Mirror in the Sky (2 page)

TWO

I
T
could have been the kind of story that came and went, eclipsed by another news cycle. But what my mother experienced as a transcendent moment of amazement at the idea of another world like ours so far, far away turned out to be only the exterior of a package labeled, stamped, and sent to us with a kind of precision and foresight we might have expected from the cosmos had we been the sort to believe in things like symmetry and order. And yet its contents still remained a mystery.

I went to buy school supplies with my father the next day. We parked in front of a newsstand on Lewis Street, the trashier rags filled with large-font declarations like “ALIEN PLANET DISCOVERED!” while the
New York Times
furnished a complex diagram of the Milky Way on its front page. My father picked up a copy of the
Times
, and I watched him as he shook
open the oversize leaves of paper, smoothing out the center crease with his fingertip as we walked.

“Tara, I know you're sad about Meg leaving,” he said without looking up.

I shrugged. Every year since the sixth grade, I had gone back-to-school shopping with Meg. We'd buy outfits together at Rags, pencils and notebooks at the stationery shop at the bottom of the Ave, even order our backpacks together months in advance of the first day of school. It made the experience of returning far less dreadful, maybe even fun.

But Meg was shopping for different supplies this year—Spanish-English dictionaries, voltage converters, sunscreen, and racy lingerie. When I thought about this shopping list, I felt a pang of betrayal.

We walked past the Starbucks on the corner of Havemeyer Place, and through the plate glass, I could see a cluster of Brierly kids hanging out over their iced lattes and laughing—Nick Osterman, Sarah Hoffstedt, Alexa Vanderclift, and Halle Lightfoot. I couldn't hear their laughter, but I could tell it was loud and raucous from the expressions on the faces around them, just as it always was in the student center of Brierly. They didn't seem to care. Halle, standing over a seated Nick, grabbed something from his pocket—a paperback—and held it high over his head, just before he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her onto his lap.

I carefully studied Halle, something I had often caught myself doing in class. She had an effortless ease about her, and it seemed to filter into every area of her life, whether it involved
flirting with the cutest Brierly boys or knowing exactly what to say when a teacher picked on her in class. She knew how to make people laugh, but there was always insight to whatever came from her mouth. I was both awed by her and resented her for making it all look so easy, for being beautiful and brilliant.

“Do you want to go in and say hello?” my father asked, observing the eerily approximate rendering of a scene from the J.Crew summer catalogue unfold before us.

“God, Dad, no. Of course not!” I don't know why my father assumed that just because I went to school with these people, just because we were the same age, and in the same grade, we had something to say to one another.

I wondered, for a moment, what it must feel like to be them—it was unlikely that they were walking around with brick-sized pits in their stomachs, dreading the first day of school. Why would they? They would arrive at Brierly on Monday morning like telluric gods and take over the best table in the student center, where they would reign for yet another year.

At the stationery store on Greenwich Avenue, I walked past the handmade cards and carbon-colored stacks of Moleskines, each sealed with a fluorescent lime-colored scrap of authentication. My father followed me into the pen section.

“I know how difficult it can be to make new friends,” he said tentatively. “It was difficult for me when I first came to the United States.”

“I know, Dad.” I didn't want to discuss it with him, any of it. I didn't want to tell him how hard it was, how I felt as though I would never fit in. I never had, not since we had arrived in
Connecticut in the fifth grade. For one thing, I looked different. My father was Indian, and my mother white. We had moved here so my father could open his own restaurant after years of working in the kitchen at someone else's, and also so I could attend Brierly.

“We're both making a new start,” he had told me as we packed the last of our belongings into oversized cardboard cartons, our entire history as a family fitting neatly into the back of a small Penske truck. “We'll have a much better life in Connecticut. You'll be able to ride a bike to school, and we'll even have a backyard.”

This was how the suburbs had always been sold to city kids, even though I couldn't care less about being able to ride a bike. And what could I have needed a backyard for? I was a bookworm even then, my nose perpetually buried in some new subject or another. This was another reason my parents wanted to move to Connecticut. I would do well in middle school and eventually be able to attend Brierly. I would have more opportunities to flourish academically in Connecticut.

But I had always liked our two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side. I liked my friends at the UN School. I didn't mind city living, the fact that brick and cement seemed constantly to be exercising a strategy of encirclement over every green, forcing an occupation of Central Park. I liked the fact that we shared a building with twenty-four other people. Our neighbors felt like extended family. They had all known me since I was two, and were always there to offer help or advice at a moment's notice. When I got sick, Mrs. Hirshbloom would
bring me chicken soup, and when my mother broke her ankle trying to carry a TV she had found at the Goodwill up the stairs, Kelly Loffman, a recent college graduate in a Teach For America program, had stayed with me, helping me build a helicopter with my Legos while my father took my mother to the ER.

In Connecticut, we were all alone, adrift in a sea of whiteness and wealth, and it really did feel like a sea I was drowning in. I felt as though I had to paddle as hard as I could, every day, just to survive. We were different here—it was obvious from the start. My father and I looked like no one else, for one, and on a near-regular basis, tension over money hung over us, a thickly, discomfiting humidity, sticking to our skin, marking us with its heaviness. But perhaps the worst of it was that here, we had no extended family. We just had us.

“I think this should do it,” I said, handing my father the red plastic basket containing highlighters and pens, loose-leaf sheets and spiral-bound notebooks.

“What can we do to make you feel better?” my father asked me after he paid for the supplies. “Do you want me to talk to Mrs. Treem?”

“Dad, ugh, no! She's such an idiot. She's just going to make things worse.”

Mrs. Treem was my guidance counselor, a woman so caught up in wanting to appear to be relatable and current to the students she dispensed advice to that she came off more as a pathetic poser than as a voice of any sort of authority at school.

I turned to my father now. He had always been the more sensitive one of my parents, the one who genuinely wanted to fix things. My mother, on the other hand, was my best friend—my other best friend besides Meg. She commiserated with me and came up with grand schemes to distract me from whatever was at hand. But my father was grounded, practical, and too naive to realize that practical solutions couldn't solve the problems faced by an American high school student with no friends.

Nick and Halle were standing by the newspaper stand when we walked out of the store. She was wearing cutoffs and sandals and a tight white tank top, her golden hair whipping around her face like a blaze. I walked a little faster as we passed them and tried not to make eye contact, as though speed and silence could serve as a much-needed invisibility cloak, but then I heard Nick's slightly throaty voice.

“Oh hey . . . Tara.”

I was already by the car, but I forced myself to turn around. He was resting his elbow on Halle's shoulder. Since last spring, they had been perpetually tied together in a way that made me simultaneously jealous and fascinated.

“Getting ready for school on Monday?” He smiled at us, waving sheepishly at my father, who nodded back in acknowledgment. Halle inspected the newsstand as he talked, her hand resting in his back pocket.

“Yeah. Just getting some supplies,” I mumbled, looking away from my father's dusty gray Honda, trying to distance
myself from a car that must have looked to Halle and Nick like garbage on wheels.

“Crazy, this stuff with that new galaxy, huh?”

“It's not a galaxy, you idiot.” Halle laughed. But her eyes were fixed on him, refusing to acknowledge me.

“A planet, whatever. My parents have been glued to the TV. Did you hear the news today about the signal?”

“What signal?” I asked, genuinely curious now.

“You haven't heard yet. She hasn't heard!” He turned to Halle. “Check your phone! It's some seriously crazy stuff.”

I stood there before them, tongue-tied and yet unable to look away. It was an unusually hot day, and the sidewalk was like a cement baking stone, but the heat somehow complemented them, making them sparkle even more then usual. It was hard not to notice the gleam of sweat on Nick's upper lip, the dewy glow of Halle's décolletage.

“Yeah. Well, I guess I'll see you both on Monday.”

“Yeah. Junior year. See you there.” He smiled that electric smile that for some reason always made me think of an Anne Sexton quote I had read in freshman-year English, “being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.” I quickly got into the car and couldn't even bring myself to roll down the window until we were well on our way down Post Road.

“They seem nice,” my father said, turning on the radio.

“They're fine,” I said, rummaging through the plastic bag of school supplies to stop my hands from shaking.

I hadn't spoken to Nick since the eighth grade, when we
were assigned to do a mock presidential debate for our social studies class. It had been almost three years since he had seemed to notice me, since we had dressed up as Barack and Michelle Obama and recited speeches together. (I had always wondered if I had been assigned this role because I was the only person of color in the entire class.)

Since that last contact, I went to school, swim practice, yearbook club. I talked to Meg on the phone, and I watched the lives of those whom I considered charmed unfold from a safe distance. In particular, I watched Nick. I observed him day after day, joking around with Jimmy Kaminsky and Hunter Caraway in the student center, listened eagerly to the speeches he gave during student council elections, smiled as he dazzled our teachers, and despaired at the way he endlessly flirted with Halle. I knew that his eyes were hazel, with yellow flecks. That when he was concentrating on something, he bit his lip and drummed his fingers on any available surface. That he liked soft pretzels with yellow mustard and practical jokes and soccer. I knew all this not because he had told me, but because I had studied him as though I were getting a Ph.D. in Nick Osterman studies. What I didn't know till that day was that he actually remembered my name.

The sound blaring through my father's lo-fi car speakers brought me back to the moment. On NPR, Oliver Spiegel was interviewing a NASA scientist.

“For our listeners tuning in now, explain to us what the Arecibo message is.”

“Certainly. The Arecibo message was a radio broadcast
that we sent into space a good forty years ago. We aimed it at the globular star cluster M13. We calculated that it would take twenty-five thousand light-years to reach its destination, but it would seem that the message was intercepted by the inhabitants of our newly discovered planet. B612 is what astronomers have named it, Terra Nova is what most laypeople are calling it, and within twenty-four hours of discovering it, we're seemingly getting a communication signal from there.”

“And how can we be sure that it was intercepted?”

“Because of the response transmission we received this morning.”