Mirror in the Sky (19 page)

TWENTY-SIX

I
T
was freezing, and we laughed as we undressed each other.

“Your hands are way too cold.” He reached for me, touching my neck.

“Oh my God! Yours too.” I giggled.

Then his body enveloped mine. His hands intertwined with mine. I could see the heat rising off him, and we were both quiet for a minute.

Nick broke the silence, his voice tentative, shaking. I couldn't believe he was nervous. “I've wanted to do this for so long,” he said, and my body arched to meet his, my fingers entangled in his hair.

“Me too,” I whispered.

“Have you ever . . .”

I shook my head. “But I want to.” I took his hand. “I want to with you.” I slid my thumb between his lips, parting them.
“I really do,” I said, and then his hands were running down my back, over my thighs. His breath was cold, and the taste of his mouth—familiar and yet a revelation. I kissed him again and again, feeling the stubble of his chin scratching my neck, my cheeks. We were a secret in the cold of the woods, our legs braided together, our ankles knotted against each other. My breath quickening as he kissed me harder, with an intensity I had never before seen in him, a kind of hunger.

He was a different Nick. Not all laughs and lightness, but ardent and fierce. It was as though underneath that cheerful facade, there was another Nick—dark and alluring, fixated, obsessed.

“I can't believe this is actually happening,” he said to me. I looked into his eyes and kissed him harder, recognizing that right there, with him, I was a different Tara. Not trapped in my head, all logic and rationalism. I was open and vulnerable in a way that I never allowed myself to be—all thoughts erased from my mind. Replaced by nothing but desire. All I wanted was him, enough to risk everything in that moment.

I couldn't have known till then the things that unlock between people in the dark, who we are underneath our masks. I realized that he, like me, was caught too, held prisoner by who he appeared to be. But I could glimpse so many sides of Nick in his fervor, all those energies not yet harnessed, not fully integrated within him. Yet they were there. They always had been. Just as this part of me had always existed: unguarded and bare.

Afterward, he held me against his chest and stroked my hair. He was tender, his arms encircling me. He told me stories
about other places, his voice a barely audible whisper. I wondered, as he held me, if maybe our world wasn't so bad after all. Maybe
I
was the lucky Tara, a better Tara. Maybe this Earth was the one where people finally got the things they had always wanted.

It was dark by the time we left, running down the gravel path to the entrance, just as the gate closed behind us, a delirious laugh escaping my lips. I couldn't remember the last time I had laughed like that, felt like that, entirely without abandon.

“I'll call you,” he told me, kissing me in my driveway. His hand was on my knee. There was a possessiveness in his voice. I traced his jawline with my finger.

“Okay,” I said. I didn't want him to leave. If it had been up to me, we would have stayed there just like that forever.

TWENTY-SEVEN

On Wed, January 1, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Megan Stevens wrote:

Tara!!!

Guess what?!? I'm back! Argentina was great, but in the end, I got so homesick. And Ernesto and Clara really started getting on my nerves. And talking in Spanish all day is really hard. Plus being around snobby Argentinian girls all day got really annoying.

But I'm so glad to be back! When can we hang out?!? I already left a message and a text for you. And I called your home phone too. Where are you?!? What did you do for New Year's?

Call me!

Megs

On Wed, January 1, 2016, at 2:19 PM, Jennifer Krishnan wrote:

Hi, Sudeep! Hi, Tara!

Happy New Year! May this year bring you peace, love, and the resolution of all challenges in your life. Hope everything is going great for both of you. Have some really big news to tell you in the next few weeks, but just wanted to give you a heads-up. In two weeks, I go into “Internal Reflection.” It's much more intense than cleansing. This means that I'll be cutting off contact (temporarily! Don't worry!) for two months with the outside world. The purpose of this is to harness my inner power. Here at the Church, we believe that if we all do this, it's almost like if you download an app on your phone that beams a signal into the cosmos. Now imagine if thousands of people do this. Okay . . . now imagine if the entire planet did this! Amazing, right?! Anyway, at the end of it all, we'll have a big celebration. More news to come in the next few days (whoops, hope I didn't give too much away!). Love you both! Miss you.

Mom/Jennifer

“Dad, she's beginning to make no sense,” I said to my father. “‘Internal Reflection'? Cell phone apps?”

“It's probably nothing,” he responded. But I could hear it—the uncertainty in his voice.

I got a text from Nick the day after Tod's Point.
Going away for a few days after X-mas. Will call you when I get back
, it said.

Talk to you soon!
I responded right away. I would come to lament that exclamation point, the immediacy of the response. Cringe at the thought of it. In the days that followed, I wanted to run miles away from that exclamation point. It betrayed the fact that my heart crackled with glee, like a colorful foil chocolate wrapper, the moment Nick's name appeared on my phone.

Then again, what was wrong with that? For the first few days after Christmas, I told myself that maybe this was how things were always meant to be. I had always wanted him, for as long as I could remember. In that moment, he was there offering himself up to me. How could I have said no?
Maybe I can trust Nick
, I remember thinking.
Maybe he knows what he's doing.

But then he didn't call after Christmas. Or on New Year's. I thought about picking up the phone and calling him myself, but I found that with each passing day, the part of me that had opened up that afternoon at Tod's Point was closing, paralyzed with fear. Something that had felt so easy just a few days ago—picking up my phone and tapping in his number—felt more and more impossible in the aftermath of what had happened.
He said he would call
, I chastised myself every time I reached for my phone,
you just have to believe him.

But what did it mean that he hadn't? That in seven days, Nick hadn't called me? To distract myself, I spent the remainder of winter break in front of the TV, listening to NASA
scientists talking about building a space probe that would travel to Terra Nova.

On the first day of school after winter break, Nick was nowhere to be found. Neither was Halle. By first period, that mild anxiety I had felt for days dilated to overwhelming dread.

“Who wants to explain to me the three-body problem?” Emerick scrawled “three body problem” across the whiteboard and turned to look at us. No one raised a hand. I was doodling in my notebook, trying to quell the rabid, aching panic within me. Halle never missed school. Nick rarely did either.
That didn't necessarily mean they were out together
, I told myself.
Or did it?

“All right, since it looks like no one did their reading over the holidays, I'll simply tell you,” Emerick said in a condescending tone. “The classical three-body problem is the movement of a planet with a satellite around a star. Did anyone read the chapter about Newton's laws of motion?”

Silence.

Maybe Nick was just running late. Some sort of emergency. Maybe Halle was traveling with her parents.

“Can anyone tell me what else the three-body problem pertains to?”

Love
, I thought. All of a sudden, I realized that I was in the most intractable kind of three-body problem, the kind that was driving me to insanity right at that moment. It was probably nothing. He was always late to stuff anyway.

“All right, let's just stick to Newton then. Right after
Newton solved the differential equation for the two-body problem, which shows us why a planet moves in an elliptical orbit around the sun, he moved on to the three-body problem for the sun, Earth, and moon. What happened then?”

Just having to be in this class, looking at the empty seats where Halle and Nick usually sat, made me want to scream.
Maybe Halle was really upset about it. Maybe she had even tried to convince him to stay with her. But why would she do that? They were broken up. She had another boyfriend now, right?

“Tara? What happened?”

I was tapping my foot rapidly against the leg of my chair, the tap-tap-tapping inadvertently drawing attention to myself, I realized. “He couldn't solve it,” I said quickly, more to shut her up than anything.

“Why?”

“Why?” I repeated, looking up at Emerick from my doodle.
For God's sake!
“Because the three-body problem . . . makes no sense. Its behavior is inherently unpredictable.”

“Thank you, Tara.” Emerick smiled at me.

“Mrs. Emerick?” I asked, raising my hand. “Can I go to the nurse's? I'm not feeling well,” I said.

“Can it wait till after class?”

Why did teachers
always
ask that? “No. No, it can't,” I insisted. If I had to sit here a minute longer, I would lose it. One more second talking about the three-body problem and I would tear my hair out or run out of the classroom in tears. I had no idea what I was capable of.

What would the Other Tara do?
I desperately asked myself.
She'd be cool and calm
.
Not agitated and driving herself crazy thinking of Nick. She'd be looking forward to seeing him. She'd be light and happy and excited.

I couldn't shake it, the belief that all the answers I was seeking lay with her. That's the thing about desperation—it's like those fish that swim against the tide for miles just to spawn. I refused to believe in something easier, continued to hang on to the idea that there was a solution to my loneliness, my feeling of isolation, all my frustrations with the people around me—my mother, Halle, Nick—even if that solution was billions of miles away. In that way, I wasn't so different from my mother. Maybe I was worse. She had traveled across the country to “psychically commune” with her parents. I couldn't go anywhere, but I still felt strongly that there
was
another me up there, the only person who could possibly understand how sad and lost I felt.

But I couldn't talk to her. And now, on the first day back at school, all I wanted was to get away from Brierly and never come back.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
HE
moment I arrived in the student center, Treem accosted me.

“Tara! I was going to call you into my office today. Do you have time now?”

“I was heading to the nurse's. I'm not feeling so well.”

“It'll only take a minute. It's important,” she said. She was the last person I wanted to see, but I followed her to her dank office.

“Sit, sit,” Treem said, flashing me that familiar toothy smile. “As I'm sure you know, there have been a handful of incidents of ‘vandalism' around campus,” she said, making air quotes.

I nodded. My heart was racing at the thought of Nick.
Where was he?

“Well, the faculty has decided to put together a safety committee to ensure that incidents of this sort don't happen again.
It's considered vandalism, you know, tampering with school property, pulling a false alarm like that. And we still haven't been able to find the perpetrator. We're going to ask students to volunteer to man all the fire alarms during their free periods for a couple of weeks to show solidarity . . .”

“Mrs. Treem, I'm not sure how any of this concerns me . . .”

“Well, it's about the committee. It was just formed, and it's composed of parents and teachers. I'm the president.” She beamed. “But we need a student representative.” At this, she smiled again, that toothy, aggressive smile that always made me cringe. “The Safety First committee—that's what we're calling it. And I suggested you as our student representative.”

I sat in Treem's leather chair, a chair that was far too nice for either this dingy office or for Treem. “Why me?” I asked, distracted by the chalkboard behind her. Someone had written “twat waffle” in the tiniest letters in the corner, making me smile involuntarily.

“Well, we're hoping the student representative can rally students and enlist them to voluntarily man the alarms. And we're still searching for the perpetrator, so we thought you'd put out feelers among your friends and fellow students. Anyway, your peers have a great deal of respect for you, Tara . . . You're most likely going to be salutatorian of your class, you're editor of the yearbook, on the swim team, and you bring . . . well, you bring diversity to the student body.”

“Diversity?” I repeated.

“Well, I have to tell you . . . I've been reading this book.” She rifled through the paperwork on her desk and produced a
copy of
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
. “I just think there's so much we could learn from you, from your culture!”

Treem had said a lot of stupid things to me in the past, but this was way past just stupid. “That . . . that's not my culture,” I said, pointing to the book.

“Forgive me . . . that came out wrong.” She smiled before she continued. “What I meant to say was that I feel like your culture emphasizes a respect for authority that the students here could learn from.”

I felt a rage pulsating within me that couldn't be controlled. “You want me to find out who did this and then turn people in to you because . . . I'm brown?”

“Tara, well, I would hardly put it that . . .”

“How would you put it, Mrs. Treem? Would you ask anyone else? Would you ask Halle Lightfoot or Veronica Hartwicke or . . .” It came out like one of those sneezes, uncontrolled and harsh.

“I asked you because—”

“You asked me because of the color of my skin, Mrs. Treem,” I said, and I could feel the outrage welling up within me as I said it. “You want me to say yes to the shittiest job in the world, and you want me to be grateful you asked? You want me to ask people to
volunteer
to man the fire alarms? During their free periods? And you want
me
to be a snitch?”

Treem crossed and uncrossed her legs uncomfortably. “That's hardly what I'm asking of you, Tara.”

“That's exactly what you're asking of me.” I raised my voice, looking away from the chalkboard scrawl to face Treem for the
first time. Whatever hidden switch there was within me that needed to be flipped, she had found it, to her own detriment. I opened my mouth and realized, in that moment, what happens to buried rage.
What will this do to Tara?
my father had asked, and Treem was among the first to find out the answer.

“First of all, your ‘Safety First' committee,” I said, using air quotes, “is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Congratulations on being president of some completely moronic circle jerk. Second of all, why the hell would anyone volunteer to man the fire alarms? Man your own damn fire alarms. Or hire security. We're not slave labor . . .”

“Well, that's why it's voluntary . . . Tara, perhaps we've gotten off on the wrong foot. I thought you'd see this as an honor, and I . . .”

But I cut her off before she could say more. “An honor?” I laughed aloud, a laugh that made Treem shrink in her chair. “You picked me, the quiet model minority, because you think it might make me
happy
to be your little pet. To sit at your feet, saying, ‘Oh, yes, pick me! Please, me! Let
me
do your dirty work. I can gather students together to do the shit job of manning your fire alarms! I can start a whisper campaign to find out who pulled the false alarm!' And then you can pat me on the head and say, ‘Good Tara! Good model minority! You did the right thing!' Seriously,
fuck that
!”

Treem looked back at me, and something clicked within her, a shameful recognition of the truth in her eyes. “I can see you're very angry, Tara, and what I don't understand is . . .”

“What you don't understand is that I don't want to be your
bitch, Mrs. Treem. And I consider your asking me to be on your stupid-as-fuck committee
racism
. I seriously think that you're a racist.” The word rang. It seemed to make the room vibrate, and Treem shifted uncomfortably in her chair again. “And given that you know nothing about my ‘culture,' maybe I
can
teach you something. When the British came to India, they got a handful of rich Indians to do the kind of shit you're asking me to do. And that was the start of colonialism.” I was going out on a limb now, and I knew it. “But I doubt you would know that, because you don't teach anything but Western history at this school.”

“Tara, I . . .”

“If you want to switch me to a different counselor, go ahead, because the truth is, I don't want to be reminded of your insulting question every time I walk into your office in the future. But let it be known,” I said, standing up and pointing a finger at her, “that as far as I'm concerned, you're a bigot.” I threw my bag over my shoulder and opened the door to her office. “And by the way, it says ‘twat waffle' on your chalkboard,” I said, pointing to it before I slammed the door shut behind me and walked out.