Of course, she’d promised to keep her aunt informed.
“She’s more like a girlfriend.” Darcy cleared her throat. “In fact, she’s pretty much exactly like a girlfriend.”
“How interesting.” Lalana took a bite of lentils and chewed thoughtfully. “Have you told . . .”
“Not yet.” She hadn’t even told Nisha, whose texts were too easy for their mother to stumble across. Darcy wasn’t the only snoop in the family.
“But you will?”
“Of course. But face-to-face.” That gave Darcy until Thanksgiving, at least.
“You know they won’t be upset, right? At least, not Annika.” Lalana shrugged, never quite sure about her sister’s husband. “And Grandma P. might find it . . . challenging.”
Darcy blinked. She’d forgotten all about Grandma P. and the uncles, not to mention Mom’s relatives back in India. Only a few of her cousins had ever visited America, but news about Darcy and Nisha seemed to scatter across the subcontinent like quicksilver dropped from a great height.
But all that was eight thousand miles away. What mattered was here.
“It’s not that I’m worried about what Mom and Dad will think.” This was true, but it was more complicated than that, and it took Darcy a moment to continue. “It’s just, I never used to do things they didn’t expect. And now that’s pretty much all I do. They probably think I’m trying to rebel or something. That’s not what this is. This is real.”
Aunt Lalana gave her a smile. “There’s that certainty again.”
Darcy didn’t know what to say to that. There were whole days when she wasn’t certain of anything. Whether she was a real writer. If she would ever find the right ending for Afterworlds. How Imogen could stand to be with someone as prying, immature, and budget-challenged as her.
But . . . “I know who I love.”
A wistful sigh escape Lalana. “That’s such a big word, Darcy. And so distracting. I thought you were going to focus on writing.”
“We write together, all the time. Imogen makes me better.”
Lalana must have heard the certainty in her voice, because she only nodded.
“And you’re not going to tell my parents? Really?”
“Darcy, that’s for you to do.” Lalana reached across the table and took her hand. “It’s a big part of your growing up. I’d never steal it from you.”
“Thanks,” Darcy said. It was a nice sentiment, but it made her feel very young. “I’ll find the right time.”
“I’m sure you will. When do I get to meet her?”
“Anytime. You’ll like her.”
“I’m sure I will. But in the meantime, since your parents don’t even know about this yet, it’s my auntly duty to learn every detail.” Lalana leaned back into her chair, interlacing her fingers. “Leave nothing out.”
Darcy felt a smile settling on her face. She had plenty of details to share. The way Imogen’s hands carved the air when she talked about writing. The way she collected scandalous gossip about artists, even ones who’d been dead two hundred years. How she never interrupted, no matter how long Darcy took to finish a sentence. The rings she wore on different days.
The conversation lasted all afternoon, and in the end there was only one thing that Darcy left out, because Aunt Lalana really wouldn’t understand the fact that Darcy didn’t know her girlfriend’s real name.
* * *
Sometimes Imogen went out all night without Darcy.
Not that Imogen wanted to leave her behind—it was Darcy’s idea. As much as she liked Imogen’s friends, she worried that her fake Pennsylvania driver’s license wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny at a serious nightclub. And it was awkward, always being the youngest. There was still so much that Darcy didn’t know, nuances of politics and gender and language that a certain kind of person learned about at college and talked about in bars. Darcy always found herself a step behind. Besides, she mostly wanted to talk about books and writing when she went out drinking, but Imogen’s friends came from all corners of the city, not just publishing, thanks to the jobs in art galleries and small websites she’d worked at over the past fourteen months.
Also, Nisha’s budget always came along and sat there in the corner of the bar like a noisy ghost, sometimes laughing at her, sometimes shrieking and rattling its chains.
So when Imogen headed out with her posse, Darcy usually stayed home. As their lives became more mixed and intermingled, she often found herself left behind not in apartment 4E, but at Imogen’s, where she was free to snoop all she wanted. This was sometimes a bad thing.
Imogen, it turned out, collected matchbooks.
She collected lots of free and found objects—transit timetables, paint samples, discarded polaroids—but the matchbooks were her great obsession. Darcy had seen Imogen taking them from restaurants and coffee shops, and had heard Gen’s laments about being too young for the glory days before smoking bans, when every sort of business had given matchbooks away as advertising. But until poking around in her girlfriend’s closet, Darcy hadn’t realized how deep the compulsion went.
Imogen kept her collection in clear plastic boxes. Each box was packed tight, carefully arranged so the commercial logos and phone numbers could be read from the outside, the interiors stuffed with duplicates and generics. There was a stack of these boxes in the closet, enough matches to burn down the whole city. Not that Imogen would ever light them, any more than a comic collector would cut up the pages of old issues.
As Darcy browsed the plastic boxes, she wondered what the story was behind this or that matchbook. When had Imogen eaten at a café out in Brighton Beach? Why had she visited a carwash in Queens? Why on earth would a dance academy have promotional matches?
Then, while snooping one night in late August, she found something even more intriguing at the bottom of the pile: a school yearbook from 2008.
Like any yearbook, it was full of thumbprint-size photos of the senior class, each with a name beneath it. Darcy did a quick calculation—2008 was Imogen’s final year in high school.
Darcy slammed the book shut, breathing hard. Under one of those photos would be Imogen’s real name. This wasn’t just innocent snooping anymore.
For a moment, Darcy thought she was about to put the yearbook back into its spot beneath the pile of matches. She even felt a surge of virtuousness flow through her, the contented rush of having done the right thing. But then she opened up the book again and began to examine the student photos from the beginning, page by careful page.
The school was mostly white kids, the boys dressed in collared shirts for senior picture day, the girls wearing a little too much makeup. None of them looked like Imogen’s younger self, or even like people who could be her friends and classmates. They seemed to be from a different universe than Imogen Gray. And there were no signatures on the photos, no inside jokes or inspirational sayings scrawled in the margins by friends.
Maybe this yearbook was simply a discarded object kept for research purposes, a source of character names and bad Midwestern haircuts. Or maybe it had been left here as a trap to torment a certain nosy girlfriend.
But Darcy kept reading, noting the names beneath the blank spaces labeled “No Photograph Available.” It would be just like Imogen to skip senior picture day.
And then, on the very last page of photos, a familiar combination of letters arrested Darcy’s eye—Imogen.
Imogen White.
“No way,” Darcy whispered, staring at the picture.
The girl had a wide smile and big eyes, chunky glasses and black hair. Her face was too round to be Imogen’s, her nose too small. It was a coincidence, nothing more. Imogen wasn’t that rare a name.
But White and Gray . . .
Darcy kept searching, past the senior portraits and into the photos of activities and clubs and sports teams, looking for anyone who looked like her Imogen. Surely no one was friendless enough to escape the relentless cameras of a high school yearbook team.
Long minutes later she found the photo. It was in the Theatrical Arts section, a shot of a crowded stage with Imogen White and Imogen Gray next to each other in old-fashioned dresses. Beside the photo was the yearbook’s only handwritten note:
Sorry to say it, babe, but you suck at accents and look stupid in a dress.
Love forever,
—Firecat
Darcy blinked, remembering something her Imogen had said the first night they’d met. My first girlfriend was a pyro.
It was like being punched, and at first Darcy didn’t even know why.
Of course Imogen had had girlfriends before Darcy. This girl in high school and a whole blogging career’s worth in college. That fact had never bothered Darcy at all.
But this was something more. Imogen White was the original pyromancer, the spark of a whole trilogy, and when Gen had re-created herself as a novelist, she’d taken Firecat’s first name. The jealousy she felt wasn’t about sex or love, Darcy realized. It was about writing.
She lay back on the bed, suddenly exhausted.
If she were in a detective novel, Darcy knew, she would now go through the yearbook again, scribbling down all the names beneath “No Photo Available,” then google them one by one with the appropriate search terms to find the answer.
But Imogen’s old name didn’t matter anymore. It was her new name—her real name, she always insisted—that told the story.
Darcy looked again at the picture of Imogen’s girlfriend, muse, and namesake.
Where was she now? Was her love really forever? Had all those matchbooks been collected for her?
Darcy knew she should be wondering something else entirely, like how she had become such a seething bag of jealousy. This relationship was less than two months old, and already she’d managed to make herself envious of someone who’d been Imogen’s girlfriend when Darcy was twelve years old.
She groaned aloud. Her body ached, as if her emotions were wired straight into her muscles. It hurt to breathe, to move, to think. How had everything gotten so intense?
She pulled herself from Imogen’s bed and took a shower, hoping to wash away her jealousy. But the streams of water felt like ice-hot needles.
The thought of publishing—of the whole world reading Afterworlds—had always made Darcy feel na**d and exposed, but loving had left her skinless.
* * *
Imogen got home, ruffled and drunken, an hour before the sun came up.
“You’re awake,” she said, her smile lighting the dark.
Darcy had been awake all night, thrashing and suffering, and by now was tangled in the sheets like a dreaming toddler. She’d put the yearbook back into the closet hours ago, beneath carefully restacked boxes of matchbooks.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Couldn’t write either. I’m useless when you’re not here.”
“You’re sweet.” Imogen’s voice was alluringly raw, as always after hours of fierce conversation over loud music. She smelled like the world outside, sweat and smoke, spilled drinks and dancing. She always smelled beautiful.
“Did you have a good time, babe?” Darcy asked.
Imogen hesitated, drunkenly wary for a moment. That last word had slipped out of Darcy, who’d never called anyone “babe” in her life. It had come from Firecat’s note, of course. But this still wasn’t some detective novel, in which a single clue revealed everything.
Imogen only nodded and sat down heavily on the bed. She leaned over Darcy for a kiss, which tasted of coffee and chocolate. On late drinking nights, she and her friends usually had dessert in an all-night diner before going home.
As Imogen pulled off her shirt, Darcy knew she had to speak up now, or she never would. She had to trust her girlfriend to understand.
“Um, I have a confession. I was snooping tonight.”