Mirror in the Sky (15 page)

“I don't know what to make of it,” Michiko Natori told him. “What would you think if it was your face? If it was you? What if you knew for certain there was another you out there? Someone who wore a different coat this morning? Someone who chose a different route to take to work? Or maybe even bigger things . . . a different wife? A different career?”

“I don't know what I would think of it.” Edward Copeland shook his head. “I think it would . . . make me go a little crazy,” he said.

But I already knew how I felt about another me on Terra Nova. Something about it was comforting. And yet that question
what if?
was like a virus. A small infection—so negligible that initially, I had ignored it, while all around, it had already become a global epidemic. And of course, I had always asked myself questions like that:
What if we had stayed in New York?
What if I hadn't walked down Hillside Road that day? What if I had stayed home instead of going to the restaurant the night Veronica was dining there?
But now there were bigger questions.
What if there was a version of me on Terra Nova who was with a version of Nick
?
What if Nick was my boyfriend instead of Halle's?
I felt a mild euphoria as I thought of it.

We watched the rest of the report in silence. I thought about my father driving my mother to the airport. I thought about how she would check in her luggage, take off her shoes at security, collect them on the other side of the X-ray machine. At eleven fifteen, she would board a flight. JFK → LAX. She would land tomorrow morning in another world. A world of sun and fake tans and people who hike through the Santa Monica Mountains.

And here I was, in Nick Osterman's living room, my eyes glued to the TV, Halle and Nick in my peripheral vision, his arm around her shoulders, hers resting on his leg. I alternated between excitement and frustration, trying not to think about what could be. But mostly, I tried not to think about what he had said to me, what I felt for him, or the fact that he didn't look my way again for the rest of the evening.

EIGHTEEN

“
A
road trip, that's what we need!” Halle announced. We were sitting in her BMW SUV, Alexa and me in the back, Veronica in the passenger seat. It was a Friday afternoon in mid-November, and by now, the cold had set in. Trees arched their skeletal branches into the street, begging for a taste of light. Instead, they got rain and haze. There was no snow yet, but the skies hinted at it, that orange early evening glow, and so I was prepared, wearing a green coat, white mittens, and a white beanie.

“I detest road trips,” Veronica intoned. “Everyone fights, people get sick. Sometimes people die.”

Alexa and I burst out laughing. “Why would anyone die?” I asked.

Veronica shrugged. “Seriously, it's the premise of, like, every horror movie. Camping is even worse. Are you guys campers?”

“I'm Indian. We don't camp. My dad says in India camping is poverty. Tents, malarial swamps, shitting by the side of the road.” We were cracking up now.

Halle had insisted on having dinner together tonight. Her parents were out of town again, this time in Italy. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that Halle's extended family was the staff at her estate—a housekeeper, a butler, a gardener, her father's driver. I had never, until I got to know her, seen her as someone who might be lonely, but now I wondered if spending all that time alone was what had made her so precocious.

“You guys, seriously. I don't mean, like, now, but maybe in the spring. We could drive up to the Cape, or my parents have a house in Nantucket. We could spend a weekend there. What say, Tara?” She turned for a minute to look at me, flicking a strand of her hair out of her eyes. She was dressed in an ivory Burberry coat and looked like the quintessential New Englander with a matching Burberry scarf around her neck.

“So it would be, what, us and Nick? Do you want to invite Jimmy or Hunter?”

“No Nick, no Jimmy, no Hunter. No boys allowed.”

“Jimmy's going to be disappointed. He might show up in Nantucket and try to roofie Tara.” Veronica turned and mock-frowned at Alexa and me.

“Yuck! Don't ever use the words ‘Jimmy' and ‘roofie' in the same sentence.”

“You haven't noticed that he's all over you, like, all the time?” Veronica asked.

“Tara's got a lot of admirers,” Halle said in a deadpan voice.
“Don't be jealous, V. Hunter still loves you. He told me he'll wait for you till the end of the Earth. Hey, maybe on Terra Nova, you're in love with him?” she teased.

I saw a flash of anger in Veronica's eyes, but she hid her emotions well. “I don't date morons.”

“He's a handsome guy,” Halle pressed. “So you won't date morons, or handsome guys, or . . .”

I could see Veronica about to say something, but it was Alexa who cut Halle off.

“That's mean,” she said. “You're all lucky to have admirers.”

“Aaaawww, poor Alexa feels left out. You can have Hunter if you want.” Halle looked at her. “I'm sure Veronica'll let you have him. He's not her type.”

“Seriously, you can have Jimmy,” I told her to diffuse the tension.

“Take Nick too, while we're at it,” Halle said.

“Whatever, Nick completely doesn't fall into that category,” I said to Halle, but even as the words came out, I sensed that they touched a nerve in her, and I wondered if I had unconsciously sought to do this. I had noticed that she and Nick were spending less time together, and Halle had been insisting on “girl time” regularly since the day of our egg-drop preparations. Sometimes Nick would call while we were all together, and Halle would simply ignore her phone.

I would say I tried not to think about this too much, but the truth was, it was all I ever thought about, curiosity about their relationship growing within me like an incorrigible weed. This was only compounded by the other questions I pondered day
and night: Had Halle heard us talking on the deck that evening? Did she know what Nick had said to me? Did she care? Did it even matter?
Had
was the word he had used. I
had
a crush on you. Before Halle. And then I would feel that twinge of disappointment in the pit of my stomach. Halle Lightfoot: 500,000, Tara Krishnan: 0. I knew you weren't supposed to feel this way about your friends, but I did.

Most of the time, I liked Halle. When we were hanging out or grabbing pizza or talking about books. But then I'd return home and start to resent her again. She was so perfect, it was kind of infuriating. She still always knew the right thing to say. She was still a stellar student and star of the track team. She still came to school every day looking as though she had just walked off a runway. And Nick was still in love with her, even if I wasn't certain she felt the same way.

“Do you want to invite Nick for dinner?” Veronica pressed Halle. “I could call him right now,” she said, reaching for her phone.

Halle reached for her wrist to stop her, but on her face was a smile. “No,” she said firmly. “Just us.” Then her tone softened. “Can we, like, pick a place for dinner and then talk? I'm starving.”

“It's five o'clock, Halls.”

“I'm up for an early bird special. I just ran eight miles. Can we go get Indian food?”

“The restaurant isn't open for another hour,” I told her. I didn't want to go to the restaurant with Halle, Veronica, and Alexa. I didn't want to run into my father, didn't want to
witness the awkward tension of him waiting on our table, or worse, Halle leaving behind a tip for him.

“Really?” her eyes widened. “Well . . . can't you maybe call in favors or something? I mean, I guess we could do something else, but . . . I would, like,
love
Indian food right now, and you would be my hero.”

I hesitated for a moment, but Halle continued to smile like she wasn't asking. “I guess. Okay, let's head over. Amit will let us in.”

“Who's Amit?”

“He works at the restaurant. They're probably prepping right now. We can have them make us something.”

“Wait, that really cute guy?” Halle asked. “He's, like . . . a sophomore in college?”

“Yeah . . . he's the one.”

“He's super tasty,” Halle said, reminding me how much I hated that expression.

Amit unlocked the door for us, looking frazzled and annoyed. “You know we're not open yet, right?” The radio was blasting loud gangsta rap.

I shrugged. “We were hungry,” I said, adopting that same indifference to other people I had seen in Halle and Veronica at times.

“Okay, just go sit over there,” he said to us like we were a bunch of recalcitrant kindergartners. “I'll see what we have ready. Your dad's not here yet.”

“Could you maybe bring us some of those really delicious lassis?” Halle looked at Amit wide-eyed, a smile on her face. “They're my favorite.”

Amit looked back at her, disarmed by her charm. “Sweet, plain, or mango?” he asked.

“What do you think? I think maybe mango? I'm Halle, by the way.”

“Amit.” He smiled, reaching for her extended hand. “Mango's my favorite,” he said with a smile that made me cringe.

“Mango for everyone then, I guess,” Halle told him.

“I'll do a plain,” said Alexa.

Amit turned down the radio. “Oh . . . don't tell your dad, okay? We were just . . . prepping.”

We sat down at a corner table by the window, and Halle sighed, looking nervously at her phone.

“What?” Veronica impatiently remarked, spreading mint chutney on a papad.

“Hypothetically speaking . . . it's normal to kind of get bored after a while in a relationship, right?”

“Are you saying you're bored?” Veronica asked.

“It's just that . . . Nick is so . . . happy all the time,” Halle said.

“He's a happy guy,” Veronica said.

“And why wouldn't he be? He's cute and smart and president of the student council and a star soccer player and everyone likes him . . .” I cut myself off, realizing that I was getting weird.

“You're exactly right, Tara. Everyone does like him.” Then she looked around at us and shrugged. “It's like that story with Socrates and Plato . . .”

“Do tell.” Veronica's eyes widened, and she mockingly leaned her chin on her fist.

Halle rolled her eyes. “Plato asks Socrates, ‘What's love?' So Socrates sends Plato out into a field of wheat and says, ‘Find the best stalk you can, the most magnificent stalk, but you're not allowed to turn back and get one you saw earlier, you have to keep walking forward, and if you find the best stalk, you've found love.' So Plato goes, and he comes back empty-handed. Socrates asks, ‘Why didn't you bring anything back?' and Plato says, ‘I saw some awesome stalks in the beginning, but then I thought there might be better ones up ahead, so I kept going, but turns out the early stalks were the best ones,' and Socrates says, ‘Yup, that's love.'”

“That's your story?” Alexa raised an eyebrow.

“There's more, Alexa,” Halle responded with irritation in her tone. “So then Plato asks Socrates, ‘What's marriage?' and so Socrates sends Plato out into the woods and says, ‘Find the tallest, most beautiful tree, chop it down, and bring it on home.'”

At this point, Amit, carrying plates of food in his hands, interjected. “And then Plato brings back a shitty tree, or at best, it's mediocre, and Socrates says, ‘What the hell is this piece of shit?' and Plato says, ‘I know it isn't the best tree around, but I didn't want to miss out on having a tree because of what happened in the wheat field, so I just . . . picked one.'” Amit placed
a plate of naan and a plate of tandoori chicken before us. “Oh, the samosas are coming. Is four okay?”

“None for me,” Alexa told him.

“I'll have yours,” Halle said before she turned to Amit. “You know all about Socrates and Plato?”

“Yeah, I'm a philosophy major.”

“I didn't know that,” I said. “I thought you were, like . . .”

He cut me off. “What? An Indian computer science stereotype? Thanks, racism toward one's own,” he said, making me blush.

“No, just . . . I didn't know.”

“So what's the moral of the story?” Veronica asked.

“That's irrelevant. It's more of, like . . . a question. How do you know if someone is your stalk? Or your tree? I'm just asking.” She turned to Amit with wide eyes again. “I mean, did they teach you that part? In college?”

Amit looked at her for a long moment before he responded. “Not . . . not quite, no. But I know what you mean,” he said. He lingered for a minute longer, making the whole thing really uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” Halle said, touching his arm. “I thought you'd understand.”

Veronica and I exchanged glances, but it was Alexa who broke the weird spell.

“I don't think you should break up with Nick.”

“I do,” Veronica said. “I mean, if you're not into it anymore.”

“So it's nothing he said or did. You're just looking for the perfect stalk of wheat?” I asked.

Halle sighed. “You're right . . . he's great. I just . . . I'm bored out of my mind. I'm allowed to want more, aren't I?”

“Then for God's sake, break it off with him,” Veronica moaned.

“No one is talking about breaking up,” Halle said. “Besides, I can't. I feel like it might crush him.”

“It probably would,” Veronica said. “But then he could move on and find someone who wants to be with him, his own stalk of wheat or tree or whatever.” I took a deep breath and picked at a samosa, breaking its edges into small crumbly shards, a tiny wisp of hope in my heart growing, wanting to burst out of its cage.

“I just wish someone would take him off my hands. I'd be happy for him, really.”

Veronica raised an eyebrow, and Alexa shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Amit was immune to all of this. He simply showed up at our table again, a silver pitcher in his hand.

“Who wants tea?” he asked with a grin on his face.