Bittersweet. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

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СКАЧАТЬ survive in a room filled with smoke – she was literally trying to suffocate me. My asthma medication’s one benefit – justification for the extra weight I carried – wouldn’t do me any good if I were dead.

      I gritted my teeth and told myself to be strong, that I didn’t need the damn boots. I could just write to my father and ask for a pair (why hadn’t I done that already?). I didn’t need a Degas-bestowing supermodel snob lying around my room, reminding me what a nothing I was. I gripped the doorknob and told myself to say it how Ev would say it, formulated ‘Fuck, Ev, could you smoke somewhere else?’ (I would make my voice nonchalant, as though my objection was philosophical and not an expression of poverty), and barged in.

      She usually smoked atop her desk beside the window, cigarette perched in the corner of her mouth, or cross-legged on the top bunk, ashing into an empty soda bottle. But this time, she wasn’t there. As I dropped my bag, I imagined with delighted gloom that she’d left a cigarette smoldering on the bedclothes before heading out to some glamorous destination – the Russian Tea Room, a private rooftop in Tribeca. The whole dorm was doomed to go up in flames, and I would go down with it. She would be forced to remember me forever.

      And then I heard it: a sniffle. I squinted at the top bunk. The comforter quivered.

      ‘Ev?’

      The sound of soft crying.

      I approached. I was still in my drenched jeans, but this was electrifying.

      I stood at that awkward angle, neck craned up. She was really under there. I wondered what to do as her voice began to break into a full, throaty sob. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

      I didn’t expect her to answer. And I certainly didn’t mean to put my hand on her back. Had I been thinking clearly, I never would have dared – my anger was too proud; the gesture, too intimate. But my little touch elicited unexpected results. First, it made her cry harder. Then it made her turn in the bed, so that her face and mine were much closer than they’d ever been and I could see every millimeter of her flooding, Tiffany-blue eyes; her stained, rosy cheeks; her greasy blond hair, limp for the first time since I’d known her. Her mouth faltered, and I couldn’t help but put my hand to her hot temple. She looked so much more human this close up.

      ‘What happened?’ I asked, when she’d finally calmed.

      For a moment it seemed as if she might start sobbing again. Instead, she fished out another cigarette and lit it. ‘My cousin,’ she said, as if that told the whole thing.

      ‘What’s your cousin’s name?’ I didn’t think I could stand not to know what was breaking Ev’s heart.

      ‘Jackson,’ she whispered, the corners of her mouth turning down. ‘He’s a soldier. Was,’ she corrected herself, and her tears spilled all over again.

      ‘He was killed?’

      She shook her head. ‘He came back last summer. I mean, he was acting a little strange and everything, but I didn’t think …’ And then she cried. She cried so hard that I slipped off my parka and jeans and got in bed beside her and held her quaking body.

      ‘He shot himself. In the mouth. Last week,’ she said finally, what seemed like hours later, when we were lying beside each other under her four-ply red cashmere throw, staring up at the cracked ceiling as if this was what we did all the time. It was a relief to finally hear what had happened; I had started to wonder if this cousin hadn’t walked into a post office and shot everyone up.

      ‘Last week?’ I asked.

      She turned to me, touching our foreheads. ‘Mum didn’t tell me until last night. After the reception.’ Her nose and eyes began to pinken in anticipation of another round of tears. ‘She didn’t want me to get upset and “ruin things.”’

      ‘Oh, Ev,’ I sympathized, filling with forgiveness. That was why she had snapped at me after the party – she was grief-stricken.

      ‘What was Jackson like?’ I pushed, and she began to weep again. It was so strange and lovely to be lying next to her, feeling her flaxen hair against my cheek, watching the great globes of sorrow trail down her smooth face. I didn’t want it to end. I knew that to stop speaking would be to lose her again.

      ‘He was a good guy, you know? Like, last summer? One of his mom’s dogs, Flip, was running on the gravel road and this asshole repair guy came around the curve at, like, fifty miles an hour and hit the dog and it made this awful sound’ – she shuddered – ‘and Jackson just walked right over there and picked Flip up in his arms – I mean, everyone else was screaming and crying, it, like, happened in front of all the little kids – and he carried her over to the grass and rubbed her ears.’ She closed her eyes again. ‘And afterward, he put a blanket over her.’

      I looked at the picture of the gathered Winslows above my desk, although it was as silly an enterprise as opening the menu of a diner you’ve been going to your whole life; I knew every blond head, every slim calf, as though her family was my own. ‘This was at your summer place, right?’

      She pronounced the name as if for the first time. ‘Winloch.’

      I could feel her eyes examining the side of my face. What she said next, she said carefully. Even though my heart skipped a beat, I measured my expectations, telling myself that was the last I’d hear of it:

      ‘You should come.’

       June

       CHAPTER FOUR

       The Call

      DO THEY KNOW WE’RE coming?’ I asked as Ev handed me the rest of the Kit Kat bar I’d bought in the dining car. The train had long since whistled twice and headed farther north, leaving us with empty track and each other.

      ‘Naturally.’ Ev sniffed with a trace of doubt as she settled, again, on top of her suitcase under the overhang of the stationmaster’s office. She regarded my orange copy of Paradise Lost disdainfully, then checked her cell phone for the twentieth time, cursing the lack of service. ‘And now we’ll only have six days before the inspection.’

      ‘Inspection?’

      ‘Of the cottage.’

      ‘Who’s inspecting it?’

      I could tell from the way she blinked straight ahead that my questions were an annoyance. ‘Daddy, of course.’

      I tried to make my voice as benign as possible. ‘You sound concerned.’

      ‘Well of course I’m concerned,’ she said with a pout, ‘because if we don’t get that little hovel shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it. And then you’ll go home and I’ll have to live under the same roof as my mother.’

      Her mouth was set to snarl at whatever I said next, so instead of voicing all the questions flooding СКАЧАТЬ