The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart

Barrett, on the night of a homecoming dance. She was laughing, looking at the camera—at me—as Will looked at her, a smile of adoration on his face. I had an urge, which I repressed, to turn that picture’s face to the wall.
    The bedroom door was closed, and when I opened it, after knocking first, I found that the room was empty. It wasn’t empty of things—there was a bed, nightstand, dresser, television—just empty of Sonia. She was really gone.
    The bedroom was as neat as the living room. I circled the room, running my fingers across the top of her dresser, over the seams of her white bedspread. After what must have been at least a dozen laps, I sat down on the bed, dizzy. I was no judge of furniture, but it seemed to me the things Sonia owned were expensive. Perhaps I’d been right in my first vision of her life. After all, she’d moved here after college with Suzette, a honey blonde with plucked eyebrows who, Sonia reported not long after meeting her, had a wedding fund of eighty thousand, established by her wealthy father when she was only a baby. Suzette was not a natural blonde, but she spent enough money to achieve a convincing simulacrum, and Sonia hadn’t been in the sorority a month before Suzette persuaded her to do the same. I remembered how Sonia came into the room, exuding a sharp chemical smell, so excited she leapt onto the end of my bed and bounced there, shouting, “It’s true, it’s true! Blondes have more fun!”
    I told her I liked it, but what I really felt was bewildered—my friend had been replaced by a changeling. I was relieved when she tired of the look a month later. That time, I went with her to the salon, where the hairdresser said, dubiously, “I’ve never made a southern girl’s hair darker before.”
    I said, “We’re not southern.”
    “How dark do you want it?” the hairdresser asked, but she seemed to be addressing the question to me, and Sonia caught my eye in the mirror like she wanted me to answer.
    “All the way back,” I said. “Match her roots.”
    In the pictures on the refrigerator, Sonia’s hair was still dark, but what did that tell me about the life she was leading now? If it weren’t for those photos and the note she’d left me, I’d have had no evidence that it was Sonia and not Suzette living there.
    “Who are you?” I said out loud.
    Then I thought to look under the bed. There it was, the chaos of books and clothing and paper I should have known I’d find. Sonia was still in some way the girl I knew.
     
     
    In the living room I sat on the couch and stared at Oliver’s package. I could hear cars passing outside, the creaking of a floor as someone moved around upstairs—sounds that only increased my awareness of the silence inside the apartment. Here in her home, surrounded by her things, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Sonia didn’t exist, that this place was my own imaginary rendering of her life. Only a few days ago I’d been in Oliver’s house, sorting through his things, trying to imagine what they meant, and yet he himself was gone. And if they didn’t exist, these people who’d at least left some evidence of their presence behind, then did I? I had no job, no home. No one on earth, not even Ruth, knew exactly where I was.
    When I got my father on the phone, he said he had been reading—I could picture the glass of single malt beside him on the table, the paperback mystery in his hand—but he seemed happy to hear from me. I told him about my mission. I described the package and said, “What do you think could be inside?”
    There was a long pause. I waited for his theory. He said, “Remind me who Oliver is?”
    I wanted not to feel it, the familiar drag of disappointment. “My boss,” I said, as calmly as I could. “The one who wrote the Civil War book.” I had given him the book one Christmas, with an inscription from Oliver that read:
To Cameron’s father, with much gratitude for her creation. I wish she were