Chapter 21

The Austin Letters show is at the university’s auditorium, which means “backstage” is a classroom. Two classrooms, really—my mother with Mags in one, me with the interns in another. Mick is hunched over his phone in the corner of the room, replying to DMs on Camilla’s accounts, mumbling to himself at regular intervals. Cleo’s drawing on the massive chalkboard, standing on a maroon chair. And Silas—well. I’m actively trying not to be aware of what he’s doing. (He’s cross-legged on the floor in front of his video camera, fiddling with a memory card.)

Good luck tonight, Ethan has sent me. I’ll call you after? I respond yes and add a heart emoji for good measure. We’ve been talking every day since he sent me the paparazzi photo—I’m back up to speed with the Penn coursework, and when I told him about visiting Dr. Kowalski with Sadie his eyes lit up over video chat, rapt and round and hungry for every detail. It was there, the Ethan I knew: fascinated by the same things that fascinate me. Eager to share all of it. I think of that flicker of doubt, back at breakfast with my dad—the soft whisper that stopped me from telling Ethan I loved him. As my phone pings with another text, I shove the memory away.

i made this, Fallon says, alongside a photo of a well—a metal spigot rising from a circular concrete pad. meet my firstborn child

They’re beautiful, I reply. What was it like giving birth?

dirty, she says. and wet

That tracks, I send, and she says: how are you aud

I stare at the words, finding myself at a full-body loss for how to respond. How am I? I have no idea. Cleo calls for Silas across the room, and I watch him look up at her. His eyebrows arched, his hair tied into a messy bun, his standard show outfit: black jeans, black Henley, black Converse. So he blends into the background while he’s filming, surely. Not so that he looks like a brooding artist, and definitely not so the green in his brown eyes becomes so bright by contrast that it’s striking. Striking to someone else—not to me, when his gaze flickers in my direction before he crosses the room toward Cleo.

I’m losing my grip on reality, I could tell Fallon. But instead I just watch Cleo and Silas: the way she grabs his elbow once he’s next to her, their heads level with her standing on the chair. She points up at the top of her drawing—an enormous dragon, its shingled scales formed into points. She hops down from the chair and Silas climbs onto it, reaching down for her chalk. With Cleo directing him from below, he extends a long arm upward and finishes the few lines at the top of the drawing she couldn’t reach—the dragon’s head, the steam billowing from its nostrils. They grin at each other and I look away, back down at my phone. This is none of my business. None of it.

“Audrey,” Cleo calls, motioning me toward her. Her eye shadow’s rainbow tonight, solid lines of color striping up toward her eyebrows. “Come here a sec.”

Silas and I meet eyes, so briefly, before he ducks his chin and crosses the room back toward his camera. When I come to stand next to Cleo she hands me a piece of chalk. “Help me color in the scales? Every other, I think.”

I can’t remember the last time I drew something, but shading in the scales is weirdly soothing—every time I finish one it feels disproportionately fulfilling.

“Fun, right?” Cleo looks down at me from her perch on the chair, and I nod. “Can’t believe I’ve got Audrey St. Vrain doing something fun.” She holds up her fingers, faking a camera and snapping a photo of me. “This is one for the scrapbook.”

I sigh harshly. “Am I really so horrible?”

“Yeah,” Cleo says, but when I jerk back to look at her she smiles and nudges me with her knee. “You’re, like, borderline horrible. How about that?”

“Great,” I mutter, and she laughs.

“You’re growing on me, though.” I look up at Cleo, watch her swooping white lines of chalk across her dragon’s torso. “Like a fungus.” She glances down at me. “On all of us, I think.”

I swallow, pressing my chalk into the board. I don’t meet her eyes when I whisper, “Is there, um. Something? Between you and Silas.”

She’s quiet for so long that I finally have to look up at her. When I do, she bursts out laughing. “Silas?” She says it so loudly that when I risk a glance at him, he’s looking over at us. When our eyes meet, he immediately looks back down at his camera. “No.”

Cleo drops into the chair next to me and I crouch to fill in some of the dragon’s leg scales, bringing our heads close together so she doesn’t have to keep shouting.

“Silas and I made out at a party during O week in a truly disastrous frat house basement—like, I think this place has since been condemned. We both have black mold poisoning, probably.” I don’t want to picture it, but I do: tall, lanky Silas with his easy smile and his jangling laugh. Cleo in some colorful leather outfit and immaculate eyeliner, her obsidian hair cascading over one shoulder. Silas reaching toward her, smoothing it out of the way, leaning close to—

“It was the stupidest thing either of us have ever done,” she says, snapping me out of it. What is my malfunction? “The next morning we ate stale bagels in the dining hall, hungover as all hell, and it was like—oh, you are my literal brother. We came from the same womb. Kissing Silas was like being one of those twins that eats the other one in utero. That’s how fucked up it was.”

I grimace, and she laughs. “Anyway, we wound up in the same media program and we’ve been friends ever since, but the kiss was an idiot move. College is wild.” She looks at me. “You’re gonna end up doing some weird shit you won’t be able to explain later. You’ll see.”

I’m already doing some weird shit I can’t explain now, but I don’t say that.

“Why do you ask?” Cleo says, studying me a little more closely. “Did he say something?”

“No, I—”

“Audrey?” We both look toward the door, where Mags is standing with a clipboard in one hand. “You’re up in five. Ready?”

I nod, and Cleo nudges me with an elbow. “Try not to dunk on your mom this time,” she says, already turning back to her drawing. “It makes Mick’s job way harder, handling all the social media shit afterward.”

When Magnolia sees me coming she turns on her heel to leave, so I’m all alone in the classroom’s doorway when Silas stops me.

“Hey, Audrey.” I’ve never seen him nervous before, but when I turn toward him he’s tucking loose hair behind his ear in a way that can only be described as fidgety. He takes a step closer to me, a careful distance between us, his voice low. “Look, I just wanted to—what I said yesterday, at the river.”

Everything inside me wants to stop this before it starts. It’s fine! I want to shout, right in his face. Let’s pretend it never happened. Let’s not interrogate it too closely. Let’s keep twenty feet between us at all times. But I force myself to stay silent and let him speak.

“I’m sorry,” he says, eyes meeting mine. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’d never want to—” He inhales, stops himself. “I just, it won’t happen again. I promise.”

“Silas,” I say, practically a whisper. Uncomfortable is exactly how I feel around him, but not because of anything he’s done. It’s because I don’t recognize myself when Silas is nearby, because even here in this weird apologetic moment, something about him makes me feel calm. Centered. “Let’s put it behind us. It’s okay.”

Okayisn’t right. Okay isn’t the way to describe this, the six weeks of travel still stretched ahead of us. I’m not okay with how it feels, standing here with him, my mind flickering to Ethan and back. So I take a step away, and then two.

“I have to go,” I say, and Silas nods, and I go.

I’m floating during the show, distracted enough to let it carry me along like a river. They have an English professor moderating. When she asks me what it’s like to know that I’ve inspired a generation of women to be kinder to themselves, I manage to smile and say, “Oh, my mom did that.”

We’re nearly to the end when the moderator says, “This tour is all about getting personal with Camilla and Audrey, her someday daughter.” I’m looking at Silas, the dark curve of his shoulder in the shadows just past the stage. “And I’d like to dig into who you were, Camilla, when you wrote the book. What that headspace was like when you were, what, twenty-seven?”

“Oh, I wish it was just twenty-seven,” my mother says, smiling graciously. “Letters is a hundred-and-twenty-page book that took me three years to get right. I started it when I was twenty-four.”

The moderator’s eyebrows rise, and I turn to look at Camilla. For my whole life, she’s been the person she is now: Letters to My Someday Daughter a thing she created in the rearview, a catalyst for her identity as I know it. I try to picture her at twenty-four, picking away at a manuscript, and can’t.

“Twenty-four?” the moderator repeats. She gestures at me. “That’s practically Audrey’s age.”

I feel myself make a face; I won’t be twenty-four for another six years. By the time I’m twenty-four I’ll be halfway through medical school.

Camilla looks at me; I can tell she disagrees, too, but her words come out on a charmed, diplomatic laugh. “Twenty-four certainly feels closer to her reality than mine.”

“So young,” the moderator says, “to have this kind of wisdom.”

“Well.” My mother shifts a little in her seat, gestures toward the audience like she’s inviting them in. “Life moves differently for all of us, regardless of age. The experiences that mold us come at different times. I was young when I went through the hardest things, the ones that forced me to learn.”

I think: her parents dying. She says, “Like my parents’ deaths.”

“Mmm,” the moderator intones, casting her whole face into a portrait of sympathetic understanding. “A car crash, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” Camilla says. She’s told me the story maybe twice in all my eighteen years—brief and bleak. A rainy day, a skid into a median, both her parents gone in a flash while she was in college all the way across the country.

The moderator leans closer to us. “And do you feel like that experience informed Letters?”

My mother draws a breath. It’s subtle, the way she hedges—if you didn’t know her, you’d miss it. It’s in the twitch of one eyebrow. How her teeth just scrape the edge of her lower lip before she speaks. “Of course,” she says. “Especially set into the context of the rest of my life then.”

The moderator presses on, tacking into a discussion of grief. But I hear the not-lie, the careful choice of her words. The “context” she doesn’t explain.

And I think of what my dad said, on that humid wraparound porch just a few days ago.

You don’t know everything about her.