“Ginger ale?”
“Strong stuff.” With a nod to Rachel, he added, “Let’s go.” I wondered if other people noticed Holden’s arm. In some ways, it was a confidence boost and made me feel like I belonged here. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give Holden such bold arm-to-shoulder rights. On the other, other hand—I was probably giving this too many hands.
“Are your parents okay with me being here?” I asked in his ear.
“You’re sweet to care about what my parents think,” he answered. “I don’t.”
“Clean-shaven liar. Of course you do.”
Holden rubbed his chin. “Touché. But Mom’s too wrapped up in the party and Dad’s too wrapped around the bourbon.”
“Holdie, fix me a Diet Coke with lime?” asked Rachel.
“You got it.”
Suddenly it struck me that this was how it would be if Holden and I got engaged. This would be our party, with Rachel bopping next to us, and Mrs. Wilde using the very same catering company and ordering up the same polleny flower arrangements. Holden’s sparrow-boned Wilde grandparents would be here from Summit, too, along with those quirky next-door neighbors, the Rossiters, who often dressed in matching safari-esque suits—and tonight was no exception. And then Mr. Wilde would drink too much, and Drew would scowl with his scar-thin mouth, and the entire event would be spread in sticky layers of politeness, and would go on way too long.
“Light on ice, heavy on the ale, right?” Holden handed me a ginger ale with just two cubes and clinked his imported beer bottle with my glass. He looked super cute tonight. Even with the clean shave. Effortlessly adult—I practically could see him at age thirty. I imagined us dating on and off through college. It wasn’t so out-there; we were natural friends, always had been. We’d never exactly said “I love you” to each other, but still. I’d never felt unloving or unaffectionate with Holden. And there were times I could get stupidly weak-kneed, staring at the chiseled angles of his face. If Holden and I ever did get back together—a big if, but not stratospherically impossible—would we ever have enough reason to break up again?
I felt the puff of Kai’s breath in the cold-storage room, the damp animal-shine of his eyes in the darkness, the way the side of his body had pressed mine, the rumble of his voice lulling me—
“Ember!” Mrs. Wilde’s thin fingers had latched my wrist. “Let me introduce you to Raina.”
“Perk up, dish-Raggedy Ann.” Rachel gave me a nudge, and Holden reluctantly relinquished me, as Mrs. Wilde led me to where Raina stood in front of the fireplace.
“Raina, I wanted you to meet Ember. Who has been a special friend to Holden.” This was classic Mrs. Wilde—to take something awkward and make it way more awkward. Special friend? Seriously? “I think I told you about her horrible year?”
“Yes. Of course.” Raina’s eyes widened. “What a thing to live through.”
Up close, I didn’t mind what Smarty had been mocking. Raina’s polka-dot headband and super-feminine shoes seemed to suit her. Plus her eyes were gentle as a child’s. “My brother, Ian, was in a bus accident,” she confided, “and no matter what anyone said, I swear he was never the same after. Oh—but I didn’t mean it that way.” As Raina touched her shell-pink manicured fingers to her lips, I noticed her engagement ring, sparkling with new ownership. “I only meant that you…I mean, you look perfect to me.” She laughed apologetically. “Not a scratch on you.”
“Oh, but I’ve got a couple of scratches,” I admitted. “Mostly on the inside.”
Raina nodded. “Sometimes those are the hardest to heal. With my brother—”
“Hey, Rain, I want you to meet some of my cousins.” Drew was at us like a wolverine in pinstripes.
“Good to see you, too, Drew.” I cleared my throat. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks, Ember.” He hardly looked at me. “Nice of you to come.” And then he patrolled Raina away by the elbow as if I were some kind of playground predator. I was relieved to join Smarty, who was now hanging out with Lucia, and, thankfully, no Claude.
“Ciao, Ember,” Lucia greeted me in her lilting Italian—did she sound delightfully musical, I wondered, even when she got angry? “I’ve been meaning to tell you something. Remember when you asked me about that girl, Maisie, from my Halloween party? And I didn’t know her? Last week, I was speaking with my uncle on the phone, and I asked about her. He said Maisie has a partial art scholarship at the New School. A scholarship that he helps to fund.”
“Oh, that’s cool.” I kept my tone casual. Lucia’s uncle probably knew Anthony, too. I wondered if he had come up in the conversation.
Lucia shook her glossy hair dismissively. “He says she is not very serious about her art, not like some of the others.” When she got imperious, Lucia sounded kind of like Claude. She had slipped into his skin in some ways since they’d started dating, the way so many couples did. “Uncle Carlos also helped to discover Alice de Souza,” Lucia continued. “Do you know of her?”
My heart leapfrogged. “Alice de Souza? Of course!” I’d just seen the piece in the arts section of last weekend’s newspaper, an article about this brilliant new young artist. The photograph had been one of those arty shots, and it had rung a distant bell, as I’d studied that image of a girl standing, speculative in her long spattered T-shirt, one foot planted on either side of a slab of linen canvas on the floor.
I’d figured it was just one of those oddly indefinable déjà vu things, but Alice de Souza must have been Maisie’s friend Alice. The picture snapped like a rubber band in my head—Alice in the Cleopatra costume and gladiator sandals at the party was also the same Alice from that day last year, too—we’d been trooping through Tribeca and then we’d stopped by the apartment on North Moore Street, and Alice was egging us on, “Let’s go up, just for a minute,” and then we were spilling through those giant rooms, looking for Anthony’s painting.…
On Rachel’s “Earth to Ember!” with accompanying finger flick, I was back.
What was wrong with me? Second time tonight.
I was still standing between Lucia and Rachel, but they weren’t looking at me. Everyone was listening to Holden’s dad give a toast. His arm swung his glass of champagne as he spoke, and his voice was reedy in his strain to amplify himself through the rooms. I fixed my attention. Mr. Wilde wasn’t as glammed-out as his wife; in fact, he looked more like a bath-toy version of Holden. Round, buoyant, and even a bit damp.