She turned on the light. The piles of clothing that she had nudged aside weren’t things her father was dealing with; they were mountain ranges of her own making. The room was exactly as she remembered it, but worse. It smelled like cigarette smoke and Calyx, the sweet and bright perfume that she’d worn all through high school and into college. She closed the door behind her and then stepped gingerly over the piles of clothes until she had crossed the floor and reached her bed, the bed that she had woken up in.
Her flowered Laura Ashley sheets were in a tangle, as if a tornado had touched down just here, on top of her twin mattress. Alice sat down and pulled her squishiest pillow, the one with the Care Bears pillowcase, onto her lap. The room was small, and the bed took up nearly half the space. The walls were covered with pictures cut out of magazines, a collage that Alice had worked on continually from when she was about ten until the day she left for college. It looked like psychotic wallpaper—here was Courtney Love kissing Kurt Cobain’s cheek on the cover of Sassy, here was James Dean sitting on a tractor, here was shirtless Morrissey, here was shirtless Keanu Reeves, here was shirtless Drew Barrymore, her hands covering her breasts and daisies in her hair. There were lipstick kisses throughout, where Alice had blotted her lips on the wall instead of a tissue—Toast of New York, Rum Raisin, Cherries in the Snow. A giant Reality Bites poster, bought from a bin at the video store for ten dollars, was now the centerpiece, with other things taped to it and over it, leaving only Winona totally untouched. There were words written behind the movie stars—movie, trust, jobs—and Alice had added her own: high school, art, kissing. Someone had tagged over Ben Stiller’s face—Alice’s friend Andrew, her brain supplied a second later. Almost every single one of her male friends in high school had had a tag and pretended to write graffiti, even if most of them only wrote it on pages in their notebooks, not on the walls of the subway. Alice turned toward the nightstand and pulled open the small, rickety drawer: her diary, a lighter, a pack of Newport Lights, a tin of Altoids, a few pens, some hair elastics, some loose change, and a package of photos. It was like she’d just woken up in a museum where she was the only exhibit. Everything in her room was exactly as it had been when she was sixteen.
Alice opened the flap and lifted out the stack of photos. They weren’t from any particular event, as far as she could tell—it was Sam sitting on her bed; Sam talking on the pay phone at school; pictures of herself that she’d taken in the mirror, a black hole where the flash had gone off; Tommy in the student lounge at Belvedere, covering his face. She thought it was Tommy. So many of the boys at Belvedere had dressed identically: enormous jeans, tops that would have looked preppy if they’d been three sizes smaller. Alice could hear her father turn on the radio in the kitchen and start to wash dishes.
“I’m just going to take a shower, Dad!” she called out. Alice had turned on her heels and escaped, which must have seemed enough like her teenage self that Leonard just shrugged and sat back down to finish his breakfast. What did her voice sound like? Did it sound the same? Alice caught her reflection in the cheap full-sized mirror that hung on the back of her closet door.
Every second of her teenage years, Alice had thought that she was average. Average looks, average brain, average body. She could draw better than most people. She couldn’t do math for shit. When they had to run during gym, Alice had to take breaks to walk and clutch her side. But what she saw in the mirror now made her burst into tears. Sure, Alice had complained about getting older—she’d made self-deprecating remarks to Emily on her birthdays, things like that, and she’d felt it in her back and her knees and seen it in the lines by her eyes, but on the whole, she’d felt exactly the same as she had when she was a teenager. She’d been wrong.
Alice stood in front of the mirror and put a finger up, E.T. style, to greet herself. Her hair was parted in the middle and hung past her shoulders. There was a small pimple growing on her chin, threatening to break through the surface, but otherwise, Alice’s face looked like a Renaissance painting. Her skin was creamy and smooth, her eyes were bright and big. The apples of her cheeks were comically pink.
“I look like a fucking cherub angel baby,” Alice whispered to herself. She looked down at her flat stomach. “What the fuck was wrong with me?” She started to hyperventilate. Her pink cassette player was at the foot of her bed, its antenna extended. Alice hugged it to her chest. The little marker was just past the 100—Z100, 100.3, a terrible radio station she had listened to probably every day of her childhood. She had made so many mixtapes for boys she had crushes on, boys who she hadn’t thought about in decades—and for Tommy Joffey, and for Sam, but also for a thousand other people, each song a secret message, and at least half of them Mariah Carey, who wasn’t even subtle. The radio had gone on to live in the bathroom for a little while, where Leonard would sometimes listen to music while he was in the bathtub, but Alice hadn’t seen it in more than a decade. She pulled it tighter, as if just holding it, she could hear every song she’d ever loved.