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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kristen Iskandrian

  Cover design by Sara Wood.

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Twelve

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  twelvebooks.com

  twitter.com/twelvebooks

  First Edition: August 2017

  Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Twelve name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-9444-3 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-9445-0 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  E3-20170630-DA-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book One: The Mother Hole Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Book Two: The Daughter Hole Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Twelve Mission Statement

  Reading Group Guide

  Discussion Questions

  A Conversation with Kristen Iskandrian

  Newsletters

  To Brian—

  for seeing me.

  O children, O my children, you have a city,

  You have a home, and you can leave me behind you,

  And without your mother you may live there forever.

  —Euripides, The Medea

  I broke a mirror, in which I figured you.

  —John Berryman, The Dream Songs

  Book One

  The Mother Hole

  When my mother caught me rummaging in her nightstand, she said, You must never look in there again. She said, Certain things are private. Do you know what private means? I did, but I told her I didn’t, which was maybe my version of what private meant. When something is private, she said, it belongs only to you. From then on, I understood my mother to be private, in how she kept herself to herself, and in how, in my mind, she belonged only to me. I really thought I was entitled to her, to the most intimate parts of her, which seemed to be in that drawer: photos, a Bible, stacks of letters held together with rubber bands, a diary. None of it helped me. Most of it probably wrecked me. But sometimes, that’s how you know something is working. The world may have been destroyed by a flood—but that doesn’t mean we don’t still need the rain.

  Dear Mom,

  The thing about college is the bodies. They are everywhere. I feel like we were all sent to one place to figure out how to be in one, what to do with the fact of them, and how close and how far to move them in relation to one another. I try to imagine what we might look like from space, clustered and worrying, how we would probably only be discernible in clumps, the solitary ones not registering on the infrared screen or whatever the technology is. I’ve been in some rooms that reek of desperation, that rapey cologne smell of boys sitting around marinating their impulses, their collective ideas about girls like some weird psychic orgy. Those are the rooms, the parties, you run away from. Or to, depending, I guess.

  I want to tell you about how many boys I’ve laid under (2) and how both of them felt the same. I want you to come here and wash my sheets and tell me the truth about my clothes, about the people I’ve met. I want you to see me working in the dining hall. I want you to come with me to my classes, comment on my professors, on what they’re making me read. None of this will happen, I know. It wouldn’t happen even if you were another mother. But being the mother you are, it’s not just impractical. It’s impossible. You are not available. You don’t want to be summoned.

  Lately I’ve been thinking about my whole life in terms of having grown up at the end of a cul-de-sac. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a certain “not a thru street” psychology to my time here. Everyone seems busy planning their futures, whereas I honestly can’t even imagine tomorrow. I think I like the sense of safety that only a dead end can offer.

  There is that picture Dad took on my first day—the last day I saw you—where I’m standing outside the student center, the place they told us would be “command central” or whatever, where we’d be spending all of our time outside of class, checking our mailboxes and praying for packages, or playing fucking PINBALL, or getting quarters for the laundry, or watching movies, or just generally loitering around with our backpacks, being coeds. I never go in there. My roommate, Surprise, whom you guys didn’t get to meet because you left too early—that’s actually her name, by the way, because she was supposed to be a boy but came out a girl—checks my mail for me. In the picture I am squinting and doing that ugly thing with my jaw. I seem to be saying, “1993, what else you got?” Dad took that picture and must have developed the roll because the next week I got it in the mail with a note that said “First day memento, Love Dad.” It’s funny how a picture of me reminds me only of you.

  I thought it was odd that he sent it to me, tried to imagine him putting it in an envelope and addressing it—looking up my address, carefully copying it down—and I couldn’t, at least not without feeling sad and sorry for him, the same way I’ve felt watching baggers at the supermarket handling eggs with great care. I guess it was that feeling that prompted me to call him to say thanks. Thanks, too, for the book of stamps he included with the photo. And it was when I asked to speak to you that I knew you were gone.

  Anyway, I’ve never had a pen pal, but this seems as good a time as any to try it out. I’m good at remembering details and I have a lot of time to record them. Though “pen pal” suggests a back-and-forth that’s impossible here. Lucky me, then. Now I have unlimited space to talk about my favorite subject besides you: me!!!

  Love

  ME
<
br />   (Agnes)

  Surprise asked me, “Is it okay if we don’t talk in the morning? Like not even ‘hey’ or ‘have a good day’?” Then she told me a story about how her dad used to drive her to school, and he’d have on talk radio, and he’d ask her little questions, and one day she sort of blew up, snapped off the radio, and told him that she wasn’t awake yet, and she just wanted it to be quiet. They drove in silence for the next two years, but she said she felt so guilt-ridden that they might as well have been talking. “It was so loud inside my head, you know?”

  I know, I tell her, and leave it at that. I don’t say how silence seems to be a member of my family. I like Surprise too much to burden her. Or maybe even more than I like her, I want her to like me. In either case, I wish we slept in the same bed sometimes.

  It’s late afternoon and I’m on my way to English, wondering if I should skip it, trying to remember how many I’ve skipped. I see the boy from my philosophy class coming toward me. I have an unbridled desire for him that wearies me and takes up a lot of my time. My face feels out of control. I concentrate on my shoes, the six-eye Doc Martens I bought with the money I’d saved babysitting the horrible Nolans, and remember my mother’s arched eyebrows when she saw them (“Those?”). I study the ground right before each shoe hits it.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  I keep walking. He slows down a little as if to chat, and I move faster. I want to turn around so badly that walking feels like pushing through the heaviest revolving door in the world, but I keep going. I don’t trust myself around him. When I get to the humanities building, I stop.

  This boy, this thing of beauty—I call him Tea Rose.

  Dear Mom,

  I go through Surprise’s stuff all the time but it’s so disappointing. Almost lurid in its boringness. She has one sexy pair of underwear that still has its tags on. There are cards and letters from her parents and aunts and stuff. In one drawer is just sheets of tissue paper, which she uses when she packs to go home. She wraps her nice sweaters and skirts in tissue. It smells faintly like her perfume, Love’s Baby Soft.

  I think I found your diary too young. I wasn’t ready for it. I don’t remember much of what was inside but I mean I wasn’t ready for the fact that you had one. Knowing you had a secret life still haunts me. As a result, everyone’s secret life—all the things I can’t see, not because they are innately invisible but because they are deliberately hidden—consumes me.

  Last time I flipped through your diary, scanning it like I was a metal detector, was a while ago. I remember, in particular, the way you never ended a sentence. That you seemed exclusively to use dashes and ellipses. I guess I have a natural aversion to endings too.

  …Agnes

  It’s Friday night. I have to write a paper on one of the following topics: the theory of forms, Cartesian dualism, the Zeitgeist, or Kant’s categorical imperative. What I want to write about instead is physicalized loneliness, my dead brother Simon, waiting as a form of punishment and/or prayer. Or some combination thereof.

  Everyone is at the bars or off-campus parties and I want to be somewhere too. I get a Coke from the vending machine in my dorm. I was hoping to find boys with whiskey hanging around but there’s not even a trace of them, no beer can tabs or baseball caps in the kitchenette. I put the Coke in my coat pocket and leave the building. Outside is chilly and has the hormonal whiff of the weekend to come.

  At the start of our first philosophy class, our professor asked us for some examples of philosophical ideas in everyday life. Fortune cookies, someone said. “To be or not to be,” another person offered (but couldn’t name the play it came from). Tea Rose raised his hand. “If a tree falls in the forest,” he said. I’d been thinking the exact same thing.

  Overhead, the spindly tree branches look as though they are trying and failing to hold hands in the stiff breeze. I can’t decide if my mother is the tree or the forest or if I am one or the other. And she’s just the person who’s not there.

  Dear Mom,

  Last night I wandered around campus in your long coat with a half-empty Coke, looking for booze. I knew where a couple off-campus parties were, so I went to one. Surprise was there, excited. She just really likes college. Her eyes were a little drunk and she put her arm around my waist to “introduce me to people” but she was still mostly her tidy self. I broke away after a few minutes and found a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen. Most people were hovering around the keg. I poured whiskey into my half-empty Coke can and put the bottle back. What did Dad used to say? If you see the glass as half empty, just fill it? I was always puzzled by that whole scenario. Whether it’s half empty or half full, it’s still only half of whatever you might want it to be.

  I wanted Tea Rose. I wanted his whereabouts. I thought for a second that he was at the party but it was some other tall boy. The disappointment of this was enough to make me want to leave, so I headed back toward campus, keeping my head down.

  I always hear Simon when I’m alone at night. “What the fuck are you walking around by yourself for? Do you have the mace I gave you? How are you going to defend yourself, Agnes?” When did he first give me mace? Do you remember? I think it was the Christmas that I was eight. Ten years ago now. And he’s been gone for less than three—the three longest, shortest years.

  I’m a slow sipper and the whiskey was doing its thing to warm me up. It’s midterm time and the library stays open until midnight or later. I always think about staying in the library after it closes, spending the night there, like those kids did at the Met in that book I loved. I want to do this with Tea Rose. I want to do so many things, inarticulable things. Not like “go hot air ballooning in the Alps” type of stuff but like “sleep in a library next to a boy.”

  I have to write a philosophy paper. If you wrote me back, I’d just turn in your letter.

  Agnes

  I get a B+ on my philosophy paper. There are red checkmarks and plus signs in the margins, a couple “!”s. The note at the end says, A fascinating essay, though gravely lacking in source material and proper citations. I’m eager to see what you could do with more research. There’s fifteen minutes left of class and I’m upset that Tea Rose isn’t here today. His paper is sitting on the corner of the professor’s desk along with the other absentees’. I’m thinking about how I can get it for him, deliver it later, when a tall blond girl raises her hand and says she lives in his dorm.

  “I think he’s sick today,” she says, smiling sweetly. “I’ll bring it to him.” She looks like one of those women in commercials for feminine products. I picture her itchy and rash-ridden and try to calm down. I leave class to go to the bathroom and stare at my face for a while. I have no idea what I look like, even looking at myself. Sometimes I wished for the blankness the girls in magazines had, the nothing gaze, the empty eyes, as though they’d unlocked the meaning of life, and the meaning of life was meaningless, and there was nothing left to do. But my face always seemed vaguely worried, searching, my dark eyes somehow darker than they needed to be, my thick eyebrows an additional source of shadow, my longish hair tangled by nature and heavier than they made brushes for. It just doesn’t seem like a face, I think to myself, that could ever set anyone at ease. I decide against going back to class and head to work early instead.

  Mr. Figgs, the dining hall director, has asked me several times whether I want to work “front of house,” serving food or replenishing the salad bar, which I hear are the more coveted positions. I’m happy washing dishes in the back. The time goes fast, and it’s rare that anyone tells me what to do or asks to give them a hand. I wear industrial-grade latex gloves up to my elbows and keep the water scorching. Today Terrence is mopping a pool of salad dressing off the floor. There is the overwhelming smell of Caesar. Surprise, who has no scholarship or work study, often asks me about the smells. “How gross is it back there? How bad is it on taco night?”

  The thing I like about this work is how uneventful it is. It’s a spill here or a sh
ortage there, but mostly it’s predictable in ways that other things can’t be. Like if a heavily manned large-scale kitchen could just be the context for every situation, we’d all know exactly what to do with ourselves. When I get back to my room after work, Surprise is there, folding laundry.

  “Your dad called. You should call him back.”

  “Did he leave a specific message?”

  “Well, he said that he got something about Parents’ Weekend in the mail, some hotel rates or something, and wanted to talk to you about coming.”

  “Oh.” I take a piece of Juicy Fruit from the pile of packs on my dresser.

  Surprise is holding a very small sock. I can’t understand why it’s so small. “That sock is tiny,” I say.

  “It stretches. It’s for working out. So did you not tell your parents or dad or whatever about Parents’ Weekend?”

  Even knowing that the sock can stretch out does not help me come to terms with its size. “Can you put that on right now? I can’t believe that it fits a human foot.”

  “Okay, Miss Change-the-Subject. Hope you don’t mind but I told your dad that they should definitely come up. We could do a lunch on Saturday or something, if you don’t have to work. By the way, you smell like…mayonnaise?”

  “Sorry.”

  Surprise steps out of her fluffy slipper and pulls the sock on. Incredibly, it fit.

  “Why can’t they make all clothes like that? We’d have so much more room to work with.”

  She shrugs, taking off the sock and finding its mate. “It’d probably be really expensive.”

  I put a few books in my bag.

  “Where are you going? Call your dad.”

  Dear Mom,

  So what I want to know is, is “leaving” a verb or a personality trait? Like, do you do it because you are it, or are you it because you do it?

  I’ve had two Simon dreams this week. How about you? Do you even dream?