Starry Night (18 page)

Trying to be a very good girl, I cleared my bowl, rinsed it, and put it in the dishwasher. Dinah rooted around in the freezer, probably looking for these tofu ice cream bars called Cuties that she loves.

“Okay,” I said, lifting the dishwasher door closed and making the dishes inside rattle too loudly. “I'll be upstairs.”

“Don't you want a Cutie?” Dinah asked.

“No thanks, Dinah.”

She came up really close to me and said under her voice, “
Nolan
is cute.”

I smiled.

“Yeah, right?” She beamed and nodded.

Oliver passed us, opened the freezer, and grabbed two Cuties. “I'll come up later.”

“Okay.” Thank goodness he's not entirely clueless and stuffing obsessed.

On my way up to my room, I grabbed my backpack that I had leaned against the bottom step when Nolan and I had come in from the park. As I rounded the banister on the last flight of stairs before I got to my floor, a book fell out of the backpack, and then three folders, and a bunch of papers. I had forgotten to zip it. I collapsed on the ground to gather everything that had tumbled out and saw the Shoppe Boys disk that Farah had downloaded for me at school. I picked it up quickly and got a pang because I remembered Farah was mad at me and I couldn't text her to make things right between us. (Being phone-less in the 2000s just doesn't work.) Then I was overcome by the need to get upstairs to listen to the CD. I looked down again and saw an unfamiliar folded-up piece of lined paper sitting on the floor with my name written in blue ballpoint pen. I put the disk in a pocket of my bag and slowly reached out to touch the paper as if it were a butterfly and a sudden move would cause it to fly away. When my fingers touched the stiff edge, I felt a tremble deep in my gut. I took a steady breath in, pulling the note closer to me as I sat up on my knees to open it and look inside. On one side, the little pieces of fringe where the paper had been attached to a spiral notebook had gently tangled, and I had to tug a bit to open it. Inside, it said:

Dear Wren (I still can't get over that name),

 

Here are the lyrics to a Bruce Springsteen song called “Rosalita.” Actually, just go get on your computer (if your parents haven't impounded it yet) and Google the song—get it on YouTube. It's the greatest love song ever written. One of them anyway. No, I think it's the greatest one. In the particular circumstance you are in at the moment, this is the song I would write for you. I toyed with writing you my own, but we are in such deep shit I thought only Bruce could get us out.

Anyway, I want to liberate you and confiscate you and I want to be your man.

 

I'll find you.

 

Nolan

 

PS: If you can get to a landline, my house number is 212-555-5467

The breath that I was holding didn't slowly come back out of my body—it rushed out like someone had just punched me. It pushed my back against the wall, my feet digging into the hardwood floor, my hands pressing the paper onto my chest. I wanted to shriek, or cry, or hyperventilate. I read the note again and again.
Do what you have to do to hear “Rosalita.”
It's not a slow, goopy love ballad. It's frenetic, it pounds, it writhes, it yells and sweats—it's wired and fast. It's hot—it grabs you from wherever you are and throws you way far away into the ether. In concert footage, people listening to this song look like they are going mad. If this were a movie, this song would be playing over images of me losing my shit on the landing of the staircase, laughing to myself, feeling my heart pound, and jamming books back into my bag.

I clutched the note to my chest, ran up the last flight of stairs to my room, turned on the light next to my bed and the light on my desk, and got back down on the floor with the note again. Forget my homework; if I couldn't talk to
anyone
, if I had to be alone with all the crazy, unbearable feelings, I had to draw. I got up, took the Shoppe Boys disk out of my bag and slid it into the side of my computer on my desk. The opening notes and chords of the first song were hard driving. There must have been three or four guitars, there was an organ and drums and maybe even a horn section. It was big, bigger than I had expected—it was more alive and more exciting and it made me feel all wound up. I hovered over the computer and waited for Nolan's voice. Every note that sounded got me closer and closer to him, and then I heard the words “Wake me in the morning Daddy, when the big old sun shines in the sky. We'll go outside, take a ride, and wait for breakfast to come.” And Nolan was in the room with me. His voice, raw and unbridled, almost hurt my feelings. It got to me. I was listening to it the way you drink water in the middle of the night. I felt something boil up inside me, as if someone had jammed a needle of Adrenalin straight into my neck. I pushed the volume button as high up as it could go and twirled around to draw.

I tore off a giant-size piece of drawing paper from a roll that stands in the corner of my room and pulled the huge piece of cardboard that I keep behind my bed to use under the paper so my charcoal doesn't catch on any imperfections on the wooden floor. I laid the paper on top of it, fastening it onto the board with jumbo black paper clips. I lurched over to my desk and pulled open the drawer where I keep supplies. I grabbed a brand-new box of Conté compressed charcoals, ripped the cellophane off, slid the box open, lifted a perfectly square stick out of the box, then folded myself down onto the ground next to
my note
with the music all around me. I spent the next long time lost, feverishly drawing a barn owl rocketing into the night sky, shooting up, wings spread wide, soaring up up up and off the paper with one hundred of her feathers fluttering in the headwinds.

If Oliver came upstairs, I didn't know it. He might have come up and decided not to bother me. I was somewhere far away.

 

32

Farah was lost too.
Really, that night at the museum pushed all of us off our course, but mostly Farah.
She
didn't think she was lost. She thought she was exactly where she should be, wrapped in the arms of Cy Dowd, who was old enough to be her father. Farah, like an anorexic hiding her food compulsion, kept most of us in the dark about this romance as much as she possibly could. But what I learned that semester is there is only so much a person can hide in the dark; a lot of times, you can still see.

“And then what happened?” Reagan said. I was retelling the Nolan-confronting-my-parents story to all the girls at the lunch table in school the next day.

“Then he left and my parents took away my Internet, locked away my phone, and grounded me until Thanksgiving.”

“What does getting grounded even mean? That's, like, so 1950,” Reagan said, cupping her hand around a cafeteria mug of lentil soup, flicking the carrots to the side with a spoon.

Vati wasn't speaking to Reagan. None of us really were because nobody had gotten to the bottom of what had happened between her and Oliver. I was supposed to get the scoop, but I never got to talk to my brother because I was drawing that owl. So we had to wait for the juice to come directly from Reagan.

“It means I can't do anything but go to school and work on my application for France for like what, two weeks?”

“A little more,” Vati said quietly, looking at her bagel and tuna that she lifted up toward her mouth but then put back down again without taking a bite.

“I guess you won't be going to Nolan's gig at Columbia this week then,” Reagan said. That was so not what I thought would come out of Reagan's mouth that I audibly gasped.

“How do you know about
that
?” Vati blasted. I was going to say something too, but now the energy had shifted to a Reagan/Padmavati thing and I had to sit back and watch that show.

“Oliver told me,” Reagan said, as cool as a cucumber. “He's going.”

We all sat in silent shock.

“Reagan, why are you being such a cunt?” said Farah.

“Hey, whoa,” I said, feeling panicky—that is quite a word, and I don't think any of us had used it before, let alone directed it at another Turtle.

“You did
not
just call me that,” Reagan said, sounding like a Kardashian.

“Yeah, I did.” Farah didn't back down for a second. Padmavati's eyes were the size of jelly doughnuts. “You know, Reagan—we all know for a
fact
that Vati has been in love with Oliver for, like, her
whole life
and you are just blindly and
meanly
acting like you had no freaking idea.” Vati's bottom lip started to tremble.

“Vati. I. Am. Sorry.” Reagan looked around at all of us but Farah. “But what did you want me to do? Oliver totally macked on me.”

“Oh yuck,” I said, and watched poor Vati go over the edge from about-to-cry to full-on crying.

“See?” said Farah. “What are you even doing? Now she's crying.”

“I'm
sorry
, but it's not that big a deal, all we did was make out.”

Vati made a very sad sound.

“Oh my god, we made out for like two minutes next to dead people. I don't even
like
him.”

“Then
why
would you kiss him, Reagan?” Vati wept.
“Why?”
She put her head down dangerously close to her open-faced tuna sandwich.

“You could have said no, Reagan,” I said.

Reagan hunched over and looked down, rubbing the side of her tray with her thumb. I felt sorry for her. It wasn't her fault that Oliver chose her. Who wants to be the girl to screw over Padmavati? No one.

“I don't think Reagan was doing something directly mean to you, Vati.” I put my hand on her trembling back. “Right, Reagan?”

“No, I just … I just kind of didn't think of you, Vati.” Well, okay, that came out wrong, but I got what she meant.

“Oh
thanks
,” Vati said and wiped her nose with her sleeve, streaking snot along her lilac purple cardigan.

“I'm thinking of you now though, I'm sorry
now
—I just didn't think through what I was doing
then.
Does it really matter if I don't even like him?” Reagan's eyes darted around at all of us.

“Well, you're
stupid
, Reagan.” Vati sniffed. “Because, well, you just are.” She took a deep breath in and out and stopped crying. “I would do anything to kiss him.”

“Maybe you will one day, Padmavati,” Farah said.

“Maybe,” Vati said dejectedly. Then, right as Vati was getting it together and it seemed like the tension at the table was subsiding, Reagan said, “Farah, what is the deal with you and that artist?”

Farah put her fork down, forgoing the bite of beets she was about to put in her mouth.

“You know, Reagan, I don't think that is your business,” she replied. All that tension cranked right back up again.

“Just
asking.
I saw you leave the party with him.”

“We did leave together, yes.”

“And?”

“And then we went to his studio to see his artwork and then I went home right after that.”

What? Farah just lied to Reagan and Vati? I tried not to look surprised, but these were new waters—lying waters.

“Look, he is an extremely interesting person. What was I going to do?
Not
go and get a tour of this famous guy's workspace? We all had spent the entire night looking at his paintings on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” The expression on her face was like,
Duh?
“Of course I went with him—to see his
process.
And his really tiny pig.”

“Ohh, he has one of those teacup pigs? What color?” said Vat, drifting off into a happy piggy place without a shred of distress in her voice. I think in the universe of Vati, miniature pigs and all of their blinding cuteness anesthetize all boy badness. But Reagan was immune to pig cuteness.

“Did he come on to you?”

“No!
God, Reagan
,” Farah whispered.

“Okay, sorry.” Reagan jutted out her neck, and put her hair behind her ears with both hands. “I just think it's super strange you went home with him, and really, I'm kind of sure everyone here does too.”

Farah gave me a look to keep my mouth shut and I totally did. I didn't tell anyone what had happened between Farah and Cy Dowd, at least not for a while.

“Doodle, his pig,
is
unbearably cute.” She pulled the dark red beets off her fork with her teeth and started chewing like the cat that ate the canary. “He's adorable.”

 

33

I had to get home.
I had so much homework. I had three papers: history, lit, and Latin, all of them mired in briar patches of reading. Primary sources, secondary sources, cross-referencing, translations, biographies, and endnotes, all due before the end of the semester. I had ungodly amounts of math. Math can seem finite because you know there is an end, but that's an illusion, because each problem has at least four additional problems embedded in it like jalapeño peppers in nachos. Hidden, unexpected bummers. A problem looks easy enough with its six numbers all neatly lined in a row, but to solve it you use three sheets of graph paper only to find out the answer is wrong, and if you are me you have no idea where you made the bad turn. I had a science project researching the anatomy of a hummingbird, which sounds fun because hummingbirds fall under the magical creatures category, but like math, this project was more complex than it first seemed. The way hummingbirds fly and their habits are an evolutionary wonder. They are way more technical than their Tinker Bell reputations lead you to believe.

So do the teachers even talk to each other? Does each one have any idea how much work the others are assigning? How do they think we can do it? Do they think we have more hours in the day than they do? And they trick you too. They psych you up for the work way before it starts by giving an inspired introduction to the assignment. They dangle the project in front of your nose like a juicy carrot. You are the dumb horse. When they assign the paper it's their chance to wine and dine you. They suck you in, they wind you up, they make you feel like what they are asking you to do is not only doable, but enthralling. Sure, write a paper on Sense of Place in Faulkner and compare it to your own Sense of Place—what
is it
about
where you come from
that makes you who you
are.
You get so interested in the prospect of figuring out who you are that you lose sight of the fact that you also need to figure out who Faulkner thought he was. And that requires close reading and careful analysis.