“Did you get lost in the bathroom?” they’d ask her, eyes smiling, all waiting to hear what smart thing she would say, Clever Sadie, so bright, and so nice, and so cute, like a member of the family. “I locked myself in.” Always this lie. Inexplicable, really, that anyone believed it, but everyone did.
Then other times she would just sit in the silence or lie in the bathtub, alone, in her clothes, looking up at the ceiling or ducks on the wallpaper, exhausted from making an effort.
As now.
She sits on the toilet seat, feet up beneath her and hugging both shins with her chin on her kneecaps. Again the phone rings, with the shrill “SADIE! PHONE!” from a distance, but no one comes knocking. She counts.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
A game that she plays with herself, or against. Goaclass="underline" guess how many seconds it will take them to notice that someone’s gone missing, that Sadie’s not there? She made up the game in that first house, in Brookline, with its funny little stairways and secret trap doorways. She’d hide in the bedroom just next to her parents’ (when her parents existed as such, in the plural) and hear them all talking in the kitchen below her, their voices a rumble, a hum through the floor: her father and brother, his voice newly deepened, the twins in eighth grade with their one husky tone, and her mother always laughing, steady rainfall of laughter, pitter patter, like crying, a laugh full of tears.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Which of them would notice that Sadie was gone? It was Olu, usually Olu, a bass in the distance, “Where’s Sadie?” floating up through the floorboards, a flare, but she always somehow hoped that her sister would notice, would come up to look for her. Taiwo never did.
9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
Sitting in the bathroom she shares with her roommate, waiting for Philae to notice she’s gone.
• • •
Philae. “Like a sister” to Sadie. As skinny. The light of her life and the thorn in her side, Philae Frick Negroponte, former darling of Milton, a sophomore-year transfer from Spence in New York, now the darling of Yale, with her Greek magnate father and American mother of Henry Clay fame. Philae, whose smile and gray eyes and blond hair and tan skin and long legs Sadie loves as her own, who had walked into homeroom that day in September knowing no one at Milton and sat next to her. Of all people. Of all miracles.
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
“Of course not, no.”
“Thank you.” In black leather pants, the first leather pants Sadie had ever seen in person. “Is it me, or is everyone looking at you?”
“You. And I wouldn’t say looking. More staring, or gawking.”
She was laughing. “I’m Philae.”
She was smitten. “I’m Sadie.”
“Philae and Sadie,” proclaimed Philae, smiling brightly. “I like it. I like you.” And the rest on from there: movies, sleepovers, vacations, matching BFF necklaces with BFF in Arabic (gift from Philae from Dubai), applying early to Yale, where Philae’s mother and uncles and grandfather and great-grandfather and Sadie’s brother had gone. Philae and Sadie: the inseparable, the invincible, Miss Popularity in partnership with Most Likely to Succeed, a high school match made in heaven relocated to New Haven as Campus Celebrity and Most Valuable Friend. The loyal, the indispensible, the wing beneath, etc. A role Sadie plays as if made for the part: the Nick to Philae’s Gatsby, the Charles to her Sebastian, the Gene to her Finny: there is always the Friend, Sadie knows, any freshman who’s done all her reading knows the narrator of the story is always the Friend.
Still, Taiwo is wrong when she mocks her for speaking like Philae — overusing whatever and like, or for dressing like Philae, monthly stipend permitting — by saying she, Sadie, secretly wants to be white. It isn’t a matter of “white,” though it’s true that she’s never had many African American friends, neither at Milton nor at Yale where they all seem to find her inappropriately suburban, nor a “secret” as such. For all of the hoopla about race, authentic blackness (which, as far as she’s concerned, confuses identity and musical preference), it is obvious to Sadie that all of them carry this patina of whiteness, or WASP-ness more so: be they Black, Latin, Asian, they’re Ivy League strivers, they all start their comments with overdrawn ums, and they’ll all end up working in law firms or hospitals or consultancies or banks having majored in art. They are ethnically heterogeneous and culturally homogenous, per force of exposure, osmosis, adolescence. She accepts this without anguish as the price of admission. She doesn’t want to be Caucasian.
She wants to be Philae.
Rather, part of Philae’s family, of the Frick Negropontes, of their pictures on the wall along their stairs on the Cape, mother Sibby, sister Calli, Philae, father Andreas, of their photos on the Internet, Fashion Weeks, galas. They are larger than life — at least larger than hers, Sadie’s family, spread out as it is, light, diffuse. Philae’s family is heavy, a solid thing, weighted, perhaps by the money, an anchor of sorts? It holds them together, the wealth, Sadie sees this, it makes them invested in one solid thing and so keeps them together, first Andreas and Sibby, then the Fricks and Negropontes, a gravitational pull. It isn’t only that her family is poorer by contrast that makes Sadie cling to the Negropontes as she does. It is that they are weightless, the Sais, scattered fivesome, a family without gravity, completely unbound. With nothing as heavy as money beneath them, all pulling them down to the same piece of earth, a vertical axis, nor roots spreading out underneath them, with no living grandparent, no history, a horizontal — they’ve floated, have scattered, drifting outward, or inward, barely noticing when someone has slipped off the grid.
• • •
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
It was Philae’s idea to throw this party for her birthday. Sadie abhors birthday parties — they always make her feel sick, the crushing pressure to be happy!, to be having a happy birthday! such as she can’t remember having had once in her life — but Philae insisted, and Sadie relented, and now their dorm suite is a mess of drunk friends. They’d gathered at midnight to belt “Happy Birthday!” and cut a massive chocolate cake shipped from Payard, very festive and dramatic, very Philae, who’d hugged her, and kissed her on the lips to the delight of the crowd. In a way she’d been waiting six years for this moment, for Philae to grab her and kiss her like this (perhaps minus the eighty-odd onlookers whooping, lacrosse players shouting with glee, “Girl on girl!”), but just after, as Philae was shouting, “Are you one?! Are you two?! Are you three?!” Sadie wanted to cry.
She looked at her friends (Philae’s friends more precisely) now shouting “Are you seventeen?!” in orangeish light, with the birthday candles twinkling and reflected in the window. She looked out the window. It was starting to snow.
“Are you eighteen?!”
“It’s snowing,” she said, but too softly; the friends kept on shouting.
“Are you nineteen?!”
“I’m twenty.”
She sits in the bathroom and thinks of it. Twenty. She doesn’t feel twenty. She still feels four. With the tears surging up from her stomach, someone banging. “I’m coming,” she mumbles as she sets her feet down.
And here she is, gorgeous, inebriated Philae, her face flushed a pale shade of pink, and the smile, sticking her head in the door without waiting, entitled and smelling of Flower by Kenzo and beer. “Your sister keeps calling.”