Chapter Four | Pictures Of Girls

♫ Pictures Of Girls by Wallows

The building in front of me sits slightly tilted, its entire left side swallowed by green. Atlas turns around and faces me where I've paused on the pavement, taking in my amazed look as I gaze at it.

"It's even better on the inside, believe it or not." His hair is caught by the wind, sweeping over his forehead and grazing his dark eyebrow. At first I think he's mocking me, but he looks at the windows and takes another step. "Are you coming?"

I nod and follow him into the café, that's buzzing with life. The interior is what my mother would call industrial, with brick walls and black shelving units and tables made out of a shiny iron. The same green that swirls outside hangs overhead, creeping up walls and circling table stands to meet around the silver lampshades. Between the strands of the plants hide miles of fairy lights, a golden glow that stretches everywhere around me. I realize it's the exact golden glow I always imagined New York to have, alive right in front of me. If I didn't know any better I'd think I can hear it buzz.

"This is Tessellate Pit," says Atlas. He pulls his hands from his pockets and rubs them together as he glances around. Our backs are still to the doors and someone brushes past us to head to the counter at the back. "It's like your regular lunchroom slash café, except they've digitalized everything. You sit at your table and fill in your order on the table, which has like this built-in screen, and they bring it to you. You gotta get your own drinks, though, if you want something cold."

"Did you somehow drag me into the future without me noticing?" I ask, following Atlas as he claims a booth by the window.

He grins at me. "This place is amazing, isn't it? This is one of those spots I mentioned at the party on Monday, where I feel at home? I remember my Dad took me here the day it opened, I thought it was one big joke, like a social experiment or something." He shrugs off his coat and bundles it up, stuffing it between himself and the window. "He's always said that these amazing things, these groundbreaking, futuristic breakthroughs are already coming to life all around us. We've grown so accustomed to amazing technology that we forget to be amazed with how submerged in it we actually are."

"Is your dad very into that kind of thing?" I ask. I follow his example and let my coat slip off my shoulders, bundling it up and laying it down next to me with my bag. I debate laying my phone on the table, but I don't know how it works. Maybe it'll connect to the restaurant's screen via Bluetooth, or the same way wireless chargers work, and display all of my notifications or something like that. In any way, I'm not willing to risk it and keep my phone clutched between my thighs underneath the table.

"What, technology?" Atlas checks.

I nod and he purses his lips, shrugging his shoulders.

"He's in the technology branch, so I guess he kind of has to be. He's one of those people who refuses to lose touch with the world's developments as he grows older." Atlas sweeps his hand across the screen and with a sound that resembles a text message being sent, a virtual leaf blows across the iron and reveals the menu. "Anyway, we came here for lunch, did we not?" He laughs at my amazement.

"If their food sucks I'll be so disappointed," I tell him, and he laughs again.

"Fair enough. You'd expect some kind of..." He trails off as something, or someone catches his eye behind me. "Elizabeth!" Atlas laughs and slides out of the booth. I turn in time to see him embrace a tall girl, his hands clutched around her waist and hers around his neck as he spins her around and she laughs with joy.

I notice a familiar face behind her. Milo has his hands in his pocket as his eyes travel from Atlas and this Elizabeth to me, surprise striking his face. He then gestures to the counter where I see the drinks station, eyebrows raised.

Atlas and the girl— Elizabeth— have dived in an animated conversation and, deciding to leave them to catch up, I fall into step next to him as we wordlessly maneuverer between tables and join the queue. There are just a few people in front of us, at least, which must give him the chance to say whatever he pulled me apart for.

I can physically feel him looking at me, as if he's waiting or trying to catch me do something. I turn and meet his eyes again, slightly raising my eyebrows to urge him to talk.

"He asked you out?"

I can't fault him for dancing around anything, I think to myself. "I asked him, actually," I tell him. I notice that I jutted my chin forward as I said it, as if it's something I should be justifying. 'Asking out' probably wasn't even the right phrasing, but the words have left my mouth quickly and I can't inhale them again.

"Really?" He purses his lips like people do when they've been proven wrong and have to admit it. "I probably can't really talk, considering the fact we met four days ago, but that surprises me, Nova."

I shrug as we move forward with the line. I'm surprised with how fast it goes, you grab a cup and choose a drink and fill it up and leave. Whoever's idea this was probably was a waiter at one point.

My brother Flynn once worked at a restaurant a town over when he was in high school. He started washing the dishes and ideally wanted to end up cooking, but an important step in between was waiting tables. His boss, a balding old man named Ked, said that hierarchy and working your way to the top was vital for valuing the position you're given— which was ironic, as he inherited the entire restaurant chain from his father and never worked a day in his life before becoming CEO (he didn't know a thing about running a business and eventually his poor wife had to take over all his duties because he deemed them to be 'boring'). Flynn ended up being a waiter at 'Fred & Ked's' for over two years, because Ked thought that his wrist was too stiff when he poured drinks for the customers and therefore wouldn't survive in the kitchen.

I have a distinct memory of Flynn returning from work, throwing his apron in the fireplace (not realizing it wasn't on, which really ruined the entire effect he was going for) and announcing he quit his job because 'pouring drinks for crying children, perverted old men and unnecessarily angry middle-aged women' was hell on earth, and that someone should invent a system that would never force anyone to do that ever again. He would spontaneously combust if he saw what I'm seeing now. I should take him and Sofia here sometime.

Milo's still looking at me and I notice the line has moved again.

"That makes sense. I was high school Nova four days ago, I'm college Nova now. It's a transformation," I say, shrugging nonchalantly. When we're up, he fills his cup with Coca Cola and I fill mine with water.

"It's a transformation..." He mutters, repeating what I said and shaking his head. "Anyway, want me to carry your drink back?"

The question catches me off guard. Walking up here with him it didn't even cross my mind that getting a drink would include having to carry it back to the table. It's not something I had the time to worry about, without I could even think about it he eliminated that fear (incapability?) for me.

I blink a few times and then nod, taking a step back. "Uh, yeah. Thank you." I hesitate before asking my next question, not knowing if it's a normal thing for an eighteen-year-old to ask, but doing it anyway. "Do you know if they have straws here?"

It was another one of Claire's exercises, specifically one of the last wise lessons she gave me before sending me off for the last time: asking for help. I know that asking if a restaurant has straws is different from asking for help, but I think it kind of falls in the same category.

You may wonder why an eighteen-year-old college freshman needs a straw to drink out of a flimsy paper cup. As a (physically) normal person, you probably don't even think about straws, and the only way you connect the word 'need' to them is when you're thinking about the sea turtles they kill (the urgent, we need to ban all straws). But although I often feel a certain guilt for using something so environmentally damaging, straws are one of the things I need without having the luxury of being able to change that.

That is because the way my body tends to work is like this. Imagine that there's a whole other person inside of your body. You can feel them right underneath your skin; from the curve of your shoulders to the slope of your wrist, in your popliteal and your shin, in your face. Imagine how they physically try to steer you away from everything you do. When you want to open a little tea pocket and direct the tips of your fingers to the string, you start to tremble because you can feel them strain your muscles and blocking you from bending your joints, and the little fight you have with them (you trying, them trying to stop you) makes your movements all confusing. Nothing goes the way you intended it to go and it takes longer and more for it to work.

Imagine having to hurry up while doing something, like getting dressed or taking a test while writing, how that pressure translates to them starting a war underneath your skin like a horse-rider tugging back the reigns, how your muscles start to ache so badly but you're unable to stop it— you just claw at your skin and stretch your limbs and twist but nothing works and it feels like you just might snap like a twig where the pressure builds and where it hurts the most.

The translation of anxiety to physical pressure (and actual pain) is what I experienced during that one math test in high school, and it happens when I'm anxious, when I'm so nervous and scared that this person underneath my skin feels it and starts to try and tear me apart. But even when I'm not nervous or hurrying, my entire life has felt— feels— like this other being inside of me, blocking me and controlling me, stopping me and hindering me.

If I had to grab that cup, this other entity inside of me would squeeze and tremble and I'd have to put so much energy into stopping it, into taking control, that I would shake and spill my drink. If we go to sit down with Atlas and Elizabeth and I don't have a straw to drink out of, then I'd have to send all my might and power to my hands when wanting to drink, then my fingers would have to be so tight with pressure that I tremble anyway, then I would spend the entire time breaking nervous sweats over this internal battle I keep having to fight and over the fact that I have to fight it in a public place, with people around me who I don't want to see me that way.

So, yes. I am eighteen years old and I need a straw to drink. And Claire's lesson, of asking for help and of not being scared anymore was supposed to help me in situations like this, so the fact that I asked is more than what it seems. It carries a weight, it breaks my streak of being scared for years, of thinking that hurting myself is somehow better than risking the Look or judgement.

Milo's been so understanding that I half-expect him to turn to me and finally just ask what the hell is actually wrong with me, but he does no such thing.

"Uh-huh, end of the counter." That's all he says. He even points with his chin, a quick nod in the right direction, as he carries both our drinks. There's no confusion or suspicion on his face, no questioning, no hint of the Look.

"So, is this like a date between you two? Did we crash it?"

It takes me a while to realize he's talking about himself and the girl. It surprises me sometimes that the wild, imaginative thoughts I have don't stray from my head, that he can't feel how much I have to consider and think about and feel and that an interaction is all it is to him. We're having a conversation and he's carrying the drinks and everything that weighs so heavily for me is actually so insignificant. To him, I mean, considering the bigger picture.

I shake my head, partly to answer his question and partly to clear my head, hover close to him as he directs us to the straws and watches me take a green one from the bowl. "No, it's not, and there's nothing to crash. This is just us getting lunch." I pull the plastic wrapper from the straw and toss it in to a nearby trash can. When I look up, suspicious of Milo's silence, his eyes are unfocused and his lips pulled into a straight line. "What?"

A few beats pass, and then he says, "I think he likes you."

The sound that escapes my mouth sounds somewhat like a crossover between a laugh and a snort. Either way, it's not very charming. "Why would you think that?"

"I think so because I know my friend. Trust me, Nova, Atlas Wilder likes you in the most middle school sense of 'like' there is."

"Well, I had one full conversation with him so he can't know that. He likes whoever he thinks I am right now, and that's not me." As I say that, he starts grinning and I roll my eyes. "What?"

"I don't know. I like you." He wiggles his eyebrows and takes a sip of his drink, wrist twisted.

I stick the straw in my drink that he's still holding and he looks at it as if he forgot that he was ever carrying it. "You like me, too?" I ask as I move towards our table again, feeling the corners of my lips pull upwards smoothly as if there's no being underneath my skin. Milo follows me with a playful glint in his eyes.

"Not like he does, I don't like my idea of you," he says, in between sips. "I like this person I'm getting to know, whoever she may turn out to be. And I especially like what you just said."

"That I'm not whoever he thinks I am?"

He hums. "That you're aware of that. That you don't try to live up to who he expects you to be. Staying true to yourself and all that." He holds my gaze for a few moments as I ponder over it, and then we've arrived back at the table.

Elizabeth has slid into the booth next to Atlas, who's somehow playing with the virtual leaf that swirls on the table's screen, and Milo and I sit across from them. He subtly puts my drink in front of me, near enough so that I don't have to pull it closer, and I start to wonder if he can read my fears and insecurities before I can feel them.

"Nova. Meet Liz. She's in NYU, too, but she ran off to Miami when summer started." Atlas says it teasingly, touching Liz's shoulder with his own as she rolls her eyes.

"Trust me, when you've spent an entire year with these guys you take every chance you can to get away," Liz tells me, pushing Atlas away. "I can't even tell you how they became my friends, but somewhere on the way they've grown to be like brothers to me." She has brown curls that graze her shoulder blades, bangs cut short by the corners of her almond eyes, brushing over smooth skin. When she smiles at me, gently, her eyes narrow ever so slightly.

"You'll meet Kaitlyn and Maxwell, too, Liz texted them," Atlas says.

I look at Milo, who's laid his arm on the top of the booth behind me. "Maxwell's your brother, right?" I ask him, and he nods his head.

"He's my better half in the most offensive way there is," he hums, smiling. I can't decide if it's a bitter smile or a proud one, but I don't have time to analyze it.

Liz leans towards me over the table. "Anyway, after Milo tagged you in that one photo, Kaitlyn and I followed you on Instagram and we were geeking over your aesthetic," she says with a grin.

"What does that mean?" Atlas pitches in. Milo meets his eye and shrugs.

I ignore the both of them and let my fingernails graze my cup slightly. "Honestly, my Instagram just mirrors my sad attempts at sticking to a cohesive one. Aesthetic, I mean."

Liz nods as I talk and then drops her shoulders dramatically as she taps her flat hand on the table (which springs back to life as a result). "Ugh, don't get me started on that crap. I tried this like, cyberpunk 2000's aesthetic for my posts in high school and looking back on it now is so embarrassing. Nobody can ever see my archives." She giggles.

"You should see my photoshop tries. You know that girl who went viral in 2014 for her edits?"

"Yes, she was Dutch, right? She started that whole face edit trend where you're half tiger, half human for some reason?"

I nod, stifling my laughs. "I thought I was absolutely killing it. It's all in the archives."

"Oh my God, can I please see that? Milo, swap with me so I can sit with Nova."

Milo grunts and dramatically pulls himself out of the booth, motioning for her to get up. "Fine. Move."

Liz scoots in next to me and pulls out her phone. "Here, look at this..."

According to my sister Sofia, there's this inevitable gravitational pull to competitivity between girls. This suppressed notion that you should measure up to one another, and if you're unable to, that you should try to pull them down to your level.

I've always ruled that out for myself and instead stamped my distaste towards girls, if you can even call it that, as jealousy: I mean no harm, but I can only wish for the elegance in Liz's movements, the ease with which she navigates her phone, scratches her nose and pushes hair from her face. I'm aware that my jealousy is rooted within my own insecurities and incapabilities, that this being underneath my skin might not just limit itself to my muscles but has taken control of my mind, too, where it slowly misleads me from my current reality to trap me in fake ones.

She is, without a doubt, the steady vision of the kind of person I've always dreamt to be. She does things, she moves without thinking about how, she is the sole inhabitant of her body and she shows it through her confidence. Perhaps I cannot be confident because I cannot be confident in my own movements. I take action without knowing what it'll feel and look like and it's captured me in a perpetual state of being unsure, and feeling the uncertainty writhing inside of me.

I believe envy to be one of the feelings that has crept unto me a long time ago and remained. Girls like Liz soar, in complete and utter control. And girls like me— people like me, with monsters beneath their skin, beings they have to fight for control every second of every day: they plummet.

Milo slides out of the booth and so do Liz and Atlas, overjoyed. There's a ringing in my ear and I missed what's happening. My previous train of thought has left me with a lump in my throat, I swallow to no avail and can only watch my fingers tremble and feel my muscles pull, curse under my breath at the being underneath my skin that mocks me for my self-pitying state of mind.

The sounds of my surroundings slowly return to me, the buzz of the fairy lights and the chatter of the café. I turn to look as the group's circled around a girl I don't recognize. She looks like the kind of person to hang out at skate parks, with short-ish black straight hair, glossy lips and a black beanie. I'm intimidated until she looks at me, breaks out into a big smile and leans in to give me an enthusiastic hug.

"I'm Kaitlyn, I follow you on Instagram!" She exclaims, hand on her tote bag and her other arm around my shoulders. "You're so cool!"

My monster can't inhibit the smile that grows on my face. I return the embrace and scoot aside, allowing for more space so both Liz and Kaitlyn fit next to me in the booth. The compliment dissolves the lump in my throat partly, I try to use it as a distraction and to appreciate Liz and Kaitlyn separately instead of as a collective that far surpasses me in elegance and grace.

The image of (non-existent) parachutes and rooftops fades from my mind.

"Maxwell was right behind me, but he had a call to take," Kaitlyn tells the group as she pulls the beanie from her head. The others grunt knowingly, and Atlas goes back to bringing the table to life.

In all the hassle, I actually managed to let the fact that I'm in a futuristic, industrial café slip my mind. I bring my attention to the way the conversation floats from Maxwell's duties in the Macarevich family business to Liz's summer in Miami and Kaitlyn's in Seoul.

I glance over my shoulder and instantly notice the guy that must be Maxwell, Milo's twin brother. They're not identical, but the similarities are unmissable. He has wide brown eyes, set narrowly within their sockets, but the slope of his lips and shape of his face are exactly like his brother's. He looks a few years older, though, curtesy of the shadow lining his jaw and upper lip and the full suit he's dressed in.

Maxwell slips his phone into his pocket and joins us in the booth. "Sorry, I had to take that. Have we ordered yet?" His eyes glide over the group and land on me. "Hey. You were at Benjamin's party on Monday, right? I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to say hi, Milo swept you away pretty fast."

"That's okay," I reply. "I always leave those things early."

Sometimes I shorten my sentences. Originally, I meant to tell him that I left after an hour and a half and that parties aren't really my scene to begin with, but when you have a mouth like my own (framed by muscles that serve as reigns for the mean person underneath my skin) and you can feel the trembles and the sudden pulls of your lips, and a feeling of embarrassment awakens as a direct result, you tend to cross out the things you want to say. I've always been selective of my words, I mull over them and turn them over and discard them. There's nothing about being awake that I don't have to overthink to save myself from the Look, from the expanse of the hatred I have for my tendencies. I call it self-preservation and act like it's normal.

"Completely understandable, I'm not much of a party animal myself." Maxwell smiles at me. "Have you guys ordered yet?"

I'm glad that he didn't ask me more questions, with the rest of the group sitting by and silently listening.

A few scattered conversations spark up around the table. Kaitlyn and Liz bend over Liz's phone, Maxwell and Milo exchange some words, and Atlas makes eye-contact with me over the table. "If you tap the screen," he says, "You should be able to place your order. Finally." He chuckles.

I smile and adjust my seating position, awkwardly hovering my finger over the table and then tapping. "Shouldn't this be super inconvenient when you're just having drinks? Every time you touch it, it turns on?" But the table doesn't respond to my taps.

"That's why you have to make a specific movement. Try swiping to the right."

I do what he says, and surely enough the screen comes to life. 'Welcome! Party of...?' the screen asks with a small smiley face.

"What do I do?"

"Draw a six," Atlas laughs.

I draw a six with a shaky line, and the screen shows a paper folding out to reveal six squares like placemats in front of us. The others, still engrossed in their respective conversations, mindlessly place their orders and then tap 'done', and their part of the screen returns to... table, I guess.

I almost want to make the comparison I thought of earlier, about how the screen reminds me of the ones at McDonald's, but I swallow the words. Something tells me this group is used to far greater things than McDonald's. Even Flynn's 'Fred & Ked's' wasn't this fancy. You sat at the table and waited for an hour and then you placed your order and waited for another hour, and in the meantime some annoying kid with a runny nose and a loud iPad would bump into your seat every three minutes because he couldn't just stay seated at his table for some reason.

This is different. In some way it's the perfect conclusion to my first few days at college, a new group of friends in a modern café where I have the opportunity to eat things like a vegetarian Mud Lock and Highland Butter Gods and Parisian Rifles— none of which I know what it is, it's just all expensive and unattractive.

I end up ordering what I assume is a sandwich. In the midst of a conversation Milo initiated, something about how we're just a few years away from bots taking over surgeries, my attention is drawn to my cellphone that buzzes on the table.

I look up at the others. I haven't seen Logan since halfway through the summer, and something about him coming back, colliding with this new world and environment, is hard to imagine. Still, Logan Peterson is the main reason I've ever felt safe in high school, maybe he'll play that same role (best friend, safety net, fierce protector) here. More importantly, I hope I can still be that to him.

If there's one thing I've been told about college, it's that it changes people, and change drives people apart.

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