Mirror in the Sky (4 page)

FOUR

M
Y
father knocked on my door at six thirty on Monday morning, and I woke with the faint memory of yesterday's encounter with Halle and Nick lingering in my mind, some sparkling mobile of a thought . . . I tried to summon the remnants of the dream, but it was already gone.

“Ready for your first day of school?” he asked. I groaned and rolled over to face the wall. Just the question made my stomach turn.
No
, I wanted to tell him.
I'll never be ready for my first day of school
. I thought of Meg attending her first day of school in Argentina, where everyone would find her new and fascinating and cool, and I wanted to scream.

After my father left, I pulled off the covers and began to dress, slipping on a pair of dark skinny jeans, a black tank top, and a turquoise cardigan. I had saved my allowance for months to buy the cardigan—it was cashmere, purchased at a
boutique in Old Greenwich. I threaded a pair of silver earrings through my ears and inspected myself in the mirror that hung over my bureau as I brushed my hair.
Not bad
, I thought. The “highlights” that Meg had prescribed looked better by now, and my hair had grown long over the summer, falling well past my shoulders.

I was about average height, with olive skin and light brown eyes, and a delicate bone structure inherited from my mother. I looked like no one else in Greenwich. I stood out in ways I didn't want to and yet still managed to fall below the surface in ways I found equally disconcerting. If only I could be more like Halle—confident in her difference, yet still able to comfortably fit in. How did she manage to do that? I had observed her for so many years and I still didn't know the answer.

In precalculus, we had studied Venn diagrams, and whenever I looked at her, I thought about the particular alchemy that occurs within the center of those three circles of popularity, beauty, and awareness of self, not to be confused with self-awareness. What gave her a resolute and unusual power was the fact that she knew just how powerful she was, and the demonstration of this required only the lightest touch—a fleeting smile, a wink, a casually lovely gesture that, when directed at her prey, left him or her stunned by its beauty.

I got ready and made my way to the kitchen. “Not again, Dad,” I mumbled as I sat down at the counter to face my father. He was holding a jar of honey in his hand. A plate of waffles, beaded with blueberries, topped with a pat of melting butter, sat before me.

“It's a tradition, Tara. That's how traditions work.” Every year, on the first day of school, my father would open a bottle of honey and feed me a teaspoon of it, though in the past couple of years, it had been more of a force-feeding. His mother had done the same for him, and her mother for her. Supposedly the sweetness of the honey was imparted to the act of learning, making it sweet.

“It's stupid. It doesn't even mean anything. It doesn't make a difference.”

“It will this time,” he said, holding the spoon in my face till I had no choice but to swallow it. “And you've done well in school all these years, haven't you?”

I shrugged. I was a good student, but sometimes I felt as though both of my parents' dreams were pinned on me, that I was pierced again and again by their expectations. And still I remained mute, hopeful that I could somehow repay them for their sacrifices, resentful that I felt that I needed to.

“Where's Mom?” I asked.

“She's still in bed. She stayed up late watching the news.”

I reached for the jar of honey and poured a glistening spoonful over my waffles.

“And it's . . . you know, the anniversary of the day.”

“Oh,” I looked up at him. “I totally forgot.”

“It's too bad it falls on the first day of school this year. Be nice to her when you get home. She might be down.”

When my mother was seven years old, her parents—my grandparents—died in a car accident. She was the only person in the car who survived. They were taking a road trip to
Orlando to visit Disney World, but instead of riding in teacups and visiting the Haunted Mansion, she woke up in a hospital in Georgia. She spent the next ten years shuttling from the home of one relative to the next, till she was old enough to move to New York on her own.

Every year on the anniversary of the accident, my mother was morose. And every year, she would invent a new ritual to honor her parents. Once she left candles burning all over the house. The living room carried an overwhelming stench of stale vanilla for days. Another year she brought home a family of stray cats, which my father promptly made her take to the local animal rescue society. Then there was the year she held a séance in our kitchen and cried herself to sleep because her parents had failed to make an appearance. I still remembered the way she had sobbed, probably the same way she had sobbed when she first learned that her parents were gone. This was something that worried me about my mother—that she was capable of breaking her own heart again and again. I wondered what she would be doing today when I returned home from school.

“Did they say anything new on the news?” I asked my father, changing the subject. I could tell from the dark purple circles under his eyes that he had stayed up late watching too. He glanced at the ancient Sony TV that perched on the kitchen counter. Clad in plywood and the size of a microwave, it was a vestige of the early '90s, a relic from well before I was born.

“We should get going. You should be thinking about school, not all this NASA stuff.” I
was
thinking about school,
actually, if you count thinking about Meg abandoning me as thinking about school. My thoughts quickly turned to Nick, almost as though my brain knew to go into survival mode in that moment, filling me with an immaterial abundance of hope to bolster my dwindling morale. I recognized this mental self-trickery right away. I wasn't about to fall into the trap of false security on the first day of school. I had to be vigilant, even with my deepest, unspoken hopes. Then I found myself giving in. I did want to talk to Nick again. I wondered if I would get another chance this year.

“This is educational, Dad. And besides, I thought you wanted to work for NASA when you were a kid.” I didn't mean for it to come out like an accusation, but my father ignored it and reached for the car keys instead.

“The most important thing for you is to be focusing on school right now. You can't remove your eyes from the prize.” My father always botched idioms. He often told me that I was yelling up the wrong tree or that I had bitten off more than I could eat. “This is the big year. If you do well this year, I think you can get into Browns.”

“It's Brown, Dad,” I told him, putting down my fork and sliding my satchel over my shoulder. “They didn't say anything else on the news last night?”

“Same thing, basically . . . just more details about how they discovered B612. They're saying that we couldn't see this Terra Nova planet before because the light of its sun was too bright, but then they detected a transit—that's when a planet eclipses its sun—and they measured the size of the planet and
its movement around its sun, and that's how they realized it was similar to ours.”

“Movement? You mean the revolution around the sun?” I asked, following my father out the door and onto the driveway. “So their year is the same length as ours?” I asked, wondering if that meant that they had a school year, summer vacation, winter break, but my father never gave me an answer and insisted that we drive to school without the radio on, leaving me to simmer in my own thoughts.

FIVE

M
Y
heart raced as I hurried down the glass corridor to the student center. What I was rushing for, I didn't know. It was more that I wanted to get this moment over with—the moment I had been dreading all summer.

Even though Brierly was more than a hundred years old, sometime in the '70s, some wealthy alumnus had donated a ton of money to the school under one condition: that they tear down the old-world brick and ivy and let the donor's son—an architect whose previous commissions consisted largely of prisons—redesign the school. His prior design experience was evident in the new campus: all concrete, the halls dimly lit. The few windows facing the green didn't open, just looked out over the campus like desperately large eyes.

I pushed through the glass doors into the student center,
and I was greeted by a blast of cold air, followed by the click of the doors closing behind me, as though to vacuum-seal me in.

I looked around, my heart racing as I inspected the hall. The student center was an acre-large cavernous space with forty-foot-high ceilings, enclosed by four enormous slabs of concrete. Two large cement stairways swirled down onto either side of the room, like clumsy mechanical drills attaching the floor to the ceiling.

Brierly was broken into a range of social castes, and each one had a designated section in the student center—you couldn't just sit anywhere. The popular kids in their preppy-chic uniforms sat by the café stall, while the thespians occupied the south side of the building, the only section of the student center unsurprisingly filled with constant and profuse theatrics. The jocks sat close to the exit and spent their days tossing wads of paper at each other, while everyone else sat in the worst spot, under the Bella House stairs. This is where Meg and I would have sat, had Meg been here with me.

Terror washed over me as I realized everyone came in pairs or groups, some in threesomes. They were smart enough to know that there was power in numbers, and so they spun around each other like valence electrons forming covalent bonds.

I held tight to the strap of my satchel as though it was the only thing in the world I had to hold on to, the rough leather digging into my sweating palms. How would I fit into this complex ecosystem now? I looked around for a familiar face,
realizing that they were all familiar in a vague and slightly unsettling way.

“Now
that
is a dress!” Tricia Larsen eyed Melanie Carter's outfit in the thespian section. Melanie, known for her eccentric costumes, was dressed in a polka-dot green '50s housewife dress and matching hairband. Melanie had been in my freshman biology class. She had always been nice to me. I could venture over there, couldn't I? But my feet felt rooted to the floor.

“It's gonna be an awesome year, dude!” Hunter Caraway laughed and bumped fists with Jimmy Kaminsky, who looked cool as always in his jeans, a distressed T-shirt, and vintage Wayfarers. They were standing in the popular section, where Sarah and Halle and Alexa and Nick always sat—a land that was altogether foreign to me. There was no way I could walk over there.

“Tara, I'm so glad to see you! Excited about a new school year?” I looked up. It was Mrs. Treem, stepping right into my path. “How do you feel about Meg not being here?” she asked, her voice conspiratorial. I opened my mouth to answer, and then Treem put a hand on my shoulder and leaned in, a little too close. “I know she's your best friend—I've never seen you two apart! But I think it might be good for you to spread your wings a little.” She smiled.

“Yeah, no. I'm fine,” I lied. I wasn't going to talk to Treem about my “feelings.” She was the kind of person who was desperate to dispense advice—and not particularly useful or substantive stuff at that.

“I want you to see this as a good sort of challenge. We love Brierly students to be dealing with challenges. But not, you know, the really tough kind.” She made a face as though she were contemplating the “really tough kind” of challenges. I wanted to suggest to her that being brown in an all-white high school was its own variety of challenge, but instead, I just smiled a tense smile.

“Make new friends,” she said. “That's what I suggest. Friendships are the best thing about high school. I'm still friends with the girls I went to Miss Porter's with. Did you know that?”

Why would I know that?
I wondered. “Well, have a great first day!” she said, her eyes already scanning the room to find someone new to accost.

After Treem left, I looked around for anyone to talk to. Making new friends was, like many of Treem's directives, an unrealistic bet for me right at this moment. Right now, I just had to focus on
not
looking like a loser.

My heart quickened as I was engulfed by the echo and hum of voices bouncing around this demented sound chamber. It slowly dawned on me that I was all alone. There was no one here who would ask me how my summer was, compliment my earrings, assure me it was going to be an awesome year. I lingered for a moment by the edge of the lunch tables, trying to decide what I should do next, where I should go. I could head to the library or perhaps slowly make my way to the science wing for my AP physics class. Just the thought of it made me want to cry.

But something within me—I don't even know what it was—told me to just stand there and wait. Maybe there was something to be said for stillness, after all. We had all been sitting still, and that radio signal had come to us. It reminded me of a Kafka quote my mother had stuck on the refrigerator years ago: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
But wait for what?
I wondered, walking the tightrope of a tense interior conversation with myself.

“Oh hey, Tara.” I turned to see Nick. He was coming over to me by himself, his rust-colored JanSport backpack slung casually over his shoulder. He looked like a magazine ad in his tailored navy blue shirt, a weathered hat, and jeans. “Did you hear the latest news report? Crazy stuff, huh?”

I looked at him, my mouth slightly ajar. He had that same loose grin on his face, the one that always made me tongue-tied. I couldn't believe he was talking to me.

“Do you have Grover for physics?” he asked, nudging my wrist with his own. I looked at his hands. He had long fingers, tan and tapered at the fingernails, and a silken down of light brown hair on his arms. “Oh, cool. We're in the same class,” he said. He was standing over my shoulder looking at the schedule in my hand, so close that I could smell his cologne, see the stubble on his chin, feel the heat of his body radiating off him. He was an entire head taller than me, and his hair curled up
from under the edges of his hat. If I turned just so, I could press my face into his neck. “I can't wait to hear what he has to say about this whole thing, can you?” he asked me just as the bell rang, causing me to jump slightly.

“I guess I'll see you there. Halle asked me to wait for her. She's always late.” He smiled again, a warmth in his hazel eyes.

I took off slowly, still looking back at him, realizing that once again, I had behaved like an idiot mute around Nick. But as I crossed the student center, I was feeling the same kind of amazement my mother must have felt upon her discovery of Terra Nova, an injection of astonishment flooding through my veins like a potent and dazzling ink.

Nick and Halle walked into physics class together, ten minutes late, giggling loudly. Grover looked up at them briefly but neither acknowledged them or admonished them for being late to their first class on the first day of school. He simply continued to talk about the year's curriculum.

“It's a very special time to be studying physics. Can anyone tell me why?”

Halle had barely made it to one of the only empty seats on the far end of the classroom, but she raised her hand.

“Yes, you . . . Miss . . . ?”

“Lightfoot. Halle.”

“Miss Lightfoot, enlighten us.”

“The discovery of a new planet within a solar system resembling ours suggests the existence of a multiverse.” Grover
didn't look up from his syllabus, but from the way he raised an eyebrow, I could tell he was impressed.

“And can anyone tell me the definition of a multiverse?”

Everyone was quiet. Halle raised her hand again.

“Miss Lightfoot?”

“I can't speak to it from a physics perspective, since I haven't taken this class yet . . .” At this, a few people laughed, but Halle continued, looking as confident as ever. “But from a philosophical perspective, the multiverse is a set of infinite possible universes that fill . . . pretty much the entirety of space.”

“That's a good answer, Miss Lightfoot, but the multiverse theory actually has little to do with the discovery of a new planet or new solar system like ours. From a
physics
perspective, the multiverse theory posits that when the universe grew exponentially, in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, some parts of space-time expanded at a quicker rate than others, and the result of this rapid expansion was the creation of bubbles of space-time. These bubbles later developed into other universes.”

In the back of the room, someone yawned.

“But we'll get into more of that later in the year. And thank you for your insights, Miss Lightfoot.”

But Halle couldn't be deterred. She cleared her throat and pushed a strand of her long blond hair behind her ear. She was sitting sideways on her chair and leaned forward slightly, her hands on her knees, determination in her eyes.

“But I actually
do
think it has something to do with the
multiverse, Mr. Grover. It's a planet, similar to ours, and it's beamed a signal to us, so close to our own that one has to wonder . . . how similar are these people to us? Are they human? Or, I guess, human-like? We can discuss theories forever, ad infinitum, but on the eve of a discovery like this one, I want physics to be
relevant
to me in terms of what's going on in the world. Not just some random class that I took my junior year to put down on my transcript and forget about once I'm done.”

“I agree,” Hunter Caraway called out from the back of the class. He was the one who had audibly yawned earlier.

“Yeah, I do too.” Nick followed suit, looking at Halle with wide, adoring eyes. The expression on his face made me flinch.

Within seconds, the entire classroom was nodding and voicing their agreement with Halle. Grover actually smiled. “All right, I think we're going to have quite a year, then,” he said.

Only Halle could have done that. It was a mandate to Grover, and of course Halle had issued it. She had essentially put him on notice.
Bring your best game
,
buddy,
she had told him as though he were an equal, not a superior.
Don't just saunter in here with last year's handouts and xeroxed quizzes and pretend to do your job.
Instead of Grover motivating us, she had somehow managed to motivate him, to challenge him without him even realizing it, and it wasn't the first time I had seen her do this. It was the first class of the first day of school, and Halle had established her extraordinariness for anyone who wasn't already aware of it.

I had questions about Terra Nova too, beyond the obvious one of whether it was inhabited by life. Why was the signal we
received similar to ours but not exactly the same? Why did they modify it for our benefit? Or
did
they modify it for our benefit?

But on this day, I simply watched Halle out of the corner of my eye as she spoke, realizing that I would never have had the self-assuredness to raise questions like the ones that occupied my brain. Or to call out a teacher on not doing his job properly. I wondered what it must be like to move through life with that kind of confidence.

I don't know what we discussed the rest of the class because I was too busy watching Nick's attempts to play footsie with Halle, to make her laugh. But Halle remained serious. She was even dressed semi-seriously in a men's button-down oxford (maybe it even belonged to Nick), unbuttoned to the spot between her breasts, and a trove of chain necklaces.