Isla and the Happily Ever After (22 page)

“You look sad to be home,” Maman says with her light accent. She just made a fuss over Hattie’s wild, self-trimmed hair, and she’s gearing up for a second fuss over me.

The cab pulls away with Kurt still inside, headed the final two blocks to his house. Dad picks up my suitcase in one hand and Hattie’s in the other, and we trundle upstairs to our landing. Our house smells like pumpkin bread. Maman has decorated everything in leaves and acorns and gourds. A garland of ribbons and red berries wraps around the bannister leading upstairs, and beeswax candles glow inside every room. Maman loves the holidays. And she loves having all three of her daughters at home.

“I’m not sad,” I assure her, thinking about the airport. Josh departed a mere two hours before our arrival. The timing still feels freshly cruel.

“You are. And you’re never the sad one.”

“When does Gen get in?”

She tuts at my obvious evasion but cheers as she answers. “Late tonight. Just in time for Thanksgiving Day.” Hattie shoots past us and slams her door shut, and Maman grows mournful again. “
Oh, mon bébés
. You will not ruin your beautiful hair,
non
?”

“No, Maman,” I say.

She’s the only family member without red hair – though, scientifically speaking, she must carry the gene somewhere – and this has made her overly protective of ours. Her own hair is the colour of coffee beans. Maman and I do share the same height and the same upturned nose. Gen is tiny like us, while Hattie takes after our dad, tall and slim with sharp features. But Dad’s the only one with a scruffy, burnt-orange beard.

“A package arrived for you this morning,” he says. My father is generally mellow, so the way he announces this news is peculiar. It’s hesitant. Maybe even a tad hostile. “I put it in your bedroom.”

My brow furrows. “What kind of package?”

“It was delivered by courier. I think it’s from Joshua.”

Joshua.
I’m getting the sense that he does not like this
Joshua,
but my entire being perks up. “Really? I wasn’t expecting anything.”

“The box is heavy.”

I’m already bolting upstairs.

“He is still your boyfriend,
oui
?” Maman says, and I grind to a halt. “Because we saw him on television saying that he does not have a girlfriend. I do not like this, Isla.”

I frown. “He was protecting me. Josh didn’t want the press to hassle me.”

She shrugs, slow and full-bodied. “It sounded like he was looking for tail.”

“Tail?
Oh mon dieu.
” I can’t believe she’s forcing me to defend this. I haven’t even been home for five minutes.

“Why didn’t he deliver the box himself?” Dad asks. “He’s been in this city for three whole weeks, but he can’t be bothered to introduce himself to your parents? It’s the least he could do after what he’s put us through.”

“What he’s put
you
through?” I throw my hands into the air. “No, forget it. I’m not going over this with you again. And he sent a courier because he had a plane to catch. To go to the
White House.
To have dinner with the
president.
Remember?”

“It’d still be the polite thing to do,” Dad says.

“Why? So you can harass him about school?”

“We do want to know what his plans are for the future, yes.”

“Do you even hear yourself?”

Maman cuts back in. “We just want to meet this boy who is so important to you.”

“You’ll meet him next month.” And I storm the rest of the way upstairs.

“Will we?” Dad calls up. “
Will we?
”

In spite of everything, I’d been looking forward to coming home. Now I’m not so sure. My energy levels are at an all-time low. It’s taken everything I have to maintain my grades –
Dartmouth
– and, even though we’re okay, things still aren’t back to normal with Kurt. I’m in detention so much that we hardly see each other. Josh has sneaked in a few more calls, here and there, but it’s harder now because his mom is less distracted now that the election is over.

And Dad harassing me about Josh’s future is particularly stressful, because the last time we talked, Josh said his mom wants him to finish the year at a private school in DC. When I suggested he take the GED instead, he replied, “Why would I waste my time when they’re just gonna put me in another stupid school anyway?”

I changed the subject after that.

My bedroom smells uninhabited and clean, that vacant scent it carries whenever I come home from abroad. A large box is in the centre of my floor. I don’t recognize the return address, and there’s no name, but it’s unquestionably Josh’s exquisite handwriting. My pulse quickens. I slice through the tape with a pair of scissors, peel back the flaps, and cry out in a grateful sort of agony.
This
air smells like
him.

On the top is a dark blue T-shirt, one of his favourites. He wore it on the first day of school this year. I press my nose against its cotton.
Citrus, ink, him.
My knees weaken. I hug it to my chest as I examine the contents below. The rest of my body weakens.

Boarding School Boy,
bound in string.

There’s a note slipped underneath the manuscript’s binding. I LOVE YOU. I love that he starts with this even in his letter. I’M SORRY THAT I CAN’T BE WITH YOU IN PERSON, BUT I HOPE THAT YOU’LL ACCEPT THIS PATHETIC SUBSTITUTE. I’VE SPENT ALL WEEK SCANNING AND PRINTING THE PAGES. I’VE NEVER SHOWN THE WHOLE THING TO ANYONE BEFORE. I’M NOT DONE, BUT HERE’S WHAT I HAVE SO FAR. I HOPE YOU STILL LIKE ME AFTER YOU’VE SEEN THE UGLY PARTS. YOURS, J
.

My eyes well with tears of happiness. I want to climb into bed with it this instant, but I have to wait. I want privacy. I don’t want to be interrupted mid-read. I place Josh’s shirt beside my pillow, but I push the box into my closet. My parents aren’t the snooping type, but anything left out in the open is considered fair game.

I spend the rest of the day with them. When they inquire about the box, I give them a vague “Oh, you know. It was a care package. A letter, a shirt.” But as soon as dinner is over, I claim jet lag and retire. I drag out the box to the side of my bed, switch on a lamp, and crawl beneath the covers. I’d wear the T-shirt, but I don’t want to lose his scent. I snuggle with it instead. And then I untie the string and remove the first page.

The book is divided, as it was in his dorm room, into four sections beginning with freshman. Josh has drawn himself as skinny and naive, slack-jawed, as he takes in his new surroundings. He finds Paris equal parts intimidating and awe inspiring, but little time passes before he falls into homesickness. It’s not that he misses his actual home – not the flights between cities, the endless campaigning, the neglectful parents. He misses the life that he glimpsed when he was younger. The cabin and the pine trees. A family in one place. He recognizes almost immediately that instead of trading in two lives for one, he now has three. And it’s too late.

A single-panel page: him in the corner, small and crouched, looking up at home, while the rest of the page – where home is supposed to be – is a blank space. He misses somewhere that doesn’t exist. And he knows that Paris will not fill the void.

He
tries
to fill it by throwing himself into his art. He befriends St. Clair in their studio art class. St. Clair is a year older, but he’s attracted to Josh’s natural talent while Josh is attracted to St. Clair’s natural charisma. At night, Josh lies awake in bed, rehashing things his new friend has said or done, hoping to learn from him. Emulate him. The pages are sad and sweet and full of humiliating truths.

St. Clair has a bushy-haired friend named Meredith, and Josh befriends her, too, and the three of them are uncannily reminiscent of Harry, Ron and Hermione. St. Clair is the leader, Josh is the clown, and Meredith is the brainiac. But in this version, Hermione is clearly in love with Harry.

The scenes with his friends are fun. They feel like characters, not like the real people that I used to see around school. Though they do trigger that accompanying, always-underlying twinge of hurt. I’ll never know this part of his life. But the scenes where Josh is alone, he becomes
Josh
again, and everything is heightened. I pour over these panels with an intensity that makes me feel uncomfortable, maybe guilty, but the harder the scenes are to read, the faster I turn the pages. Josh thinks about girls
constantly.
He sees a beautiful, too-tall French girl on the street, and I’m horrified to flip the page and find him masturbating back in his room to the thought of her. Over the summer, he gets his first kiss with an older girl who works at his favourite comics shop in Manhattan, but the next time he goes to see her, she brushes him off in embarrassment.

It took guts to draw these things. It’s a different kind of excruciating to read about them.

SOPHOMORE begins. St. Clair starts dating a girl named Ellie. She’s two years older than Josh, and he struggles with feeling cool enough to hang out with them. He and Meredith swap unkind words about Ellie – each out of a different type of jealousy – but his eventual coming to terms with Ellie means getting to know
her
best friend.

Rashmi Devi.

She’s pretty and smart and sarcastic. And I hate her. She flirts with Josh one day in their art class –
of course
she can draw, when I can’t – and he becomes consumed by thoughts of her. Page after page of Rashmi shining like a gorgeous Hindu goddess. They go on for ever. He woos her pathetically, desperately, until she agrees to go on a date with him. And then I’m forced to relive the painful moments of
my
past as they engage in on-the-page PDA.

It gets worse. Josh tells her that he loves her. She says it back. He touches her. She touches him back. And then they’re losing their virginity on the floor of her bedroom beside her pet rabbit, Isis.

A rabbit.

Josh literally lost his virginity in front of a metaphor for sex.

There’s another single-panel page, and this time Rashmi has been drawn naked like the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, who – it turns out – is the goddess of
fertility,
and she’s holding her pet rabbit, and she’s surrounded by more rabbits, and
enough with the stupid rabbits and fertility and sex already.

Ohmygod. I
hate
rabbits.

And I feel ill and furious, but there’s no way I’m stopping now. It’s masochism. There’s a weird, out-of-place flashback to Josh getting his tattoo. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s probably because he was so eager to draw more naked pictures of his girlfriend that he figured the story of his own body modification could wait. Or whatever. I grab the next stack of pages from the box and realize, at some point, that I’ve pushed his T-shirt onto my floor. I don’t pick it up.

Finally, Josh and Rashmi are fighting. And it’s nasty. She’s pissed because he’s skipping school, and he lashes back at her in full force. I relish his anger. And I feel vindicated because
I
never yelled at him for skipping class to work on this book. Though maybe I would’ve if I’d known what was in here. But then the school year ends, and he flies out to join her family at their vacation home in Delhi.

He once told me that he’d spent “some time” with her family one summer, but…an entire month? In India? No wonder he knew so much about Sanjita. Somehow, the idea of Josh spending an entire month with the Devi family hurts almost as much as the rabbit.

JUNIOR begins without any mention of Josh’s time in New York. His parents were everywhere in the beginning, but they’ve almost entirely disappeared. It’s a strange omission.

School kicks off, and St. Clair moons over Ellie’s absence, even though she’s attending a college nearby. Anna shows up. I remember watching her in the cafeteria that first week of school, seething with jealousy because she made the leap to their table so effortlessly. I wanted her luck. I wanted her confidence.

And then, suddenly, Josh is alone.

St. Clair gets a crush on Anna. He’s torn between her and Ellie, and he spends so much time running between them that he hardly has time left for Josh. And the more time that Josh spends alone, the more he realizes how alone he actually is. All of his friends will be gone the next year. Josh grows increasingly antagonistic towards school, which makes Rashmi increasingly antagonistic towards him, which makes him increasingly antagonistic towards her. And she’s upset because Ellie dropped her as a friend, and Meredith is upset because now St. Clair likes
two
girls who aren’t her, and Anna is upset because St. Clair is leading her on, and
then
St. Clair’s mom gets
cancer.

It’s a freaking soap opera.

As the drama between his friends grows, Josh pulls away and into himself. His illustrations become darker. The slack-jawed freshman is long gone, the oversexed sophomore has disappeared, and now he’s a sullen junior. His parents briefly, randomly, appear to hassle him about the election. He wants to break up with Rashmi, but he’s too depressed to find the energy. He stops drawing and skips class to sleep. The head of school – having called him into her office for the hundredth time – tells him, “I think you’re passively trying to get me to kick you out. So I’m not going to.”

I’ve never thought about their actual interactions. I’m shocked as the head pulls out his records and informs him that he had the highest pre-acceptance test scores that she’d seen in years. He’s the brightest student in our class.

Josh
is the brightest student. Not me.

I’m ashamed to admit that this hurts. It definitely hurts. And yet…I’ve always known it to be true. I’ve always known that he’s been putting on an act. That he can see through the bullshit, and he’s not willing to participate in it. It’s one of the reasons I was attracted to him in the first place.

“For a certain type of person, high school will always be brutal,” the head says. “The best advice that I can give you is to figure out what comes next, and work towards that.”