Page 96 of Wish You Were Her
“You can’t keep me here, Ma,” he said, seeing right through her. “I’m running on empty. I know I’m never on everyone else’s schedule, but it’s now. I need to go.”
He moved into his bedroom, switching on the small lamp by his pillow and taking his shoes off. His mother moved to lean in the doorway, knowing that he was fixed on it and there was little she could say to dissuade him from his course.
“Is this about her?”
Jonah paused for the smallest second as he put his shoes away, his back to his mother. When he turned to face her, he wore a grim expression. “Yes.”
“She’s very special, Jonah. I know it, I see it. The whole world does. But that’s the whole problem. She’s—”
“Too good for me.”
“No! Not at all. She’s just…”
Jonah couldn’t blame his mother for having trouble with words. Allegra was not “just” anything. He had felt so as he was emailing his elusive pen-pal, the one who seemed further and further away every single day. It was impossible to describe Allegra. He knew the human. The girl with the mole on her neck. The girl who would only say “bless you” twice—if you sneezed a third time, she was silent. The girl who picked at her lips when she was nervous. The girl who carried her own hot sauce around. The girl who stared off into space, sometimes for minutes on end. The girl who only made eye contact when she was listening to you, rarely when she was speaking to you. The girl who loathed smelly cheese. The girl who unconsciouslymimicked people’s accents. The girl whose entire face transformed when she laughed.
His Allegra. The one millions would never know. The one he had earned through one summer of working with her, and one night in a glass house.
“She has people all over the world chasing her down, Jonah,” his mother said, and she sounded sadder than he had ever heard her. “How can anyone compete with that?”
“Because I don’t want to chase her down,” Jonah said. “I want to stand still with her.”
Allegra slept late and, on waking, felt an old wound twinge. Her chest felt as though someone had casually placed a piano on top of it during the night. Each breath she took felt labored and painful.
It was how her lungs had felt when she was ill with pneumonia.
She fired off a text to Jasper, who was due at the apartment for a consultation. It hurt to get out of bed, she realized, as she staggered to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth with great difficulty and tried to splash some warm water on her face, but it soon became clear that standing and walking were only making the problem worse.
She stumbled back into bed and must have slept for another hour, as she woke to the sound of Jasper calling her phone.
“Hey,” croaked Allegra.
“God, you sound terrible,” Jasper replied, her voice full of concern. “Listen, someone got wind that you’re not well and… can I let him up?”
Understanding hit Allegra and she closed her eyes. Her hairwas a long mass of unbrushed tresses, she had no makeup on, and she was wearing nothing but an old t-shirt and underwear.
But there was one person she had missed the most since leaving Lake Pristine.
“Yes,” she breathed. “That’s—that’s okay.”
She tripped and clawed her way to the intercom as it buzzed with great urgency.
“Hey, Mohammad. They’re good to come up once they’ve signed in.”
“Loud and clear, Ally,” he replied and then there was a click.
Allegra swayed on the spot in her vast and empty reception room, awaiting her guests. She cursed her own executive dysfunction, wishing she had just bought some basic furnishings so that they would now have something to sit on.
“The door’s open,” she wheezed, as she heard Jasper’s polite, and now very familiar, knock.
“Oh, my God,” Jasper gasped, as she gingerly entered the apartment. “Allegra, get into bed right now, you can barely stand.”
Allegra glanced to the open door, happy to see Jasper but also confused and dismayed by her solitude.
“He’s gone to grab something, he was very insistent,” Jasper explained, in response to Allegra’s expression. “Come on. Back to bed.”
Allegra let the designer walk her into the sparse bedroom. She climbed under the covers and coughed, a coarse and crunching sound.
“I’m getting you more water. And you need to eat.”
