With all of the windows, our bedroom wasn’t ink dark, so much as grainy, charcoal gray. I could see Celeste’s closet door gaping open again, which made me think of her comment at the dorm meeting—her insistence about the horrible smell. I tiptoed over and breathed in through my nose. It still smelled good to me. I waited a few minutes, letting the scent bring me that feeling I’d had earlier. Warmth, comfort. Definitely a memory. What was it? My old cedar chest? No. I leaned farther in, inhaled once more, and shivered slightly. If the scent had been more perfume-like, I would have guessed that it reminded me of the way my mother smelled when I was a baby. The feeling was that essential.
Something made me turn my head. Celeste was propped up on her elbows, staring at me.
“Oh.” I snatched my hand off the door. “I didn’t know you were awake.”
“They won’t let me sleep.”
They, meaning us? “I’m so sorry. We tried to be quiet.” She couldn’t have heard what we were saying, could she? I walked quickly over to my bed.
“Not you guys,” she said. “Them.” She flailed a skinny arm at the windows. “The trees, the moonlight. I told you, there are too many windows here. And there’s this, like, constant breeze prickling my skin, touching me. It’s creepy. You slept here last night. Didn’t it bother you?”
“Actually, I fell asleep right away. Should I shut the windows a bit, so it’s not as breezy?”
“No. That nasty smell from the closet took over the whole room. It was making me gag.”
“Do you want some Tylenol PM?”
“I don’t take drugs.” She said it like I’d offered her crack.
“Okay. Well, I’ll get some new shades, if that’ll help. If we put in a work order, they won’t get around to it until graduation.”
“Can you do something about the closet, too?” she said. “You must have noticed the smell, standing over there.”
“I think it’s just the wood,” I said, turning on the small lamp by my bed and finding my basket of toiletries. “Smells kind of old and musty. I don’t mind it at all, but I grew up in an old house.”
“There’s old, and then there’s dead.”
I glanced back at the closet. She couldn’t be talking about the same smell I was. “Did you store all your bugs and bones and stuff in there? Maybe it’s them.”
“Those do not smell. Anyway, you said you didn’t want them in the bedroom. I put them across the hall. I’m telling you, Leena, there’s something in here. Something weird and gross. And unless the boys who lived here left behind a corpse, it has nothing to do with them.”
With that, she lay down and pulled the sheet back over her head. In a case of utterly perfect timing, a breeze swept through the room at the same time and the closet door slammed shut with a bang.
Celeste sat up straight. “Why did you do that?” she asked me, alarmed.
“I didn’t,” I said. “It blew shut.”
“Blew shut?”
She stared at the closet as if she couldn’t quite grasp the concept. Then lay back down, not taking her eyes off it, making sure it didn’t startle her with another sudden noise. Finally, she drew the sheet over her head again.
“’Night,” I said to her covered figure as I turned off the light and headed to the bathroom.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Not in here.”
Chapter 9
I STEADIED MY FEET ON THE CHAIR as I reached up, drill in hand, and repeated, “Many prokaryotes are able to take up nonviral DNA molecules,” in an accent like the Terminator’s.
It was Saturday morning after our first week of classes, and I was multitasking: switching the old, broken shades for new ones I’d bought at the mall, while listening to my recording of Friday’s unnervingly complicated lecture by my bio teacher, Mr. Baumschlager.
Not exactly how I wanted to spend a day without classes, but it needed to be done. Celeste had had insomnia all week, and continued to be paranoid that someone could be watching her through the windows. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t share her caution—it was true that a person in the backyard could have seen everything we were doing. To me, though, the garden felt like an extension of my space.
As for the bio lecture, after struggling in a couple of subjects at Barcroft, I’d figured out that the more a subject daunted me, the more trouble I had paying attention in class. Apparently, my brain left the room when it was confused. Ritalin hadn’t worked, so—at the suggestion of a tutor—I’d started recording and re-listening to classes last year, and had made honor roll for the first time.
“The genomes of eubacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes—”
A knock came at the door behind me. I turned. David stood in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his low-riding jeans, wearing an orange tee that said I LIKE PI on it.
“I expected you to be more muscular,” he said, smiling. “And male.”
“Herr Baumschlager.” I stepped down from the chair and moved over to my laptop to pause it. “Yesterday’s bio lecture. I enjoyed it so much the first time I had to listen again.” I figured I didn’t need to be embarrassed about my nerdiness in front of a guy with math humor on his shirt.
“My sister around?” he said. “She called me to help you guys do something. Hang these blinds, I guess?” He picked one up off the floor, still rolled and wrapped in plastic.
“Really?” This was my project. I hadn’t asked her to call him. “She’s not even here. Her wireless connection wasn’t working so she went to the library.”
“God, she’s such a twerp sometimes.” David shook his head, like he was sort of annoyed, sort of amused. “Well, since I’m here, at least let me help. She asked me to hang that photo of hers, too.”
Usually, I preferred to do projects alone. But I did have a ton of homework this weekend and was supposed to take Anya to the park tomorrow. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
We headed down the hall to get parietals.
Over the past week, I’d run into David around campus and here in the dorm a few times. Always happily. Aside from the gorgeous thing, he was friendly and easygoing, and knowing he was around made me feel like if I ever had a major problem with Celeste, there was someone sane who could mediate. It was pretty obvious he was an equal-opportunity flirter, so I wasn’t convinced that, like Celeste had said, he’d noticed me in particular. But since it didn’t matter either way, I just enjoyed the buzz I got from his attention.
Back in the room after getting parietals from Ms. Martin, I assigned David the duty of measuring for the new brackets, while I finished up removing the old ones.
When the drill stopped screeching, he asked, “Where’d you learn how to use power tools?”
“My dad,” I said. “He’s a carpenter, old-house restorer guy. Big into DIY.”
“My dad’s smart as hell,” David said. “But the only thing he can hit with a hammer is his thumb.”
“It takes practice.” I wondered if his dad was a mathematician, like David. Like the man in the movie A Beautiful Mind. “I’ve been using tools since I was a kid,” I said. “I made that bookshelf this summer.”
I turned to point and noticed not only the muscles in David’s back when he raised his hands, but also what he was doing. “Are you measuring the front of the molding?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“With this type of molding and these brackets, it has to go inside the frame. See?” I held one up and demonstrated.
“Oh. Right.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll hang the photo first.”
I took down the last of the old brackets as he got the frame from her closet. “So, you inherited your dad’s,” I coughed, “talent with this stuff. Is he where you got your brain for spoon math, too?”
“My what?” David said.
“Well, I know that you’re a math whiz. And you made that comment about spoons. So I figure you were talking about some type of equation or theory, or something.” I was kind of kidding, but also a little serious. I didn’t kno
w anything about superadvanced math, and I hadn’t come up with any more plausible idea.
“Like, physicists have string theory, and mathematicians have spoon theory?” he said, standing there holding the photo.
“Yeah, exactly.”
David laughed. Hard. “Spoon theory. That’s great.”
“So if that’s not it,” I said, enjoying the goofy heh-hehs of his laughter, “are you going to tell me what you really meant?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, still smiling really wide. “It’s going to sound lame in comparison.”
“The more you delay, the more you’re building it up,” I teased.
“Okay, okay.” He rested the photo on the floor and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “I took a metalwork class last year and developed a bit of an obsession with spoons.”
Metalwork. “Wait,” I said. “So you actually make spoons?”
He shrugged, as if to say, “See? Lame.”
“Spoons have always annoyed me,” he said. “I could never find the right one for the right job.” He went on to describe how he made them for specific uses. One had a built-in rest, so that it didn’t touch the table after you used it to stir your coffee. One had a small hole in the basin, so you didn’t get a whole lot of milk with your bite of cereal.
“You realize this is kind of weird, right?” I said. I couldn’t decide if it was cool-quirky weird, or just plain strange.
“I guess,” he said. “It was something … concrete to do. You know?”
That I understood. Making something useful, something you could touch, that solved a problem. Like the bookshelves I make to fit in weird-shaped spaces. I’d made the one for this room low and wide, to fit under a section of the windows. Seeing it in its place was incredibly satisfying.
“Is this still an obsession?” I asked. “Are you going to write your college essays about how you want to bring better spoonage to the masses?”
“No,” he said, turning his attention back to hanging the photo.
He didn’t say anything else, so I got my pencil and tape measure and had just begun correcting his measurements on one window when he asked, “Is this a good spot?” He was holding the frame up in the only free wall space, at the end of Celeste’s bed. “And do you mind if I hang it? I wouldn’t want it on my wall if I were you.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “That’s perfect.” Perfect because it wouldn’t be very visible from my side of the room. I didn’t feel so strongly that I’d tell David not to hang it, but I definitely didn’t need “Dead Celeste the Bug Charmer” to be the last thing I saw before falling asleep at night.
“Can you mark the spot for the nail?” he said.
I stepped off the chair and crossed to where he stood, then had to lean next to him—just touching—to make a dot at the center of the top of the frame. His smell of coffee and warm boy skin filled my lungs and melted through my limbs.
David suddenly shifted to look behind us.
“What?” I said, stepping back, looking, too.
“Thought I heard someone,” he said. “I think I know why Celeste feels like she’s being watched in here.” He gestured over at my bed, where Cubby sat with her wide owl eyes directed right at us.
“Oh,” I said, smiling. “Yeah. You’ve got to watch what you do in front of her. She’s all-knowing.”
We went back to our respective tasks. I drilled holes in the first window frame, then got my screwdriver and one of the new brackets.
“Is all this—making bookshelves, carpentry stuff,” David said after finishing hammering, “something you’d do? Like your dad?”
“Not professionally.” I twisted a screw around, around, around…. “I love buildings because of him, though. I was always convinced I wanted to be an architect.”
“But?”
“Now I’m thinking I might want to do something that’s more people-oriented. Social work, maybe. Or teaching. Or … I got really into my psych class last year, so maybe psychiatry.”
“You’d be a great teacher.”
I looked over at him. The photo was hanging and he’d started measuring windows again. “How would you know?”
“Both my parents are teachers,” he said. “My mom’s a professor. My dad taught middle school. I can spot a good one a mile away. And I saw you give that presentation, remember?”
“Oh, right.” I brushed a loose section of hair behind my ear, almost stabbing myself in the eye with the screwdriver. “Well, the good thing about teaching is that I feel like I can major in lots of things and go into it. But if I want to be an architect or a psychiatrist, it’s more … complicated. I feel like I’d have to decide soon.”
“You’d want to go to med school?” he said.
“So I could write prescriptions. I know therapy helps, too. Obviously, it’s hugely important. But so much of everything is chemical.”
I began turning the next the screw into the window frame. “Like schizoaffective disorder. Therapy can only do so much, right? It’s all about neuroscience and”—I almost said genetics— “and biology.” The wood splintered, the bracket broke off and clattered to the floor. “Damn.”
“It’s not like science has done anything great for my dad,” he said as I stepped off the chair and scanned the floor for hardware. “Jesus. I don’t know if he’s better when he’s on or off his meds. Well, no. That’s not true. But he’s bad in different ways.”
“But new drugs are coming out all the time.” I bent over to grab the bracket and screw, then stood and faced David. “Eventually, you know, in the future, mental illness won’t even exist. Not in our lifetime, I guess. But eventually.”
“I think we’ll just make new problems as we fix the ones we have.”
“You and Celeste aren’t big on medication, are you?” I still couldn’t understand why she’d choose insomnia over Tylenol PM.
“I guess we’re kind of cynical.” David said. “We’ve gotten our hopes up too many times. But, I mean, of course if something happened to her, or to me, I’d be happy there were options.”
“Do you … is that … is it something you guys talk about? You know, the possibility … ?”
He nodded. “We have a pact.”
“A pact?”
“Sometimes, when people first get sick, they know something’s wrong but are scared to talk about it. Celeste and I have a pact so if one of us ever starts … I don’t know, worrying about thoughts we’re having, we’ll tell the other one.”
He sounded sweet, but kind of naïve, until he added, “Of course, there’s not much I could do to help her, at that point. But at least I could keep her from doing something, you know, desperate.” He paused. “My dad has. A couple times.”
“I don’t blame him.” After I said it, I realized how awful it must have sounded. “I mean, stuff must be so difficult for him.”
“Not everything,” David said in a flat voice.
“I tried, in eighth grade,” I said. “And I’m sure my life wasn’t nearly as hard.”
The words hit the air before I could stop them.
“I didn’t really try,” I added quickly. Had I just compared my immature stupidity with his father’s serious mental illness? “I took a bunch of pills,” I said, “but I threw them up. I didn’t almost die, or anything. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made that connection. It wasn’t that big a deal.”
“Sounds like a big deal,” he said. “What happened?”
“Well,” I started, my heart suddenly pounding. Why had I mentioned this? “Like I said, I think stuff can be really … physically based. My body was going through hormonal changes, my chemistry was all screwed up, and my parents were getting a divorce and I just kind of lost it.”
“The divorce was messy?”
“No,” I said. “They didn’t even use lawyers.”
“So—”
“They were making me decide if I wanted to stay in Cambridge with my dad or move to LA with my mom.”
“As a thirteen-y
ear-old?” he said. “Of course you were upset. Nothing to do with hormones.”
“People’s parents get divorced every day,” I said, “and it doesn’t make them want to kill themselves. I mean, my parents both wanted me. I got much better after I was on antidepressants for a bit.”
“Who did you pick?”
I wiped my forehead and rested my hands on my hips. “Neither. I was close to both of them and didn’t want to … you know, choose one over the other. So in ninth grade, I came here. Some vacations I go to LA, some I go to Cambridge. Sometimes I go to Abby’s family.”
“That’s kind of sad,” David said.
“It’s not,” I said. “It was the perfect solution. During the school year, my friends are my family.”
“There’s a big difference between friends and family.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Friends you can choose.”
I smiled, but instead of smiling back, David’s expression hardened like cement. So did his voice. “I’d choose my dad and Celeste,” he said. “Over anyone. And I always will.”
“Oh. Of course.” Blood rushed up my neck and flooded my cheeks. “I didn’t mean that. I was talking about myself, about my own family. Not about yours.”
It took a couple of seconds for his face to soften. “Sorry,” he said. “I just assumed.”
“That’s okay.” I stepped back up on the chair and refocused on hanging the shades, something I knew how to do. My hands trembled.
We worked for a while in unsettled silence. I couldn’t believe how many stupid things I’d said. I wasn’t usually so tactless. After a few minutes, I asked, “Would you mind if we listened to my bio lecture?”
David didn’t answer right away. “It’s not you,” he finally said, keeping his eyes on what he was doing. “I’m just so used to being defensive about my family. But you’ve been so cool about Celeste moving in here, hanging these blinds for her, and you’re not all freaked out about my dad, like people get. I appreciate it.”
I could tell that this was a major thing for him, protecting his family. I guessed maybe he’d had to take his dad’s place, in some ways.
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