Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [72]
She went back into the stall and banged around until she’d gotten the tights off and the ballet flats back on. She looked down at her bare legs. They were pale, but at least she’d shaved them the day before. How cold was London in February? She looked down again. Her skin was already mottled and goose pimply. I am terrible at this, she thought.
She brushed her hair. She put on mascara and lipstick. She tried to put on eye shadow, but it made her look like she’d been in a fist-fight. She washed it off and tried again. By the third time, she gave up on the eye shadow. She put on gold hoop earrings.
After several dozen people had come and gone, babies had cried and been changed, and a toilet had overflowed, Lena gazed unhappily at the final product. She reached into her bag and took out the envelope with the precious address.
I should call first, she thought. But she didn’t have the number, and according to a live, living London operator it was indeed unlisted. She felt idiotically grateful talking to a real voice on the other end of the London telephone.
It was weird to just show up at his address. But it was weird to do this in the first place. It was weird for Tibby to have written Kostos a letter. It was weird for Lena to travel thousands of miles to deliver it in person when she didn’t even know what was in it. But this was her project, and she was doing it, God help her, in a red dress.
She pictured Tibby’s face as it looked in the graduation picture that haunted her every day from her computer screen. I wish I could have loved you better than this, Lena thought, but this is what I’ve got.
Don’t wear fear
or nobody will know you’re there
You’re there.
—Cat Stevens
London was cold in February. That wasn’t surprising. Lena sat in the back of the train with her threadbare wool coat wrapped around her. She practically ran, regretting the decision to ditch the tights, from the train station to the Underground.
She had mapped this route carefully several days before and checked it over many times since. It involved the airport train to the Underground, and a few bursts of walking in between.
Kostos lived in a place called Eaton Square, off the King’s Road. When he’d lived in London long before, after the summer they’d met, he’d lived in a place called Brixton, over a pub and diagonally across from a place called the Speedy Noodle. She remembered so distinctly the feeling in her chest when she saw a letter come through the mail slot with the address written on it in Kostos’s neat-for-a-boy handwriting. She remembered so distinctly the feeling of writing that address out carefully on one envelope after another.
Brixton Hill, Lambeth. That was the start of a poem for her. It captured a feeling. Eaton Square, less so. It was newer to her, and time and memory helped bestow poetry. It was a little colder-sounding, she thought, less evocative. It had its power, though. How many times had she stared at the address, trying to picture it, trying to picture the Kostos who lived there and the moods and ranges of the place?
She spent a few moments orienting herself after she emerged from the Tube stop called Sloane Square. She walked the wrong way a couple of times before she found a street name that seemed right.
She found the street and a row of houses with relevant numbers that appeared to be going in the right direction.
Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. She stopped and checked the map she had printed out. His house was apparently five numbers farther down a row of stunningly posh and handsome town houses. Did that mean he lived in one of these?
She slowed her pace. Eaton Square was seeming colder by the minute. Her legs were not simply cold, but numb. She checked her map and then the address as he’d written it on the envelope again.
She tentatively walked past another house and another, wondering if these were the kinds