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THE DROPPED ACORN REVISITED , or French Words That Start with W

Perhaps the spring’s magic worked by keeping the beloved away.

Ros had been staying at Jess’s for nearly two weeks, and the whole house slept poorly in their absence. Not just the people, but the Lily Pad itself: Its joints shifted and creaked all night, as though it were deeply disturbed by the events of the summer. Ros sent texts—pictures of Jess’s cats or bouquets they were making—and I occasionally dropped in at the Hidden Fern to see them and say hello. But the house knew in its bones that things were going wrong, that something had disturbed the easy comfort of the Triumvirate, something far worse than Touchstone finishing all my granola with his hands. Time passed slowly and painfully. The Trojan Women opened. It was the third week in July, and Ros was officially a ghost.

It hurt.

I could have said something to them, I suppose. Hey, I miss you. Hey, are you going to come back and hang with us, ever? But I preferred to stew, which probably wasn’t the most mature response (my mom would have called it extremely passive aggressive ). Besides stewing, I started spending more time in the costume shop. Benna and Phoebe were knee-deep in designing the costume for the yeti, while the rest of us handled the costumes for The Trojan Women . Phoebe claimed she didn’t need the extra help, but after her injury, it didn’t seem fair that I didn’t pitch in more. Plus, it was fun to watch her work through the yeti costume with Benna. It was coming along well—she was making changes, trying out different fabrics, and the coat seemed clumsier, more haphazard than it had in the beginning, in a way that worked for the character. I loved not just Phoebe’s ideas but the way she worked—her focus, the way she slipped her earbuds in and disappeared into her drawings, or the way she tacked fabrics to the wall and stood back and squinted at them, turning her head slightly to consider them.

“It’s looking good,” Benna assured Phoebe, eyeing her sketches. It was Monday morning, and we were all exhausted from the opening of The Trojan Women —all of us except for Benna, who seemed to come more alive the busier the theater got. “I had a thought. Something I wanted to show you.”

She typed something into one of the desktop computers that lined the room.

“Phoebe, have you ever seen Beauty and the Beast ? The black-and-white one? By Jean Cocteau?”

Phoebe shook her head.

“Do you know who Cocteau is?” Benna asked.

Again, Phoebe shook her head.

“Does anyone know who Cocteau is?” Benna asked, calling around the room. Her question was met with resounding silence by the other costumers. “If you’re working in costumes, you’d benefit from looking at his work. Personally, I think everyone would benefit from looking at his work. Cocteau called himself a poet, but he was, among other things, a French filmmaker working in the first half of the 1900s. He was a gay man and one of the early surrealists. Lots of movie magic. His version of Beauty and the Beast is, in my opinion, the best adaptation there is. Look.”

She stepped back from the desktop, and we watched as a fearsome creature—the Beast—stepped out from behind a rosebush. His eyes literally flashed, like two small supernovas. It was no Power Jam , but the Beast took my breath away.

“Cocteau made that flashing effect by pricking holes in the film,” Benna said. “Isn’t it incredible?” She turned back to the computer, hitting pause on the scene. “Tell me what you notice about his costume.”

We studied the screen. The Beast was fearsome, yes, but he was also dressed to the nines. He wore a tunic with an upturned lace collar, heavily embroidered gloves, and a set of sparkling necklaces. He wasn’t just a big hulking animal—there was something light about him, some elegance, in spite of his size and heft.

Phoebe spoke first. “There’s an animal quality, but there’s so much more to it than that. The lace and the embroidery create this feeling of daintiness.”

“He’s, like, graceful , even though he’s a beast,” I said, thinking of what Oliver’s director had said, about him being too graceful. If Oliver were graceful, I thought, why not lean into that attribute, make it an essential part of the yeti’s character, rather than trying to erase it entirely? Why not exploit that inconsistency, make him less of a Neanderthal and more like this beautifully dressed beast?

“Exactly,” said Benna, as though she were confirming my thoughts. “I think that’s what’s missing from the yeti costume—the beauty and the grace. He’s fearsome and maybe ugly, but I think the costume will be better if there’s more tension. Are there opportunities for more moments of beauty in the design of a terrible creature?”

Benna turned the video back on, this time with sound, and was immediately interrupted by her walkie-talkie going off. She retreated into her office, and the French came through the speakers, and I listened hard and caught a few words. I was surprised by how much I’d liked speaking in French with Touchstone that day in the Lily Pad; it had me wishing that there were space in my senior year schedule to take three languages, Spanish and French and Latin, even though my schedule was crammed with all the senior electives I could take.

“Did you know that French doesn’t have any words that start with w ?” I said to Phoebe.

“Really?” said Phoebe.

“There’s wagon , but it’s pronounced like v . Everything else is imported from another language. Like Wi-Fi. Webcam.”

“Do you speak French?” Phoebe said.

“No, I take Spanish. We did some French in middle school. I just remembered that. I thought it was interesting.”

“Huh,” said Phoebe. “Why do you suppose that is? The w thing?”

“I’m not sure.” 19

“Knock, knock,” we heard, and in walked Oliver Teller. Jacques threaded himself between Oliver’s legs and mewed pathetically. “Do you need attention?” Oliver asked, and bent to scratch the cat’s chin.

Oliver had been stopping by since our hike, but we didn’t have plans to go on a second date. I thought about asking him all the time, but I found myself hemming and hawing when the opportunity presented itself. Phoebe told me the ball was in my court—I just couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Sometimes I thought about asking him if he wanted to play tennis, but every time I got close, I remembered Ros and swallowed the words, lost my voice like I had that day at the lagoon.

“Hey,” said Phoebe. “We just got a lesson from Benna, and the takeaway is that we’re supposed to make you more beautiful as the yeti.”

“That sounds lovely. I’m all about beauty,” Oliver said. “Celia, how are you doing?”

How was I doing? How was I doing ?

I’d spent most of my time since the date trying to figure out what was wrong with me, and why my internal love compass seemed to be so screwy. Here was this really nice guy who I liked quite a lot—and whose character on TV I loved —but I couldn’t seem to transfer the feelings I had for Blade to the feelings I had for Oliver. Plus I still was thinking about Ros all the time, and the spring’s magic wasn’t working nearly as quickly as I wanted it to. The ball may have been in my court, but it was lodged in my chest, and I didn’t know whether to cough it up and serve it up, or swallow it, let it be eaten by my stomach acid. I had the same problem with the sunglasses he’d given me. I kept them on me, but found myself squinting in the sun instead of reaching for them.

Of course I didn’t say any of this.

What I said was:

“I’m fine.”

“Do you want to get lunch?” Oliver asked us.

“Yes, definitely,” said Phoebe. “I need a break from all of this.”

“I actually told my friend Touchstone I’d take him to the Dropped Acorn,” I said.

“Oh, fun,” Phoebe said. “I haven’t seen him since Audrey’s party.”

“Really? We’ll have to change that soon,” I said. “You should get to know him. He’s the best.”

“That’s the clown friend, right?” said Oliver. “Tell him I say hi?”

Given that Touchstone still referred to Oliver as “Fish Eyes,” I suspected I would not.

My secret hope in going to the Dropped Acorn was that I’d run into Jess delivering bouquets again, and that this time, Ros would be with her. But even though the restaurant was crowded—everything had been crowded lately as more tourists flooded in to see the shows—there was no Jess in sight. With all the people to serve, the food took longer to arrive than it had our first day. Touchstone kept checking his watch.

“You have somewhere to be?” I asked, mock-offended.

“Yeah,” he said. “I need to be back on campus at one for a movement workshop with the visiting director. They’re coming all the way from Seattle. They’re supposed to be kind of a big deal.”

“Oh,” I said. “You haven’t heard anything from Ros, have you? They’ve been, like, silent on the group text.”

“Actually,” said Touch. “I saw them the other day.”

“Wait. Really? Way to bury the lede, Touch. You two hung out without me?”

“It wasn’t really like that,” Touchstone said. “They came to the Lily Pad to get some of their stuff. We ate your cake.”

“I saw someone had gotten into it. I just assumed it had been only you.”

“It was really wet in the middle. Like it hadn’t cooked through.”

“You try baking a cake in a broken oven,” I said. “How’d they seem?”

“They seemed good,” he said. “They joked about writing a poem about your baking efforts. It was titled ‘Wet Cake.’”

“Seriously,” I said. “How’d they seem?”

“Honestly?” he said. He sighed, and for a second he seemed almost bored. “I think they were kind of upset with you. They wanted to hang out with you on the Fourth of July. They wanted you to get to know Jess.”

“I talked to Jess.”

“You talked to Jess for two point five seconds and then rushed away with this bogus excuse about buttons. You left us all stranded there, looking for a way home.” Touchstone played with his fork, dropping it and resetting it. “I think you hurt their feelings.”

“I—” I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t even considered Ros’s feelings—or anyone’s feelings, for that matter. Between me and everyone else, I was the one with feelings. Why would Ros—or anyone else—be upset with me?

“It wasn’t a bogus excuse,” I said finally. “It was a legitimate emergency.”

“Celia, really? Come on. I mean, even I was kind of upset you did that. We wound up getting home fine, but it was sort of a pain in the ass for you to ditch us like that.”

Our server arrived with our food then, an enormous prosciutto-and-mozzarella sandwich for me and a big kale salad for Touchstone, who was worried, accurately, that we were not getting enough greens at the Lily Pad. Especially in Ros’s absence, we were struggling with the contract’s stipulation that we were expected to learn how to cook beyond gluten-free macaroni and cheese. We ate a lot of cereal for dinner, eggs if we were feeling fancy.

“Here’s a question,” Touchstone said, spearing a wedge of mandarin orange with his fork. “Is there ever a time in the future when you can stop being jealous of their relationship?”

“I’m not jealous ,” I said.

“So what are you, then?”

This, I didn’t quite know how to answer. What I was experiencing wasn’t jealousy . That was a word that felt so flat, and so villainous. Like the wicked stepmother who was jealous of her daughter’s beauty. What I was feeling was much more complicated than that, so complicated there didn’t seem to be a single word for it. I wanted them, yes, but I also wanted them to be happy, but I didn’t like the way that they’d chosen to be happy, and I didn’t like that I didn’t like it. I decided, instead of answering Touchstone’s question, to ask him one of my own.

“What did you mean, that you were kind of upset when I left Lovers’ Lagoon the other day?”

“I meant I was upset you left. First of all, you were our ride, and second of all, I wanted to hang out with you, too.” Touchstone sighed again, this time heavily, which felt oddly foreboding. I thought fleetingly of the night we’d broken up. It had been relatively painless—an “I think we’re better as friends” speech delivered by yours truly—and then we’d had a quick hug goodbye, and a week of awkwardness before things went back to normal. Now, though, the positions felt reversed, like I was waiting for Touchstone to deliver bad news. If we had been dating, I’d have been the one being broken up with.

“Look,” he said. “We’re talking a lot in the workshop about the character’s story. Each character, in any play, has an arc, has a story. And sometimes it seems like the story you’ve been telling yourself, Celia, is that you’re the wronged party. I wonder what it would be like to see things from Ros’s perspective. They’re in love for the first time in their life. They’re obviously going to forget us a little bit. They’re not going to text us back. They’re going to bumble through it. We’re not the thing they’re focusing on.”

“Okay,” I said, but my heart was hammering in my chest.

“I know it’s stressful what’s going on with you and Ros. But I don’t know, Celia. I’m not trying to make this into a competition over who’s more in the wrong. But I don’t think you’re… um… killing it on the friendship front, either.”

“What are you talking about? I’m so good to them!”

“I’m not talking about Ros. I’m talking about me ,” he said. “We’ve been hanging out for, what, almost an hour? You haven’t asked me about the workshop at all. You haven’t asked how it’s going with Audrey. You haven’t asked about any of the clown stuff. You haven’t even asked me how my salad is.”

“How’s your salad?” I said.

“It’s magnificent,” he said. “Look, I don’t like to bring this up, but, like, even before Ros and Jess, I felt a little left out. Like, you and Ros are always together, and I’m always a beat behind.”

“You’re not a beat behind.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. You went swimming without me the first night.”

“You could have come in,” I said.

“You went to the Dropped Acorn without me, even though you knew I wanted to come here with you. And you came here with Oliver .”

“Why do you say his name like that? Like he’s something that’s stuck to the bottom of your shoe?”

“Because guys like Oliver are competition.”

“For what ?”

“Parts. Career success.” He bit his lip and fussed with his salad. “Girls.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be competing with Oliver for any girls.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said.

“You know I think you’re a catch. I just meant that he’s famous—he could have whoever he wants. He’s not a regular person, like you and me. Although—he’s actually very nice,” I said. “You might like him if you spoke to him a bit.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Look, my point about the Dropped Acorn is that was a thing I really wanted to do with you , and you went without me.”

“We’re here now!” I said brightly.

“Yeah, but you chose to come here with someone else beforehand,” said Touchstone.

He picked at his salad, quiet. We listened to the babble of other customers, all of them joyful, having a good time. I felt guilt start to creep in. He was right, and I hadn’t noticed it. I had been a bad friend to Touchstone. This whole time, I had been a bad friend to Touchstone.

“How’s Audrey?” I said finally.

“We decided to be just friends.”

“Wait, really? What happened?”

“Nothing. It’s fine. It just… it felt better being friends than it did moving things along. Neither of us really felt into it, I don’t think. It’s no big deal. She and I are good.”

“Touch, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. It was for the best.”

“Are you still going to go to clown school?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” There was a heavy sigh again. Guy could’ve sent a windmill spinning. “I’m kind of frustrated with theater stuff. Don’t get me wrong—I like the clown stuff that I’ve been learning. I can be the clown. But if I go do clown school for a year, I wonder if everyone will only ever see me as a clown. I’ll be pigeonholing myself. Like, no one will ever see me as a leading man.”

“I see you as a leading man,” I said.

“You obviously don’t ,” he said. “That’s part of what I’ve been saying.”

“What are you talking about? I always think you deserve the lead.”

“The one you see as a leading man is someone like Oliver . Someone muscular and tall and rugged-looking and handsome. You don’t see me . You don’t see the guy with freckles and red hair and the gluten allergy,” he said. “You know how many people in the workshop just assumed I was gay?”

“So what?” I said.

“Well, I’m not,” he said. “I need more male friends. I need to hang out with Sil, from the workshop. I need to hang out with people like my brothers.”

“Your brothers are meatheads,” I said.

“Meatheads have leading-man energy,” he said. “A meathead wouldn’t order salad.”

“What if you hung out with Oliver? I could set you two up on a friend date.”

“I have absolutely no desire to hang out with Oliver Teller! I’d rather eat nuts and bolts than hang out with him! Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?” Touchstone said.

“I thought you said you wanted male friends.…”

He threw his fork down, looking exasperated. “You know what? Never mind. I take it all back. I don’t need more male friends at all. I don’t want to hang out with Oliver. I don’t want to hang out with my brothers, even. What I want is to hang out with you , which is somehow very difficult to get you to do, even though we’re supposed to be best friends. Not to mention the fact that we live together.”

He sounded angry, and I shrank back into my seat, staring at my half-eaten sandwich. Touchstone rubbed his eye socket with the heel of his hand.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to yell at you, or guilt you, anything. I just have a lot on my mind.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Can I tell you something? It’s just—but—like—part of me worried, when you said you wanted to come here for the summer, that you didn’t even really want me to come along? Like I was crucial, because it’s my uncle’s cabin, but you really didn’t care that I was here. Like it would have been better for you if it was just you and Ros. And I was just a cog in the machine.”

“He’s not your uncle.”

“Dude. Are you even listening?”

“Sorry. Yes. I’m listening. Touchstone—I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Okay.”

“I’m serious,” I said, and I reached across the table and grabbed his hand, made sure to lace my fingers in with his. His palm was sweaty, but I didn’t flinch.

“Celia, you don’t need to hold my hand ,” he said.

“Andrew Holt Touchstone. You’re my best and oldest friend . You are so much more than a cog. I’m sorry I’ve been distracted with Ros. I’m sorry I’ve been…”

Obsessive? Jealous? A terrible friend?

“But I don’t want you to think for a second that your being here is ancillary to the plan. You’re part of the plan. You are the plan. You made me an egg , okay? You’re part of it. You’re part of us .”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It’s okay, you don’t have to, like, make me feel better or whatever. I know what you’re saying.”

“The contract says the Triumvirate,” I said.

“Can you let go of my hand now?”

I squeezed it tighter. When I’d lost my voice in first grade, clammed up for weeks, Touchstone was the one who finally got me talking again. He came up to me on the playground and offered me some of his chocolate orange. I took a slice, and my manners came back to me suddenly. Thanks , I said. You’re welcome , he said. We’d been friends ever since. He’d swept into my life and helped me solve my problem as though he were magic, and I hated that I had done him wrong.

“There are three of us. That’s who we are. We’re not the… Twoumvirate.”

At this, he managed a small smile, but pulled his hand loose from mine at the same time.

“We should go,” he said.

So I drove him back to campus, the air between us so thick that no words could get through, even if I had them.

Footnote

19 I looked this up later that night, when I might have been watching old episodes of Power Jam or making progress on A Tale of Two Cities , but instead I fell down an especially large rabbit hole about the peculiarities of the French language. W is a nonnative French sound, and the letter wasn’t added to the alphabet until the nineteenth century. The other nonnative letter is k , which joined the alphabet shortly after w .