Mirror in the Sky (5 page)

I looked out the window to the track field outside. It was freshly mowed and presumptuously green, those tiny fledgling blades of grass unaware that they would be relentlessly trampled on by Pumas for the rest of the season.

SIX

B
Y
the time I got out of AP calculus it was lunch hour, and the air in the student center carried the stale stench of adolescent sweat and French-bread pizza. Juniors were allowed to leave campus, but I didn't have a car, leaving me stranded in Brierly purgatory.

I thought about going outside and walking the grounds but knew I would run into the stoners who always lingered on the edge of campus on the far end of the track, smoking cigarettes and looking deliberately bored, and I didn't want to run into my old friend from the sixth grade, Laurie Hoffman. I hadn't spoken to Laurie since her parents divorced in the seventh grade and she had dyed her hair blue and pierced her nose.

“You would look good with a pierced nose,” she told me the day she invited me over to her house to see it.

“What, because I'm Indian?” I asked her. I didn't like
the defensive tone in my voice, but I often felt I was walking through a field of landmines in Greenwich. People—teachers, other students, parents—constantly made offhand comments that didn't mean much to them, but I read something else in their words. A hidden language that told me I was different. Or maybe I was so aware of my own difference that I was just looking to be offended by other people's words. Anyway, I don't think that was the reason we stopped speaking, but we had, shortly after that conversation. During this lapse, several other piercings had followed. These days Laurie skipped classes frequently, and when we passed each other in the corridors of Brierly, she looked through me, as though we had never been friends at all.

I'd like to think I took stock of my options before I made the decision to head to the library, but I was fooling no one. Kafka himself would have told me to stop waiting. He was a pragmatist, after all. And yet, as I walked the length of the glass corridor, I realized that spending lunch at the library had been my biggest fear, the ultimate concession to the fact that I had no friends anymore.

I wondered what Meg was doing right now—probably eating a medialuna and sipping coffee in some glamorous café in Buenos Aires, talking in broken Spanish to Argentinian boys who found her charming.

I stopped for a moment to look outside, my eyes scanning the perfectly azure sky. Nothing looked different, and yet it was. The summer was over, I was an upperclassman, Meg
was gone. Around the globe, a million different events were unfolding at once. People were falling in love, wars were being fought, children were born. And on that other Earth? What was happening there? I frowned at the thought that I would have a year of lunches in the library to ponder that question, not unlike an incarcerated criminal thrown into solitary confinement.

The long wail of a fire alarm interrupted my thoughts, the flash of red and white lights bringing a smile to my face. I covered my ears as bodies funneled through the corridor like a bag of marbles split open.

“Such a stupid waste of time, these drills,” I heard someone say.

“It's not a drill!” Mrs. Leonard, the AP calc teacher, interjected. “This is not a planned event!”

“Okay, hysteria,” I muttered. I made my way outside and was greeted by a rush of humid air. Within seconds, I was pushed by the swell of the crowd toward the sidewalk near the main gates.

“It has to do with that planet. It's like a solar flare or something, I bet.” I heard a familiar voice behind me. It was Alexa Vanderclift, one of Halle's best friends, the one I had seen her with at Starbucks over the weekend.

“Solar flares affect GPS systems, you idiot. They don't cause fire drills,” Veronica Hartwicke declared. “And besides, there's a major difference between the sun and some random planet that isn't even in our solar system. Anyway, where'd Nick go? I thought he was going to have lunch with us?”

I turned to look at them, my ears perking up at the sound of Nick's name.

“I told him to just go without us. I wanted to have lunch with my girls,” Halle said.

“He seriously adores you,” Alexa insisted. “I mean, the way he looks at you!” She shook her head.

Halle pursed her lips into a tight smile. “He's definitely insistent on spending a lot of time together. Like A LOT,” she said, rolling her eyes and making a goofy face.

“Whatever, Halls, just break up with him if you don't want to be with him anymore.” Veronica lit a cigarette and blew a ring of smoke into the air. Veronica and Halle were best friends, but I had always sensed a rivalry between them, and Veronica was the only person in school who wasn't afraid to disagree with Halle in public.

“Break up with Nick? But why? He's so great. And you have no idea how much it sucks to be single,” Alexa said.

I raised my head slightly so I could hear them better, bumping my arm into the edge of someone's iPhone.

They were about six feet away, sitting calmly on a stone wall, eating their lunches, oblivious to the crowds around them. Even in the midst of a fire drill, they had found the VIP seats and claimed them. Halle was picking sushi out of a plastic container with her fingers, her legs swinging back and forth, while Veronica artfully swirled noodles on a pair of chopsticks. She was tall and angular, prettier than Halle, but there was something about the severity of her face, her no-nonsense attitude, that made her intimidating. She was wearing a pair of
electric-blue heels with red soles. She had always been the most fashionable of the bunch.

Alexa, who used to take dance lessons with my mother in middle school, was rumored to have an eating disorder. She sipped on a plastic bottle of green juice, one of the many she often carted around. She kept adjusting her loose-fitting yellow halter top, tugging at it with her long, skeletal arms. None of them even made an attempt to hide the fact that they were openly eating on the grounds, literally right next to a sign that said:
NO
FOOD
OR
DRINK
ON
THE
GR
OUNDS
. Hiding was for people like Moira. If you were a certain type of person, you could break the rules in public and no one would stop you.

I tried again to remember the dream I had about Halle and Nick the night before, but trying to remember a dream is like trying to thread a needle. It requires that same exquisite concentration that can only be developed if the granularities of daily life don't keep getting in the way.

“What are you guys doing after school?” Alexa asked Halle and Veronica.

“Bitsy and Walter are going to some charity event in the city. You guys should come over,” Halle said, a strange eagerness in her voice.

“Can't. My parents always want to have dinner together on first day of school,” Veronica responded.

“Sure you don't want a romantic evening with me?” Halle teased, linking her arm through Veronica's.

“That's Nick's job. Not mine,” Veronica coolly responded, unlinking her arm.

Halle looked down at her tray of sushi. “Bitsy was like, ‘I can't miss this.' It's for the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Or maybe the Greenwich Yacht Club? I can't remember. Anyway, she's the committee chair, she can't
not
go.” Bitsy was Halle's mother. She was a petite blonde who always wore sunglasses indoors and had cheekbones that looked like they were sharp as knives. I saw her at school events occasionally, and she always flashed my mother and me fake veneer smiles from a distance.

“Come over for dinner, Halls. My mom was asking about you,” Veronica said.

Halle shook her head. “I wouldn't want to intrude on a Hartwicke family tradition.”

“What are you going to do?” Alexa asked. “I
hate
being alone.”

“We're well aware of it,” Veronica snorted.

“I'm going to tell Nick I have a ton of work to do, pour myself a finger of whiskey, and start looking over college applications.”

“You're a
junior,
Halls.”

“Doesn't mean I can't get a head start. I should start looking over that Stanford application.”

I watched Alexa roll her eyes at Veronica, but Veronica didn't look back at her. She jumped off the edge of the wall, her eyes scanning the crowds. She was looking for a waste bin, holding the empty noodle container with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. I looked around. I was standing next to the garbage can. I turned away, trying to disappear, but it was too late; she was already right next to me.

“Oh hey, Tara,” she said, eyeing me coolly as she tossed her container away. “How was your summer?”

I shrugged. “Uneventful. Yours?”

“I was in London. It was fabulous; stayed around Brick Lane. Great Indian food. Does your dad still run that restaurant, by the way?”

I looked away, embarrassed that my father's restaurant, the only Indian restaurant in town, was considered a defining characteristic of my identity. Then again, I had become used to this. Teachers were generally the worst, asking me questions about Gandhi and Diwali and where to buy Indian bangles and scarves.

I looked at Veronica now, and I could hear a hint of resignation in my voice as I answered. “Yeah, he still runs the place.”

“I've been craving that stuff. Maybe I'll ask my parents if we can eat there tonight.” She smiled, but it was an uncomfortable smile, as though she wasn't sure whether she had said the wrong thing.

I smiled my own counterfeit smile back. She had never been
un
friendly to me, which was strange because Veronica snubbed her peers like some people reached for salt.

“I was just about to . . . take off,” I told her, realizing the stupidity of my comment the moment it came out of my mouth. Where was there to go? We were all clustered across the grounds till it was okay to go back inside again.

“Okay, see you later,” she replied, and I turned and pushed through the crowds, my whole face red. I felt like such a nobody around them, I thought as I squeezed through a tunnel
of backpacks and bodies till I emerged on Hillside Road, the tree-lined street that led to our school. If you followed Hillside all the way up north, it led to backcountry Greenwich, where Halle and Alexa lived. But if you took the road south, it spouted out into the busy intersection of the Post Road, the road I traveled every day to get to school.

I started walking toward the Post Road. I wasn't sure where I was going, I was too busy berating myself for my stupidity around Veronica.
Just . . . forget it
, I told myself.
She probably already has
.

It was a pretty day, and the only good thing about Connecticut was how blue the sky was those last few days of summer. Oak trees bowed and swayed in the wind like sea hydra, and every surface was covered in a carpet of rich green—moss climbing up rocks and stone walls, ivy running rampant over people's homes, tripping unwelcome feet on the sidewalk. It was such a contrast to the deadened cement of the new campus.

At the end of the road, a black Labrador puppy dashed past me and then came back, sniffing at my ankles. A puppy without its owner was definitely an unusual sight in Greenwich, where all dogs were kept tightly on leash. He leapt up to my waist, wanting to play.

“Hey, buddy.” I smiled, petting him. “Where'd you come from?” The dog ran a circle around my ankles. He had a tag on his collar, and he looked groomed, but when I asked him to “sit,” he just pawed at my knees. He was adorable.

“Looks like you're lost, huh? Who do you belong to?” He
sniffed at my hands and put a paw on my knee as I reached for his collar, but just as my fingers grazed the tiny metal tag, he pulled away and ran off, down the sidewalk and toward the busy intersection.

“No, no, no!” I yelled, running after him. It was as if I had lost the memory of all other words in my vocabulary. I ran as fast as I could, a tree root tripping me on the pavement. I fell hard, scraping my knee, but scrambled to get up and make it to the intersection before the dog did.

I could see him just ahead of me, his graceful, brisk run, the way he stopped for a moment to look around, almost as though he half-expected someone to call out his name, take him back home. But he was in unfamiliar territory, trying to find something that might anchor him.

I ran faster, and as he saw me approaching, he seemed to think we were playing a game of tag and turned and ran up ahead of me.

“STOP!” I yelled. “Seriously, I can't run that fast!” I was already overwhelmed with regret that I didn't grab him when I had the chance.

He was running so fast that he was just a blur of black zipping across the street and around the bend. And then I heard it. The shrill screech of tires, a horn, a thud, and a gasp—my own. I ran even faster now, my feet pounding the pavement, my heart racing.

My brain didn't make the connection right away. At first, I thought it was a black blanket accidentally strewn in the middle of the road. But then the blanket moved and made a
sound, causing me to cry out. I ran to the middle of the intersection. Cars honked. The light turned yellow, then red. It was instinct—the way people describe saving their infants by lifting boulders. I threw off my satchel and reached for the dog, cradling its head in my lap, listening to its wheezing breath, my heart racing so fast I could barely think.