Althea and Oliver Read online

  “Where did you get these?” he asks.

  “The back of the toilet.”

  Oliver thinks about it and decides he’s too drunk to care. “Remember when I had to drag you to parties like this? Now I can’t drag you away.”

  “I bet you could stay here, too. They’ll take in anyone who promises not to burn down the house.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a promise I’m willing to make.”

  “You don’t have to like them—”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t.”

  “You want to hear something weird?”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to have a boyfriend someday. I’m going to have a boyfriend someday, and it isn’t going to be you.” Althea stares up at the sky dreamily.

  Oliver drinks his beer. “I bet he’ll look like me, though. Not exactly, but just enough to be creepy. He won’t be as handsome, of course, sort of like the budget version, but older, with more tattoos, and drug experience. He’ll play the guitar, you know, but not very well. He’ll have a temper like yours. The kind of guy you end up throwing a lot of plates at.”

  “You guys are totally going to hate each other. You’ll be terse but civil when you meet him. He’ll barely be able to conceal his hostility.”

  “And you’re going to love watching us squirm.”

  “Yes, McKinley, I believe I will. And you’ll have some awful perfect girlfriend who plays softball and studies chemistry and has a really high ponytail. The kind of girl you meet at the library. And the four of us will try to go out to dinner together, just once, and it’ll be so uncomfortable, you’ll end up drinking too much and making a scene at the restaurant.”

  “I’ll make the scene? You’re sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. You don’t even know it, but you’re already saving up for that one. It’s gonna be a real shitshow.”

  “Are we going to get thrown out of the restaurant?”

  “No, you’re going to storm out, and then your stupid girlfriend and I will have one of those awkward moments where it’s unclear who should chase you. Then I’ll go ahead and do it, and she’ll get stuck with the check.”

  “What about your greasy boyfriend?”

  “Are you kidding? That clown never has any money.”

  “I hope we can do better than that.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to marry the guy.”

  “That’s not what I mean. It all sounds like a bad romantic comedy. I don’t want to be that predictable.”

  “You won’t be, Ollie. You’re not.”

  The rest of the party has been driven inside, not by the cold but by the fear that the cold might make them sober. From their perch on the roof, Althea and Oliver survey an empty backyard. The whole block feels silent, and like it’s theirs. Any minute one of them will want to go inside and get warm, or pee, or locate more alcohol. Suddenly Oliver feels pressure to manufacture some kind of a moment, to fashion her a memory like a child’s crude valentine, something she can look at over and over again after he’s gone.

  “What will you say that I was to you?” he asks her. “The first time you tell that tattooed barfly a story that’s got me in it, and he asks, ‘Who’s Oliver?’ What will you say?”

  She opens her mouth to answer, like she thinks it’s going to be an easy question, and then she realizes none of the standard answers apply. To simply call him her best friend would omit so much as to be nearly duplicitous. He had never been her boyfriend; v-cards have been cashed in, respectively, but that was just one part of the last ten years. Her forehead creases with the effort of finding the right word, and when she’s got it, she nods to herself, like it was so obvious. “I’ll say,” she finally says, “that you were my favorite.”

  “Your favorite what?”

  “That’s it,” she says. “Just my favorite.”

  He takes her hand and together they look up at the cloudy, starless sky. The warped shingles are digging into his back and the cold January wind is taking great big bites out of his neck, but he doesn’t want to be the one to say they should go back inside. He doesn’t want her to remember it that way.

  “And you?” she says. “What will you tell that girl when you get all weird around the holidays because I’m coming home to visit?”

  There was a snag somewhere in the last fourteen months, and if he could unravel them like a thrift store sweater he’s sure that he would find it. Maybe it had started in his brain or maybe in Althea’s—whichever, it doesn’t matter anymore. In any case, it happened, and everything that came after had been tainted by it, by some feeling of wrongness that hasn’t gone away but is slowly becoming a constant, pervasive sense of the unfamiliar that is—he admits it—maybe a little addictive. A year ago, every day was the same, a variation on a single theme, Althea and Oliver. Now he doesn’t even know when he’ll see her again. He kisses her, the kind of sloppy, sentimental kiss New Year’s was made for, and wonders how many more of them—New Year’s, not kisses—it will take before their saga is played out the rest of the way.

  “I’ll tell the softball player that you were my almost,” he says.

  Althea sits up and finishes her beer, then casually crushes the can, like she’s balling up a failed sketch, and throws it in the trash directly below her feet. “She’s really going to love that,” she says finally, sliding toward the edge of the roof.

  “Tough shit. That’s my story,” he says, “and I’m sticking to it. You don’t want to go back in the window?”

  “Windows are for climbing out, not climbing in. Roofs are for jumping off.” And she demonstrates.

  • • •

  For the rest of the night, they play. They chase each other up and down the stairs, they arm wrestle, they argue and make out. They keep each other close. Laughter rings and rings through the house, over the sound of glass breaking and the low, deep throb of the bass from the stereo. Matilda and Dennis disappear upstairs for a spell; Althea shares a knowing smile with Leala. Eventually someone turns off the music and the revelers gather in the living room again, passing around the guitar and making use of the old snare drum tucked into the corner. Althea claps until her palms sting. By the time the sun comes up, the sky is so overcast they can barely tell it’s daylight. So when someone yells “Let’s go to the beach!” it is actually within the realm of possibility for them to venture out, without fear of being turned to dust and ash by the harsh mistress of the New Year’s sun, and walk en masse to the boardwalk at Coney Island, most of them still toting half-empty bottles of room-temperature champagne. Althea and Oliver bring up the rear of the unlikely parade as they file through the empty streets of Brooklyn, toward the ocean.

  If this were a movie, she thinks, it should end here. With champagne, by the water, while everyone is still celebrating, while she still has everything she needs. Before the sun muscles its way through the clouds, before her hangover springs to life, before her new tattoo starts to scab over and itch and she has to help clean the house. And then she would never have to watch Oliver go, or wake up after he leaves, terrified that she did the wrong thing. It should stop now, before her choice becomes a reality and she has to prove that she’s strong enough to live with it; while Oliver is still relishing that he finally has a choice at all, before it paralyzes him to realize that whatever happens next will be all his own doing. She watches Dennis sling Matilda over his shoulder while she screams and kicks her heels. Althea raises her champagne bottle to her lips, banging her teeth with the thick green glass, then she holds it out to Oliver. “Now you drink half.”

  They pass it back and forth until they’re trying to parse a single drop of flat champagne. Oliver really does look gorgeous, standing on the beach drunk in the early hours of the morning with the wind in his messy blond hair. It would be so easy to sleep it off and then get in the car with him and leave. And if Althea heads back to Wilmington with him, t
hings will go back to the way they were—not exactly, but still. It will be The Oliver and Althea Show, airing around the clock. But she recalls her conversation with a forlorn Matilda and what she said about the family you choose. With Oliver, it would always be just Oliver, because she doesn’t know how to do it any other way. Matilda and the rest of her warriors are dancing around one another in the sand. Maybe they won’t come to mean to Althea what they mean to Matilda; maybe they don’t even mean to Matilda what Matilda thinks they mean. But it’s too late for Althea. The seed has been planted. There’s more out there, more to be had than one person who’s known you since you were six. Everything would be different if he loved her the way she loves him; the entire universe would still consist of a single constellation: Castor and Pollux, set together among the stars, fettered only to each other. But he doesn’t.

  She knows that he doesn’t understand, and she wishes she could make him, that she could show him all the things she imagines will happen to her after he leaves. Drawing a comic with Ethan, learning a trade from Dennis, exploring this strange dirty city until she knows it by heart. Learning to cook like Matilda, to sew like her, how to be a good friend like her. And there are flashes in her head of things she can barely grasp—a coffeemaker of her own, in a place that’s just hers, a line of potted plants sitting on a fire escape, an easel placed by that window, pictures on the refrigerator of dozens of people she hasn’t yet met. There’s an Althea-sized place in the world somewhere, waiting to be claimed. She lets the unfinishable bottle fall to the sand.

  “I have to go back to the hospital,” Oliver says.

  “I can drive you.”

  “It’ll be days before you’re sober enough to drive again.”

  “You’ve had a few yourself, you know.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “So you’ll do it, then?”

  He’ll do it. He’ll take the fucking pills, and if his hands start to shake, if he can’t line up the equations the way he used to, if he can’t look up into the sky and find Cassiopeia as effortlessly as he knows he can, then he’ll stop. But he’ll try. He wants to go home and finish his senior year, see Minty’s band play at Lucky’s, swim in the Cape Fear, and get one of those fat envelopes from MIT on a spring afternoon; he wants to watch the leaves change in Massachusetts in the fall, see for himself if the foliage is as glorious as it is in the catalogs. He wants to have an annoying roommate, and meet the softball player Althea predicted for him, and send his mother postcards from New England. He wants to know what happens when he isn’t the smartest person in the class. He wants to plant his telescope somewhere new. He wants to see what else is out there.

  When he’d imagined the end of the universe, the wormhole that would bring them all salvation, he’d pictured the other side as being identical to this one. Even in the face of Armageddon, he’d dreamed of a solution where nothing had to change, where even a parallel dimension would contain no uncertainties, where everyone could cross the threshold with their entire lives intact, emerging on the other side without a hint of vertigo. But the truth is, when the solar system starts to collapse, nobody’s going to give a fuck about what’s on the other side.

  This is it, then: the end of hope. Her hope that he would love her back, his hope that things would return to normal. The things they’d willed so hard to happen have failed to manifest, and their respective efforts have brought them here, to Coney Island of all places, standing on the beach as if they’ve just landed in a new world, the chances of returning to the old one as surely torched as if they’d set a fleet of ships aflame. There’s only one way to go now: forward, into the unknown. Welcome to the jungle.

  Down the shore, the Coney Island Polar Bear Club is racing toward the ocean. Althea catches Matilda’s eye and smiles, unbuttoning her coat. Matilda does the same, and their jackets drop in unison.

  “Come on!” Matilda yells at her friends.

  They giddily carry out her order. Althea and Oliver watch as everyone else undresses, unlacing their combat boots, slipping out of their secondhand coats, littering the sand with piles of clothes, unmasking the milky parts of themselves that haven’t seen daylight in so long, until they’re all standing on the beach in their underwear, and of course Kaleb removes even that. Althea steps out of her shoes.

  “Are you crazy?” Oliver says.

  “Just drunk,” Althea says. “Fuck! It’s cold out here! Can you unzip me?”

  “It’s going to be cold.”

  “You’re already cold.”

  “It’s going to hurt.”

  “It’ll feel good once we’re in,” she says.

  Matilda and the others are running toward the Atlantic. Oliver gives in and takes off his clothes. Althea grabs his hand and pulls him along, her toes going numb before they’ve even reached the ocean, the wet sand stinging the soles of her feet, the tide sucking at her ankles and drawing them in. When she’s in up to her thighs, she lets go of his hand and dives in, flippering her feet behind her. The icy water burns like a million lit matches held to every instant of her skin, but she knows that she can take it. When she surfaces she half expects that Oliver will have run back to the shore, but he’s swimming out to meet her, his lips already drained of color. Quickened, she waits. He closes the distance between them by half, and then half again, and when he reaches her, he proves Zeno’s paradox of infinite divisibility is exactly that. Eyes shocked wide open, laughing wildly with disbelief that he’s doing this at all, he treads water beside her, looking horrified and ecstatic. Sensation displaces thought completely, and it’s a relief to see it go. All that’s left is this, this astonishingly cold water, the gentle rocking of the waves, that first treasonous break in the clouds. Everyone is thrashing madly in the ocean, screaming through chattering teeth, and Althea yells “Nobody leaves!” and everyone shouts it back, but she hears only Oliver’s voice, loud enough to make the Polar Bear Club stare down the beach at the commotion.

  Turns out, they’re both right—it feels good, and it still hurts.

  Acknowledgments.

  Thanks to my agents, Michele Rubin and Brianne Johnson, for believing in the kids so completely, and for all the soothing noises; and to Sharyn November, editor of my dreams, for making sure this book would be the best I could do.

  I am so grateful to everyone from Brooklyn College who coaxed this manuscript through its nascent stages, especially Michael Cunningham, Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Joshua Henkin, and Francisco Goldman. Special thanks to the Carole and Irwin Lainoff Foundation for their support and generosity, and to the inimitable Jim Shepard for all his kindness. Thanks to Reese Kwon, who asks after the kids by name; Marie-Helene Bertino, who looks after my heart; and Andy Hunter, who knew why Althea was going for the medicine cabinet.

  Thanks to my family for their faith and encouragement—sorry about those teen years, Mom and Dad. Thanks to all my friends—there’s a piece of each of you somewhere in these pages. Special thanks to Caitlin Meister, who told me about Kleine-Levin Syndrome; Saki Knafo, for his tacos and enduring patience; the Warriors of 30K, who provided much inspiration; particular thanks to Ryan Hanlon, a friend as good for my soul as he is hell on my liver. Love, thanks, and heartlights to Sarah McCarry, beloved jarmate and boon companion—it doesn’t matter that I wrote it before I met you; I wrote it for you anyway.

  CRISTINA MORACHO completed her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, where the first chapter of Althea and Oliver received the Lainoff Foundation Award. In 2012, she was awarded a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.

  She was an active member of the Riot Grrrl movement’s NYC chapter as a teenager. In her twenties, she made a lot of bad decisions, and chose to recover by moving to a dude ranch in Idaho. She now lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where she works as a freelance writer and editor, and is teaching herself to play the guitar. This is her first novel.

  Find her on Twitter at @cherielecrivain.

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