“Are you Cayley?”

“Aubrey?”

“Hi!” She came in for a hug, and I returned it. Aubrey was short, shorter than me, with short black hair and a short sleeve shirt, and shorts. Her suitcase was not short, and I helped her wrestle it into my trunk.

“Thank you so much for picking me up. It’s not that I don’t have a car, but my parents won’t let me leave it at the station when I visit, even if it’s just for a weekend.” She rolled her eyes. “And, they won’t let me drive all the way, even though it’s only another two hours and I’ve driven that far loads of times. Oh my god, did you paint those?”

She was looking in the back seat, where my unfinished canvases were still stacked, only partially obscured by my recent purchases. I nodded. “They’re not done yet,” I said by way of apology. “There’s so much more I need to do, but I only got to the house Friday night, and yesterday I was just settling in.”

“Madge told me! I’m so glad it’s you and not some old guy.” She colored. “I mean, they’re all amazing artists and everything, I just....”

“You’d rather have at least one person around who knows what Instagram is and didn’t vote for Barry Goldwater?” I laughed, and a moment later, so did she. “I know what you mean. But there’s Darren, right? He’s not that much older.”

She shrugged. “He’s what, thirty-two? That’s like, thirteen years. Anyway, he’s a guy, so it’s different.”

“Yeah.” I felt another pang of guilt. Here’s one more person that I was going to be lying to. I had lied to her already, just by the body I wore when we met. And here she was, opening up for some serious female bonding, when an hour before I’d been sitting in a parking lot with a penis.

“Hey, are you hungry?” I asked. Remembering my own college days, I added, “My treat!”

“Yeah, okay. That’d be nice.”

After a brief conversation about likes and dislikes that went nowhere, since we were both too polite to turn anything down, Aubrey pulled out her phone and started scrolling through Yelp reviews. The highest rated one nearby was seafood, which we were both about to agree to until we confessed, almost at the same time, that neither of us cared much for seafood.

Sushi was a shared exception, though, so off we went to Akari. It was within walking distance of the train station, as a matter of fact, so I parked right where I was before and in we went.

Pretty soon, I started to understand what Aubrey had meant about having other girls around of a similar age. I had never had a female friendship before, not with me as a girl as well, and it was eye-opening.

First off was how unrestrained the conversation was. Back in college, I had male friends that never opened up, over years of friendship, as much as Aubrey did over the miso soup. Part of that was Aubrey’s personality — there wasn’t a shy bone in her body — but even so, it was intense. I was guarded at first, but I quickly grew more confident, and soon I was speaking about my own life and work, albeit in gender-swapped terms.

Physical appearance was not off the table either. She started in about my hair (“it’s like you’re on fire, all the time!”) and touched on my skin, cheekbones, eyes, eyelashes, taste in clothes, legs, feet, and even more intimate areas. “Damn, I wish I had your boobs,” she told me as the green tea ice cream arrived.

“They’re a fucking hassle is what they are,” I replied, by now more than confident enough to swear. “I’m on my period too, so they’re sore as hell.”

“Oh god, that sucks so bad. I’ve got like, barely anything and they still hurt for like a week.”

“So let me tell you this,” I said, and I related my first meeting with Darren. I emphasized my own embarrassment, which brushed up the anecdote considerably. “There I was, with my hair looking like a Scottish Pixar princess, and my tits poking out in opposite directions like a crosseyed cartoon character, making fucking pirate jokes. I don’t know what I was thinking!”

She laughed, and launched into a story of her own. We were still chuckling when I signed the check and left the restaurant.

Conversation slowed as we crossed the river and began to wind our way back to Belmont House. Despite her candidness, I felt like Aubrey was circling a subject and then shying away every time we approached it. But I gave her some space. I’d only known her a couple of hours, after all.

“I won’t be staying long,” she said finally, all in a rush. “Just for the week. Then I’m going.”

“Okay,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“It isn’t, though. No, it is. It is.”

I kept my eyes on the road and my voice level. “You don’t sound very sure.”

“My dad said I should get my head out of the clouds. He said that you can’t make a living this way, and that I need to make sure and get an education so I don’t move back home.”

“Well, he’s wrong, but go on.”

I saw her shake her head out of the corner of my eye, though whether it was to contradict me or just straighten out her thoughts, I don’t know. “And my mom just wants me to get married like she did. She wanted to be an artist too, but she wasn’t good enough, so she thinks I’m not good enough.”

“Oh, come on. You got chosen as a Belmont Fellow! Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“But it’s not like I’m as good as everyone else! Look at your paintings!”

“My half-finished paintings? Or the ones that were hanging up at an art show that literally no one attended? I had a single visitor that stayed for like, five minutes.”

“But you’re a real artist, you know? Like with real paint and things.”

“Why, what do you do?”

“I do all digital. Painting, photo manipulation, pixel art, that sort of thing. I can’t paint with real paint for shit.”

“So? That’s just the medium. You can always learn new skills and techniques, but it’s way harder to develop an artistic eye in the first place.”

She considered this, and for a moment I thought it had gotten through, but she shook her head again. “No, I need to give up my space to someone who deserves it. Anyway, school will be starting back soon, and it’s not like I can commute between here and Stony Brook.”

I had forgotten that she went to school on Long Island. Stony Brook, that’s SUNY. Why don’t you just transfer up to SUNY New Paltz?”

“Yeah right, I just tell them that I want to go to this other more convenient school now, please, thank you!”

We were on a country lane with a wide shoulder, so I wasn’t risking an accident by pulling over. She looked at me in concern as I turned in my seat to face her. “Do you have any of your images? On your phone?”

She nodded, pulled up an app, and handed it to me. “Awesome,” I said, swiping left. “Fucking amazing.” Swipe left. “Gorgeous.” Swipe left. “Yeah, I hate you for how good this is.” I handed her back the phone. “You belong here as much as anyone, and if there is any way that you can keep your place and go to school at the same time, you should do it. And I swear to all that is holy that I will beat up anyone who says you can’t.” I flexed my non-existent bicep and pointed to it.

Aubrey laughed even as a few tears trickled down her cheeks. “I mean, I want to, of course I do, but my parents–”

“–shouldn’t get to control your life, and they definitely don’t get to make you less than what you are. So let me tell you what’s going to happen. We’re going to go back to the house, we’re going to tell Madge and everyone else that you’d like to transfer to New Paltz and finish your degree, while still keeping your fellowship. And on the way there, we are going to put on music and roll down the windows and sing at the top of our lungs. Agreed?”

“Fuck. Yeah.” She hit the button to roll down her window, and I did the same.

My car was old enough that it still had a CD player, although I rarely used it anymore. But if I remembered correctly, there was an old mix CD in there. I hoped that the track listing had not changed along with me. I pushed play.

Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world. She took the midnight train going anywhere.

Aw yeah.

I pulled back onto the road. The wind whipped my hair back behind me, and although I knew I would have to spend half an hour untangling it, I didn’t care. We were bellowing the lyrics to “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the top of our lungs. We were young and talented and no one could tell us that that we didn’t belong.

Except ourselves of course. And even as I drove and sang, I knew that soon I would have to give up this dream myself. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Aubrey give it up. Unlike me, all of the haters and the doubters were wrong. Unlike me, she had earned her place.

I might be lying to her about about everything else, but at least I could tell the truth about that.