The Bona Fide Fraud - Chapter 19 Secrets

Will hadn’t told her secrets to Chance. She had told them to Gemma.

Gemma had realized the truth of it early on, even before Will had told Gemma her birth name, and before Brooke Lannon ever turned up at the Vineyard house.

It was the Fourth of July, not long after Gemma had first moved in. Will had found a recipe for pizza dough you made on an outdoor grill. She was messing around with yeast in the kitchen. She had invited friends, summer people she’d met a couple of days earlier at a farmer’s market. They came over and ate. Everything was fine, but they wanted to leave early. “Let’s drive into town for the fireworks,” they said. “We shouldn’t miss them. Hurry up.”

Gemma knew Willow hated the crush of people at crowded events. She couldn’t see over people’s heads. There was always too much noise.

Chance didn’t seem to care. He just got in the car with the summer people, stopping only to snag a box of cookies from the pantry.

Gemma stayed behind. She and Will left the dishes for the cleaner and changed into swimsuits. Gemma pulled the lid off the hot tub, and Will brought out tall glasses of seltzer with lemon.

They sat in silence for a bit. The evening had turned cool, and steam rose off the water.

“Do you like it here?” Will asked finally. “In my house? With me?”

Gemma did, and she said so. When Will looked at her expectantly, she added: “Every day there’s time to actually see the sky, and to taste what I’m eating. There’s room to stretch out. No work, no expectations, no adults.”

“We’re the adults,” said Will, tilting her head back. “I think so, at least. You and me and Chance, we’re the effing adults, and that’s why it feels so good. Oops!” She had tipped her seltzer into the hot tub by accident. Now she chased around three slowly sinking pieces of sliced lemon until she caught them. “It’s good you like it here,” Will said as she fished the last slice out, “because there was a part of living with Chance that was likebeing alone. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s because he’s writing a novel, or because he’s older than I am. But it’s better with you here.”

“How did you meet him?”

“In London I went to a summer program with his cousin, and then one day I was getting coffee at Black Dog and I recognized him from Instagram. We started talking. He was here for a month to work on his book. He didn’t know anybody. That was that, basically.” Will trailed her fingers across the top of the water. “How about you? You seeing anybody?”

“There were some boyfriends at Stanford,” said Gemma. “But they’re still in California.”

“Some boyfriends?”

“Three boyfriends.”

“Three boyfriends is a lot, Gemma!”

Gemma shrugged. “I couldn’t decide.”

“When I first got to college,” Will said, “Vivian Abromowitz invited me to the Students of Color Union party. You’ve heard me talk about Vivian, right? Anyway, her mom is Chinese American; her dad’s Korean Jewish. She was set on going to this party because some guy she crushed on would be there. I was a little nervous about being the only white person, but that turned out fine. The awkward part was that everyone was all political and ambitious. Like, talking about protest rallies and philosophy reading lists and this Harlem Renaissance film series. At a party! I was like, when are we dancing? And the answer was never. Were parties like that at Stanford? With no beer and people being all intellectual?”

“Stanford has a Greek system.”

“Okay then, maybe not. Anyway, this tall black guy with dreads, really cute, was like, ‘You went to Greenbriar and you haven’t read James Baldwin? What about Toni Morrison? You should read Ta-Nehisi Coates.’ And I said, ‘Hello? I just got to college. I haven’t read anybody yet!’ Vivian was next to me and she was all, ‘Brooke texted me and there’s another party that has a DJ, and the rugby team is there. Should we jet?’ And I wanted to go to a party where there was dancing. So we left.” Will ducked her head under the water of the hot tub and came back up again.

“What happened with the condescending guy?”

Will laughed. “Isaac Tupperman. He’s why I’m telling this story. I went out with him for nearly two months. That’s how come I can remember the names of his favorite writers.”

“He was your boyfriend?”

“Yeah. He’d write me poems and leave them on my bicycle. He’d come over late at night, like at two in the morning, and say he missed me. But the pressure was on, too. He grew up in the Bronx and went to Stuy, and he was”

“What’s Stuy?”

“Public school for smart kids in New York. He had a lot of ideas about what I should be, what I should study, what I should care about. He wanted to be the amazing older guy who would enlighten me. And I was flattered, and kind of in awe, but then also sometimes really bored.”

“So he was like Chance.”

“What? No. I was so happy when I met Chance because he was the opposite of Isaac.” Will said it decisively, as if it were completely true. “Isaac liked me because I was ignorant and that meant he could teach me, right? That made him feel like a man. And he did know about a lot of things that I never studied or experienced or whatever. But thenand this is the ironyhe was totally annoyed by my ignorance. And in the end, after he broke up with me and I was sad and mental, I came to the Vineyard and one day I thought: Eff you, Mr. Isaac. I’m not so very ignorant. I just know stuff about stuff that you dismiss as unimportant and useless. Does that make sense? I mean, I didn’t know Isaac’s stuff. And I do know Isaac’s stuff is important, but all the time I spent with him I felt like I was just so dumb and blank. The fact that I couldn’t understand his life experience very well, combined with how he was a year ahead of me and really into all his academics, the literary magazine, et ceterathat meant that all the time, he got to be the big man and I was looking up at him with wide eyes. And that was what he liked about me. And why he despised me.

“Then there was this week I thought I was pregnant,” Will went on. “Gemma, imagine. I’m an adopted kid. And there I am, pregnant with a kid I think I might have to put up for adoption. Or have aborted. The dad is a guy my parents met once and wrote him off as a party personbecause of his color and his hairstyle the one time they met himand I have no idea what to do, so I spend all week skipping class and reading people’s abortion stories on the Internet. Then one day I finally get my period and I text Isaac. He drops everything and comes over to my dorm roomand he breaks up with me.” Will put her hands over her face. “I have never been as scared as I was that week,” she went on. “When I thought I had a baby inside me.”

That night, when Chance came back from the fireworks, Willow had already gone to bed. Gemma was still awake, watching TV on the living room couch. She followed him as he rummaged in the fridge and found himself a beer and a leftover grilled pork chop. “Do you know how to cook?” she asked him.

“I can boil noodles. And heat up tomato sauce.”

“Willow’s really good.”

“Yeah. Nice for us, right?”

“She works hard in the kitchen. She taught herself by watching videos and getting cookbooks from the library.”

“Did she?” said Chance, mildly. “Hey, is there crumble left over? Crumble is necessary to my existence right now.”

“I ate it,” Gemma told him.

“Lucky girl,” he said. “All right, then. I’m gonna go work on my book. Night is when my brain works best.”