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"What?" Eleanor says.
"I said, I can't do this anymore," Carissa repeats hoarsely.
Eleanor is sitting on one end of a park bench, knees pulled up to her chest. Carissa mirrors her position on the other side, chin resting on top. If either of them moved just an inch, their legs would brush. Neither do.
"Is this—Is this about Drea?" Eleanor asks, as though it would be about anything else. Carissa looks away.
Because it's always about Drea. Eleanor remembers when she first saw her, how time seemed to freeze as Drea cast her that carefree smile across the room. Or maybe that was Eleanor's imagination, thirteen-year-old romantic that she is, always wanting a love like the movies where they kiss sweet and slow in the rain. But to Eleanor, Drea shone like the sun: gleaming white hot from her lofty place in the heavens, attracting everyone to her warmth.
Act One: Eleanor as the moth, Drea the flame.
It was a Wednesday, Eleanor remembers clearly, when she sidled up next to Drea in the lunch line, stuttering her way through a pathetic introduction, and Drea listened. Not like how people usually listen to Eleanor, with eyes glazed over and the occasional hum. Drea let her ramble (and ramble and ramble and ramble), and she smiled.
One week later, standing side-by-side as they practiced archery in the park, Eleanor told her, "I think I like girls."
Two mornings later, under the blazing heat of the July sun, the girls at Big Beach Day Camp were whispering, "Did you hear? Nosy Nora assaulted Drea Torres."
And three days later, weighed down by those crushing rumors, Carissa told Eleanor that they needed to talk.
Here they are now, two teenage girls who look like death. Carissa's hair, which used to cascade gracefully over her shoulder, now falls in ragged sheets around her face. Eleanor hasn't eaten since the bag of Cheetos that Drea offered her the morning of the fateful confession, and that vicious edge of hunger is what's keeping her upright. Too exhausted to think, too tormented to rest. All because of Drea.
Maybe Eleanor was being self-centered, then, believing that everything would always work out for her. Narcissists are too busy thinking about themselves to realize they're being played.
So instead of no, what the hell, we can figure this out, you can't seriously be leaving when I need you most, Eleanor tells Carissa: "Okay."
Carissa blinks, wide eyes underscored by grayish shadows. Faintly, Eleanor recalls that quote about windows to the soul, and how she'd never tire of looking at Carissa, if only she stayed.
But nothing has ever been constant in Eleanor Levetan's life, and so she stands, careful not to let their bare, sunburned skin touch. "Okay," she repeats.
"H-Heaven rests—uh, rest them now," Eleanor reads.
If there's one thing Eleanor hates more than being called on, it's being called on to play the part of Macduff in front of her English class. Mrs. Dunbar insists on them going the whole nine yards: standing before the SmartBoard, mimicking the characters' actions, pouring emotion into it like they're theatre kids who will peak during their shoddy 10th-grade performance of Dear Evan Hansen.
For Eleanor, it's not the intrinsic shame that comes with performing in front of twenty judgmental high schoolers so much as the intrinsic shame of being seen. Her parents have been dragging her to therapy once a week since the day she fainted from malnutrition coming down the stairs and yet, Eleanor will never be the same After Drea—since yes, that one moment has split her life in two, Before Eleanor Crossed Paths With Drea and After. The Before, when Eleanor walked through school hallways with the awkwardness of a newborn deer; and The After, when Eleanor hides in the bathroom until passing time is over and she can head to class alone.
"Be this the whetstone of your sword!" cries the other actor: a dark-skinned, dark-eyed boy who definitely qualifies as a Dear Evan Hansen kid. Eleanor hasn't been paying attention to him, but he's gesturing so wildly now that it's difficult not to look his way. "Let grief convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it!"
Mrs. Dunbar nods, because of course she does. "Yes, yes! Channel his rage, just like that," she instructs Eleanor. Eleanor valiantly resists the urge to roll her eyes.
"O, I could play the wo-woman, with mine eyes," Eleanor manages, "and braggart with my tah-tongue."
She thinks of Drea, with her saccharine smile and cocked eyebrow. Drea, daring Eleanor to lash out against the rumors, knowing that it would only prove her right. How could she have ever trusted the girl who coined Nosy Nora in the first place?
"But, gentle heavens," Eleanor mutters, "cut short all intermission; front to front."
Eleanor told her therapist about the incident with as little detail as possible. The woman nodded, as though she still remembered what it was like to be thirteen and feel as though the world was crumbling around her, and told her to find some healthier ways to grieve. Time heals all wounds, or some bullshit like that. None of her suggestions ever sat well with Eleanor; to sweep something so brutally life-defining under the rug like that was never her style.
"Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself," Eleanor continues, "Within my sword's length set him."
Eleanor has never been particularly prone to violence. She got into one fight in middle school, slapping the hell out of some girl whose name and transgression she cannot recall, and decided that was enough for her. But there are other ways to break a person—Eleanor speaks from experience—and she fantasizes, for the first time, what it would be like to see Drea Torres weep. Perfect makeup smudged, hair in disarray. The sun extinguished.
"If he 'scape," Eleanor says, screaming without quite knowing why, "Heaven forgive him too!"
The room goes quiet. Eleanor's blood is buzzing with something new and ugly and right. Mrs. Dunbar gawks before shaking free of her stupor.
"Excellent, Nora! I could really feel your passion."
So this is how Act Two begins: not with any grand show of rage, Eleanor sharpening knives before a tattered printout of Drea Torres's smarmy smirk, no. Rather, it is with her carefully working Oscar Winner Olivia Colman's limbs through an elegant yellow robe.
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," she says absently.
Oscar Winner Olivia Colman gives her a blank look and refuses to budge.
"I know, I know; that one's pretty basic." Eleanor shakes a handful of cockroaches out from the bottle beside Colman's tank and offers them to her like an olive branch. "But I'm making sense, right?"
In response, Oscar Winner Olivia Colman devours the roaches out of Eleanor's hand. Eleanor sighs.
Vengeance is a nebulous thing, a feeble rivulet trickling down her spine when she wakes up from a nightmare. The same nightmare that she's been having for the past two years, really: Drea Torres ridiculing her in a thousand different ways, always ending in that embrace, that whispered "I understand, thank you for telling me," that knife that twists in her back. Out, out.
It's in those hours that Eleanor thinks about preying on Drea's vanity, exploiting her darkest secrets. She's heard about the posse that's formed around her, the glamorous doll of a boyfriend she has. A plan has amalgamated in her mind, though not ready to be put into practice. Not yet.
Eleanor's doing better now, though. Drea no longer eclipses every waking hour, only runs a jagged blade against her side once in a while to remind her that she's there. Eleanor has even mustered up the courage to make a few friends—that is, sit at the same end of the lunch table with the kids who still play with Legos and talk excitedly about Cartoon Network shows. The kids who haven't gotten the memo to move on, just like her; the only difference is that they're having fun.
She also has a bookshelf of Shakespeare: Caesar and Richard III and, of course, Macbeth. Mostly they're simply entertaining reads, but there's a way they speak to some visceral experience of hers as well. Something about watching people fall apart.
Maybe there's something to the genre, too. Eleanor wouldn't know; symbolism was never her strong suit.
Colman makes a sort of rattling noise, so Eleanor gives her a few pets on the head and decides to give up on the dress-up project.
Eleanor touches the side of her nose experimentally.
She's gotten her nosejob, a modification large enough to be noticeable but not enough to completely change the appearance of the rest of her features. Now her nose slopes straight down, upturning slightly at the end. If she holds a hand before the lower half of her face, she looks like herself; if she moves it away, she is pretty and demure and nothing like Nosy Nora.
"O heaven, the vanity of wretched fools," Eleanor says, and she laughs.
"You look beautiful, darling," her mom had said, plucking a lock of hair out of her face. She's grown it out over the past few years, a tangled mess that tumbles down her back.
"I know, mom," Eleanor replied, "but still, I think it'd be a nice look on me. Don't you?"
Her mom gave her a sympathetic look, the kind that made Eleanor's skin crawl. She despised being treated like a kicked puppy, sixteen and still feeling thirteen. She knew what her mom would say before she said it: "Is this about those girls at camp?"
Was it? Eleanor couldn't explain why she wanted this so desperately. The rumors and taunts have dissipated, and That Day is so very distant now, a dried ink-blot on the pages of her life. Yet still she pestered her mom to let her get that surgery, only a week after her birthday.
Eleanor smiled and said no, she didn't think about them at all.
Here she is now, standing in front of the mirror, feeling as though she's been hollowed out with a spoon. Not happy, not angry, not sad. It's a curious sensation, looking into the mirror and seeing not-quite-you stare back. But Eleanor should be used to that by now, right?
Sometimes she does worry that she'll lose who she is, looking this thing that seems bigger than herself in the face. Who was Eleanor Before Drea, and who is she now? Was there ever really a separation, or did Drea only shed light on her own inner cruelty?
...How terrible it is, to allow Drea Torres to shape her body as well as her soul. They've walked separate paths for three years and yet, Eleanor cannot rid herself of her influence.
Drea is a part of her now, for better or for worse.
Eleanor has imagined her reunion with Drea going one of thirty-six ways.
Most of them entail something small going wrong: Drea miraculously finds someone else to drive home with, or she ignores Eleanor's goading, or she doesn't show up at all. There's one scenario where Eleanor, unable to contain her rage upon seeing that oh-so-punchable smirk, lunges at Drea and strangles her in front of every other camper. A tragedy played out on-stage.
Instead, however, the event proceeds according to script. Their eyes meet once, across the pool, and Drea scowls as she jerks her head to the side. Still pissed about Max, probably. Adorable. Eleanor sidles up to Drea, implicates Erica for spreading the video around camp, and bites back a laugh during their confrontation. Of course the only person who has the right to spread life-ruining rumors is Drea Torres, goddess among women.
It's hilarious, really. Four years have irrevocably changed Eleanor, tempered her into an unforgiving weapon, and through it all Drea Torres has remained precisely the same.
Except... not quite.
This Drea will brush her hair from her forehead with a startling gentleness or reserve a secret smile for her across the room, all while playing it off as a casual gesture. She still has that wicked twist to her mouth—and Eleanor would be a liar if she said her eyes didn't linger there on more than once—but there exists something softer there, too, born of that only slightly shaken self-assurance she possesses. Or perhaps Eleanor has not changed much at all, still that gangly teenage girl who follows any form of affection like a sunflower.
No matter. Eleanor Levetan has been waiting for this moment for four years, and she's sworn unflinchingly to follow through—
"I kissed Tara," Drea admits.
Eleanor sits upright so that she's looking down at Drea, eyebrows raised in intrigue. They're in Drea's bedroom, and this is one of those things they've resolved not to talk about, how Drea drives them to her home blasting Olivia Rodrigo—'Cause who am I, if not exploited?—and how they fall asleep side-by-side, ribs pressed against each other like fingers laced together, like they're middle-schoolers having sleepovers all over again. No, this is a thing they'll never talk about, because Drea must always, always be the one in control.
Drea takes a deep breath.
"It was... during the only time I'd ever broken up with Max. Besides now, obviously," she continues. "We were ranting, you know: 'why are men like this,' 'why do we have to be attracted to men in the first place,' that kind of thing."
"As you do," Eleanor says wryly.
Drea snorts. "Yeah. And Tara was like, 'do you wanna make sure?' Like, whether we only liked men or—yeah."
Eleanor inhales sharply. This conversation nauseates her, all things considered; thirteen-year-old Drea snarling lesbian echoes in her mind. She could pretend to fall asleep, let Drea curse her out for not paying attention, and feign ignorance in the morning. In fact, she should do that.
Instead, Eleanor tilts her face up to the ceiling, where plastic glow-in-the-dark stars have left faint marks in their absence, and says, "So? How did it go?"
Drea doesn't respond for a long time. Eleanor is drifting off for real by the time Drea says, so quietly that Eleanor questions whether she imagined it, "I liked it. It was... nothing like Max."
Eleanor bites back the condescending remarks that come to her tongue. This, too, she has no justification for. "Did you like Tara?"
"She was my best friend."
"That's not an answer, Drea." Eleanor musses her hair. Surprisingly, Drea doesn't snap at her, instead curling into a tighter ball beneath the comforter.
"...I think so," she says, even quieter than before. "But it—it wasn't like that for her. Or... maybe it was, but we both knew I was gonna crawl back to Max in the end. Fuck."
The image of a heartbroken Drea, watching half-helplessly as her best friend drew away from their kiss, should have made Eleanor rejoice. Indeed, Drea looks so fragile like this, a weeping angel with broken wings, and Eleanor could snap her in two, laugh and spit in her face and—
She finds herself not wanting to. Too dedicated to her own scheme, of course. Eleanor Levetan is in no rush.
"I'm sorry, Drea," she tells her. Is that what she is now?
Drea laughs again, more of a scornful exhale than anything. "Whatever. I don't know if it would have worked for people like us, anyway."
"Mm." Eleanor drums her fingers against her thigh. "If you could go back and try, at least—try to make things better, would you?"
Drea shifts so that her eyes meet Eleanor's, cheek still pressed against her ribs. Her warmth radiates through Eleanor's thin T-shirt. The flame to her moth.
"I'd like to. I have... a lot of regrets," Drea says softly. How Eleanor wishes that were true.
So there are things that Eleanor lets this Drea Torres keep: that story of how she'd cried the first night her mother hadn't tucked her in, working too late at the hospital; her insecurities about the shape of her cheekbones or the curve of her waist; her hatred of coffee and how she'll stop by Starbucks in the morning for a latte nonetheless, all to save face in front of Rosehill's social cannibals. These things don't belong to the Drea she hates, the sharp-eyed Drea she would see burnt to the ground, the thirteen-year-old Drea that betrayed thirteen-year-old Eleanor so carelessly.
Because Eleanor Levetan is an actress, first and foremost. Since That Day, she's driven a wedge between the girl whose best friend is a dress-wearing bearded dragon and the girl who has dreamed unwaveringly of seeing Drea in tatters for the past four years. No need to get tangled in—in whatever the hell this is.
(Nonetheless, she will later wonder whether Drea noticed that Eleanor was always pulling her punches. Willing to hit Drea with a car, but Eleanor be damned if she broadcasted what they shared in confidence. Maybe not. These things always seemed to go under her radar.)
The digital clock on the nightstand proclaims: 1:59 AM. Sleeping Beauty has drifted off by now, hair still perfect in the way it splays out beside her face. Eleanor combs her fingers through the strands and mutters, "Since I cannot prove a lover..."
It's late when Eleanor returns to her dorm, passing only a few people hanging out in Keeney Quad. She yawns a touch louder than necessary, jams her key into the lock, and shoves the door open to her room. It isn't particularly well-furnished, though "interior designer" is far from Eleanor's dream job, so she just dumps her backpack onto the bare floor next to her beat-up sneakers.
"How did you get in here?" she says to the shadowy figure sitting on her bed.
Drea leans back against the wall, moonlight slashed across her face like a milky-white scar. Her hunch was right, of course; no one else tilts their head in such an indescribably arrogant way. "Use your brain, Eleanor. I told your roommate I was a friend returning a book I borrowed from you. Andrea from your psych class, remember?"
Note to self: tell Jude not to let the Devil into the room next time, Eleanor thinks. She strides across the room and hops onto the bed next to her. "Is that your name? Andrea?"
"You're not the only person who has ever had a nickname," Drea says. "Anyway, you ask too many questions. Aren't you happy to see me?"
And Eleanor is, really. They talk every day, whether that manifests as Eleanor sending screenshots of passive-aggressive Tweets she calls "pertinent to Drea" or Drea ranting about the shitty guys in her classes while Eleanor cooks breakfast on the weekends. It never feels like quite enough for Eleanor, though, just as the hundred miles from Brown to Yale are too much to traverse without coming across as overly sentimental. Eleanor is the one who told Drea to take Max's spot there, actually—fuck up those other rich white girls, she had said, and she'd like to think it was the right call.
"Screw you," Eleanor says without any real malice.
Drea gasps, placing a mocking hand over her heart. "You wound me, Eleanor. Almost as much as when you hit me with your car."
Eleanor rolls her eyes. "Let's go outside. I'd rather not talk to you in my dorm room."
"So rude, too," Drea says. She trails after her nonetheless.
It's getting colder now, the kind of autumnal chill that creeps up on you until you realize suddenly that you can't feel your fingers anymore. Despite that, Drea is only wearing a satin halter top and jeans. Eleanor considers offering her cozy windbreaker to her, but that thought disturbs her more than when she wanted to drink Drea's tears. Maybe that says something about her.
They navigate the lamplit sidewalks around campus, the evening's quietude broken only by snippets of small talk until they arrive at a small building off the beaten path. Eleanor turns, presses her fingers to her lips in a hushed motion, and seizes the vines that tumble down the brick wall.
"Oh, fuck no," Drea hisses as Eleanor climbs up onto the roof.
"Don't be such a diva," Eleanor returns. Drea flips her off before approaching the wall. She tugs on a vine warily before, with no small amount of wariness, she also scales the side of the building.
There's a great view of the Green from here, a golden sea dappled by the light of the streetlamps, and the air smells nostalgia-sweet. Eleanor first came her to rage-scream in the dead of night, but after a passing group of professors collectively gave her an unamused look, she's settled for sitting here with her thoughts. This spot makes Eleanor feel like she's in middle school again—in a good way, somehow.
"This feels like a place people come to smoke," Drea says. "Isn't that, like, what you guys are known for?"
"Uh-huh. We're all tree-hugging hippies here," Eleanor replies. In reality, most everyone Eleanor's met is pleasant in a boring way, like I was my class's valedictorian and I don't know how to loosen up every once in a while. No one whose ashes she wants to burn. No one whose throat she wants to press her mouth against and—
Well.
Drea laughs suddenly, hands bracing against the edge of the rooftop. "Remember when we spiked the ring ceremony dinner with Carissa's weed?"
"How could I forget?" Eleanor talked to Carissa recently, to apologize for catching her in the crossfire of her feud with Drea. When she said she liked her—could have loved her, even—she wasn't lying. Carissa refused her apology, because even Eleanor's flowery words could never be enough to fix all the pain, but they were still cool. The reform place lets Carissa keep a pet snake, which she uses to harass Erica when she starts stepping out of line.
"It feels like just yesterday that we were caught up in all of that," Drea murmurs. "Christ, we're college students, Eleanor." She grabs her shoulders and gives them a shake.
"I know." Eleanor doesn't push her away. "Do you still talk to the people from Rosehill?"
Drea sighs. "Kind of. I've been trying to find a time to hang out with Tara and Montana and Meghan, but we're all, like, so separate. Still, I'd rather hang with them," she adds, "than some of the people at Yale. There was this girl who asked me if I wanted to take her private jet to Singapore for the weekend, and I wanted to kick her privileged ass so bad."
"Sounds about right."
"Mm. What about you, girl? Uh, your girlfriend, Gabbi—"
"We broke up three days ago," Eleanor says.
It wasn't a bad breakup by any means, which Eleanor appreciates. The occasion was funny, even: both of them opened their mouths to say, "Hey, so—" at the same time. Long-distance would've been especially difficult for them, what with Gabbi headed to Caltech, and anyway, they seemed to be more in line as friends, the candid cherub and the pathological liar.
"Plus, it was kind of wild that you were more into me after the kind-of-attempted-vehicular-manslaughter thing," Eleanor told her. Not that I'm not a walking red flag either, she didn't add.
Gabbi laughed and said that was fair.
Still, the look on Drea's face is comical, staring wide-eyed with her mouth slightly agape. She manages to pull herself together enough to say, "Sorry. Didn't know."
"Don't sweat it," Eleanor replies, and she means it.
They keep chatting about everything and nothing in particular, but Drea still looks slightly shell-shocked through it all. Eleanor is about to ask what's up with that, but Drea beats her to the punch. She says, "So when did you decide to fuck me up?"
"Hmm." Eleanor considers the identity crisis and the literary tragedies and the ill-advised decision to do theatre once. "Probably when I was around fifteen, but the plan didn't really get set into motion until, like, spring of junior year."
"Jeez. So there was a time you didn't want to stab my guts yet," Drea says. A pause elapses between them, one that feels unfathomably heavy. Eleanor fidgets with the cuff of her jacket until Drea continues, "Was there... a time after we met again? That you, like, didn't want to make my life a living hell?"
Eleanor squints, trying to evaluate Drea's intentions. To her credit, though, her expression is inscrutable, half-shadow against the golden light below. "I don't think I can give you an answer that'll make you happy," she says, thinking about movie nights and silly dances and their place in the bathroom, sitting across from one another. "I am falser than vows made in wine, after all."
"Even if for no ill will I bear you," Drea murmurs carelessly.
Eleanor chokes. "What?"
Drea turns to look at her, and it's like Eleanor's seeing her for the first time—really seeing her, past the rose and the thorn. With the breeze carding through her unstyled hair and the streetlights illuminating the cut of her jaw, she might be some cruel angel from on high, everything Eleanor never wanted.
Drea tosses her head carelessly, and if Eleanor weren't so used to acting, she might not have noticed the subtle tension in her shoulders. "We should head back. It's getting late, Nora."
She moves to stand, and Eleanor grabs her wrist.
"You're such an asshole," Eleanor says, not looking at her face. "No, we're not—we're not just going to drop this, alright? We should talk about what the hell you just said."
"Always in charge," Drea mutters. She sits back down.
"Okay, first of all," Eleanor says, "I didn't know you were a Shakespeare girl? I mean, I didn't think you could read."
"Oh, shut up," Drea snaps, rolling her eyes. "I read Shakespeare for English. Besides, you're the one quoting him like, I dunno, Hannibal Lecter."
"Touché. You know me: ever the dramatist." Eleanor flips her hair—still chin-length and streaked with blonde. Another permanent change, too.
The conversation dies down, then, replaced by the incessant ringing of the cicadas beneath them. "So is that it?" Drea asks. "You just wanted to make fun of me for getting your dumb reference."
Faintly, Eleanor says, "You could've kissed me."
Drea splutters, and this is the kind of thing Eleanor would cackle in her face about if she weren't busy trying to concentrate over the roaring in her ears, the static burst of what the fuck are you doing, this isn't the plan, remember when you were thirteen and wanted nothing more than to strangle Drea Torres?
"At the admissions party," Eleanor clarifies. "When we were behind those perfectly trimmed hedges, just you and me. Would've been the perfect time."
"Uh, pretty sure 'five minutes after exposing you as Nosy Nora' doesn't qualify as the perfect time," Drea says. She's regained her poise, curling a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Fine. Before the party, then. When did you know? That, uh—"
"The ring ceremony, I guess," Drea says, glancing away.
Eleanor takes in a sharp breath. "That early?"
Drea tilts her chin upward, eyes flashing dangerously. Eleanor has always liked that look of hers. "Yeah. I was listening to you laugh and I thought, 'it would be nice to hear her laugh like this all the time.'"
That night is a blur for Eleanor, all soft edges around things that seemed funnier in the moment than they actually were. She remembers stumbling around Rosehill, giggling like a maniac with Drea as they watched Max supplicate before the Spider Queen he'd imagined up. She remembers it being one of the few times she ever let her guard down around her, really.
"Surprisingly soft, Drea," Eleanor says. Thirteen-year-old Eleanor would deck her in the face, then, and grin as she fell to her death. Seventeen-year-old Eleanor would sling an arm over her shoulders, friendly all the way up until she snapped her neck. Eighteen-year-old Eleanor sits there, legs swinging over the edge of the rooftop, wondering what's left inside of her if not that unfathomable flame of wrath.
Eleanor's still holding Drea's wrist, she realizes, pulse rabbiting in her grip. Or maybe that's just Eleanor's imagination, as it's always been, wanting to believe that her life would come to a grand finale after she destroyed Drea's. Instead she's here, picking up the pieces, looking into Drea's dark, dark eyes.
Drea says, "What are you going to do now, Ellie?"
Eleanor swallows. "For the record, I think this is worse timing than those other moments," she says, and she yanks Drea forward.
Drea kisses more softly than Eleanor expected—because obviously she's thought about this before, teeth sinking into her lip until she bled, manicured nails digging into her scalp as Drea pulled her closer, an all-consuming fire that would destroy them both. In reality, Drea hesitates before her hand rises to cup Eleanor's cheek, her jaw, the back of her neck. She smells like lavender.
So maybe this is Act Three, or the end, or some ridiculous sequel; Eleanor's been losing track. It doesn't matter. They're fucked-up soulmates, yes, and there's something to that, wanting someone more than anything else, even if at first it's only to organize their funeral. They—the sun and jealous moon, the wicked flame and moth—are together nonetheless, here to build something new out of each other's ruins.
"I've had it up to here with your shitty villain monologues," Drea interjects, and she seizes Eleanor by the collar of her windbreaker for another kiss.