Belong to Me: A Novel

by Marisa de los Santos

  When Dev confronted Lake with these facts, she didn’t get mad or try to say that Dev had misheard. Instead, she said, “You’re right. The thing is, I think I miss you. I wanted it to be just us. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell her that,” with such a sweet, rueful look on her face that Dev didn’t have the heart to stay mad. “Anyway,” Lake had continued, “Cornelia invited us for dinner the night before, and I told her we’d go to that.”

  But then, when the day before Thanksgiving rolled around, an hour or so before they were supposed to leave for Cornelia’s, Lake began to press her fingers to her eyes and her temples and say that she’d been trying to evade it all day, but here it was: one of her headaches, a bad one, like a siren blaring in her head except without the sound, a comparison that would have interested Dev if he hadn’t been totally thrown for a loop by the next words out of her mouth.

  “I don’t want to let Cornelia down, Devvy. So you’re going alone. Ride your bike.”

  “Alone,” said Dev, incredulously. “Yeah, right. Are you clinically insane?”

  “I’ll thank you to get the sarcasm out of your voice.”

  Dev dropped his eyes and mumbled, “I wasn’t being sarcastic,” but as irritated with her as he was, with this last comeback, Dev had crossed his own rudeness line, not just Lake’s, so he followed up by saying, before his mother could say a word, “Sorry, Mom. But I’m not going. You don’t even like me to ride my bike in the dark.”

  “You’ll be on easy roads the whole way, and you’ll wear your reflective vest. And you’re going.”

  He’d gone, of course. With the reflective vest over his jacket even though the sun was still up, Lake’s cell phone clipped to his waistband, and a bottle of wine stuffed into one of his panniers, which, he’d pointed out coldly to his mother, could possibly get both of them arrested, since he was thirteen years old, a fact that had apparently slipped her mind in recent days. But she’d just smiled with one hand pressed to her temple, as though she could push the headache back to wherever it had come from, and shooed him on his way.

  Dev had ridden the almost three miles to Cornelia’s house comforting himself with a detailed scenario in which he was run off the road by a crazed ice-cream-truck driver and plunged into a three-week coma: his head swathed in bandages like a Civil War soldier’s, Lake sitting by his hospital bed, eaten up with guilt, “Can you ever forgive me?” the first words out of her mouth.

  “Aidan was right,” Dev muttered through gritted teeth, “females are all clinically insane.”

  But even if Dev had honestly believed this as he said it, the belief would’ve had one of the shorter life spans in belief history because approximately four and a half minutes later, Dev met Clare, and even the most exasperated, most fed-up kid in the world couldn’t help but notice that Clare Hobbes was both unmistakably female and unmistakably sane.

  She was playing catch with a man in Cornelia’s front yard.

  Even though Dev saw Clare before he saw the number on the house and even though he’d never been there before or met her before and had even forgotten that a girl his age would be there at all, he turned into the driveway without hesitating, his cheeks burning at the image of himself in his stupid reflective vest, but still feeling positive, 100 percent sure that he was in the right place.

  He leaned his bike against the side of the house, then got out of his helmet and vest as fast as he could, and stood there, absently trying to ruffle his hair back to its normal shape, thinking about the bottle of wine inside the pannier. Forget it, he decided. He’d get it later. How idiotic would it be to walk up holding a bottle of wine like some cravat-wearing yacht guy? Just then, with horror, he realized what he was doing to his hair. “You bonehead,” he growled at himself inside his head. “She’s just some girl.”

  Then, suddenly, she was three feet away from him, her hands on her hips, her smile cutting through the early-evening dimness.

  “Nice bike,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at the bike. With big dark sparkling eyes, the best eyes he’d ever seen, Clare was looking straight at him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’re Clare, right?”

  A voice yelled, cheerfully, “Heads up!” and a football came flying from out of nowhere, and in what had to be one of the most glorious moments in human history, without thinking, Dev jumped up and caught it, just snagged it out of the air. For a second, he and Clare stared at the ball in his hands. Then Clare started to laugh a startled, happy, jingly laugh.

  “That’s right,” said Clare, her laughter filling the crisp air like sleigh bells, “I’m Clare.”

  Whenever Dev remembered that night, and he’d remember it for a very long time, what never stopped amazing him was how normal it felt. Not everyday, no-big-deal normal. More like extragalactic, superradiant, night-in-a-million normal. Normal turned up a couple of thousand notches, but normal nonetheless because, against all odds, with so many reasons to feel nervous, shy, and out of place, Dev spent the entire evening feeling precisely and absolutely like himself.

  They were all nice: Clare; Cornelia; her husband, Teo; her brother Toby, who’d thrown the football and who was also a visitor, stopping in for a couple of days on the way to move in with his girlfriend in Philadelphia. Their dinner-table conversation was like a good-natured, five-way Ping-Pong game, with Dev himself getting in an excellent shot now and then, if he did say so himself. Later that night, Dev would lie in bed letting individual, small, clear-cut memories rise to the surface of that whole great stretch of remembered evening, and the word that kept coming to him—and maybe Clare’s jingle-bell laugh had something to do with this—was merry. They were a happy group, funny, kind, vivacious, vibrant. Merry.

  Toby was the loudest, calling Cornelia corndog, Teo uglyman, and all through dinner, shooting no-look passes Dev’s way—a carved wooden napkin ring, a Peking duck pancake (they were having Chinese takeout), a fortune cookie—all of which Dev caught, provoking Toby to high-five him and shout things like “Little brother’s got the hot hands!”

  Cornelia was the funniest, telling stories from when she, Toby, and Teo were kids together: Teo’s crush on someone called the Bionic Woman. (Teo to Dev: “If you’d seen the episode where she goes undercover as Savage Sommers, professional lady wrestler, I think you’d understand”); Toby eating insects for money. (Dev to Toby: “Worms?” Toby to Dev: “Japanese beetles.” Cornelia to Dev: “Cooked Japanese beetles.” Dev to Cornelia: “In the microwave?” Cornelia (dryly) and Toby (proudly) to Dev: “Air popper.”)

  Teo was the quietest, and although he did almost as much teasing as the others and although they were all really friendly, Teo was the most considerate, making sure Dev felt part of things, catching his eye, drawing him in, asking him questions about himself in a truly interested, not-CIA-operative kind of way. They talked about music, and it turned out they liked the same kind: punky but melodic and un-mean, music that made you want to jump up and down hard, but that didn’t make you want to smash things. As Dev was walking out the door, Teo slipped him CDs by Social Distortion (“Social D circa 1990, their kinder, gentler, less-addicted period”), the Clash, and a band from Texas called Bowling for Soup.

  But even while all this went on, all the talking and laughing (once Toby even sang, if you could call it singing), Dev never stopped noticing Clare. She didn’t distract him, exactly. It was what happened with math problems sometimes or hard concepts, or, recently, with poems. He could be giving his attention to other things—really focusing—while part of his brain privately worked on Schrödinger’s cat or the Koch snowflake or “The Man with the Blue Guitar” or whatever other nut he might be trying to crack, like those supercomputers that keep constantly, silently solving problems (how to predict tsunamis or figure out protein structure) while the rest of the world sleeps or goes about its daily business. Not that Dev’s brain or any part of it was a supercomputer and not that Clare was a problem to solve. There was just a lot to notice about her. Dev believed there was mor
e to notice about Clare than about any girl he’d ever met.

  For starters, she used adverbs more than most people did, a lot more. She ate the twice-cooked pork—so loaded with peppers that one minuscule bite made Dev want to scream and run around in circles until he fell down—like it was potato salad. Her eyebrows were long, straight, symmetrical lines. She had a delicate, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t cleft in her chin (since cleft chins were far more common in males, Dev made a mental note to look up exactly what genetic odds Clare had beaten to end up with this trait). Her glossy ponytail curved at the end like a comma.

  Dev spent at least fifteen minutes trying to put his finger on what about her reminded him of Aidan before he realized that it was her gaze: direct and true. In Dev’s admittedly limited experience, most girls his age didn’t look at boys this way. Come to think of it, most kids his age didn’t look at anyone this way. They’d look challenging, knowing, sarcastic, flirtatious, wary, many, many gradations of bored, attitude that slid across their eyes like those transparent membranes lizards and sharks have, and the trick was to figure out what was underneath. It was like a guessing game, and even though Dev believed he was better at playing it than he used to be (because he used to suck), he knew he wasn’t great. When her eyes weren’t flashing naked panic or fear, even Lyssa gave Dev shrugging, sideways glances he found about as easy to read as quantum theory.

  They played chess.

  It was Clare’s idea. She told Dev that since she’d learned the game two years ago, she’d had a rivalry going with Cornelia’s father, Dr. B., who lived in her neighborhood.

  Clare grinned at Dev. “Cornelia says you’re smart. Maybe I can steal some strategies.” She led him into a book-lined room with a big desk at one end and a fireplace, but no fire, at the other. In front of the fireplace stood a tiny chess table with curving, gold-tipped legs and a leather chair on either side of it. “Besides, Cornelia’s chess table is too pretty to leave in here all by itself. She rescued it from some junk shop and refinished it, and Teo surprised her with these carved rosewood pieces from Germany.” She lifted the white knight, a horse with two heads pointed in opposite directions and cupped it in her palm for a few seconds, then handed it to Dev. It was heavy, smooth, and warm from her hand.

  “But you know what’s funny? They don’t play. Cornelia doesn’t even really know how. They just think this stuff is beautiful.” She smiled at the knight Dev held. When Clare talked about Cornelia and Teo, the love was obvious. They were people who belonged to her. Dev caught himself wishing that she’d talk about him like that, and then gave himself an imaginary “Get real, moron” punch in the arm.

  Dev didn’t make a habit of playing games like chess with people he’d just met. Basketball, yes. Chess, no. He wasn’t any Bobby Fischer guy who could make one move and see the next twenty moves light up like a constellation in his head, but he had studied the game a little, which was more than most people had done, and he had a kind of knack for it to begin with, so consequently he could usually win. And even though Dev wasn’t generally one to dumb himself down for public consumption, mainly because when it came to subjects that interested him, he’d get too caught up to put on an act (the Mr. Tripp incident being a case in point), he wasn’t a show-off either, and whenever he played chess, he sort of felt like one. He knew Aidan well enough now to not mind stomping him now and then (although Aidan could give him a run for his money), but he had just met Clare.

  As soon as they started, though, Dev knew everything was fine. For one thing, Clare could play, no doubt about it. But as Dev watched her, her straight back, her hand hovering over but not touching a piece until she was ready, the way her eyes flickered over the board, he understood that she wouldn’t mind losing. She wouldn’t love it, but losing wouldn’t shake her up or make her mad. The Berkeley psychologist had called Dev “self-possessed” and, at the time, he hadn’t been exactly sure what that meant, but as he played chess with Clare, the word suddenly made perfect sense. The same way Teo and Cornelia belonged to Clare, Clare belonged to herself. Clare liked being Clare, the same way that Dev had always (even when he was friendless and invisible) liked being Dev.

  “So at dinner you said something about your mom being in Antigua?” said Dev. “Is that why you’re spending Thanksgiving here?”

  “No. Not exactly,” said Clare, shaking her head. “More like she’s in Antigua because I’m spending Thanksgiving here.”

  “Oh,” said Dev, vaguely, “got it.”

  Clare smiled. “Not biologically, but in every other respect, Cornelia and Teo are part of my family. I mean, my mom’s my mom. I love my mom. But Cornelia and Teo and I need time together every few months. We all know that. Even my mom. Maybe even especially my mom.”

  Clare looked down at the board. Dev saw a risky but potentially great move she could make, and when Clare’s eyes stopped zigzagging across the board, imagining moves, and paused on a single chess piece, he saw that she saw it, too. He waited, liking that she didn’t hunch over the board in concentration but just dipped her chin down a little with her hands in her lap and lowered her eyes, her long, feathery eyelashes tilting like tiny awnings. She made the move, then shifted her clear, root beer–colored gaze back to Dev.

  “My mom’s bipolar.” She said it matter-of-factly. “Actually, she says manic-depressive’s a better term for it. Less cold, more accurate. What do you think?”

  Dev thought for a second. “The chef at this restaurant where my mom used to work would tell people he got his stomach stapled. He said gastric bypass sounded like traffic and bariatric sounded like weather. Bipolar sounds like geography.”

  “Precisely. And don’t things with poles always have two of them?” She held up her hand. “Wait, don’t answer that.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed. “Because I can tell you’re about to give me a really complicated math answer, and I bet I wouldn’t get it.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Dev sheepishly, “but I think I remember reading the word ‘tripolar’ somewhere.”

  “Anyway, my mom didn’t show any symptoms until a couple of years ago, but neither one of us knew that they were symptoms. My dad was out of the picture, so it was just the two of us, and I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Eventually, my mom had a breakdown—she calls it a breakdown—an incredibly awful one, and she took off in her car. Just left because she was so confused and didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “Wow,” said Dev quietly.

  “Cornelia and Teo swooped in and took care of me. They didn’t even know me, but they did it anyway, like it was the most normal thing in the world. We got to know each other really, really well.” She raised her eyebrows and grinned. “You want to know what I think?”

  “Yeah,” said Dev, unable to think of one thing he wanted more.

  “I think there are certain people who change the way time moves. Cornelia and Teo are people like that. I’ve only known them for two years, but really, in reality, I’ve known them for a long, long time.” Clare paused. “What do you think?”

  “I think Einstein couldn’t have said it better himself.” Dev took a breath. “But you might want to consider another possibility.”

  “Did I say you could poke holes in my theory?” Clare folded her arms. “Okay, what? What’s the other possibility?”

  “Maybe it isn’t Teo and Cornelia who change the way time moves.” Dev bought himself a couple of seconds by squinting down at the chessboard, pretending to consider his next move. Then he looked up into Clare’s expectant face and shrugged. “Maybe it’s you.”

  He ended up telling her everything. All of it: Mr. Tripp, the Berkeley psychologist, their sudden cross-country journey and seemingly random relocation, the genius-kid school applications, his mother’s current craziness (although he took care not to use the words “crazy” or “clinically insane”), and finally, most importantly, most surprisingly, his theory about his father.

  Except that Dev wasn�
�t really surprised, even though he’d absolutely decided to keep that theory a secret and even though, under ordinary circumstances, Dev was an ace secret keeper. It hadn’t just slipped out, the theory; he had set his sights on it from the second he started to tell Clare about himself and then had talked deliberately toward it, and when he said the words “I think my dad’s here. Someplace nearby. I think he’s why we came,” Dev didn’t follow up with so much as an “oops,” not even a silent one.

  Later, as he tried to put into words how this had happened, the phrase that popped into Dev’s head first was “truth serum.” Being with Clare was like drinking truth serum. But as soon as he thought this, he recalled that all the truth serums he’d ever heard of, maybe even including the Harry Potter potion Veritaserum, were sedatives. They depressed the central nervous system and interfered with judgment. As Dev talked to Clare, he felt the total opposite of depressed (he didn’t feel all that sedate either), and, if a person could be a fair and objective judge of his own judgment (which Dev had to admit was a biggish “if”), he believed his judgment had been just fine. In any case, he’d stand by it until hell froze over.

  So then the next word that came to Dev was “trust.” Probably trust serum did not exist, but if it did, Dev knew that it wouldn’t depress your central nervous system or anything else. A single sip of trust serum would zip around your brain flipping switches (maybe in your cerebral cortex? your limbic system? Dev was a little fuzzy on neuroscience) until you felt so flooded with lucidity and certainty that you would happily roll your most carefully guarded secrets into a ball small enough to place in someone’s palm, and then you’d do it: you’d give it away.