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“You don’t have my number.”
Jessica hands him a piece of paper and a pen. He beams at her briefly before scribbling down his number.
“Great,” says Jessica, snatching back the paper. “Now goodbye.”
The boy smiles at her again and turns to leave, but Jessica suddenly thinks of something. “Oh. Malcolm. Heard of this guy?”
She holds up the flyer.
“Akinesiz? Yeah. He’s awesome.”
“What sort of clothes do his fans wear? What do they look like?”
He looks her up and down, at the black-on-black-on-black outfit she wore to meet Amber, and shrugs. “Kind of like you, I guess,” he says. “Except young.”
“Get out of here,” she says. “Geez.”
Jessica is halfway through a premade egg salad sandwich from a fancy deli. It was superexpensive and looked amazing when she chose it but for some reason the smell is making her nauseous. She’s scouting for a trash can to dispose of it in when she hears noise and movement coming from the apartment block to her left. A girl who looks like Lark Randall emerges, followed by an assortment of faux-raggedy rich kids flaunting nonconformist affectations and talking very loudly.
“Shit.” She screws the half-eaten sandwich up and hurls it toward the nearest garbage can. It lands, a perfect bull’s-eye. Rubbing her hands down the sides of her jeans, she steps toward the kids.
Lark is more beautiful in the flesh than in the photo that Amber showed her this morning. She’s a full four inches taller than the other girls and closer in height to the two boys. She is wearing a sheer black lace sleeveless top and a turtleneck and baggy jeans with huge construction boots and an oversized denim jacket that she’s shrugged off her shoulders so it hangs from her thin milk-white arms. On her head she wears a black beanie with studded black cat’s ears. Her eyes are ringed with black liner and her lips are painted pale pink. Her nose ring catches the light almost like an exclamation mark to her beauty, but nevertheless she’s standing slightly apart from the others, who are all looking at a phone belonging to one of the girls and laughing.
Jessica sees Lark’s eyes go to the sky, as if she’s studying the rosy, dusk-tinged clouds, committing them to memory. The others start to move as one toward the subway and it takes Lark a second or two to notice she’s been left behind. She picks up her pace to catch up with them and Jessica follows suit.
The group passes through the turnstile and down into the station, where the air is warm and fetid with the breath of the last of the evening rush hour. Lark dawdles behind her friends, her gaze constantly being drawn upward as if she is seeing things overhead that nobody else can see. Her hands, the hands that Amber said once used to be always in motion, hang neatly by her sides. The train arrives and Lark follows her friends on board. Jessica enters by the adjacent doors and takes a seat two down from Lark, then presses record on her phone.
The conversation mainly revolves between the girl named Tara and another named Anna. The two boys sit opposite each other staring at their phones, legs akimbo. Lark gazes up at the roof of the train car and Jessica looks closely at her now that they are stationary. Her skin does look extraordinary, especially here under the harsh strip-light of the 4 train. Her gaze moves from the ceiling down to the floor and a small smile passes over her mouth.
“Lark.”
Jessica squints to look. This one’s Tara.
“Earth calling Lark!”
Lark breaks her trance and turns slowly to face her friend. “Yeah?” she asks, pleasantly.
“Do you have a lip balm?”
“No,” she replies simply before looking away again.
Jessica observes Tara and Anna exchanging a look.
“Okay then,” says Tara, a little snarky, before exchanging another look with Anna and changing the conversation.
The kids change onto the L train at Union Square and Jessica follows suit. The carriage looks like an emo party, pale kids from all four corners of New York being funneled toward Williamsburg. The carriage smells of that vanilla scent that teenage girls all smell of these days and Jessica experiences another wave of nausea.
At the recognition of the nausea, her mind turns to a night with Luke when it’s possible they’d been maybe a little less than careful. How many weeks ago was it? She can’t remember. But no. Even drunk she would not be that idiotic, and anyway, isn’t it called morning sickness? Not all-day-long sickness? She shakes the idea from her head, returns her thoughts to the matter at hand, the five teenage children sitting across the aisle from her, the beautiful girl with the cat-ears beanie who does not look at her phone, does not engage with her friends, does not move her hands, who just sits, her eyes so focused and glassy, her skin so smooth and poreless, like a life-sized doll.
Jessica jolts at this realization, and for the first time since Amber Randall walked into her office yesterday morning, she starts to believe that maybe this is something more than just a wronged wife’s twisted paranoia.
“Lark.”
It’s Tara again.
“Lark!”
Lark turns to Tara and smiles. “Yes.”
