My mother is waiting by the window. Her black stiletto–clad toes graze the glass as she peers straight down. Her bright white scent hovers in the air. I swallow the lump of defeat in my throat, and with it, the urge to cry.
“Hey,” I say as coolly as I can manage. My mom looks up and we lock eyes.
“Ay Dios, qué hiciste?” she barks. She looks horrified.
“Is that a rhetorical question or do you actually need an answer?” My insides sink down even further.
“It’s blonde,” she says.
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“I think it looks great,” my dad says.
My mom turns to him. “Did you give her permission to do this?”
“It’s just hair,” he replies. “When I was sixteen I was riding a motorcycle across Italy with an ounce of weed in my pocket and a guitar strapped to my back.”
“Yes, which worked out so well for you,” she snaps. My dad may be a recovering addict with five years of sobriety under his belt, but my mother is a recovering martyr with two decades of resentment under hers.
“It’s just hair,” my dad says again.
“Thank you for coming,” interrupts Joe, who’s been waiting for us to finish bickering.
“No, thank you,” gushes my mother. She reaches out to shake Joe’s hand as he leads us to the door. “Please tell Mr. Bell I hope to have another opportunity to meet him myself. My lab is doing some amazing things in neurochem right now.”
“I’ll let him know that, ma’am,” Joe says. He smiles like a golden retriever. I am mortified on multiple levels.
“Thank you,” I offer quietly.
“A pleasure, Luisa.” Joe takes my hand and looks me straight in the eye. For a moment, I think I can smell roses in his smile, but it passes. I follow my mother down the hall. Her manicured finger rings for the elevator.
“We’ll deal with the hair later,” she says.
“Or not,” I mumble as the doors open. I step in and leave Bell’s otherworldly world behind, along with my dreams of escape.
CHAPTER 2
“So?” my mom inquires.
The elevator shoots down. I grip the handrail. “So it was fine.”
“If it didn’t go well, you can tell me.”
“Why would you assume it didn’t go well?”
“I know how you get when you’re nervous.” She turns to my father. “You shouldn’t have let her go in alone.” They’ve been separated since he got sober, but she still loves to throw a little blame his way.
“That was the only option,” I insist.
“If I had been there on time—which I was going to be, but the idiot cab driver took Broadway even though I told him that was going to be slower—I wouldn’t have let you go in alone.”
“I don’t think that would have mattered,” I say.
“So it didn’t go well!” she exclaims like some kind of lawyer catching me in a lie.
“I didn’t say that. It was just a normal conversation.”
“Look, it’s fine, sweetheart.” I perk up at this unusual display of compassion. “It’s better that you don’t get picked.” Right, that’s more like her. “Getting to the finals is all you need for colleges to pay attention. You don’t need to make an enemy of Thomas Bell.”
“What do you mean, make an enemy?”
She smirks. Her smell, a bright white haze that makes me squint. “If you were to turn him down. You’re too young. And you need to go to college.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
“Wait, I’m sorry. So all that work and you were planning to try and stop me from going?”
The elevator dings. The doors open. A flash of purple: anger. I almost forget to get off.
“You’re too young to be on your own,” she says, walking away. This from the woman who moved out and calls me maybe once a month.
I step into the magenta chill of the lobby in a daze. The sun blasts through the window, casting a blinding rectangle of light onto the marble floor.
“Dad?” I murmur.
He looks at me with a helpless expression. “Lena, let’s maybe see if she even gets it before we make any decisions.”
My mother says nothing as she disappears onto the street.
We walk to the train in silence. I try to focus on the warm summer air against my skin, the clacking of my footsteps on the pavement. My entire body aches from trying to keep my shit together, and I’m so tired I want to crawl into bed for the next, maybe, week.
But then as soon as we reach the subway stairs, I’m back on alert. Even though it’s been five years since the Blackout Bombing, I can’t go down these stairs without feeling just a little bit afraid.
My mother hands me her MetroCard. “I only have enough for one fare,” she says as I pass through the turnstile.
“No problem,” my dad says. He swipes his own card and glances down at the digital display. “Shit.” He turns and hustles to the refill machine as our train thunders into the station.
“Hurry up!” my mother calls. “The train is here.”
“I do have two working eyes, and ears. But thanks!” he calls back.
New York, Chicago, and Boston. Someone hacked the electric grids, cut the power, and set off bombs on twenty rush-hour trains. They never figured out who did it and 6,000 people died.
We hurry down to the platform. I stare hard at the other people shoving to board the car. I imagine against all logic that if one of them is a terrorist, I will sense it and intervene.
A mother pushes through with a stroller. A gauzy sheen of sweat covers her skin. Her infant is asleep with a pacifier in his mouth. Does her diaper bag contain explosives?
A Front Line Peacekeeper steps up. “Let’s back it up, now,” he says, making space for people to exit. I smile at him without meaning to. After Blackout, when everything was chaos, a bunch of college kids in Boston started a group to do all the stuff the FEMA people couldn’t seem to manage—food distribution, transportation, supplies, even funeral arrangements.
By the end of the year, Front Line was in a dozen cities and now, they are everywhere. There are more Peacekeepers on the street than actual cops. They are one good thing that came out of something horrific. My dad getting clean was another. It was like realizing we all could have been killed shocked him into getting sober.
The woman struggles to get her stroller over the lip of the doorway. My dad rushes up and he and the Peacekeeper both lunge forward to help. She nods her appreciation but declines the open seat in front of me. I let my mom have it and squeeze into an empty pocket by the door.
The train lurches forward. I put my headphones in. I close my eyes and disappear into a recording of an Italian physicist. He’s talking about Einstein’s vision of the universe, how Einstein understood before anyone that interstellar space swells and falls in waves, like the ocean. He describes a wave as a “disturbance.”
My body rocks with the motion of the train. I steal a look at the stroller. A flash of yellow. How quickly would the blast move from there to the surface of my skin? Would there be a nanosecond of recognition first or just oblivion? These questions encircle me like wreaths of smoke.
I return to the physicist’s rolling Rs and pinched-nose vowels. I ignore the meaning of his words and just listen to the sounds. My fear fizzles.
Suddenly the train whips around a curve. I lose my balance and look up. The train slows. We are at Canal Street. People’s attention turns to the platform. Conversations quiet.
It’s mostly been cleaned up. It’s just the missing tiles where the station’s name used to be written in mosaic. But we can’t help straining to see what can never be seen: some evidence of what it was like for the people who were right where we are when the bombs blew. We are looking for ghosts.
My dad glances up from his phone. On the day of the bombing, I might’ve wished he’d been on one of the trains. Not really, but kind of. In the abstract. I used to think about things like that. Like maybe he’d drink too much
and die. It seemed like it would be a relief. But it turns out I didn’t want him to die; I just wanted him to stop being that version of himself.
Four more stops and we’re in Brooklyn. We resurface into the quaint charm of the Heights, with its large-leafed trees and immaculate brownstones. It’s my brother Ben’s high school graduation tonight. I’m psyched for him. He actually gives a shit about going to college.
My dad stops on the way into the church. Some of the other music teachers want to chat. I turn back and watch him. He looks out of place. He’s older. His face is etched with all the years of not taking care of himself. His tawny hair has thinned and his sloping shoulders make him look like he’s sinking.
But then he smiles at someone’s joke and a silver swell of love washes over me. I feel his smile like the sound of wind blowing through the trees. It’s familiar. It’s like my scar—memory embedded.
My mom and I find seats along the aisle about halfway back. I try to adopt a casual pose, but my eyes are darting everywhere. The small orchestra tuning its instruments. The school chorus dressed in black at the back of the stage. Someone’s ancient grandma inching forward with her walker.
And then I spot him. Kamal. Up in the balcony with Des Frank and George Keenan from swim team.
His broad shoulders and smooth, dark skin are like a magnet only I can feel. I steal a long look at his almond-shaped eyes glittering in the chandeliers’ light. I hear his voice in my head. His English accent melts like honey in hot tea. My legs tingle and a swirl of fresh pine sweeps around me.
Kamal has been my brother’s best friend since he moved from London in eighth grade. The night before he left for Harvard last summer, he and I stayed up all night watching movies after Ben went to bed.
We went out into the backyard at dawn. I could hear the inky morning light—a heavy drone like the earth churning through the cosmos. We walked past the massive maple that fills the view from my bedroom on the second floor and settled at the table at the end of the garden.
“It’s almost too late to sleep,” he said. He pulled a silver flask from his pocket and took a sip. “I might have to just stay up.”
“Forever,” I added.
“Never sleep again,” he said, handing me the flask.
The scorch of bourbon hit my throat with a hum like an old basement’s fluorescents. I squeezed the edge of the table to keep myself steady.
“I’d like to be one of those people,” I said. “The ones who need, like, three hours of sleep a night. They always become president or something.”
“Yeah. My dad is one of those.” He looked down at his watch. “He’s probably getting to the office right now.”
I eyed the raspberry bush along the fence. My parents bought our house in Bed-Stuy when they got married. It was a shitty house in a shitty neighborhood back then, but it was what they could afford and my mother fell in love with it because of that bush. She once cared about things like that.
“He’s not taking you up to Boston?” I asked, getting up to pick berries.
“Nope.”
“Your mom?”
“She’s in London. Some courier service is taking my stuff and my dad’s plane is taking me.”
Silence between us. The sky continued to brighten.
I put a handful of berries on the table and sat back down. “God, you’re just so …”
“What?” he asked.
“Rich.”
He laughed. “I’m not rich. My parents are rich.”
“Well, I’m not rich either,” I said, smiling.
“So we’re both not rich. Probably a good thing. I see what my father has to do to keep up with his cash and it’s a type of happiness, but it’s not the one I want.”
“What’s the one you want?”
“The kind that has to do with people. When you have serious money, you see everything in terms of money. People stop mattering and you can’t be free because you become a slave to your own wealth.” I followed his gaze to the surrounding brownstone rooftops. They seemed to be getting darker as the sky grew light.
“Most people would say the opposite,” I countered. “That money assures freedom.” I took another sip from the flask and passed it back.
“I’m not most people.” He exhaled a big breath. “My last few hours in Brooklyn.”
I grabbed some berries and leaned toward him, just an inch. The smell of pine needles and that prickly sensation only I could feel. It made me wish he could exist in my strange universe, just for a minute.
“Yeah, it must be weird.” Three taps on the grass beneath my feet. “What will you miss?”
“A lot of things,” he said. His hand was suddenly resting on my knee. He was looking straight at my face and my legs were growing numb. I wondered if they were disconnecting from my body and then I felt his fingers press against my bare skin. “I’m gonna miss a lot of things.”
I grabbed the edge of the table again and forced myself to hold his gaze even as the garden seemed to revolve. For the first time maybe ever, the feeling of too much was also the feeling of not enough.
“Yo,” my brother’s gravelly voice cut through the air like sharp peppermint. Kamal quickly pulled his hand away. Three more taps on the grass as my heart threatened to burst. Holy shit.
“What’s up,” Kamal called out. His voice was calm and even. I looked at Ben. He’s tall and lanky like our father, but his nose is flat and wide and his brows are dark and thick, like our mother’s. He was coming toward us, his mountain of wavy brown hair piled in a mess on top of his head—peppermint dulling the pine.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, taking a seat. Kamal offered him the bourbon and I retreated into the thought of Kamal’s hand on my leg. I placed my own hand where his had been, like I could trick myself into believing it was still there.
I don’t know who said what or what time it was when we finally said good-bye. I was just trying to act cool as Kamal walked out our front door like nothing had happened. A few hours later, he left for school.
Now he’s sitting up in that balcony.
I distract myself with the program and find my brother’s name. Benjamin Ochoa-Jones. Such a strong name. I breathe in pride, anticipation.
“Next year, it will be you,” my mother whispers as the lights dim. Is she trying to piss me off or does she genuinely not get it? My father slips in next to us and gives my arm a squeeze.
I sneak a look at Kamal. Our eyes meet for a fraction of a second. He looks away, but he saw me. Definitely. A rush like little pinpricks as the room goes silent.
The familiar notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” reverberate across the church. We rise and turn to greet the first pair of graduates. They appear like bride and groom at the back of the chapel and two-by-two the whole class walks. Beaming. Finished and about to start over.
I replay the moment Bell stood up and walked out. “A waste of energy.” His words echo in my head. My heart sinks. I know my life could be way worse. I shouldn’t complain. But it gets old being smarter than everyone and hanging out with rich kids when you aren’t one. It gets old trying to hide the thing that makes you different. Also, if I’m honest, I don’t like to lose.
Here comes Ben in his black suit, checked shirt, bow tie, and fedora. He chose to walk with his ex, Annalise Hastings. She’s the kind of girl that comes to school in a chauffeured car and carries a Chanel bag. Like, instead of a backpack. But she’s a serious actress, the star of every school play and on her way to Yale.
In March, she told Ben they should break up since they were heading to different colleges. I’ve never seen Ben so drunk as he was that night. He woke us up banging on the door because he couldn’t hold the key steady enough to fit it into the lock.
The next morning he ditched school, dug an old wetsuit out of the basement, and took the train to Far Rockaway. It was like twenty-eight degrees out. He swam two miles in the ocean and never said another word about it. By the end of the year they decided they were friends. Bu
t I know he still loves her because when he says her name, his voice catches in his throat.
He winks at me as he walks past. He looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. Silver tears fill my eyes, peppermint swirls around my head. I roll the program into a tube and wrap my hands around it. I think about how smooth the paper is instead of how much I love my brother.
When the ceremony ends, everyone files out into the street. I stand on tippy toes and crane my neck.
“Do you see him?” my mother asks.
“No,” I reply, secretly searching the crush of faces for Kamal, not Ben. “Oh wait.” I spot Ben and wave him over. “He’s coming.”
“Congratulations, cariño,” my mother says. She pulls him into her arms like she may never let go. When she finally does, she’s looking at him like she used to look at us when we were kids—no judgment, no harshness.
My dad steps forward for his own awkward hug. “B.” His voice cracks. “God. That was so exciting. To see you up there. I’m so totally proud of you.”
My mother wipes tears from her eyes and whatever softness I glimpsed vanishes. “Yes we are. Very proud,” she echoes. Ben glows.
My dad pulls out his phone. “Let’s get some pictures.” He snaps a few of me and Ben, then makes us all get together for a group selfie.
“How about dinner?” offers my mom. “Chinese?” My father looks at the photos.
“Love to, Mom, but grad party,” replies Ben. He’s already texting his friends.
“Well, soon,” she says. “I’ll call you both tomorrow and we can make some plans.” I don’t expect her to call. And I don’t particularly want her to either.
“Is Kamal here?” I ask, avoiding my brother’s eyes.
“He already left.” Fuck. “We should go too,” he adds.
“Hey, hey.” My dad puts his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “This is a big deal, what you’ve accomplished. I know I’ve created a lot of struggle for you. Both of you,” he looks at me. “I’m going to be making up for that for a long time. And I don’t deserve much credit for this moment, but I’m beyond happy to be here to see it, to see you.” Tears well up in his eyes, Ben’s too. I look down at the cracks in the pavement.
Light Years Page 2