curiosity in her eyes.
I’ve stayed so caught up in the world of the visual arts track at the Conservatory, I forgot that as someone in the theater track, Kiersten doesn’t really know us, either.
“I’m going to go get Dad from the rental office, and then we can hit the road,” Sarah says.
She flashes her eyes at me, and a second later, Kiersten and I are alone.
A second later, and I’ve forgotten that Alice could have been anyone other than Kiersten: Her hair is nearly black at the roots, graduating to periwinkle at the ends, and today she’s wearing it in a long braid that hangs messy over one shoulder. Her pink bomber jacket has studs at the neck and pockets that look like lace, her eye makeup is smudgy and dark, and she’s sewed patterned patches behind frayed holes in her jeans.
“Hi,” she says finally.
I didn’t realize I was staring at her.
She’s just so pretty. I have lost all ability to brain.
“Are … you on … um. Drugs? Still?” She pops her gum.
My face burns hot enough to ache. Oh my God, this is a God-forsaken disaster.
I giggle involuntarily for way too long—WHO THE HELL AM I?—before it occurs to me that I can hide it in a series of fake coughs in the inside of my elbow, vampire cough–style.
A half a beat later, it hits me that she thinks I’m on drugs.
“Still?” I ask. Where the hell is Sarah? This is terrible. Everything is terrible.
“Didn’t you, like, get caught high on campus last year?” Kiersten pops her gum again. “You’re the only Iliana at the school—”
“I wasn’t on drugs!”—WHERE THE HELL IS SARAH? OH MY GOD!—“It was just pot. It’s not, like, uh, a regular thing—or even, like, a sometimes thing.”
Pot’s too expensive for anything remotely resembling even occasional use.
I don’t really care for how it makes me feel, anyway.
Finally—fucking finally—Sarah and her dad emerge from the rental office. He has a genuine smile for all of us—and not much else by way of conversation—and rounds the side of the van to start the engine. Sarah isn’t far behind, eyeing my and Kiersten’s faces with a level of curiosity that completely mortifies me.
Kiersten’s interest moves from Sarah to myself, then to the phone in her hands.
“What the hell happened?!” Sarah tries the locked front passenger-side door, then bangs on the glass.
The locks pop, and she hops inside.
“More like, what the hell took so long?” I sling open the side door and clamber to the back. Kiersten claims the middle row.
Sarah and I blink out an entire conversation at each other in a Morse code of waggling eyebrows and shrugging shoulders:
Sarah: Dad’s gotta be Dad. I dunno. He always takes forever.
Me: I completely bombed that. She thinks I’m weird and that I use drugs.
Me: SHE THINKS I’M WEIRD NOW. Does she even like girls?
Sarah: Well, you’re weird.
Me: But does she like girls?
Sarah: I have no idea if she likes girls, Iliana.
Me: SHE THINKS I’M ON DRUGS. HELP.
Sarah doesn’t help. Instead, she puts headphones on and turns to the book in her lap.
It occurs to me that maybe we were having two different conversations.
We have enough room in the back of the passenger van that Kiersten and I have rows to ourselves. I’ve turned to rest my chin on the back of my seat, and Kiersten rests against the window with her legs stretched out in front of her. Alice has told me before that she’s tall, but Kiersten is small like Sarah and me: Her feet—clad in gorgeous, one-of-a-kind floral Doc Martens, because of course she has amazing, one-of-a-kind floral Docs—don’t even make it to the end of the row.
She’s a theater-track kid, I’ve learned, but her passion isn’t acting.
She loves costume design.
“It’s DIY,” Kiersten says, fingering the studded details around the neck of her jacket. “I found my mom’s old BeDazzler in our attic and just … figured it out myself. Ordered the studs and stuff off the internet and googled the user’s manual.”
From the front seat, Sarah and I make eye contact in the rearview window.
The internet! She’s on the internet!
Of course she is on the internet. Everybody is on the internet.
Still, it feels like a clue of some kind.
“So you’re studying costume design,” I say, eyeing the sketchbook in her lap. If I could get a glimpse, I’d recognize Alice’s unique drawing style immediately. “But you’re an artist, too.”
Instead of showing her work, Kiersten pulls the spiral-bound book closer to her chest. “Costume design is art.”
“Fair,” I