I look at the paper, at the big red A minus on it, and feel a huge rush of pride. As Dee and I walk to our next classes, I keep peeking at it, to make sure it doesn’t shape-shift into a C, though I know it won’t. I still can’t stop looking. And grinning. Dee catches me and laughs.
“For some of us, these A grades are novel,” I say.
“Oh, cry me a river. See you at four?”
“I’ll be counting the moments.”
When Dee comes in at four, he’s bouncing off the walls. “Never mind thinking outside the box—we got to look inside the box.” He holds up two DVDs from the media center. The title on one reads Pandora’s Box, and there’s a picture of a beautiful woman with sad, dark eyes and a sleek helmet of black hair. I immediately know who she is.
“How are these going to help us?”
“I don’t know. But when you open up Pandora’s Box, you never know what’s gonna fly out. We can watch them tonight. After I get off work.”
I nod. “I’ll make popcorn.”
“I’ll take some leftover cakes from the dining hall.”
“We know how to party on a Friday night.”
Later, as I’m getting ready for Dee, I see Kali in the lounge. She looks at the popcorn. “Having a snack attack?”
“Dee and I are watching some movies.” I’ve never invited Kali anywhere. And she almost always goes out on weekend nights. But I think of the help she’s offered, and what she said about being a friend, and so I invite her to join us. “It’s sort of a movie/fact-finding mission. We could use your help. You were so smart with your idea of trying to find the brother in Rochester.”
Her eyes widen. “I’d love to help. I’m so over keg parties. Jenn, wanna watch a movie with Allyson and Dee?”
“Before you say yes, be warned, they’re silent movies.”
“Cool,” Jenn says. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Neither have I, and turns out to be a little like watching Shakespeare. You have to adjust to it, to get into a rhythm. There are no words, but it’s not like a foreign film, either, where all the dialogue is subtitled. Only major pieces of dialogue are shown with words. The rest you sort of have to figure out from the actors’ expressions, from the context, from the swell of the orchestral music. You have to work a little bit.
We watch all of Pandora’s Box, which is about a beautiful party girl named Lulu, who goes from man to man. First she marries her lover, then shoots him on the eve of her wedding. She’s tried for murder but escapes jail, going into exile with her murdered husband’s son. She winds up sold into prostitution. It ends with her getting killed on Christmas Eve, by Jack the Ripper, no less. We all watch it like you’d watch a slow-motion train wreck.
After we finish, Dee pulls out the next one, Diary of a Lost Girl. “This one’s a comedy,” he jokes.
It’s not quite as bad. Lulu, though she’s not called that in this one, doesn’t die in the end. But she does get seduced, have a baby out of wedlock, get the baby taken away from her, wind up cast out and dumped in a horrible reform school. She too dabbles in prostitution.
It’s almost two in the morning when we flick on the lights. We all look at each other, bleary-eyed.
“So?” Jenn asks.
“I like her outfits,” Kali says.
“The outfits were indeed extraordinary, but not exactly enlightening.” Dee turns to me. “Any clues?”
I look around. “I got nothin’.” And really, I don’t. All this time, I’ve been thinking I was like Lulu. But I’m nothing like the girl in those movies. I wouldn’t want to be.
Jenn yawns and opens a laptop and pulls up a page on Louise Brooks, who apparently had a life as tumultuous as Lulu’s, going from A-list movie star to a shopgirl at Saks, winding up a kept woman, and finally a recluse. “But it says here she was always a rebel. She always did things her own way. And she had a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo!” Jenn smiles at that.
Kali grabs the computer and reads. “Also, she pioneered the short bobbed haircut.”
“My hair was cut into a bob when we met. I probably should’ve mentioned that.”
Kali puts the computer down and takes my hair out of its ponytail and folds it up to my chin. “Hmm. With your hair bobbed, you do sort of look like her.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. That I looked like her.”
“If he saw you that way,” Jenn says, “it means he thought you were very beautiful.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe this is all some game to him. Or calling me Lulu was a way to distance me, so he never had to learn anything about me.” But as I throw out the less romantic scenarios—and let’s be honest, the more likely ones—I don’t feel that usual clutch of shame and humiliation. With these guys at my back, nothing feels quite so fraught.
Kendra’s staying over at Jeb’s, so Kali offers her bed to Dee, and she crashes on Kendra’s bed. When all of us nestle under our covers, we call out good night to each other, like we’re in summer camp or something, and I feel that sense of rightness, stronger than ever.
Dee starts snoring straightaway, but it takes me a long time to drift off, because I’m still wondering about Lulu. Maybe it was just a name. Maybe it was just pretend. But at some point, it stopped being pretend. Because for that day, I really did become Lulu. Maybe not the Lulu from the film or the real Louise Brooks, but my own idea of what Lulu represented. Freedom. Daring. Adventure. Saying yes.
I realize it’s not just Willem I’m looking for; it’s Lulu, too.
Twenty-five
APRIL
Miami Beach
Mom and Dad are waiting for me at my gate in the Miami airport, Mom having arranged for their flight to get in a half hour before mine. I’d hoped I might have gotten out of this year’s Passover Seder. I just saw Mom and Dad for spring break a few weeks ago, and coming down for Seder means taking a day off from school. But no such luck. Tradition is tradition, and Passover is the one time of year we go to Grandma’s.
I love Grandma, and even if the Seders are always mind-numbingly dull and you take your life in your own hands eating so much of Grandma’s home cooking, that’s not why I dread them.
Grandma makes Mom crazy, which means that whenever we’re visiting, Mom makes us crazy. When Grandma visits us at home, it’s dealable. Mom can get away, go vent to Susan, play tennis, organize the calendar, go to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe I don’t need. But when we’re at Grandma’s old-people condo in Miami Beach, it’s like being trapped on a geriatric island.
Mom starts in on me at the baggage claim, sniping at me for not sending thank-you notes out for my birthday presents, which means she must have asked Grandma and Susan if they’d gotten theirs. Because other than Jenn and Kali—who baked me a cake—and Dee—who took me out to his favorite food truck in Boston for dinner—and Mom and Dad, of course, there was no one else to send thank-you cards to this year. Melanie didn’t send anything. She just posted a greeting on my Facebook page.
Once we get into a cab (the second one, Mom having rejected the first one because the AC was too weak—no one is safe from Mom when she’s on a Grandma trajectory)—she starts in on me about my summer plans.