly Massachusetts as you can get. Cat’s from Vermont, and is predisposed to believe that her state boasts the most breathtaking foliage of all, but has been pleasantly surprised at the fierce bursts of autumn that her second home displays each year. Now she stares at the shadows at the edge of the trees, imagining witches, breadcrumbs, fumbled palms, claps of silence. The smell of gingerbread burning.

“You’re not gonna tell on me?” she asks finally.

Ms. O’Ryan is halfway through her cigarette. She brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Cat has always been jealous of the effortless preppiness of young adults; how they can come sweaty off the boat dock in the heat of the early morning and still look put together, glossy, triumphant. Ms. O’Ryan’s hair is wound up in the artfully messy kind of bun Cat herself finds impossible to emulate. 

“Are you gonna smoke again?” she asks, and widens her eyes at Cat, a hint.

“Um, no,” Cat says.

“Then I won’t have to tell on you.” The teacher smiles, cigarette in the corner of her mouth. It dips with the change in expression. “What’s up?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Oh, come on. There’s always something up.”

Cat shuffles her feet against the leaves. “There’s this guy.”

Ms. O’Ryan’s eyes light up, embers in the dark. “Ooh. Do tell.”

She is young, Ms. O’Ryan, and relatively new at Campbell—this is only her second year teaching junior English. Cat generally feels a comradeship with the female teachers of Campbell, who on the whole are disposed to like her more than their male counterparts. To the best of her knowledge, Cat figures this is because women are more sympathetic to her relative silence in most of her classes. Men always seem disappointed when you don’t volunteer your thoughts constantly, despite the fact that those classmates of Cat’s that do this often speak in circles, repeating themselves, their professors, their peers. Cat had decided never to open her mouth unless what she had to say was completely and truly her own, that is to say, new. She read somewhere that nothing anyone could say about The Great Gatsby could be novel, that everything that can be deconstructed in Fitzgerald’s text has been deconstructed by someone, somewhere. Cat was silent throughout the three weeks they studied the novel in class last spring, prompting her friend Will to ask, loudly, “Cat got your tongue?” at the end of the unit.

She got an A on her final Gatsby paper, which discussed novelty in literature by way of framing Gatsby in a larger historical context. The only passages of the novel she quoted were ones that furthered her thesis. She did not discuss character. Characters are always simple; she doesn’t understand why essays and journals exist for the sole purpose of picking them apart, putting them back together dressed up in whatever argument the author is putting forth. All characters are the same: they all want something. What they want, and how badly they want it, varies, but the truth of their desire remains the same across texts. People are stupidly, stupidly simple. The act of discovering motive—now, this was where the complications of life sprung from. 

When Cat doesn’t say anything, Ms. O’Ryan drops the end of her cigarette to the ground and grinds her heel into it, an act Cat has seen in movies but never in real life. The teacher turns to her in the growing darkness of the evening. 

“My ex-boyfriend, he’s a real douchebag. I know how it can be.”

“I’m sorry,” Cat says.

“He’s back in Boston,” Ms. O’Ryan continues. “Cheated on me right before I came here, actually.”

“Classy,” says Cat, and her teacher laughs.

“Thanks. I think so too.” She shoves her hands deep into the pockets of her blue peacoat. “Listen, if you ever feel like you need to talk about this stuff, you can come to me.”

Cat isn’t sure what to say to this. She’s intrigued by this enigma of a teacher, who hands back papers at the end of class without discussing them with you and often sits at the edges of class discussion. Cat herself sometimes feels as if she only exists in these spaces in time and thought, hovering anxiously, never truly touching down.

“Let me buy you coffee tomorrow,” Ms. O’Ryan says now. “Come on. I owe you for the cigarette.”

“The cigarette you won’t tell anybody about.”

“Right.”

#

The next day autumn truly descends upon Campbell’s campus. The leaves brush against the windows as Cat sits in the North Dining Hall stirring her yogurt. One leaf sticks in the break between two glass panes, fluttering helplessly. 

“Look at that leaf,” she says to her friend Will. “Metaphor, please.”

Will glances in the direction Cat is pointing. “Um. The futility of human existence.”

Cat crinkles her nose. “You can do better than that, hopefully.”

“How about the resilience of human existence, then.”

“It might just be a leaf.” 

Campus is covered in them. Groundskeepers are already beginning to brush them away from the benches and paths winding their way up and around the buildings of Campbell Academy. Cat loves Campbell in the way a small child loves a beloved stuffed animal: hugged against her chest, dreams and perceptions entangled in her arms, imperfectly preserved. If she could live here forever, she’d be content, provided that she lived in solitude. She often imagines Campbell devoid of the students that traverse its halls and lawns, chattering incessantly, kicking up dust and walking over everything: blessed, blessed silence, empty echoes under archways. Lately the crowds of people have been suffocating her; she’s been weaving her way through them, stepping around bodies and ducking her head against the noise and wind. She stares at herself in the faded mirror above her dorm dresser and wonders what broke inside of her.

Will kicks at her feet under the table. “Where were you the other night? I thought you were coming over to play Clue.”

“I was busy,” says Cat. “I’m sorry.”

“We missed you,” says Will.

Cat doubts this, because Will has recently started dating their friend Amy, and has had little time for his other friends in the wake of this development. “I was busy,” she repeats, which is easier than admitting that she was testing herself. Now, she looks at Will. Objectively, he’s good-looking, she can see this, but she doesn’t feel anything else. Should she feel something else? He’s her best friend, she’s his shadow, it’s been like this since freshman year. But nothing. She bites her lip, tastes the metallic blood on the tip of her tongue.

“Stop biting your lip,” Will tells her.

“You’re not the boss of me,” she responds automatically.

Will raises his eyebrow at her, a perfect arch. “Would that I were, Ms. Obermeyer. The world would be a simpler place.”

Cat loves Will, wants nothing hard from him, desires nothing more. She pushes her yogurt at him. “Want to finish this? I’m not hungry.”

He grabs it, tips the spoon at her. “Friendship,” he declares.

Would that life were always like this, Cat thinks.

#

She has coffee with Julia O’Ryan in the late afternoon, when the leaves have browned at the edges like a photograph burning. Cat sits and listens to the older woman talk about her life back in Boston, the cheating boyfriend, the college best friend. She talks about how the other teachers at Campbell are much older than her, stuffy, preppy, immoveable. Cat wonders if this is what it is to be an adult: the moments of your life translatable, bits to be shared and dissected over a cup at the local shop. Everything is complicated in Julia’s life, everything merits discussion. Strangely, though, she seems intrigued by Cat’s life as well, when the younger girl feels as if she has nothing to offer to this inaccessible world, this glittering, unknowable future that she so desperately wishes to inhabit.

Julia asks again about the boy. “Do I know him? Does he have me for English?”

Cat pauses. “It isn’t—like that. I mean, it was just one time;” too late she realizes how this sounds, and adds quickly, “I don’t have anything with him, I don’t want anything else.” I hated it, she thinks. It isn’t me.

She thinks of Amy, cross-legged on Cat’s bed, leaning in and admitting things about Will that Cat had never considered, never thought possible, never wanted for herself. 

I’m not growing up right. 

Julia nods knowingly. She sips at her coffee. “As long as you feel okay about it.”

“Do you feel okay about, you know, your old boyfriend?” Cat asks.

“Mostly. There are some days I get up and I’m really mad about it, but less and less as time goes by.”

Cat thinks that maybe this is what it means to grow up: wounds healing slowly, bruises fading. Teenagers are all edges and bumps, beating hearts, red blood. Everything matters so much, everything is magnified. Splinters become stakes in the heart, cuts blossom into infected gashes; bright, harsh, unhealing: the wounds of youth. She wants to be able to pick herself up gingerly, brush away the sharp pains of the fall, and hobble away without looking back.

“You’re so lucky,” Julia tells her. “You’ve got so much in front of you. So much left to happen. I miss that, you know?” 

Before Julia Cat had a tendency to view teachers as if they were separate from the rest of campus—although many of them lived in dorms, functioning as dorm parents, they always seemed to her as if they treaded lightly upon the world that rightfully belonged to the students. Occasionally, watching them traverse the sunlit grounds with their families, Cat would feel a pang of longing for what they had achieved: stability, assurance, a laughing sense of rightness in their place in the world as the leaves fall down around them, obstacles overcome. Without having a real idea of what she wants to do with her future, Cat knows she wants this level of balance somewhere down the line. She wants her autumns to be forever gleaming and preserved. More than this, she wants to know what she wants, instead of what she doesn’t.

#

Alone in her room on the North side of campus, Cat rolls over on her bed, kicks her feet up against the wall. Will hasn’t responded to either text she’s sent him that day. Outside the sky is suffused with storm; it’s either about to rain or it isn’t. Weather deals in absolutes. Cat loves it. She often tries to capture the sky on paper, painting with the dilapidated watercolor set she brought from home sophomore year. Once her paintings dry, though, the colors are never quite the same.

She picks her phone up, taps at it halfheartedly for a minute. She considers texting her friend Theo, Will’s roommate, whose mother was recently diagnosed with cancer. Last week they had dinner together, just the two of them; Cat had asked about his home life and Theo had been evasive, eating very little and eventually slipping away into the evening as the lights of campus slowly blinked on, visible through the large bay windows of the dining hall.

Julia has given Cat her phone number, but she has yet to text her. It’s a daunting bridge, one that she desperately wishes to cross but can’t take the first step over. Brian has texted her twice since last week. He belongs to a world that Cat realizes she cannot bring herself to inhabit. She doesn’t want the sweaty palms and jerking bodies, heat and gasps and release. She is Alice in the looking glass: palms spread out against an imperfect reflection, peering into another version of herself with curiosity, not longing. Then she thinks of the fevered whispers of her friends, of her peers, and wonders why her visage can’t seep through the cracks, why the barrier exists in the first place.

Before her nerve dissipates, she types a quick message to Julia: “Do you ever feel like your friends are much, much younger than you?”

Two minutes later, a response: “Literally ALL THE TIME. I feel you ☺”

Cat smiles in the growing darkness of her dorm room. 

They get coffee twice more, and start texting daily. The next weekend Julia drives them both into Boston for no reason other than she felt like getting off campus.

“It can be so isolating sometimes,” she says to Cat as she twiddles the radio knobs in her car. “I can’t imagine not being able to get away, like you.”

“It’s suffocating,” Cat says. She rolls down the window; brisk air wallops her face, blows her hair about. “I wish I could just drive away whenever I feel like it.”

They visit the aquarium, Cat’s favorite childhood haunt. Julia doesn’t pay for her admission, which she likes. They wind their way up around the central tank. Julia absentmindedly taps on the glass; fish scatter away from where her fingers land.

“I always loved this place,” she says. “Think I could get funding from Campbell to take a field trip here?”

“How is that related to English, though?” asks Cat.

“I have no fucking idea. Moby Dick, maybe?”

Later they smoke as they walk along the dock, jellyfish bobbing beneath their feet. 

#

Edmark feels like miniature Burlington to Cat. It is the kind of place she can see herself raising a faceless, barely imagined family some day, in one of the colorful Victorian houses that line the streets, taking strolls into town for dinner and eating ice cream along the river. Strangely, this fantasy exists outside of her aversion to the technicalities necessary in creating these imaginary, shadow-children. 

Further out of town proper are establishments like the Mexican joint many of Campbell’s students frequent, and the Edmark Town Diner, notable for the mad rush of Campbellites who attempt to be the first customers every year on the day after classes end. Past these are the marshy roads of the Massachusetts countryside, along which many Campbell day students live, set apart from the residential kids both in geography and lifestyle. Cat had gone to a party at one such house the past spring, after finals, and had been amazed at the sheer vastness of the place, which belonged to a fairly quiet classmate of hers who had never given any indication of the wealth that her parents so clearly possessed.

Her favorite night of the year to be out and about in Edmark is Halloween, when twinkly children stream off of porches, leaving trails of light for their parents to follow along the darkening streets, the shouts and cries of the twilight hours. Last Halloween she had gone out trick-or-treating with Will, Amy, and Theo; they had dressed up as the ninja turtles and had only hit one block of houses before calling it a night, retiring to Cat and Amy’s room, and drinking booze that Amy had smuggled in the weekend before when she had visited her parents in Boston.

This Halloween she has other plans, but first she has agreed to go out for dinner with Amy, who cornered her in the student union the previous week and demanded quality time together. Now Cat waits at the edge of the grass on a quad. Three freshmen guys are playing ultimate Frisbee to her left; the disc sails close to her and she steps back, not wanting to interfere with their game.

“Hi, hi!” Down the steps of the Language building comes Amelia St. Clair, running and shoving her papers in her bag in one swift motion. “Sorry, sorry, have you been here long? I’m hungry too, I don’t even want to drop this shit off at my dorm, I just want to go. Do you think this is too heavy to lug into town?” Breathless, she shoves her bag at Cat. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter, let’s just go. Let’s do sushi, I’m so tired of Mexican, sorry if you wanted Mexican, I was literally just there two nights ago. Actually maybe it was three. Which night was the night that you had that paper?”

Amy had been Cat’s sophomore year roommate; the only reason they are no longer living together is that Amy has moved in with a crew teammate of hers, citing guilt over waking Cat up every morning at ungodly hours. Cat doesn’t really mind, either the being woken up or the not living with Amy.

“Oh. I don’t remember. Maybe Tuesday.” They start walking across the quad, breaking up the Frisbee game momentarily before ducking around the back of the Humanities building. Amy walks beside her, chewing gum and swinging her arms. 

“Listen,” Cat says. “You know Ms. O’Ryan?”

“The English teacher?” asks Amy. “Sure. Will says she’s not the greatest teacher ever, apparently.”

“No, I like her a lot,” says Cat. “I’ve been hanging out with her a bit. Like, last weekend, we went into Boston, hit up the aquarium, got dinner after.”

Amy scrunches up her face, a habit Cat finds charming. People please her aesthetically; she likes viewing them from a respectful distance, an observer of man. 

“Oh. Is that kind of weird?”

“Nah. I mean, would it be weird if she were my advisor?” Cat’s advisor is Mr. Greeley, a middle-aged biology teacher who lives with his wife in an apartment in Whalin, the dorm Will and Theo are in. 

“I guess not.” Amy hefts her backpack higher on her shoulder. “Shit, this is heavy, why did I think I wanted to lug this into town?”

“Sushi’s not that far,” says Cat.

“Yeah, see, I was right about not getting Mexican, that would’ve been a hike.” Amy grins at her friend. “Hey, what are you doing later? We were thinking we’re probs too old to trick or treat, but Will can get vodka from a senior on the soccer team. We were thinking we’d take it out on the fields. We can tell scary stories!” She jabs Cat in the side. “It’ll be fun.”

Cat imagines swallowing alcohol until the stars buzz above her head, the laughter of herself and her friends echoing across the empty lawns. “I’d like to, but I actually already have plans with Julia.”

“Who?”

“Ms. O’Ryan. I call her Julia.”

Amy looks at Cat. “On Halloween?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Amy shrugs. “I guess. I don’t fucking know. Still seems kind of weird to me, to be honest.”

They get sushi to go and carry their Styrofoam boxes out to the edge of the river, eating the rolls by hand and throwing bits of rice to the ducks. A family walks by with their black Labrador, which barks at the girls as it passes. Cat can still hear it long after they are alone. 

#

Julia has Netflix up when Cat arrives at the house she’s renting. “Thank God you’re here,” says the teacher. “I can’t decide what shitty horror movie we should watch. Are you a classic kind of girl, or a remake kind of girl? To be honest, we probably can’t be friends anymore if you’re a remake girl. I’m sorry.”

Cat laughs. “I’m more of a comedy kind of girl, is that an option?”

“Not tonight it’s not!” Julia slides on socked feet into the adjacent kitchen. Cat shuffles for a minute, stares around Julia’s place. It’s haphazard, messy; it’s unattainable in its sincerity. It looks, to Cat, like a place someone real lives, not a paperdoll person, playing at house. 

Julia comes out of the kitchen brandishing a bottle of wine. “Hope you like red.”

“Shit,” says Cat. “Are you allowed to give me that?”

Julia makes a face. “Eh. Probably not. Do you care?”

“Well, no, I guess.” 

“Cool.” There are already two wineglasses on the coffee table; Julia pours into them, spilling the one nearest her. “Shit, that one’s mine.”

Cat sits down on the couch. “Let’s watch the original Friday the 13th,” she suggests. “I’ve never seen that.”

“God, you’re young.” Julia pulls it up on the screen.

Cat sips at her wine, ignoring an uncomfortable humming in the corners of her awareness. She downs two glasses, answers Julia’s questions about her social life as the movie plays quietly in the background. 

“I don’t think I ever want to have sex,” she hears herself telling the teacher. “The idea of it, it feels wrong to me. It makes me sick.”

Julia waves a hand, but Cat is slightly drunk and it looks as if her hand has taken off, butterflies fluttering across her field of vision. “You’ll get there, I promise. I remember my first boyfriend—“

She spends a lot of their time together talking about guys from her past. Sometimes it seems to Cat that it doesn’t matter who is on the receiving end of these spiels, as long as someone is. Immediately she feels guilty for this thought, but she waves it away. She’s always been a bit of a mean drunk. Last Halloween she had gotten into an argument with Theo, voices raising until Will had literally clapped a palm over her mouth. “Do you want us to get caught?” he had hissed in her ear. 

Let go of me, Cat had thought.

By the movie’s end, Julia’s socked feet are propped up on the arm of the couch while she chats animatedly at Cat; her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and it bounces every time she shakes her head for emphasis. Cat feels like she needs to be somewhere, but she can’t remember where. Outside she hears the faint yells of children still trick-or-treating. 

“I should probably get back,” she says.

#

“Who are you texting all the time?” Will asks. They’re on the top floor of the library, the ugliest building on campus in Cat’s opinion. It is supposedly an architectural triumph, but Cat only likes the inside, with its giant, circular holes that adorn the central atrium all the way up to the fourth and final floor. Will has his feet up on a library table, hunched over the laptop balanced on his legs. “I thought you were morally against texting. I thought it was your cause.”

“Her cause?” asks Theo, who is there in person but not really in mind; he has been spending more and more time shut up in various places around campus as of late. Now Cat studies him as he sits across from Will, scribbling halfheartedly away at physics notes. She wonders what he’s thinking.

“You know,” says Will, “like when a new president gets elected, and the first lady has to throw herself into some piece de resistance, so she has something to do without actually having a job. Like Michelle Obama and health food.”

Theo pauses in his writings and looks up at Cat. “Who are you texting?” 

This is the most direct engagement she has seen from her friend in ages, so she feels obligated to respond, even though something about the coming answer seems off to her. “Ms. O’Ryan.” 

“What, the English teacher?”

“You’re texting Ms. O’Ryan the English teacher?” Will repeats, lowering his legs off the table and staring at Cat like he’s just noticed she’s sitting next to him.

“Yeah.” Cat shrugs. “I mean, I call her Julia. We’re friends. We get coffee sometimes.”

“Isn’t it kind of weird that she gave you her number?” Theo asks.

“Do you just text about school stuff?” asks Will. “Or are you actually talking like friends?”

“We’re talking like friends, because we’re friends,” says Cat. “It isn’t that big of a deal. She’s not that much older than us, even.”

“Yeah but she’s our teacher,” says Will, “so it’s inappropriate.”

  “You just—“ Cat has been unsure as to how Will would react to her relationship with Julia; this seems, to her, blown out of proportion. “I think you’re overreacting a bit, Will.”

Will raises his eyebrow, a move he utilizes before he delivers what he believes to be an inarguable fact. “Well, if she was a guy, you know it’d be inappropriate.”

“Well, that’s completely sexist.”

“You can’t be sexist against women, it’s a social construction—“

“She’s my best friend,” Cat says defensively, before she can stop herself.

“What?” Theo pushes aside a smattering of papers in a deliberate gesture, as if emphasizing his alarm at Cat’s admission.

Will furrows his brow. “I thought I was your best friend."

“Cat,” Theo says. “Look at me.” She does. “She isn’t allowed to be your best friend.”

“Isn’t allowed—“

“Okay, supposed to! She’s your teacher—“

“Why can’t she be both?” Cat exclaims. “Why can’t she be more than just my teacher?”

“Listen!” Will shakes his head at her, a condemnation. “We’re young, okay, we can be more than just one thing. We’re allowed to be more than just one thing. Ms. O’Ryan, she’s an adult, and that means right now, for us and for you, she has to just be one thing, and that one thing is to be your teacher. By blurring that line, she’s not doing her job, and she’s being inappropriate. She doesn’t get to be young anymore. She’s an adult.”

Cat sucks in her breath, splays her fingers on the table. “You don’t know—you have no idea what it means to be an adult.”

“Apparently neither does she!”
Will seems to Cat in this moment unforgivably childish. She hates him for this, for his conviction, his cockiness, his sense that everything he says is right. If she’s learned anything from Julia, it’s that being an adult is being confused and messy—a patchwork of attempts, the artfulness of falling apart. The lines between these two worlds have never seemed more solidified, but the worlds themselves have never seemed more alike. Wrongness in absolution.

She gets up to leave. Will shouts for her to sit back down, trying to extricate himself from his chair, but she is outside before he has a chance to stop her. It’s late evening, and the streetlamps around Campbell are lit. She pulls her phone out of her pocket. 

“Hello?”

She is crying before she even realizes it. “Hi, I’m so sorry to bug you this late, but I just—“

“Cat?” Julia asks. “What’s wrong?”

Cat starts walking, fast, away from the library and Student Union and through an academic quad. The boathouse looms ahead of her, set on the murky waters of the river. “Will was just being an asshole, and I didn’t know who else to call.”

“I’m in my office,” says Julia. “Do you want to come over?”

#

In the hallway of the Humanities building Cat hesitates. Light seeps out under the door, illuminating her sneakers as she rises on tiptoe to peer inside Julia’s office. The teacher is behind her desk, hair in a messy bun, papers strewn across the surface and trailing onto the floor, a waterfall of disorganization. Cat waits a moment to observe her friend in the odd moment of unfiltered action—she has always liked to watch people in these moments, when they don’t know they are being watched. Strange bubbles of truth. Sometimes she feels as if maybe she really is the only person in the world, and everyone else who exists only moves in and out of her own life at her convenience. How can she know for sure that somewhere, at that moment, Will is out in the world, probably with Amy, traversing the darkening grounds in the early moonlight; how can she know that her parents are sitting down to dinner in Burlington, the lights of their dining room illuminated in the growing blackness around them? Even calling on the phone, an act she clings to despite its obsolescence, is nothing more than conjuring someone into her plane of existence. Here, now, is Julia, frowning at her laptop as she hammers away on its silvery keyboard, and unbeknownst to her, Cat is there, maybe creating her presence.

And Julia is looking up, a quick jerk of the head. “Cat! Hey!”

She comes into the office like she is walking on early morning grass, ruining it as she steps. “I’m sorry to call so late, I just—“ Suddenly she feels too big to be there. “My friend—“

“This is your guy friend? Will McKnight?” Julia shakes her head; strips of her bun peel away, hair fluttering in the stuffy, windless office. “He probably just likes you, that’s why he’s treating you like that, doesn’t know how to handle it. What did he say?”

“No, he’s dating my friend—“ 

“Oh, yikes,” Julia says. “That must be tough. I remember this time with my ex—“

“No, no, it’s not like that.” Cat is exhausted. “I just wanted to talk to someone like… actually mature.”

Julia raises both her eyebrows. “In an adult capacity, you mean? Do I have to put my teacher’s cap on?”

It’s as if she’s been chastened, but the ghost of the sin she committed is ungraspable. She wants to sit across from Julia and have an actual conversation about the bits and pieces of her life she can’t bring together, but the desk between them suddenly seems too big to cross, heavy and obtrusive in the tiny office. She wonders if Julia hadn’t caught her smoking that day if there wouldn’t be another student sitting across from the teacher in the glow of the desk lamp, buoyed by a false sense of purpose, distracting the older woman from her own life.

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” she says now, uncomfortable.

“Nah, you’re fine,” says Julia. “I don’t really feel like doing work right now anyway. I’d much rather hear about the boy drama.”

For a moment tears brim in Cat’s eyes, but she takes a deep breath and steels herself. She imagines Julia, ostensibly an adult, pressing a gilded key into Cat’s hand with a secret smile and admitting her, early decision, into a world she isn’t yet meant to tread in. Across the oceans of the desk is a woman, a woman who has tethered herself to Cat’s teenage self, a self not fully formed but blessedly, blessedly fluid, blooming into myriad possibilities each day. The woman’s mold is hardening; desperately, she tries to extricate herself from the setting plaster, but bits of her snap off in the struggle. Cat doesn’t want to break apart, but she wants to set a little bit, feel the ground under her feet and know that she isn’t about to spill into another life, one that isn’t hers to live. She is only just understanding who she might be.

“I should go,” she says to Julia. “I think I should go. I’m sorry. I need to go.”

Julia smiles, a question, and it cracks Cat open. “Are you sure? You can totally stay. I can put this away—“ She moves to shift her laptop aside.

“No,” says Cat.

For a moment Julia looks as if she will protest again, but instead she blinks hard and purses her lips. “Okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’ll see you in class tomorrow.” Cat backs out, stepping over the threshold without looking where she’s putting her feet. “Goodnight, Ms. O’Ryan.”

Keyboard taps trail her as she rushes out of the building, bursting into the cold night air like a bird from a cage.

#

Two weeks later she and Amy and Theo spread a blanket on the arched hill that borders the athletic fields and watch Will and the varsity soccer team bravely fight a losing battle against another, richer private school. She watches other students with arms draped around each other, faces turning away from the bite of the New England autumn wind, and envy is not what she feels. She zips her jacket up higher, leans her head on Amy’s shoulder.

This is enough, she thinks.

She has stopped texting Julia back.

“I wish they’d let us play against club, just once,” Will grumbles afterwards, shouldering his bag and turning away from his teammates.

“A tainted win, that would be,” says Amy. 

Cat shakes her hair; it glints in the afternoon sunlight. She thinks of apples, of slight bruising, of a surprisingly sweet taste. 

“No, I’ll take it,” says Will. “I’m that desperate.”

“That’ll look good on your college app,” Theo says. They’re walking away now, towards the South side dorms. “’The greatest moment of my life was the time I scored ten points on Andover’s sadly incompetent JV goalie. Did I mention I play varsity?’”

“A pyrrhic victory,” says Cat, who isn’t sure she is using the adjective correctly, but thinks it sounds appropriately reverent. She thinks that sometimes things don’t fit in the places they get put in, but that intention gets understood against all odds.

“I wouldn’t say ‘greatest moment,’” says Amy. “I would say ‘strongest memory.’”

“Yeah, don’t use ‘greatest,’ don’t use words that do that,” says Theo.

“Words that do what?” asks Cat.

“You know, like, indicate good or badness. There’s a word for it, I forget what.”

 “Thanks, friends, for your tireless support in the face of my humiliating victory,” says Will. “This will be what I remember from high school.”

“Being borne back to Whalin on the shoulders of your greatest allies?” asks Amy.

“I don’t see anyone offering to lift me up, as it happens.”

“We’ll do it! Get on our shoulders!” says Cat immediately.

“You will definitely drop him,” says Amy.

“No, we can lift him,” says Theo.

“Well, you can. Cat can’t.”

“Cat can!” says Cat. “The two of us can totally lift him.”

“I don’t trust either of you, actually,” says Will.

“Will!” Cat grabs him by the shoulders. “Twenty years from now, what are you going to remember? What do you want to remember? Losing 8-2 to Andover, or being carried back to Whalin by Theo and me? What legacy do you want to leave?”

They bend over and he clambers onto their two backs, hooking one knee over each of their shoulders. The sun is setting against the backdrop of Campbell’s brick buildings and the oak trees that line the winding entrance road up to the Student Union, and when they rise as one into the air, for one shining moment fall is encompassed in their intertwined bodies. Then Theo staggers, and they all tumble into the dying grass.

“There’s your college essay prompt,” says Amy.

“’My strongest memory is the time my friends attempted to kill me,’” says Will. “’But for one glorious moment, I touched the sun.’”

Once in the fall she tumbles down a hill, a fall from something greater than what she understands to be true. Golden sunlight, golden leaves. Autumn descending. Laughter, pure and bright. Her strongest memory. An essay of innocence. A world of discovery. The pack of cigarettes has fallen out of her jacket pocket, and there it remains, forgotten on the hill as the four of them wind their way back up to campus.