Chapter Text
The first time she meets him, she's eleven years old in kitten heels a size too big for her and a cashmere skirt, and he's twelve, a boy in patent leather shoes and a shirt buttoned nearly all the way to the throat. He's standing resolutely at the side of a broad-shouldered man that Victoria thinks could pass for his grandfather. There are dusty patches in the man's hair, and they make him look rough even though he's dressed to the nines otherwise, and there are hard lines raked into his face, like someone's nails have stabbed him through eyeball to jawbone. The boy doesn't look anything like him, pale and poor-postured, sinking down into the floor like melting candle wax, and he won't meet her gaze, even though Victoria keeps trying to catch it. Every time she comes close to snagging it, his eyes flicker away again.
"We were looking to commission a piece for the summer exhibit..." her mother says, and the voices drone on with negotiations and terms Victoria doesn't understand nor care for.
She crosses her legs at the ankles and weaves her fingers together, studying the boy. There is a tall girl beside him with the same caramel colored hair, a little older than her, but one glance at her hadn't been all that interesting. It's the boy that's had her focus from the start. Maybe her staring goes on for a few seconds too long, because a response seems to suddenly roll through his shoulders, an oh-really, a you-want-it-like-that, and now he acknowledges her, looks up at her with his eyes narrowed and face wrenched into a scowl.
What, he mouths at her, what?
The Chase Space is her parents' facility, but he's looking at her like she's the one that doesn't belong here, and that makes her sharp and defensive. He's not the one who grew up in these halls, who took his first steps on the slick alabaster tiles, who can name every exhibit that's ever gone through it.
His eyes are so hard. She already dislikes him. Victoria tips her chin up and lifts her brows and looks away: Nothing.
"Kristine," says Sean Prescott, whose name Victoria knows because, she thinks, who wouldn't know it if they've ever been to Arcadia Bay, "why don't you take Nathan and Vicky outside?"
Irritation spreads through her. She doesn't know this man. She's never spoken to him before. Even if her mother had introduced her to him as Vicky, it isn't his name to use. It's hardly her mother's name to use, either. She wants to be Victoria.
The older girl puts a hand on the boy's shoulder and smiles at Victoria sunnily. "Come on," she says.
Victoria doesn't come on. She stays right where she is, hip bumping into her mother's thigh, and does not return the smile. "No thank you," she says politely.
Her mother exhales, and Victoria cringes inwardly. A hand presses between her shoulder blades, and she automatically jerks forward after scooping her little point-and-shoot off of the desk. Not stomping, even if she wants to. Her shoes are new.
The boy — Nathan? — moves ahead, even though Kristine is the one who had been asked to lead. He puts his hands right on the glass of the office door and pushes, leaving blurry impressions of his fingertips behind. Victoria wants to grind her teeth. She doesn't.
The Chase Space is all wide, frosted windows and empty space punctuated occasionally by placards and sealed glass boxes and canvases stretched over the walls. Kristine stops to admire a sculpture of twisting, rusted wires encased in a fiberglass shell, but Nathan heads right for the exit. Victoria looks between the two of them. Sunlight bursts in when Nathan shoves the double doors open, and that's what makes up Victoria's mind. She follows him outside, pretending as though she isn't as fascinated with him as she is irritated, although she has been from the beginning. She wants to dare him to say What? at her aloud.
Nathan has found a seat on one of the benches outside of the entrance, and he is perfectly rigid there, arms folded across his chest, his face blank. Victoria looks at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something, but suddenly he won't make eye contact again. It's a little disappointing, and although she lingers for a few seconds, waiting and wondering, soon she realizes that nothing is going to happen, and she turns her attention to the flowers.
Her parents won't buy her a real camera. Not yet. Before, it had been When you're ten, and then When you're eleven, and now it's When you're twelve, so Victoria doesn't expect to have any kind of SLR of her own until she's thirteen. It's not for a lack of money. She knows that. It's because that's just the way things are with them. It's because Because is always a final answer when she asks for explanations. She's embarrassed by her point-and-shoot, just like she's embarrassed by her inability to do anything right within her family, and by the Chase Space, a cutesy and unfitting name she's come to loathe. She'd change it if she could, but it's not like she's inheriting it, anyway. She's almost glad she's not; she hates the constant shuttling between Seattle and Arcadia Bay.
She prods through the limited options on her camera and kneels, framing the peonies in the viewfinder. The clusters are twice the width of the palms of her hands, and she wishes she could somehow capture their scale in the shot. It's not very exciting subject matter regardless, but Victoria is too self-conscious and too underprepared to try to take the kinds of photos she really wants to take, the kind of pictures that wind up on the cover of Vogue.
Click.
She lowers the camera to take a look at the preview, but a pair of hands suddenly reach over her and sweep it out of her grip. Victoria jumps. She nearly falls backwards onto her rear, jerking her head around wildly to look over her shoulder.
Nathan Prescott stands there, her camera in his hands. Anger and embarrassment flood through her, making her want to shriek. She reaches up and shoves her dark hair out of her eyes, planting a hand on the ground to try to get to her feet on the heels she has yet to master. Nathan is looking down at her. She wants to reach up and pluck every tooth out of his mouth and roll them between her palms like pearls.
"Give that back!" she snarls, and she's proud that her voice doesn't waver, because it feels like someone's filled her throat in with cement.
She's not sure why she expects him to respond. He hasn't said a single word to her yet at all. But it's what he says that startles her, not the fact that he talks.
"Let me take your picture," he says. He's cupping her inexpensive little camera with cocked wrists and a finger hovering impatiently over the shutter.
She tells herself that he's mocking her, he's been mocking her the whole time, and her face feels hot, and she reaches out to try to claw her camera away from him. Nathan takes a half step back, and Victoria looks between his face and her camera, paling. "Give it back right now. I don't care that your dad and my mother are making deals. You can't come here like you own me, too." There's an implied threat in it, or at least she thinks there is: I'll tell. But it's an empty one. When Victoria thinks about complaining to her mother, thinks of the potential scolding, the cold voice, she blanches. She won't be saying anything. But there's no way that he can know that.
Nathan doesn't argue with her. He just lifts the camera. "Will you let me take your picture?" he says in a voice that's a little frustrated, like he doesn't get why he has to rephrase the question for her.
The red in her vision begins to seep away, and Victoria looks at him, really looks at him, at his stooped shoulders and the purplish shadows beneath his blue eyes. She looks down at her camera in his hands. His knuckles are red, the skin broken and bitten. His wrists are thin.
She thinks his hands are shaking, but when she looks again, she can't really tell.
"Give it back to me when you're done," Victoria says finally, petulantly, and she half expects him to take off running with her camera. Or maybe he'll throw it to the concrete and smash it to pieces. Maybe he'll start scrolling through the photos she has saved on the memory card to laugh at them, picking through her self-portraits and the photos of her favored possessions. But when she backs up against the peonies, expecting something awful to happen, all the does is lift the camera to his eye.
"Tilt your head," he says, and then when she does, "No— the other way." He looks between the viewfinder and then out at her, comparing. He shifts his body very slightly to the right. Victoria stands there. She doesn't know what to do with her hands, so she just crosses her arms. She doesn't know what to do with her face, either, so she just stares into the lens, trying to see right through to the boy behind it.
Click.
She drops her arms and steps forward almost immediately when he lowers the camera, holding her hands out for it. Instead of handing it over, Nathan brings up the preview and steps close, his shoulder brushing hers. Victoria recoils, stepping away, not wanting him in her space. He just gives her another dark-eyed, impatient look, and steps closer again. She realizes that it's because he wants her to look at the photo with him, and so, reluctantly, she does.
"See?" Nathan murmurs softly, cupping a hand over the screen so that they can see it under the sunlight. "Look. Contrast."
His fingers splay over the delineation of her dark hair against the pale pink flowers. He's not wrong. It creates a perfect line of contrast in the shot. She looks tense and wary framed on that little screen, staring right into the lens plaintively. Her hair looks a little wild in it; she reaches up self-consciously to pat it into place, still staring at the photo, at her hard, defensive face. They both look at it in silence for so long that the preview screen times out and goes black. It's only then that Victoria speaks.
"It's," she begins, then stops. "It's a nice photo."
There's a sound— the double doors sweeping open. Sean Prescott appears at the gallery entrance with Kristine at his side. She's clutching his briefcase, holding it to her chest like a textbook as she looks curiously between her brother and Victoria by the flowers. Victoria looks beyond Prescott's shoulder into the gallery. She can see her mother standing there, hands clasped neatly in front of her, looking at Victoria expectantly.
"We're all wrapped up. Come, now," says Prescott, lifting a hand.
Nathan's hands gently press the camera back into hers, and then he snaps to attention like a soldier, trailing to his father's side. They leave for the Bentley that's parked right in the front in the no-parking zone. Victoria stares after them, but Nathan doesn't look back.
"Don't cause problems with that boy," her mother says to her, later, when she's standing above Victoria's bed. "But don't let him make you into a problem, either. He's trouble. Just try to get along. Please, Vicky. Behave for once. You don't appreciate how important this all is."
"Sean Prescott could buy you," says Victoria, before she gathers enough sense to bite it back. "That's what this is about, right?"
She sleeps with a hand pressed to her cheek.
"Avedon? Seriously?"
Nathan's voice startles her, and she jerks up with a yelp, knocking her drink over. Sticky bright red punch goes blossoming onto the photo book, which just has Victoria shrieking anew as she plucks it off of the ground to hold it up, staring in horror as juice runs off of it and the pages ripple. The damage has already been done. There's no undoing it. The punch is running into her towel, too, but that's not what matters.
"It's ruined," she begins, ready to tear into him, before realizing that there's something else that might be ruined, too. "Nathan, my camera!" She frantically reaches for it, but it's not in the spot she'd left it. She jerks her head up. Nathan's already cradling it, having grabbed it at some point. She's come to find that his reflexes are sharp— that he always seems to be on the verge of flinching, somehow. Victoria's grateful for that now, but her copy of Woman in the Mirror is still ruined.
"Sorry," says Nathan, but he sounds more annoyed with her anger than he does about being the reason for causing it. He hooks the strap of her camera around his neck and grabs for her towel to try to blot at the pages. Nadja Auermann, locked in an embrace with a skeleton, has already been warped beyond recovery in a damp pink fog. It's one of Victoria's favorite photos. She wants to scream.
"I loved this book, you asshole," she says, trying not to sound as miserable as she feels.
"So what? You can get another, right?" Nathan asks. He turns his attention back to the pool, shaking the towel out over the chlorinated water. It drips red into it, which quickly swirls pink and then dissipates entirely.
She doesn't want to tell him that she had to save up for her own copy, just like she'd had to save up for the camera, an acquisition two months shy of her thirteenth birthday. And if she's thinking of telling him why it matters, well, that disappears the moment he continues talking.
"He didn't capture character," says Nathan, dropping the towel to the ground. "Or moments. It's easy to put someone against a backdrop and set up a scene and bide your time until they give you what you want. Fake shit. All of his most famous photos are totally manufactured."
Victoria peels the wet pages apart and smooths her fingertips over stark photos of empty eyes and tense shoulders, the faces of a generation she wishes she had been born into instead, a time when photography had just started to come into its own as art. Raw photos. Honest photos. That's what's she's always thought. "Fine," she says, trying to tell herself There will be another, dropping the book with a clatter to the murky blue mosaic framing the pool. She looks at it laying there like a dead drowned thing. "Who's your idol, then?"
Nathan just shrugs, and Victoria studies him. Arcadia Bay is hot and humid in the summer in a way that makes her want to gag on the air, and her skin is sluggish hot even in her shorts and bikini top, but he's wearing a long sleeved shirt that's embroidered with his initials, the cuffs coming over his wrists. She realizes that she doesn't think she's ever seen him in a t-shirt. She watches him tug on his sleeves and say, "I don't know," and then, "Isn't there anyone else you like?"
There is. Nathan might not be the most pleasant person to talk to when it comes to their shared hobby, but Victoria thinks they both want to understand the art as much as possible, and she doesn't think she's ever shared her favorite photographer with him. They're dripping with pool water when they go back inside, tracking it down the halls. Her scalded feet feel a lot better against the cool marble floors, even if she knows she's going to have to follow the path back the same way with a towel before her parents see. Nathan trails her to her bedroom, where Victoria makes him stand just outside the door while she goes inside to tug a book free from a shelf. It's placed right at the end. Easy to reach.
"Here," she says, returning to the door and handing it over. "Mark Jefferson."
Nathan fixes her with a look that lingers for a little too long, and then he looks back down at the coffee table edition of Sequence. He thumbs through the portraits, photo after photo in monochrome— editorials, fashion campaigns, street shots. Victoria barely has to look to be able to identify any of the pages. She has been following Mark Jefferson's career since she was a little girl, ever since she was six years old and the Chase Space had hosted a retrospective on works by artists born in Oregon. Mark Jefferson was the most prominent star, the one everyone could name. The one that made Victoria realize that she could be something bigger than Arcadia Bay, if only she would put in the effort, if only she could claw her way out.
"Arcadia Bay's finest, right?" Nathan says, and it takes Victoria a moment to realize that he'd spoken aloud and not in her head.
"Who asked you?" she shoots back, trying to reach for the book again.
Nathan pulls it back, parts the pages to a centerfold of a fragile looking young woman posed on the ground, her weight shifted to one hip, surrounded by the charcoal husks of burnt trees. Her white dress is faintly blackened at the edges. Contrast, Victoria thinks.
"There's something kind of empty about all of his shit," Nathan says, after a while of staring.
Resentment rises in her gullet, and she takes the book from him with hands that are far gentler than she had expected them to be. "You really never have anything nice to say about anything," she says, snapping the book shut. She can't censor her mouth, even though she knows that she should. "I think maybe you should go home."
Nathan's face colors, red oozing into the pale, and for a short but immensely satisfying moment, Victoria is glad to see that he seems to be hurt— but within the moment that immediately follows it, she feels sick. Nathan is digging in his pocket when she goes to carefully replace Mark Jefferson's Sequence back on her shelf, and by the time she's returned to the door, he's got his phone to his ear.
"I know. I'm sorry," he says into it, after a pause. "I'll take the bus."
Sometimes Nathan phones her in the middle of the night, and he never wants to talk about anything at all. She'll lie there in bed, only half awake, her head heavy with exhaustion, and listen mutely as Nathan stammers on about horror films, about The New Romantics, about the grindcore bands he's been getting into lately, about his fifth therapist in as many months.
Once, Victoria puts her phone on silent mode. The next day, she wakes up to four missed calls, and when she sees Nathan at the movies that afternoon, he has a tremor that won't seem to go away, and his lips are bitten raw.
She keeps the volume on high from then on out.
Sean Prescott has high cheekbones and wide hands and a fuse so short it's always kissing the gunpowder.
He's similar to his son in that last way.
hey. happy birthday. fyi 14 sux
Wow Nate just what I didn't want to hear. lol what's up?
howd it go
Im not telling you what girls do on sleepovers so don't even try.
i didnt ask
Answer my question
look outside
Victoria lowers her cell phone and hauls herself up from her bed to take a look out of the window. She can just barely make out, past the gate, the sight of Sean Prescott's Mustang idling there. At his age, Nathan shouldn't be driving, especially not close to midnight, but he does anyway, because even though he's still got more than a year until he can do it legally, who's going to stop him? The cops definitely won't, Victoria knows that much. Nathan does a lot of things he shouldn't, and Victoria lets him, because it's none of her fucking business anyway. Because he's really the only exciting thing she's got in Arcadia Bay. Because whenever she needs to get out of her house, he's always on call, like he's got infinite time to be anywhere but home, just like her.
The Chase estate is too far back on the lot to talk to him through the window, so she texts him again. This is really fucking 80s teen movie of you
i know so just come outside
Victoria moves very carefully to her bedroom door and slides it open a crack. She stands there with her head tilted slightly, listening closely. She can't hear anything beyond the steady hum of the television downstairs. Her parents won't notice. They don't notice a lot of things.
That's how, ten minutes later, Victoria is climbing into the passenger seat with nothing more than her phone and a fistful of bills. She's hardly managed to buckle up by the time Nathan is taking off like a shot, his hands rolling against the steering wheel. He drives fast and reckless in a way that makes Victoria completely believe the fatality statistics for teenagers in collisions, sweeping past the streetlights and onto one of Arcadia Bay's many unmarked roads, the headlights catching reflections of wide, frightened eyes lurking in the treeline. She rolls the window down and is blasted by cool air, and her heart swells greedily. Sometimes, she half hopes she'll be caught when she's out with Nathan like this.
"Where are we going?" she asks.
"Don't worry about it," Nathan says. She looks at him, and it's hard to see anything in his face against the soft glow of the dashboard lights, but she can tell one thing: his pupils are blown out so wide that the blue's nearly black.
She stiffens in her seat and lets loose a searing laugh that conceals the tension that has yanked every one of her muscles in a different direction. "Jesus, Nathan," she says, and she turned fourteen yesterday, but she really doesn't feel grown up enough for any of this, and she doesn't know if she ever will be. She wants to crawl back into her bed and sleep off all of the junk food she's eaten over the past twenty four hours. She wants to sprawl out with her laptop and read reviews for the winter animation season. But this is Nathan, and he passes his time differently, and when she's with him, she plays by his rules.
There's something freeing about that. Nathan's taught her how to smoke a cigarette and how to shoot in manual and what to do if a cop catches her shoplifting or with alcohol in her backpack and where that one spot in the graveyard is where the light catches the headstones perfectly, just perfectly, and he's done all of those things from the lap of luxury, spat out the silver spoon in his mouth like she's tried so hard to do, even more determined than she is to rip off the cloak. Nathan is a zero to one hundred sort of person.
She still feels like she doesn't know him at all.
He pulls up to a house that she doesn't recognize. There's loud music piercing the night air, and before Nathan's even fully shut the engine off, a tall, wide shouldered boy has ambled up the driveway. Victoria can't place an age on him. His face is youthful, but his voice isn't, a heavy, lazy bass.
"Hey," he says, clapping a hand on the roof of the Mustang and leaning in to peer at Victoria through the window. "Happy birthday."
"Thank you," she says, uncertain of this congratulations from a boy she doesn't know, unable to suppress the urge to recoil from the smell of alcohol on his breath.
Nathan leans in so close that his chin bumps her shoulder. Victoria twitches, feeling trapped on both sides. "Hey, Hayden," he says, and he's grinning as he shuts off the car.
"So this is Victoria Chase," says the boy, reaching out for a fist bump that Victoria doesn't meet in the middle. "We were all wondering when we'd get to meet you. We all thought you basically didn't exist."
"What?" Victoria looks back at Nathan over her shoulder. Her cheek collides with his, and she bats at him. Nathan laughs and sits back to climb out of the car. She notes that he hadn't had to undo his seat belt, because he hadn't fastened it in the first place. Beside her, Hayden is slipping an arm through the crack in the window and manually unlocking the door. He opens it and holds it out for her like a chauffeur. Victoria jams her cell phone and her money in her pocket and climbs out.
She sees that there's a not insignificant number of teenagers crowding the lawn. Victoria recognizes some faces, and some names surface hazily for her, but she doesn't really know any of them. They're the youth of Arcadia Bay, like her, but she's always attended the girls-only academy in the next town over, a forty five minute drive both ways every single weekday for as long as she can remember. Her education and social life have been marked by uniform skirts and friendships maintained by telephone calls with girls she rarely sees outside of school. Once, Nathan had seen her in her school uniform. He'd laughed so hard she thought he was going to pass out.
Nathan's different from these Arcadia Bay kids. Different like her. Their parents broker business deals together. They're members of the county's Rotary Club. They compare yachts and beachfront properties and say Why don't you both go outside and play when they're lounging around on the Prescott manor sun deck to both Nathan and Victoria as though they're still children. As if they were ever children together. Sometimes Victoria wonders whose parents are more clueless: hers, or Nathan's.
But he's her only friend in the Bay, and maybe it's more circumstantial than anything else, but most of the time, she doesn't mind being on his collision course.
"So you all go to Arcadia Bay High," Victoria says slowly, looking between Hayden and the group of laughing teenagers nodding along to the music and sprawling on the grass. She sees sparks fly from the ground several feet away, followed by a yelp and a puff of smoke. Her remark about the school is pretty unnecessary; there's only one high school in Arcadia Bay, and Blackwell Academy, with its specialized curriculum and entry requirements — seniors only, somewhere between high school and college — doesn't quite count.
"You bet," says Hayden. He's standing a little bit too close. He sways when he walks, and Victoria doesn't know if he's just that tipsy or if he's trying to affect swagger. "Me, it's only 'til I get my bad self into Blackwell."
"That should be easy if you're friends with Nathan," Victoria says.
"Speak of the devil," Nathan interjects, wedging himself between the two of them, all nervous energy and live wires. "Yeah. Can't wait. It's a real fuckin' shame you won't come, Vic."
Victoria presses her lips into a thin line. This is a conversation she has had before— with Nathan, with her mother, with her friends. She is not going to streamline herself into a filter school. Not when she can just close out her studies and move directly to one of the post-secondary institutions she has her eye on— the American Academy of Art, preferably. Gil Elvgren and Kanye West studied there. More importantly, Mark Jefferson studied there.
Blackwell Academy just means yet another year confined within Arcadia Bay. It means seeing all the same faces every single day. It means boarding in the Prescott dorms. Regimented, structured days. It's everything Victoria doesn't want, no matter how much of it the Prescotts own.
"I'm so sure I'll be missing out on a bunch," she says as airily as possible. Nathan plants a hand above her shoulder blades and gives her a little shove towards a group of girls congregated by the pile of sparklers. They all look cozy in plush hoodies and torn jeans and scuffed sneakers. Victoria feels overdressed in her cardigan and boots. These girls look small town and unaffected and an ugly part of her wishes she could be, too.
The girls look up at her, and they give her cautious but easy smiles. One of them, a blonde girl with bangs so blunt that Victoria thinks, meanly, that she must have cut them herself, looks to Nathan, as if for his approval. Nathan looks back at her like he has no idea what she wants and scoops a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lights one as his cell phone goes off. He answers it as he wanders away. Victoria watches him go helplessly.
"So Nathan totally ditched us to go and bring you here, huh?" asks the blonde girl, catching her attention again. Her eyes are a little red and watery. "I'm Taylor." She holds up her hand, and Victoria reaches out to shake it before realizing that she's being offered the joint pinched between the girl's fingers. Taylor laughs at her awkwardness. Victoria prickles, but she won't be laughed at, only laughed with, so she forces a giggle, as if she meant to do it on purpose. It doesn't quite work; Taylor is still looking at her with a raised eyebrow, like she wants to say Seriously?
Victoria's never smoked anything beyond cigarettes before, even if she's watched Nathan too many times to count with the palm sized glass pipe he's always rolling between his hands like it's some kind of stress toy. Sometimes he'd offered it to her, but she'd never felt like she had anything to prove to him, so she'd shrugged off every offer. But right now, surrounded by these carefree kids all staring at her like she's a rare zoo animal finally put on exhibit — Look, it's the Chase Space space case — she feels cornered.
Bitterly, Victoria reminds herself that she's always got something to prove to someone. That's how the game of life is played. These girls have no idea that she's had all of the rules memorized since birth. She snatches the joint up. "I'm Victoria," she says icily, and she pulls it up to her lips. The tip is a little wet, which makes her cringe, but she sucks in, and she doesn't cough.
Twenty minutes later, she's huddled in next to Taylor, who doesn't seem to be all that bad through the thick static of smoke in her head. Soon, she's looking at Victoria with wide, adoring eyes, plucking at her sweater with envious fingers, tipping her head onto her shoulder like they've been friends for years, curling around her little finger like a cat in heat. Victoria, who typically hates being touched, finds that she doesn't even mind it, now. The weed's making her feel sleepy and electric all at once, rolling down her spine and through her shoulders to the tips of her fingers. She laughs with the girls and helps them set off more sparklers, and when Hayden returns to try to engage her in conversation, she talks freely, secretly pleased with his attention.
She could own all of them, she realizes. It'd be easy.
It's been an hour, or maybe two — she's not sure; it's so hard to tell how much time has passed — when she realizes that she hasn't seen Nathan in a while. Taylor's head is on her lap as she relates a story about her attempts to join the choir at Arcadia Bay High when Victoria gently eases her away and excuses herself. Taylor pouts — it's kind of adorable — and Victoria climbs to her feet, feeling like she's floating. She's unsteady, every motion feeling so much bigger than it really is.
"Hey," greets some meaty looking jock who's been eyeballing her for a while, and Victoria doesn't even bother to disguise her disgust as she elbows past him. She's fourteen. She's not here to do whatever stupid thing is obviously going through his head. There will be a time when she'll have to wonder why thinking about boys makes her uncomfortable rather than excited, but it won't be tonight, and it won't be with some stranger. When she moves beyond him, she's hit by the music pulsing from inside the house. The lights are on, even though it seems like most of the party is congregated out on the lawn. She hasn't seen Nathan anywhere out here, though, so she decides to invite herself inside.
Transitioning from the cool, dark outdoors to the warm, bright interior makes her dizzy. She steps past the living room and picks her way over a mess of coats and shoes in the hallway. There's a door that's slightly open, a sliver of light at the frame. She can just barely make out the shape of a shoulder through it. She impulsively shoves it open.
Nathan's there, hunched over the sink. Somehow, she's not surprised to see him in here all by himself. Nathan has this way of seeming alone even when he's in a room full of people. Victoria stays where she is, clutching at the door frame, looking into the mirror as she waits for him to notice her. His eyes meet hers through the glass.
He looks tired and uneasy, but it's not that that gives him away. It's his posture and the way his nostrils are flaring and the way his breaths come short and timed perfectly.
Victoria suddenly feels very sober. "Do you want to go home," she mumbles quietly.
Nathan's eyes flicker closed. He tilts his head to the right, then the left. His neck cracks. "What did your parents get you?" he asks out of nowhere.
"What?" Victoria's fingers close on the door frame.
"For your birthday," Nathan says patiently.
She reaches through the fog in her head for the answer. "There's a show this month," she says finally, "at the Bean Hip Café."
Nathan's mouth twitches, and his lips part, and he huffs out something like a laugh. "Mark Jefferson's exhibit, right?"
She's not surprised that he knows of it, but she doesn't know how to react, or where he's going with it, and suddenly she feels defensive of her favorite photographer and of the exhibit she's been aching to go and see. The tickets had been a surprisingly thoughtful gift from her parents, although a bitter, pessimistic part of Victoria suspects that they are VIP passes granted to the Chase Space as a courtesy. A fortunate coincidence. "He's going to be there on—"
"—on the last day," finishes Nathan. "Meet and greet."
"Yeah," says Victoria, who already knows exactly which book she's going to ask him to sign, and what she's going to say to him. "And I've been looking forward to it for basically my whole life, so, like, whatever you were going to say, don't." Her hackles are raised, ready to go on the offensive if Nathan has even one negative word to say about it, but her caution turns out to be unnecessary.
"Good thing mine are refundable," says Nathan blankly, and then he pushes off and away from the sink and runs his hands through his hair. His collar is askew. His fingertips are twitching. Victoria takes a step away from him without thinking of it, too confused to do anything else but respond instinctively. But if he's hurt, it doesn't show.
"Wait," she says, finally, "did you—"
"I think I want to go home," says Nathan, and he paws at himself for the car keys. And he says it again in the Mustang, several times, I want to go home, but in the end they park at the Chase estate, and she winds up sneaking him into her room, where he falls asleep on her floor.
The end of November brings frigid weather to Arcadia Bay, but all Victoria can think about is meeting Mark Jefferson between school and get-togethers (they feel more like dates, really) with Taylor Christensen, whom she's sure is at least a little bit in love with her, not that she really minds. Spending time with Taylor is much more entertaining than going on the actual dates her mother sets her up on, which she has decided to stop humoring. Besides— there's only one person Victoria is fixated on. The first of December is circled on the dry erase board in her room and plugged in as a reminder on her phone, reinforcing the date that's already running on a constant marquee in her head.
But the cooling weather brings a change in Nathan, too, and maybe it's because she doesn't see him every single day like Taylor and Hayden and the rest of her new friends that she's able to notice it. The circles under his eyes are getting darker. On one morning, Victoria finds a newspaper that her father, or maybe the housekeeper, has left out on the kitchen table. The title is BLACKWELL ACADEMY OFFERS LUCRATIVE TEACHING CONTRACT VIA PRESCOTT FOUNDATION TO FAMED PHOTOGRAPHER MARK JEFFERSON. Nathan has never mentioned this to her. She wonders if he knew. She wonders why she cares.
Nathan tells her that he's been suspended from school— two weeks, for throwing a punch at a teacher. "But I'll still take you to the café," he reassures her over the phone, his voice watery. There's a long stretch of silence. Victoria has learned that she usually never knows what to say to him, but that tends to be the right tactic with him. "My dad's going to kill me," he says finally, quietly.
She believes it. She can smell it on him through the phone like he's leaking blood into the water. It's really just a matter of when.
"Are you going to ask him why he turned the contract down?" Nathan asks her. His tone is faintly teasing. At least she thinks it is.
They're parked outside of the Bean Hip Café watching the snow come down, or what passes for it— it's turning to slush the moment it hits the ground. Victoria doesn't think she's ever seen a real snowfall in Arcadia Bay, but even the sleet is making her uneasy. The reddish light coming through the windows isn't doing her nerves any favors, either. She's steps away from meeting her idol. She has Mark Jefferson's Re-Collection in her lap, her camera around her neck, and her hopes up ridiculously, pathetically high. She's never felt more insecure. It's turned her hard, harder than usual, and when she turns to shoot Nathan a glare, she can't filter her mouth.
"No, I'm not," she says acidly, and she knows that she's only allowed to talk to him like this because he'd started it to begin with. "Who gives a shit?"
"But you'd come to Blackwell if he'd agreed to teach there," Nathan says just as bluntly. He leans in, his blue eyes wide, imploring. Challenging her, in a way. "You fuckin' would. Don't deny it."
She doesn't like the way Nathan's been lately, on edge and almost manic. Being suspended seems to have untethered his already limited sense of patience. He's twitching more. The other day, Victoria uncovered orange plastic bottles in his room. She's not sure if the twitching is from taking the drugs or because he's not taking them. It's none of her business, but she thinks about it all the time, anyway.
"So what?" Victoria snaps. Maybe she'd thought about it. Maybe she'd considered putting her plans aside for the brief few days she'd thought Mark Jefferson might come back to Arcadia Bay to teach at Blackwell Academy. It's not as though she'd really believed it— for the past handful of years Jefferson has taught at other schools, but they've been prestigious universities in huge cities, not a small, specialized academy in an even smaller town, much less the one he'd grown up in and moved on from. But maybe she'd still entertained the notion of being able to learn from one of the greats, to sit in on his lectures and absorb his knowledge and maybe — just maybe — turn her idol into a mentor.
She's hardly dared to let herself think about that last part. She doesn't think about what it would be like to have one-on-one time with Mark Jefferson. To have his input, his guidance, his advice. She doesn't think about it, because she doesn't want to hurt herself with something that might never happen.
It's not going to happen. She'd hurt herself anyway.
But so what? What was wrong with wanting that? Nothing, she tells herself. Nothing's wrong with that. But Nathan makes her feel like there might be, and she doesn't want to find where the end of that thread leads. She reaches for the door and shoves it open. Nathan stays right where he is. "I'll be right out here," he says.
That startles her. "You're not coming in?" she asks, turning to look at him. She can already feel the slush seeping through her sheepskin boots.
"No," says Nathan, and he doesn't elaborate.
"Fine," Victoria breathes, because her head's too scattered to think of anything but how nervous she is. She'd had a couple of hits off of Nathan's pipe about an hour ago, but it's done nothing to relax her. She reaches up and touches her hair. Suddenly, the loose bun feels ridiculous, like maybe she's putting too much effort in, and she tugs it free. She heads for the door before she can change her mind again.
She's purposely held off coming to the café until this day, even though the exhibit has already been open for a month, which has just worked her anticipation and her anxiety into a frothy mess. But there's something lush about the atmosphere that makes her feel at ease. There are photos she's familiar with blown up to scale proportion covering every wall, each one a stunning masterwork in black and white. Victoria feels faintly detached from her own body as she brushes past patrons in Burberry coats and bespoke suits. There's a congregation of people gathered in the back and a spotlight on the modest stage. She breaks through the crowd just in time to hear Mark Jefferson say, "and what a pleasure it is to be back in Arcadia Bay."
He's different in person, but she's not sure what she was expecting. He's taller, his shoulders a little broader. He looks just as young for his age as they say, smiling easy and confident even in front of a rapt, expectant crowd. He's handsome in a way that makes her stomach clench up and her knees knock together, and it's him. It's him. Victoria realizes that this is the first time he's ever seemed like a real person to her, the first time he's ever been anything more than a concept, and everything she planned on saying to him drains right out of her mind. She stands there, lightheaded, as he finishes his speech and invites the crowd to join the line for autographs— after which, he says, he will be glad to mingle.
She stands there, dazed, before realizing that she needs to find a place in line. She turns to try to nab the first or second spot when she feels a hand on her shoulder.
Victoria jerks her head up. Sean Prescott looks down at her with a slow smile that doesn't quite meet his eyes. "Vicky," he says. "What a pleasure it is to see you here. How are you? Are your parents here, as well?"
His hand is so heavy on her shoulder that, combined with her anxiousness, Victoria fears her knees might buckle. But she's a Chase, she reminds herself. More than that, she's Victoria Chase, so she pulls herself together, even though her heart's beating so hard she's getting a headache. She eases her shoulder back from under Prescott's grip and manages to do it in a manner so casual that it just seems like coincidence.
"No, they're not," she says as sweetly as she can. She wonders, suddenly, if Prescott knows that Nathan is the one that drove her here. If he's seen his son in the borrowed Mustang in the lot. If he doesn't know, well— she can't give anything away. She straightens. "I came here on my own," she adds. "Mark Jefferson's my biggest inspiration." Her voice doesn't quiver. Good.
Prescott's looking at her like he's trying to stare right through her. After a pause, he says, "It's good to aspire to something. If only Nathan had your focus."
Victoria lowers her gaze and stares at her wet-mottled boots. She wonders what Prescott means by focus. She wonders about the teaching contract. She wonders why Nathan had the faintest shadow of a bruise on his cheekbone even before he was suspended for fighting.
There's a lot of things she wonders about but doesn't want to know.
"Nathan's very talented," she says finally, as blandly as she can. "A lot more talented than me." That part is honest, and something she is forced to admit freely. Nathan doesn't seem to give anything resembling a real fuck about photography, and that makes all the difference in his art. It makes her so sick with envy that she could puke just thinking about it, but it's hard to hold it against the one person she's able to call a friend, however uncertainly.
"He is talented," agrees Prescott, and Victoria thinks that she ought to hear fatherly pride in his voice, but she doesn't detect any. "But talent is nothing without drive." Before Victoria can come up with something to say in response, he's reaching out to push at her shoulder, smiling in what she assumes he thinks is an approximation of friendly. "I won't hold you. I can see that you're looking forward to this. The Prescott Foundation is pleased to have brought Mark Jefferson back briefly, even if it isn't at Blackwell."
He's walking away before things have started to click into place in her head, but then she's not thinking about any of that at all, save for a brief moment of rolling her eyes at the indulgent and unnecessary Prescott Foundation namedrop. Victoria turns her attention back to the line. While she's been talking to Sean Prescott, it's swelled to several dozen people. She takes her place at the end of it. It's more than an hour later that she gets her turn.
Up close, she can see every stitch in Mark Jefferson's fitted suit and smell his woodsy cologne. He stands up from the table to greet her, and although she's had a growth spurt recently, he still dwarfs her. He catches her gaze and holds it, and in that moment, everything, everything is fine, and she's floating somewhere high above the clouds; it's a dozen times better than Nathan's weed or Taylor's stolen liquor. She wants to take her camera from around her neck and press close to him and scroll through the shots saved on her memory card and say See? See? What do you think?
"How are you?" Jefferson asks, and the whole thing shatters. It sounds perfunctory. There's none of the charisma with which he'd delivered his speech. He's looking past her shoulder, onto the rest of the line, as if counting how many are left.
"Fine," Victoria hears herself say. She stands there unmoving. A beat, and then, "How are you?"
"I'm doing great," Jefferson says in that same measured tone.
Victoria puts a smile on, but there's a knot in her throat, and her eyes are watering, and she realizes she's been holding her breath. Suddenly she feels painfully young and achingly outmatched, and she wonders why she came here at all. She wonders what she was hoping for. She can't believe she was stupid enough to entertain it for even a second. She says, "You're an inspiration." In her head, it had sounded a lot more confident and a lot less like a stupid, childish platitude.
"Thank you," he says simply, but he's not really looking at her. He's holding his hand out for the book she's forgotten she was carrying. She holds fast to it, desperate for the moment to mean something. Desperate for it to be real.
"I mean it," she says. "When I saw your work in Vogue Italia, it was— it was what made me want to—"
"What's your name?" he interjects. His hand is poised with a pen at the ready. Victoria doesn't try to finish her sentence. She holds Re-Collection out to him with shaky fingers.
"Victoria," she whispers.
On the inside cover of the book is a studio shot of a young woman with pale blonde hair and wide hazel eyes. Victoria has the description memorized. She knows that the girl in the photo had been one of Jefferson's favorite muses in the nineties, and that they had collaborated on a handful of award winning editorials. She remembers reading a rumor, once, about how it was thought in the industry that Jefferson had made easy work of sleeping with his models. She's thinking about that rumor as she watches him scrawl his signature right over the photo, streaking it across the girl's throat.
Victoria feels so small.
When she climbs back into the car, Nathan's red eyed and the cabin smells like ash, and she pretends she doesn't notice as he says, "How was it?"
She shows him her teeth. "It was amazing," she lies. "You should have come in."
Nathan stares at her, his fingers hitting out patterns against the dashboard, his shoulders twitching. They drive on in silence, the scent of pine blowing through the vents. She wishes he would say something, but in the end, he doesn't call her out on it, just lets her head disappear beneath the undertow of her lie.
That's worse, somehow.