Before We Were Innocent, page 5
Joni never spoke a word of French again.
* * *
—
My own parents eventually agreed to the trip, as I knew they would, but they insisted on paying for my flight to Athens themselves. They said they didn’t feel comfortable letting the Aetoses cover everything, which just meant that Joni and Ev now had to fly economy too. I knew my parents thought they were doing the right thing, but I wanted to scream at them that Evangeline’s parents wouldn’t have given the extra five thousand dollars for my fare a second thought, perhaps wouldn’t have even known about it. I wondered whether Evangeline and Joni had discussed the situation and decided not to mention it to me, even in jest, and the thought was even more humiliating than knowing that neither of my friends would have considered flying anything other than first class before they met me.
My mom drove me to LAX herself in our family Prius as NPR played quietly through the car speakers. Occasionally we’d pass the ridiculous black limousine driving Joni and Evangeline, and I would pretend not to see them as they wound down the windows, giggling and waving as envy slithered through me, and my mom asked me for the fortieth time whether I’d remembered to pack Tylenol and antihistamines.
When we pulled up at the curb outside the terminal, I was alarmed to find that my mom was crying, her eyes milky and tender behind her glasses as she swiped at them.
“Oh, God. What’s wrong?” I asked, my hand already on the door handle. When the automatic doors opened, I could see that Joni and Evangeline were already in the check-in line, and I hoped this wouldn’t be a sign of the summer ahead, that I wouldn’t always be rushing to catch up to them like a snotty younger sibling nobody wanted there.
“I don’t know,” my mom said, swiping at her eyes before correcting herself. “This is a big deal, Bess. The first trip without us? This is actually a pretty big deal.”
After a moment, I put my arms around her and hugged her, and I think I wished then that she’d take it all back, that my mom would say of course she’d only been joking when she said I could go away without her. That there was no way in hell I was mature enough to fly across the world with these two girls she hardly knew, that, in lots of ways, I hardly knew unless you counted knowing exactly what shade of pink someone’s tongue is, or how long they could wear Crest Whitestrips before their teeth started to hurt, or how many people they wanted to fuck before college. Instead, we could turn around and drive home, and we’d make guacamole and watch a movie we’d already seen thirty times, and maybe we’d go camping for a few days like we used to, before Steven and I had had to readjust to our new reality, reassessing our priorities and our lives that had little space for ordinary, loving parents and bike rides around canyons or playing on the swing my dad spent months installing in the backyard even though we were both already too old for it.
My mom pulled back and gently wiped at my cheeks, which were embarrassingly streaked with tears too.
“I love you,” she said, and I laughed a little to defuse the situation. I thought of Evangeline’s mom, distant and fragile in bed, her eyes tracking the brilliantly rendered characters on her fifty-six-inch TV, and of Joni’s mom, her own face as smooth as a boiled egg as she looked at me appraisingly the first time I met her, before benignly telling me that my full cheeks made me the perfect candidate for buccal fat removal.
“I love you too, Mom,” I said.
NINE
2018
I WAKE UP TO A loud hammering at my front door and Joni calling my name. I check my phone for the time—7:10 a.m. Joni must have left her home in Malibu as soon as she got my text. I stand up with a splitting headache and not nearly enough sleep to adequately arm myself against our shared history, already regretful of the choices that led me to this moment.
When I open the door, Joni is waiting in a pair of white jeans and a blue linen shirt. She waves a ziplock bag filled with grayish powder at me and smiles winningly as the blazing sunlight assaults my eyes.
“Cordyceps,” Joni says by way of explanation, just before she pushes past me and makes her way through to the kitchen.
“Excuse me?” I stare after her.
“It’s an adaptogen,” she explains as she opens my fridge and takes out a carton of orange juice. As she talks, a flash of “Joni Le Bon” comes through—the charismatic, striking multihyphenate who is just as confident sharing her unfounded opinions as facts online as she is ranting about the gendered politics of shame on a talk show. “Ayurvedic? It’s the only thing for depression. You still look like shit—this desert is uninhabitable, I swear to God.”
While she’s talking, Joni casually pours the juice into a glass before stirring in a significant amount of powder with a pen she finds on the counter, and I watch it all in disbelief.
“Unless, of course, your intention is to slowly rot alone,” Joni says, glancing up at me then, absorbing everything from my unwashed hair to my stained vest through narrowed eyes. “In which case, forget the Cordyceps and go off.”
Is she being fucking serious?
“Joni,” I say slowly. “You’re just not going to explain why I had to lie to the police for you?”
Joni rolls her eyes as if I’m being dramatic.
“Thank you for doing that,” she says. “But truly, it’s only a temporary thing.”
A lightning bolt of pain shoots down my left temple, landing in my jaw.
“Do you think you need to tell the truth?” I ask quietly. “If Willa is actually missing, this is surely bigger than any argument you may have had.”
“If I change my story now, it will just distract them from finding her, which, I’m sure I don’t have to point out, is in none of our interests now.”
A tug of panic, deep in the pit of my stomach.
“I’m also interested as to when you, of all people, fostered this inflated sense of trust in the capabilities of the police.”
“Joni,” I say, my tone a warning shot.
“Look, they already searched the house,” Joni says casually. “And I answered a few questions.”
I swallow another wave of tequila-laced dread.
“Do you . . .” I trail off before trying again. “Do you have a lawyer?”
“Come on, Bess,” Joni says. “Lighten up. I promise you Willa will be back in the next few days, and this conversation and all the other ones like it will be rendered entirely meaningless. It’s a tragic waste of both our energy.”
“Where does she usually go?” I ask. “In the past when she’s done this.”
“Rehab in Utah, her aunt’s house in Beacon Hill, a horse ranch in Wyoming,” Joni says, reeling off the locations. “Tulum, once. It doesn’t matter where, as long as I don’t know. It’s a power move.”
I pretend I don’t understand what it would be like to be so desperate that you walk out of your own life.
“You know it would be easy for the cops to find out where you were that night if they wanted to,” I say. “They can check your cell phone location.”
“I told you I didn’t have my phone,” Joni says. “Plus, I think that whole cell tower system is fairly flawed.”
“Well, someone would have noticed your car,” I say, even though it’s a black Range Rover and noticeable only in its ubiquity.
“Look, it’s never going to get to that point,” Joni says. “Trust me.”
“Have Willa’s parents heard anything?”
“I was the one who told them. They had no clue Willa had even left until I called.”
“So nobody’s heard anything? It’s been over a week now, Joni.”
“I’m acutely aware of that, Bess, but I also have too much other shit to worry about with my book release next month,” Joni says coolly. “Trust me, she knows what she’s doing.”
“Did you already know?” I ask then, steeling myself against her reaction. “When you came over that night. Did you know that Willa would do this and that you’d need me to cover for you?”
“How would I have known that?” Joni asks, looking at me strangely, and it’s a relief when I decide to believe her.
“So you didn’t come over to thank me, but you came over to . . . ?”
“The Cordyceps,” Joni says.
“You drove here from Malibu before sunrise to drop me a bag of mushroom powder,” I say, and Joni smiles again, her perfect, sharp teeth sparkling even in the dim light of my kitchen.
“You know where I live?”
“Okay,” I say, opening my laptop. “I have to start work now.”
Joni studies me for a moment, and I can tell that there’s something else on her mind.
“Bess . . .” she says. “Do you want to talk about the last time we saw each other?”
“Are you going to apologize for what you did?” I ask, not lifting my eyes from the screen.
When Joni doesn’t answer, I flick my eyes over her.
“Then I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”
After a moment, Joni pushes the bag of powder across the counter toward me.
“Trust me,” she says, looking around the room one last time. “Cordyceps. It’s the only cure for . . . for whatever the fuck this is.”
Joni walks out, leaving me staring after her.
* * *
—
My brother emails me moments after Joni’s departure, and, with a sinking feeling, I remember that we have our biannual coffee this week. Over the past five years, he has insisted on letting me know every time he has a meeting in Palm Springs so that I can drive up to meet him at some ridiculously overpriced brunch spot where we plow valiantly through an hour in each other’s company, presumably so we can both promise our parents that we tried. I figure that at least this time our meeting will serve as a momentary distraction from Joni’s chaotic reappearance in my life, or, more specifically, the fact that I clearly left the fucking door wide open for her.
I email Steven back, telling him that ten a.m. at the Ace Hotel works fine for me, and to make sure he doesn’t stay up too late slobbering over some nineteen-year-old model at a Hollywood club tonight.
He still uses the account he set up when we were teenagers, back when you could still get a name like BradPittsGoatee@APG.com.
* * *
—
Once I’ve sent the email, I search to see if there’s any news of Willa.
Still nothing.
My browser hovers over the search bar, and I can’t help but think how easy it would be to just surrender and type Evangeline’s name into it. I can already imagine the pages of results that would appear to remind me of what I already know, that whatever we do now, nobody will ever forget what happened, and our history will always be out there, waiting to be reignited, reinterpreted, wielded against us at the earliest opportunity. Joni has rebuilt her life on facing this fact head-on, refusing to forget, while I have done the opposite. My entire adult life has been built on the merits of restraint, of treading so lightly that I leave no trace of myself.
On Instagram, Joni posts a photograph of herself holding up a copy of her book and smiling serenely.
One month to go! Thanks for all the support, you truly wild creatures. Viva my Le Bon Babes
TEN
2008
THE GOD IN CHARGE of flight seating assignments must have been a teenager once too, because my seat for the first (and longest) leg of the journey was in the middle, right between Evangeline and Joni. It meant that I had to be included in every conversation they had, and if Evangeline spoke particularly quietly, I could repeat it so that Joni could hear. I still felt unsettled from running up to join them in the check-in line only to find that they had already taken what seemed like three hundred photos on Ev’s pink digital camera during the car journey. They had even looked vaguely surprised to see me, as if they had forgotten I was coming on the trip, and I was reminded once again that they had been a perfectly happy, perfectly self-contained duo before they ever met me.
I could also tell that Joni didn’t love that I had been the one who had known my way around the airport terminal, having flown to and from the UK multiple times over the past couple of years. I pointed out the best bookstore and magazine kiosk, and steered Joni away from ordering a burrito at the place that had once (maybe) given Steven a particularly humiliating bout of food poisoning on a flight back to England. She wasn’t used to me being the native in any situation, alien as LA culture still was to me much of the time, and I think she was hoping I wouldn’t be able to sustain this superiority for the whole summer just by dint of the fact that we would be in my home territory of Europe. She needn’t have worried—the gray mundanity of the suburbs of Sussex I grew up in was as similar to Tinos as Calabasas was to the moon, or Bushwick.
We hate-watched the Sex and the City movie together in full, and then Joni got up to use the bathroom. Evangeline put her hand on my arm and I slipped one earbud out.
“Are you excited?” she asked, and I nodded.
“Thanks so much again, Ev,” I said. “It’s so generous of your parents.”
Evangeline frowned, and I realized it hadn’t been what she wanted from me at all.
“I can’t fucking wait,” I added.
“Well, I’ve already explained this to Joni, but I don’t know if she totally got it. I don’t want you to be freaked out by the house—it’s been in my dad’s family for generations, so it’s not what any of us are used to, but that’s exactly why my family has always loved it. It’s all rickety, with wood rot and, like, actual holes in the wall that you can look right through to the outside,” she said, smiling as she recalled its flaws fondly. “Because a lot of it is made from stone. So we’ll kind of be slumming it, but at least it’s real, you know? Like charming squalor. We can play cards, read books, swim in the sea every day. I think this summer is going to be pretty special.”
I never quite knew how to respond when Evangeline was sincere like this. More often than not it made me want to shake her, but sometimes I could feel a rush of scalding envy that she had everything in the world a girl could want and also somehow got to keep her innocence longer than the rest of us too.
“Cool, cool, cards are great and everything,” I said, weaving my sun-bleached hair into a loose braid over my shoulder. “But are there any local hotties you can introduce me to? I’m thinking a young fisherman with a haunted past and a cabin filled with poetry books.”
My tone was flippant, but I was being deadly serious. I’d had sex for the first time a year earlier with a senior at a party in Eagle Hills, and I’d found it to be an entirely uncomfortable experience. While I’d thought I wanted it at the time, in a carnal, frantic way that made me feel ashamed to remember, the act of sex had left me feeling (like most things did) lonely, as if I were fundamentally different from everyone else. It was a cycle I repeated over and over again with my next quasi boyfriend, Ben, whom I’d slept with ten or so times before breaking it off to leave for Greece. Ben had made me beg for it, and yet I still felt unfulfilled at the end, like it was some failure of mine that sex hadn’t turned into this magical thing that made people wild enough to write songs about or kill each other over. I told myself that it was a privilege to feel empowered enough to choose my own sexual partners and not be judged for my own desire, but it didn’t always feel like that. Still, I’d been promised that sexual liberation was a good thing, and, in my mind, there was no alternative but to persevere until it felt like it.
“I guess there’s a few guys our age,” Ev said, after a pause. “But their English won’t be great. And I don’t know about your Greek . . .”
“Oh, you know me, Ev, I’m extremely goal-oriented. I’ll be fluent by the end of the summer,” I said, opening the copy of Us Weekly I’d bought at Hudson News. There were two pages filled with various female celebrities posing in beautiful gowns, and, when Joni sat back down, we went through comparing each one in heats until we each ended up with our winner. I ended up with Keira Knightley in a strapless purple pleated dress, while Joni and Evangeline went for Rihanna in a neon yellow Giambattista Valli gown, which I instantly realized was indeed the better option, but by then it was too late to change my mind.
“Did I tell you that Theo might be coming?” Evangeline asked casually as she flicked over the page I was still scanning. I paused, forcing myself to read a headline before responding.
“Oh yeah? For how long?”
“A week max, don’t worry.”
Joni leaned across me then, grinning. “I don’t think Bess was worried.”
I felt my cheeks burn hot, but Ev ignored Joni. It was the quality I admired most in her, this ability to absorb only what she wanted to, as if she could create her own reality that way.
“He’s moving around Europe with a few friends from college, but I don’t think Tinos is exactly what they had in mind when they booked the trip. It’s more like a numbers game thing.”
“Meaning?” Joni asked, and I realized I was holding my breath.
“Meaning they’re trying to sleep with a girl in every city they visit.”
“Wow,” Joni said. “Men just love to remind you at any opportunity how heinous they are, huh?”
I could feel Ev bristle beside me, so I gave Joni a warning dig in the ribs. She instantly pinched me back so hard it brought tears to my eyes.
“I’ve already told him under no circumstances is he allowed to stay for longer than a week,” Ev said, effectively closing the subject. “He’s my favorite person in the world, but I don’t want his fratty friends ruining our trip.”
I felt a heady mix of adrenaline and disappointment, but I tried to curb it. Theo had already left for college when I arrived in Calabasas, and was about to start his final year at Brown, but I’d met him maybe eight, nine times at various charity or familial events that called for his presence, and he always made my stomach drop, with his golden dimples and easy self-possession. His general good-naturedness felt almost subversive under the circumstances, when their mom was so useless and their dad so distracted, and it seemed to me that Theo was the antithesis of the disposable guys I half-heartedly hooked up with in LA—he was confident without being arrogant, assured but not entitled, responsible but not a buzzkill. It wasn’t even that he was particularly witty or smart himself, rather his palpable confidence felt generous, contagious, as if he somehow elevated everyone around him. I found that I couldn’t help but be my best self in Theo’s presence, mostly because it was what he expected from us all.
