“Why did you call me ungrateful?” I asked.
She sighed. “Because you didn’t want him. He offered you something good, and you didn’t take it.”
I understood her jealousy, but I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. She could tell I was bristling.
“Okay, I know,” she soothed. “I’m not saying that I have a right to feel that way, just that I do. Okay? I’m just explaining.”
“I know you liked him.”
“Yeah.” And she smiled, like I didn’t really know, not everything.
“What?” I asked.
“I was out with Gina that afternoon. You know Gina?” I shook my head no. But it didn’t matter. “She’d given me a cute sweater she didn’t want anymore, and a pair of earrings. I felt really pretty. I ran into him later. He seemed kind of down. I tried to cheer him up, you know, I was being silly. I pulled him into this staircase party. It was just what he needed. And we ended up dancing a little, I mean it was too crowded to really dance, but there was music and we were standing near each other. I pretty much threw myself at him. Then the porter broke the party up and we went into my room and went at it.”
“Oh,” I said. My mouth was dry. This was agony. This recitation was a form of revenge.
“We didn’t do it all, okay? It was a kind of President Clinton thing.” She smirked, but her hands were shaking. “I’m a virgin, okay? And I’d never done that before either. And I knew he was yours, but I wanted to try.”
“He wasn’t mine,” I said. She said “yours” like this was borrowing a shirt and getting a stain on it. She said “yours” like when she had taken ten pounds from my bag without asking.
“Whatever,” she said. “When everyone else said that you were the girlfriend, what was I supposed to say? That I was, really? Because I didn’t know that. I was waiting to find that out. I knew that what we’d done wasn’t a sure thing, it wasn’t a ‘progression’ in our ‘relationship.’ It was a thing that maybe would make him see me that way, or maybe it wouldn’t. I was waiting to see what it was to him.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve and went on. “I knew I was second choice, okay?” she blurted. “But it wasn’t until yesterday that I found out from the freaking newspaper what had really happened that day. I thought he’d gone upstairs with me because I’m maybe more exciting than you are, or prettier, or more enthusiastic, or more obviously into him.” She took a deep breath, glanced at me to see how I was reacting. “He only let me do it because that was the day you got him all high like a kite but then wouldn’t get him off. I was just… finishing the job. But he wasn’t hard for me, you know?”
She was a mess by this time. For a few minutes she couldn’t talk. I stared at a photo of an empty wall. Finally she said, “You’re my best friend and I hate you.”
I got up. I had to get out. Liv followed me. We almost knocked into a sculpture of a woman made out of hard wire knots.
“I have to go. I’m meeting somebody.”
“Who?” she demanded.
I hesitated. This would make her angry too.
“Nick’s sister,” I confessed. “She asked to meet with me.”
She gaped. She shook her head. Liv had sent the card to his family. Liv had sung with Nick in the choir. Liv had put out. But his sister wanted to meet me.
“Sometimes the whole world is just crazy,” I agreed.
We’d wandered into the way of the gallery’s spot lighting. Liv squinted and looked down. I put my hand, flat, above my eyes, like I was looking at something far away.
“You’d better go,” Liv said. “It must be pretty awful, missing a brother.”
That’s all it takes to realize you have no right to be so precious about your feelings, your loss, your trauma. There’s always someone with more rights to it than you.
Liv’s story made sense of the mention in the paper that Nick had been seen at a party at Magdalene in the days before he disappeared. Some person there had noticed that he’d been friendly with a girl, and it had been reported, I guess by someone making assumptions, that that girl had been me.
Alexandra went to Perse Girls, like the Chander daughters. It’s not far from St. Peter’s Terrace, where she offered to meet me after school. She looked nothing like Nick, and much, much younger. She was about fourteen and dressed, as required by her school, entirely in navy and light blues.
We couldn’t fit on the sidewalk with two umbrellas, so she ducked under mine. She was headed for town and we walked together. “I know this is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But, until last week, I didn’t know Nick’s family was in Cambridge.” I immediately regretted it. What a rude thing to say. “I mean, he talked about you. You especially. I know you play cello. I play cello. I just… I didn’t know you were here.”
We stepped over the great gutter called Hobson’s Conduit and slipped through a break in traffic to cross the road. When we got to the other side, we continued up the street and she said, “When Nick started boarding at King’s, my family relocated. I was born a year later. Before that, Mum and Dad and Nick lived in London.”
“Do you like it here?” I asked, stupidly, as if she’d been dragged here instead of born here. “I mean, do you ever wish your family had stayed in London?”
She shrugged. “I’ll go to uni in London if I want,” she said simply. “I didn’t know about you either.”
Okay, touché. Nick hadn’t mentioned me to his family.
“I read about you in the newspaper…” she said.
Of course she had, and in light of the latest it made me cringe. “Yes, well… Nick is my good friend. One of my best friends. I don’t think he was my boyfriend. It’s all gotten a little out of hand.” I didn’t want to talk about this. “Did your parents name you after the Romanovs?”
She rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how many people ask me that.”
How Cambridge. I doubt many people back home would have noticed.
“Mum’s brother who died was Nicholas,” she explained. “Dad’s dad was Alexander. It just worked out that way.”
Wait, what? “Your mother’s brother died?”
She looked right at me. “He drowned when Mum was my age. He was ten. Now her second Nicholas is gone.”
She looked so sad.
“I know he’ll come back,” I said.
“What do you mean? Do you know something?” She stopped walking and got right up in my face all of a sudden, my height, eye to eye.
“No! No, I just…” I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. “He’s got to,” I said. “He’s got to come back.”
She backed down, started fiddling in her bag, digging around. “The last time I saw him I was really angry,” she confessed.
At Nick? I didn’t think he could make anyone mad.
Alexandra looked both ways. She turned off the main avenue onto a side street; I followed.
“He’d hate that I’m doing this,” she said, putting a cigarette in her mouth. “Do you want one?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
Her lighter was made of purple plastic. She lit and sucked in. “He’s such an older brother,” she said, looking just straight ahead, leading the way.
We turned again, onto Tennis Court Road, parallel to Trumpington but much more private.
“What do you mean, ‘older brother’?”
“You know what I mean. He just thinks he knows everything. If he were still here I’d still be angry. But because he’s gone, I don’t get to be angry anymore.” She raised her voice. “I’d be really, really angry. I probably wouldn’t even talk to him.” Tears squirted out of her eyes.
We stopped again. Because we were under one umbrella, her little curls of smoke got caught around my face.
“Why does he live at the Chanders’ house?” I asked, as if this little girl weren’t baring her grief to me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t have room for hers too.
“He’s a grown-up,” she said, incredulous at my ignorance. “Grownups move out.”