Field Notes on Love(3)
When she’s gone, he sits back down on his bed. There’s a dull pounding in his ears, but otherwise he feels oddly numb. An hour ago he had a girlfriend, and now he doesn’t. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
He flips open the blue folder. There’s a note inside that says Happy Birthday, Hugo! in Margaret’s neat handwriting. He moves it aside to look at the itinerary, thinking back on all their conversations about this trip. She teased him about his long legs, promising to book an aisle seat on the flight from London, his first one ever, and he rolled his eyes when she talked about going for tea at the Plaza. “We live in England,” he’d said. “We’re already drowning in tea.”
There were nights in Chicago and Denver, and also in San Francisco, where they’d planned to stay a couple of days before Margaret needed to head down to Stanford. It’s all a bit harder to picture now, and he shuffles through the pages, trying to imagine how different the trip will be.
This is when it dawns on him that every single sheet of paper has Margaret’s name on it. He looks a little closer. The train tickets, the hotels, even the general booking from the company—all of it has Margaret Campbell printed across the top.
He glances down to the bottom of the confirmation from their hotel in Denver to see the words spelled out in bold letters: nonrefundable and nontransferable.
Hugo almost laughs.
Happy birthday to me, he thinks, and his heart falls as he realizes what this means. But just as he reaches for his mobile to call the tour company—to see if there might be any exceptions at all—the door to his room flies open and Alfie sticks his head in.
Among the six of them, there are two sets of identical twins: his sisters, Poppy and Isla, and then Hugo and Alfie, who are carbon copies of each other, right down to the flecks of green in their eyes. They have matching dimples and ears that stick out a bit, the same brown skin and black hair. At the moment, Hugo’s is longer than Alfie’s, which is cropped close to his head, but otherwise they’re almost impossible to tell apart. Except for their personalities.
“Hey, mate,” Alfie says, uncharacteristically reserved. He steps into the room and shuts the door. But instead of flopping onto his bed, he just stands there, scratching the back of his neck. “So, uh…”
“You ran into Margaret,” Hugo says with a sigh.
Alfie looks relieved. “Yeah. We did.”
“We?”
He opens the door to reveal the others out in the hall. All four of them. They file in a little sheepishly. “Sorry,” George mumbles, sinking onto the bed and giving Hugo an awkward pat on the back. George looks deeply solemn, but then he always looks solemn, as if being born first instilled in him a certain seriousness of character. “This is rubbish, isn’t it?”
“I can’t believe it,” says Isla, spinning the desk chair around and sitting backward in it, her chin resting on her forearms, her dark eyes fierce and protective. “How could she do that?”
Hugo gives them a smile, but he can feel it wobble with effort. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m fine. Really.”
Poppy is still standing near the door, absently twisting the ends of her box braids. She fixes him with a skeptical look, as if she can see straight through him. Which she usually can. “Hugo.”
“Really,” he says again. “It’ll be fine.”
There’s a long silence, in which Hugo stares at his hands to avoid watching the rest of them exchange glances. Finally, Alfie shrugs. “I never liked her much anyway,” he says, which makes Hugo laugh in spite of himself, because they all loved Margaret. If anything, they thought she was out of his league.
But still, one by one, they join in.
“Yeah,” says Oscar, who has been hovering on Alfie’s side of the room, never one for drama. He generally tends to prefer the world of his video games to the real one, but now he runs a hand over his twists, cracking a grin. “She was the worst.”
“A real monster,” Isla agrees, trying to keep a straight face.
“Remember that time she spilled her drink on you, Pop?” asks George, and for a moment, Poppy hesitates. Of all of them, she’s the closest with Margaret, and Hugo can see that she’s torn. But in the end, she nods.
“I still haven’t forgiven her for that,” she says gamely. “And now I never will.”
They carry on like that for a bit, and Hugo does his best to smile, but he’s still thinking about everything that happened and about the itinerary in his hands, and it isn’t until Alfie chimes in that the idea occurs to him and a plan begins to form.
“Don’t worry, mate,” Alfie says merrily, reaching out to give Hugo’s shoulder a little pat. “There are other Margaret Campbells out there.”
Mae claps a hand over her eyes as she presses Play, but the moment the film begins, she can’t help peeking through her fingers. There’s the familiar swell of music, then the black screen with the words mae day productions scrawled across it, and then—
She punches at the keyboard of her computer, and the window disappears.
Clearly, this is ridiculous. She’s probably watched the film a thousand times, and she’s not even sure that’s an exaggeration. Just a couple of months ago, she’d been practically gleeful about it, filled with a fizzy lightness when she imagined all the praise that would be coming her way. Most of all, she was certain the members of the admissions committee at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts would see its brilliance. How could they not?