“I’ll try them before bed.” Another lie. But my father doesn’t know that I’m not speaking to Mimi. Coming here was about getting space from her, and as she jets off with her sister, she’s getting space from me, too. But I don’t feel entirely guilty about not telling him this. He’s the one who started keeping secrets first.
We leave the restaurant, and the sky turns fuzzy as the night creeps in. The other families are slowly disappearing from the square too. The Mahoneys were gone over an hour ago. We reach the curb where a car service is waiting to take me back to Rutherford, and my dad looks devastated.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” He’s stalling; he doesn’t want to say goodbye yet. “I hate leaving you here, all by yourself. Practically on your own.”
“I’m not all by myself or on my own. Not in the way you were.” Secretly, his worst fear is that I should ever feel unloved or neglected, the way he felt growing up with parents who instilled in him a great work ethic but only by example. He told me once that he still felt to this day like he never truly knew his parents. Mimi and Rosie had the opposite problem. Parents they couldn’t wait to escape—parents who were alcoholics in that functioning way that kept food on the table but turned every day into a juggle of their mood swings complete with hiding behind locked doors and walking on eggshells. They did escape them eventually, when cancer took their mother and a car accident took their father.
My dad nods and rubs his eyes. I hope he believes me. I hope he doesn’t worry the entire time I’m here.
“I’m going to miss you,” he says. I feel a tightening in my chest as I give him a hug and we say our final goodbye, knowing this really will be the last I’ll see of him until the winter holidays.
“Don’t go easy on them, kid,” he says as we break away. Something he says to me every time I’m about to do something new.
I answer the way I always do, with a promise. “Never.”
“Wait,” he says when I’m about to get in the car. “You’ve never listened to Rosie before.” True. “Why now? For this place? You don’t have to believe what she says about adventure, you know. All that traveling she does—she’s searching for something, but she’s also running. It’s not any way to live.”
“I know that,” I tell him. “That’s not why I wanted to come here. I just wanted something new. Something great.”
He nods, and I make a silent wish that when I finally get in the car and drive away from him, I’ve quieted some of his fears. Even if I can already feel that heavy sadness of how much I’m going to miss him.
The truth is, I never believed anything Rosie said about adventure and what it means to make the most of your life. But then I learned that Rosie was the only one in my family telling the truth. And that makes me look back on everything she said and consider what’s actually possible.
Three
When I return to Rutherford that evening, first and second years are gathered in the west wing, and third and fourth years are in the east, in a common room that’s full of tuft sofas made of brown leather, a few foosball and pool tables, and a couple of high-top tables where people are playing cards.
Jasper is easy to spot. He’s sitting on the thick arm of one of the sofas reading a book. He has to bend slightly so light will hit the pages. The room is only lit up by lamps in a way that casts many shadows and gives the east wing common room the feel of a 1940s smoke room. Despite how antisocial he’s being, Jasper’s still surrounded by a group of guys. They laugh and talk around him like they don’t notice he’s ignoring them in favor of fiction. Or maybe they’re just used to it.
Theo is at one of the tables playing cards. Anastasia is with him. They look like they might be having the most fun out of everyone, the way they’re laughing. And people flock to them like magnets, like their happiness and good time is contagious.
I turn back to Jasper. How is a person supposed to get his attention when this is how he chooses to spend his time in an atmosphere intended for socializing? I watch as a girl wearing a bright purple sundress tries. She taps him on the shoulder. He hesitates to look up from his book, but when he does, he smiles at her in a way that makes him seem like someone who at least has the capacity to be warm. She says something, and he lets the book dangle by his knee like he’s forgotten about it. Something makes him laugh. Something makes her touch her hand to her cheek. Next, she puts a hand on his shoulder, and he proceeds to talk as though he hasn’t noticed. It embarrasses her a little, his lack of reaction, and she casually removes it. It’s hard to see the imperfections in Jasper now that he isn’t reading in the middle of a staff-orchestrated party. It’s easy to see why the girl in the purple is turning pink and why she keeps shifting from one foot to the other. He looks very handsome like this, with a smile that is more charming than I’d thought it would be, and a cool demeanor like nothing on earth could faze him.
I can’t quite imagine what he’d be like in love with someone—realistically—and yet, it’s effortless to fantasize about it. The girl leaves him, and though he watches her walk away wearing an expression I would definitely want someone who’s watching me walk away to be wearing, he’s back to his book the moment she’s out of view. I should go up to him, I think. He was happy to talk to that other girl, and he’ll be fine to talk to you, I try to tell myself. But my feet stay grounded. He’s too attractive in this light, the shadows over his face. The way he’s focused on that book—the memory of the way he was fixated on the girl while she was leaving him. I stare at him, but I can’t think of him this way. I have to remember the boy who cut himself shaving and who was impatient during my overview. I have to remember what Rosie told me before I came here and the reason I know I can believe her.
It was a year ago the first time she told me that I had the ability to make anyone fall in love with me. Rosie has always been a whirlwind, showing up at Mimi’s without calling whenever she’s run out of money or is in between traveling bouts. She stayed with us pretty regularly the entire year before I left for Rutherford.
Mimi was listening from the open kitchen window where she was pinching rosemary over the sink. Rosie and I were out on the patio watching the sunset.
“Is this some sort of Olsen woman power that I’ve never been told about?” Mimi joked when she heard what Rosie was telling me.
Rosie waved her hand, brushing away Mimi’s comment. “This is something that’s true for everyone,” she said. She pivoted in her chair to face the open window and speak directly to Mimi. “You’ve chosen to live a solitary life, Michelle. You could’ve had men lining up for you if you’d wanted.”
“Well, darn.” Mimi put on a loud, sarcastic voice anytime she responded to Rosie’s Unsolicited Advice, as she called it sometimes. Other times she called it trivial nonsense.
“It’s probably too late for you now. It’s strongest when you’re young.” And I knew that with that comment, Rosie was talking about me.
“Then you’ve probably lost the power altogether,” Mimi called. Any chance to remind Rosie that she was the older sister, Mimi took it.