Exposure (7 page)

Before long, though, Anthony came to see Amelia as being in a class of her own. She represented the difference between
general
and
specific
. He’d always found girls generally appealing. He generally enjoyed girls’ company. But Amelia had looked at him from across the stage, blue velvet curtains hanging behind her, stage lights illuminating her auburn hair, and a jolt of something—call it electricity, call it whatever you liked—went through him and he’d literally stopped breathing. What he’d wanted to do was drop to his knees. What he’d done instead was turn to Ms. Fitz and say, “There’s my Rosalind.”

Ms. Fitz looked to where he pointed, then back at Anthony. Her thin eyebrows rose and her painted lips parted, but they did so strangely, as if she weren’t in charge of her expressions. “So it is,” she said.

“But, Ms. Fitz,” Chris Harrington had complained, “you said you were thinking of
me
for Orlando.”

Ms. Fitz blinked at the boy. Once. Two times. “Yes, well, there’s nothing to be done about that. You’ll be a fine Oliver.”

That was just the way the universe worked when Amelia was around.

Undeniable. This was the word Anthony felt best characterized his relationship with Amelia. It was that, and she was that.

The physical aspect: their first kisses had been tentative, almost chaste, him following her lead so that he wouldn’t come on too strong and scare her off. Unlike other girls he’d known and encouraged, she didn’t press herself against him, not flirtatiously, and not purposefully. She trembled the first time he moved his hand from her shoulder and ran it along the side of her breast to her waist.

The first time he kissed her deeply, with his hands wrapped in her hair and his hips grazing hers, making his desire for her obvious to both of them, she’d gasped. Actually
gasped
. He hadn’t expected that.

“Sorry,” he’d said, quickly pulling back.

“No, it’s okay.” Her face was red, her eyes wide—but she was smiling. Not frigid. Not gay. Not unavailable. Just inexperienced.

A few weeks later, after an
As You Like It
rehearsal, they’d stood together in the parking lot, sodium lights buzzing overhead, talking about how she wished she could date him openly. Her father wasn’t a bad guy, she said. He worried about her, is all. She’d had some troubles when she was younger, and he was protective.

“Trouble?” he asked, his imagination answering the question with obsessive boyfriend, abusive boyfriend, secret drug abuse, bulimia—

“A problem. A … a defect, you could say.” Avoiding his eyes, she told him that she’d had a stutter for years. There’d been therapies, she said, and lots of evaluations by various shrinks. When she looked at him again, she seemed to be wincing in anticipation of his response.

“You obviously beat it,” he said. “That’s impressive.”

“Yeah?” She brightened. “Thanks. I used to think I was, I don’t know, a freak. I don’t talk about it. A few friends know.”

“I won’t mention it, if you—”

“No, I’d appreciate it if you don’t. Keeping it hidden from everyone was good practice, I guess, for this.” She smiled and gestured to indicate the two of them.

“And while I’m confessing things?” she added. “You should know … I wanted you to know that I’m still a virgin, so …” She shrugged, letting her words trail off.

“I figured. It’s fine. It’s
good
. What’s the rush, right?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Since confession seems to be a theme here … I’ll confess that I really like the idea of maybe getting to be your first.”

What followed over the next few months were stolen minutes spent making out behind her father’s roadster garage, the “stables,” on frosty nights; late-night text messages when they should have been asleep; emails she’d painstakingly composed between rehearsals or lessons—she wanted to be clear that her desire for him was so much more than lust. Other kids rutted for recreation, just one more bit of fun on a night filled with easily accessed booze and party drugs. That was not her wish at all, not her style, and she was adamant that he know it, that he not lump her in with the group of privileged kids who too often substituted cash for good judgment and good morals.

Anthony was more than ready to go further than the heated kissing and touching, but Amelia wanted to wait until the end of the school year, when their schedules eased up and the weather would be warm. Late June looked ideal, given their obligations, and her monthly cycle, and the fact of her leaving July second to spend eight weeks at her beach house. “Is it lame that I want it to be really special?” she’d asked.

Amelia did things to him, to his brain, to his heart, that no girl had ever done before. She could make him dizzy, literally, just by standing close enough for him to smell her. And his longing—well, suffice it to say he’d tested out how well the cold-shower theory worked. The worst of it was also the best of it: though the idea scared the shit out of him—how could it have happened so soon, and so fast?—he knew he’d met his soul mate and that his life was, from the moment he laid eyes on her, hers.

Their plan was to begin that
really special
night with a romantic dinner at a little French place her parents would never think to go. She’d fake a sleepover at Cameron’s and he’d fake staying at Rob’s, and they’d get a hotel room at the Marriott in Durham—a good distance away from any of her father’s dealerships, so that there was no way she’d be recognized by an employee who might, say, be there with visiting family members or friends. They couldn’t be too careful. He’d make a pitcher of strawberry margaritas—his mom never checked their liquor supply—and pack it in ice, for them to drink at the hotel. He was in charge of the music, Amelia would bring bubble bath, and they agreed that they’d brave a visit to Rite Aid together, to buy “protection.”

It was a good plan, but as the poet Robert Burns put it in his ode to an unearthed field mouse, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley.”
Often go awry
was the translation. A good plan, but a plan that would be undone, altered by events outside of anyone’s control. Even so, at the time Anthony would not recall the poem’s next lines: “An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/ For promis’d joy!” That recollection would come months later.

The day the plan got changed, they’d been backstage after the Raleigh Little Theatre’s final performance of
Our Town
in mid-June, the weekend after Erica Gold, a freshman friend of theirs, was killed when her brother Barry lost control of his car and crashed into a stand of trees. Barry hadn’t been drunk, he hadn’t been speeding, the roads had been dry.… At the funeral on Thursday, Barry’s parents kept saying, “It had to be a deer, or a dog. A possum, maybe. A fox.” They didn’t know, and Barry, still unconscious at WakeMed, hadn’t been able to say. The randomness of the accident reverberated through the teens who knew them. Some dealt with it by partying, some by praying. Anthony and Amelia and the others in their circle had gotten together at Blue Jay Point on Friday afternoon and tried to write a song for Erica, but ended up tossing rocks into Falls Lake and counting the ripples until it had gotten too dark to see.

In
Our Town
, Anthony was George Gibbs to Amelia’s Emily Webb, a casting coup that only reinforced what they were sure was true: Fate wanted them together. Amelia had reported that her father had a different view (“That Winter kid
again
? I don’t like that boy sniffing after you this way.…”), but the audiences responded to them with such genuine care and enthusiasm that the director was going to pair them again next spring in
Kiss Me, Kate
. And who knew? Maybe New York directors would cue in to their tandem experience and keep putting them together—not as leads, okay, not right away; they’d need to pay their dues first. Still, to work together on a regular basis was their dream and their goal. If that also meant that when the other lotharios came sniffing around, he’d be there to warn them off, all the better. He knew that once Amelia was in the world—the real world, the New York City world—men would be drawn to her the way they were to Broadway star Idina Menzel. Amelia’s face would be the jubilant one on the Times Square billboard, she would be the costumed woman whose image would decorate buses and bus stops, whose autograph on a playbill would one day become a talisman for any number of young hopefuls.

The Raleigh Little Theatre’s audience was filing out, and behind the curtain, the actors made their ways to the dressing rooms to wash off stage makeup and transform back to their everyday selves. There was backslapping and merriment over a job well done. Amelia, however, had looked troubled.

Anthony pulled her aside. “You okay?”

She tugged at the high neckline of her white ruffled blouse, then undid the top button, and then the next, and the third. But there was nothing suggestive in her actions. In fact she seemed unaware of what she was doing as she watched the other actors go.

She turned toward Anthony and said, “We did this play, what, eleven times? And listen to everyone, laughing and happy.…” She shook her head. “It’s like they haven’t paid attention to the substance of it at all. Are any of them even
thinking
about act three?”

Act three was the somber, existential part of the play. Emily, after her death, witnesses her own funeral and muses about life: “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.… Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.… Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”

Anthony thought for a moment, then said, “Some are thinking about it, sure—maybe all of them. Could be that’s why they’re happy.”

Amelia turned to him, her eyes wide. “Why are we waiting, Anthony? It could all be over any day, any minute.”

“We don’t have to wait,” he said.

“If it was up to you—?”

“I want you any time, all the time. But I want you to be happy about it, so—”

“All our plans … that’s not what’s going to make it special. It being us is what makes it special. Anything might happen in the next two weeks.”

She was right. Still, he said, “Nothing will happen.”

“Probably not. I hope not. But you don’t know. Nobody
knows.
” She checked that they were unwatched, then put her arms around his waist, moving so close that he could feel her thighs, inside her skirt and petticoat, against his own. “Meet me in the clubhouse at eleven.”

“You sure?” he asked, already feeling his blood rush at the prospect.

“Completely.”

At ten minutes before the hour, he’d parked his car on the service road a half mile from Amelia’s house so that there was no chance the sight or sound of a car—especially a sunbaked, dinged-up, decade-old beater like his—would draw attention. Then, with his heart thumping against his ribs even before he set off, he jogged the distance to the far side of the Wilkeses’ property. He was experienced and knowledgeable enough to feel confident about the mechanics of what they were about to do, but he’d never been quite so anxious about getting things right.

Amelia’s clubhouse was a small cottage set just beyond the patio and lawn, at the wood’s edge. Modeled after her mother’s favorite Thomas Kinkade cottage, it was built of stone and brick, a full one story in height, and with a real thatched roof. He’d seen it once in daylight, as one of probably thirty teenagers there at the Wilkes home last February to celebrate Amelia’s seventeenth birthday. Harlan Wilkes had engaged him in conversation:

“So, you’re the one whose mom’s the teacher—you all came from New York, that right?”

“Yes, sir,” he’d said, the way his mother taught him he needed to address Southern men if he didn’t want to raise their hackles—and where Harlan Wilkes was concerned, he wanted to go as unnoticed as possible.

Wilkes watched Anthony watching Amelia and three of her girlfriends, who were playing Twister. Mary Beth Pernelli’s low-rise jeans were threatening to show more of her backside than she intended. Wilkes seemed not to notice, saying, “Your mother, she teaches French.”

“Art and French, yes, sir,” Anthony said, casually turning his eyes away from the game (from Amelia) and to the kitchen, where Sheri Wilkes stood with several other women, mothers of partygoers, in the same manner he was sure they’d all done a dozen years earlier. The same way his mother had done with her Ithaca friends, while he and his playmates built LEGO towers or ran around in Batman capes.

Wilkes remained at his side. “You’re a junior, like Amelia?” he asked, and Anthony nodded, wishing someone would come along and save him. “You do sports?” Wilkes asked.

Anthony said, “Soccer, yes, sir. We’re just starting practice for spring rec league, and I played for the school this past fall, varsity.”

“What’re you planning to major in—assuming you’re planning on college.”

“I am. Fine arts—drama.”

“That’s a degree?” Wilkes snorted, then patted him on the back, saying, “I wish you luck with that,” before wandering off to grill another of the dozen boys there.

That day, the day of the party, had been too cold for them to be outdoors. From inside the family room’s towering windows, Amelia’s cottage had appeared austere, its surrounding rosebushes and hydrangeas cut back in anticipation of spring. This June night, with those same plants lush and blooming, their colors deepened almost to black in the moonlight, the cottage beckoned Anthony as if it, or he, had been put under a spell.