Mirror in the Sky (26 page)

“The two of you knew? And you guys kept it from me? So all of you—Nick, Tara, and the two of you—all kept this . . . secret . . . and you never said a word to me?” We were all quiet. “And you!” Halle pointed to Alexa. “Here I am
protecting
you! Signing up to be on committees so you don't get caught!”

“Wait . . . get caught for what?” Veronica asked.

Alexa pulled her knees into her chest. She didn't look at any of us. “I'm the one who pulled the alarm. Who kept pulling the alarm. I'm the one who graffitied the science wing. I'm the reason for that stupid Safety First committee,” she said.

Halle sank into the armchair by the fireplace. She looked out the window at the ocean.

“Well, I guess it's all out now,” she said. And then she buried her face in her hands and began to cry.

FORTY-ONE

T
HERE
are endless variations on that particular second-grade math puzzle. In one of them it's a fox, a chicken, and a bag of corn that a man has to get across a river. In another version, it's a wolf, a goat, and cabbage. There might even be a version with a lion. The point is, the man can only take himself and one other item with him. The problem is he can't leave the fox and the chicken together, because the fox will eat the chicken. And he can't leave the chicken and the corn together, because the chicken will eat the corn, so it's a fairly lousy situation.

I still remember working on that puzzle, wondering how resolving it might ever serve me in real life. Who would have thought that a decade later, I'd find myself in Cape Cod with two cars and seven people who all hated each other?

Hunter was pissed off at Veronica for supposedly leading
him on. Jimmy hated me for supposedly leading him on. Halle hated all of us for keeping secrets from her. She hated Alexa for keeping things from her while Halle was trying to protect her from getting caught. We were all perplexed that Alexa was some secret vandal, lurking around school pulling fire alarms. Veronica hated Halle for outing her. Veronica also hated Nick for putting her in the position of being outed in the first place. I think Veronica might have also hated me for not telling her what I knew about Halle and Amit and for not telling her I had slept with Nick. I was definitely pissed off at Alexa for telling Halle about what had happened between us. Maybe Nick was too. Nick was pissed off at Halle, obviously, for cheating on him. But the weird, or maybe not so weird, thing was—I don't think Halle was mad at Nick for what happened between him and me. It was almost as though she knew. Or she didn't care. The secret upset her more than the fact that I slept with her boyfriend. And I was in a state of delirium, as though I was walking around underwater. I didn't care what they decided. I was frantically trying to call my father, who wouldn't pick up his phone.

Finally, I looked up from the end of the driveway, watching them standing on the gravel path by the door as they continued to bicker. Veronica was refusing to drive with Halle, and Halle was refusing to drive with Veronica. Nick and Veronica were at odds too, yelling at each other.

At the last minute, Halle shrugged her shoulders. “I'll stay here.”

“Then I'll stay with you,” Alexa told her.

“I kind of want to be alone,” Halle said.

“Well, we can't fit all six of us in Nick's Jeep.”

“Yes you can. Throw Jimmy in the back. Or take Amtrak. I don't care. I'm staying up here. By myself. You guys figure it out,” she said. She looked at me, and I could tell that she knew I was thinking about my mother. She gave me a sympathetic look for a moment before she turned and walked inside.

In the end, Nick, Alexa, Veronica, Jimmy, Hunter, and I piled into Nick's Jeep, on what was supposed to be the third day of our vacation.

It hadn't taken long for everything to get tangled. It was like that peasant blouse from the '90s my mother had lent to me. It was white with a red ribbon stitched around the waist. It had been perfectly preserved in her closet for years until, one day after borrowing it, I accidentally threw it into the wash and it came out pink, strangled by the ribbon, which had disintegrated in some parts, wrenched itself into a ball in others.

“Turn on the radio,” I said to Nick. And he did. I frantically scanned through stations. Every one was playing music. I checked my phone again, but there was nothing new about the raid. No clue as to whether or not my mother was okay.

For a while, no one said anything. Finally, Nick broke the silence.

“Why, Alexa?” Nick asked her.

“You know why.” She shrugged. “I hate Brierly. I hate high school. I vomit every morning out of nervousness. I'm not a stellar student like all of you guys. People talk about me behind
my back, say I have an eating disorder. I just want to be left alone.”

I turned to her. “I . . . get it. Not the pulling the alarms part. But the rest of it . . . I get it.”

She turned to Veronica then. “And you? Why didn't you tell us?”

“Because it's nobody's business. Nick knew, obviously,” she said, nodding her head at him. “He's always known. I . . .” She took a deep breath before she continued, “I tried to kiss Halle, last summer. We were at a club in New York. Sarah was with us. She saw it. And she kept on making these homophobic comments afterward. I think that's why Halle wanted her out. Halle's . . . you know, a major pain in the ass sometimes. But she is my best friend. Whatever. You can't help who you love . . . and sometimes hate, in my case.” Veronica shrugged. She turned to Hunter then. “Sorry, Hunter.”

“You can't help who you love,” Hunter echoed, shrugging.

“I'm pretty sure she gave Sarah the boot to protect you,” Nick said. “Sarah has a big mouth.”

“Did you ever talk to Halle afterward? About the kiss?” Alexa asked.

“No, of course not. I knew she didn't reciprocate my feelings, so what's the point? And . . . I don't know, I guess I didn't trust her enough to have a real conversation about it.”

“Why didn't you trust her?” Jimmy called out from the backseat. But I already knew why. Because Halle was secretive. She was mysterious. She was hiding something, and none of us
knew exactly what it was. So we suspected things, we made up stories about her. We made her a villain, a manipulator, a bitch. And she
was
manipulative, she was strategic, she was hiding a secret, but it wasn't that simple. She was hiding the fact that she felt unloved.

I thought of something then. “That thing that you said to me about . . . you know, how she sees me as different . . . she never said that herself, did she?”

“No,” Veronica admitted quietly. “I just felt that . . . she's so heteronormative, and so . . . white, and so . . . ‘came on the
Mayflower
, I'm a Pilgrim' . . . that she would, you know . . .”

I felt sick to my stomach again. We were passing the industrial skyline of Providence. It looked ugly and gray this time.

I turned to Nick. “Why did you get back together with her? Why didn't you call me and tell me?”

He shrugged. “I guess . . . because I didn't want to tell you. I mean, I knew I would have to, but I still liked you. And because I felt . . . bad.”

“About sleeping with me, or about leaving town with Halle right after you slept with me?”

He shook his head. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I love her. I always have. Even despite all the shitty things she's done . . . like cheating on me. But I also really like you. Not just
like . . .
I feel like . . . in an alternate universe, you and I . . . we're probably together, you know?”

“Yeah. I know,” I said, a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“No you don't. I wonder about us. All the time, actually. I think about you. But I also feel like Halle and me . . . this is going to make me sound like the biggest asshole, but I'm happiest when I'm with the both of you. Does that make sense?”

“It makes you an asshole misogynist,” Veronica announced from the backseat.

“Lucky Tara. She gets to be Halle's sister-wife,” Alexa said.

He shook his head. “But it's not like that.” He turned to me. “You know it's not like that. I don't know how to express it to you, how to tell you this without sounding like a jerk. I can't stop loving her, and I can't stop wondering about us. Just the way she wonders about that other guy, I guess. Which is why I can't hate her. Even if I should.”

The moon revolved around the Earth, and the Earth revolved around the sun. It was the natural order of things. But what did we actually know about the natural order of things? What did any of us know about anything? There was an Earth-like planet in the sky that contained an alternate version of each and every one of us. My mother was stuck in a compound in California that was being raided by the FBI. I was sick to my stomach wondering whether she was even alive. Till a few months ago, that wasn't normal.

“Tara? Why didn't you tell me about Halle?”

I turned to Veronica, grateful for the change of subject, because I didn't feel like thinking about Nick loving Halle for the rest of eternity, no matter what she did. I didn't want to think about my mother in a compound that was being teargassed either.

“Because . . . I don't know why I didn't tell you.” It felt like it was
my
dirty little secret that I had kept from everyone.

“You should have told me,” Nick said.

“Why would I have? You were a jerk to me,” I said.

“But
I
wasn't! I was your friend!” Veronica exclaimed.

“Yeah, me too,” Alexa said.

“You still are my friends. And you guys kept things from me too.”

“Was I supposed to tell you that I'm some arsonist vandal who gets a thrill out of pulling the fire alarm every week?”

“Technically, you're not an arsonist,” Veronica told her.

“Don't think I haven't considered actually setting Brierly on fire,” Alexa said.

“
I've
considered it,” Veronica responded. “Seriously . . . do you know what it's like to be a dyke in Greenwich, Connecticut?”

I had to smile a little. “Do you know what it's like to be poor and Indian in Greenwich, Connecticut? And I can't hide it either, okay? It's, like . . . right here on my face,” I said to her, scanning my hand over my face until Veronica smiled back at me. It was a moment of levity, and I needed it.

“Tara, you underestimate yourself,” Jimmy said. “And you underestimate me.”

“Probably.”

“And you overestimate Nick,” Veronica said.

“Thanks, V,” Nick replied.

“Everyone overestimates you, O Golden One,” Alexa said.

“I thought Halle was the Golden One,” Veronica responded. “I wonder what she's doing right now.”

“This is the shittiest road trip on Earth. We're all a bunch of unloved liars and criminals,” Hunter said.

“Technically, Alexa's the only criminal,” Veronica responded.

“Yeah, and Hunter and I never lied about anything,” Jimmy noted.

“And love is a maldistributed commodity,” Alexa said, and we all turned to look at her. “No, seriously. It's a poorly organized, uneconomical thing . . . love.”

“Do you think that's why we're friends?” Veronica asked me now. “Because neither of us belongs here?”

“What about me?” Alexa turned to her.

“You too.” Veronica nodded.

“Who knows?” I asked.

We were quiet for a while till Veronica broke the silence. “You know, for a moment, just for that day, when we were all up at the house together . . . I felt like . . .
this is kind of amazing. We're not angsty or complaining or secretly annoyed with one another. We actually like being together.
We were like those matrilineal societies they taught us about in the ninth grade. And then these fuckers came up and ruined it all.”

“It was not my intention to ruin . . .”

“Shut up, Nick. Your defensiveness is not welcome right now.”

“I know what you mean.” I turned to her. “It was nice. For a day.”

Veronica shook her head. “Well, that's all over now.”

“Yeah, but not because a bunch of guys showed up and destroyed your utopia. It's because you're all dishonest, deceiving, terrible people.”

“Speak for yourself, Nick,” Alexa said.

“I know I am,” he said. “I'm a terrible person, you don't have to remind me,” he said. And then he punctuated the conversation by switching the radio station. He turned it up when he heard it was Oliver Spiegel on the air.

“Now let's talk about some of the different theories that suggest that we live in a multiverse. Tessa Novak, you've likened the universe to a breadloaf. Explain this to our audience.”

“Certainly, Oliver. Now, while Terra Nova exists in this very dimension, physicists have proposed that there might be many more dimensions to our world than we know of.”

“And what would this mean for us?”

“Well, I like to think of it like this: What if our universe is one of many floating in a higher-dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic loaf?”

“That's an interesting idea. Go on.”

“Maybe these universes might line up like slices of bread in a loaf, but let's just say they aren't always parallel. If that's the case, they might slam into each other, and every time they do, it causes a Big Bang, a series of Big Bangs that reset the universes over and over again.”

“Fascinating. And what about you, Adam Bryson? You also believe in the possibility of the multiverse, but you subscribe to a slightly different theory than Ms. Novak.”

“Well, scientists don't know for sure the shape of space-time. Maybe it's a loaf, but some of us believe that it's flat and that it stretches out infinitely. So if space-time goes on forever, then somewhere down the road, it has to start repeating.”

“Why is that?”

“Because there are a finite number of ways particles can be arranged in space and time. In this model, eventually, after looking far enough, you would encounter another version of you. And then another, and soon . . . infinite versions of you. Some that are exactly like you—down to the number of strands of hair on your head—while others will be, say, wearing a different shirt today. Others will have made drastically different choices in life. Perhaps they live in a different city. Or they're married to someone else, or have an entirely different career.”

“And we have some more interesting developments in the field of science today, related to Terra Nova. Adam, would you like to tell us more?”