“Can I come in?”
“In here?”
“Yeah. Can I come up there?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Yes, okay.”
“Because we are,” he said.
“We are?”
He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”
I went downstairs and let him in, forgetting that I was wearing a ratty Ramones T-shirt and too-big boxer shorts, my sleep uniform, forgetting that my house was a mess, the banister along our stairs creaky and loose, the hardwood floors worn and scratched, that embarrassing flowered chair clearly sat in for far, far too long. He didn’t seem to notice anyway, and what did I care about some guy who thought I was too crazy to date? What did I care?
I cared so much.
He walked behind me as I slowly brought him up the stairs, then he reached for my hand, and it was so warm. It was so warm. But I took my hand away. I led him out my window and onto the roof.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“I never said that you were crazy. Especially to that guy. He likes Def Leppard.”
“I kind of like Def Leppard,” I whispered.
He scrunched up his nose. “You do? Oh, man, I don’t know about you, then.”
“I know that!” I was too loud. “I realized that you were not particularly fond of me even before you knew that I think ‘Photograph’ is a catchy tune. I like the Bee Gees, too. And, yeah, I’m crazy.”
“This is all that happened. Soo said that you were kind of like fancy crystal—that I had to handle you with care—not because you’re fragile but because you’re so …” He trailed off.
“What? So what? So crazy?”
“I don’t know. So special or something. That’s all she meant.”
“Special like special education?”
He sighed, frustrated or annoyed. “I said just what I said to you. I like crazy chicks. That’s all I said. And Soo was just going, you know, ‘Yeah, she’s pretty crazy,’ but not in a mean way, like, in a way that she liked you. Carrie. Carrie, come on. Carrie. Carrie?”
He sang more lyrics to the terrible Carrie song. How when lights went down, he saw no reason for me to cry.
“Stop! Stop, I can’t take it,” I said, covering my ears. He pulled my hands from them.
“I’m just scared,” he said, staring at his lap. “I’m scared, okay?”
“Why?” I could barely hear, that’s how hard my heart was beating.
“I just got scared that I wasn’t going to be able to handle you with care. That I’d break you. It seems like I break people. I don’t know—it was sort of what your mom said. I know what she did sucks so bad, but I worried I’d do the same thing. So I just, I thought I should stay away from you. It’s kind of like if I feel too much again, even too much good …” He trailed off. “I just … I don’t want to lose my mind again.”
“Well, okay.” I said. “You’ve found your mind, right?”
He smiled and the world was right. “Yes,” he said. “My mind and I have been reunited. I’m sorry I was an asshole. I was trying not to be an asshole, and in doing so, I became a total asshole.”
“Okay,” I said. Then I hugged him, and I loved the feeling of his long hair on my cheek, and I whispered in his ear, “Don’t be scared. Please don’t be scared.”
I told him I wanted him to take me somewhere, and then directed him down the Avenue of the Pines and through the parking lot and up the little dirt road that led to the geyser and its giant pile of calcium, the bright orange flowers of the jewelweed. He left a mix tape in, and we sat by the half-finished construction project.
The comet was still too low and far away for us to see without a telescope up there—it would still be another week or so before we could see it with our naked eyes, but the Scorpius constellation gleamed above us. “What kind of star is that?” he asked, pointing to the constellation’s tail.
“Probably a white dwarf,” I said. “It’s a little star that forms when a bigger star collapses.”
“It’s the dregs of the big star, you’re saying.”
“Yes, the astronomical dregs.”
“Another band name?”
“I’m thinking no.” I had no beer to sip, nothing in my hand to hold on to.
“What kind of star is the sun?” he asked.
“That’s easy—yellow dwarf.”
“Wait—the sun is a dwarf?”
“Yes, it’s only that hot because it has a Napoleon complex.”
The music thrummed faintly, the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” and we were just sitting there looking up at the sky, and time evaporated or it stood still or something, and I was just so uncomfortable. I was waiting and dreading, both.
“All those stars might not even be there anymore,” I said finally, trying to fill the silence. “Do you ever think about that? They might have exploded thousands of years ago, but it takes so long for their light to travel here that we’d never know. That’s old light we’re looking at.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s amazing.”
And then, I thought it was going to happen. Meteor showers and that warm soft air and his arm lightly brushing mine and the smell of jewelweed and him saying “I love this song” as the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” came on. It was too much. I couldn’t wait anymore. He was just sitting there, his hands to himself, not even looking at me.
“What’s happening?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be whining, but I was. “Is something going to happen?”
He said, “Um.” That um seemed to last for ten minutes. Then, very quietly, “Okay. Can I kiss you?”
No one had ever asked me that before. No one had ever been so solicitous and gentle and kind. His head was moving toward mine, the hair and the tangy smell and the night. He took the lock of my hair that had fallen over my face and tucked it behind my ear and then I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t take it, my heart was beating so hard that I could feel it in my ears and I jumped up and ran over to his car and got in the front seat and shut the door.
Dean came over and knocked on my window, and I rolled it down.
“Um, I have a question,” I said.
“You’re in luck.” His face was close to mine, even if the car door was in between us, and I could feel him getting closer.
“Why do you like me?” I asked. “And not just because I’m crazy. Or in spite of the fact that I’m crazy.”
I was stalling, just trying to find a minute to catch my breath, but he actually paused to consider the question. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”
He took my hand in his, my limp little dirty-fingernailed hand, and he looked at our hands as he talked. “I like your messy rock star hair. I love that one tooth that juts out. I like that you love astrophysics.”
It took all my energy not to evaporate from the sheer intensity of feeling; I didn’t even know what kind of feeling. Just: it was too much. It was too much good.
“And,” he said, “you have good taste in music.”
The nicest thing anyone could ever say. Somehow I could exhale.
“But the truth is …” He stopped. He was going to tell me that he still loved a girl back in Oregon and too bad for me. “The truth is, I knew I really liked you when I saw you in those work boots with that hardhat on the back of your bike.”
Then my lips were on his. I had kissed him without even meaning to, right through the open window. I pressed my lips against his and sort of hurt my lip, and he said, “Ow,” but then he kissed me back, and he put his hand against my cheek and our mouths were too open and then too closed and then we hit the rhythm. We kissed and we kissed and we kissed. And then Dean said, “This is a stupid way to do it,” and he opened the door and took me out and leaned me against the car, and I was more on fire with desire than I’d ever been in my life. All that heat, all that light, all that white—I felt like it wiped clean the dirty slate of the past two years of my lif
e.
We spent what felt like hours out there by the creek, by my imperfect corner of the unfinished footbridge, kissing until my lips were so red and chapped that I could hardly kiss anymore. I’d never felt any sensation in my life better than that pain.
“I should take you home,” he said at some point, pausing to rest his head on my shoulder, to kiss me at the base of my ear. “Your dad.” He lifted his head to look at me, and I looked at him, and this was happening. This moment. We were just looking at each other. And then we kissed some more.
We drove home, his hand on mine, moving away only to shift gears. We said nothing, and didn’t even put any music on the radio. When we pulled up in front of my house, all the lights were off. I had been out with an upstanding human being, who thought I had good taste in music and liked my hardhat. I kissed him and kissed him again.
Chapter 16
For that entire week, the comet blazed, a fireball making its way across the sky. It watched over us as we put the finishing touches on the footbridge, a glossy coat of polyurethane that had to sit for forty-eight hours before we worked on it again. We built a tent of tarps and dowels to cover the bridge so dirt and bugs wouldn’t get stuck to the polyurethane, which had a terrible chemical smell like spray paint that was also kind of a good smell.
“This is it, kiddos,” Lynn said, standing before the almost-finished footbridge, all three hundred feet of it snaking up toward the observatory. “We’re going to be done by Friday, and I encourage you to invite your family and friends to come celebrate the official opening of the Youth Workforce Footbridge.”
“Sounds like a rager,” I said. “I assume there’ll be a keg.”
Lynn started for a minute, then seemed to adjust. “Yes,” he said. “It’ll be a two-keg party, starting at nine a.m.”
“Really?”
Lynn smiled. “No,” he said, “but there will be coffee and donuts.”
I rode my bike the long way home, through the park and past the creek and by the racetrack and down along Mansion Row and then out to the wrong side of town, where the houses were far more run-down than mine and closer together, little bungalows squatting next to trailer parks. I hadn’t been to Tonya’s for a couple of years, but it looked the same: somehow sad and proud at the same time. I peered into the screen door and knocked. She was vacuuming—apparently that was the first thing she did when she got home—and didn’t hear me at first, so I had to open the door and call out. “Hey. Can I come in?”
“Enter at your own risk,” she said, turning off the vacuum. “My grandmother does not smell any better than when you used to come over.”
“Oh, I—”
“It’s okay. I heard you saying that to Soo one time. You’re right. The smells of pee, perfume, and booze do not mix. But she’s in the back with her nurse, so it’s actually not bad.”
“So, I just came to give this to you,” I said, handing back her hammer.
“Right,” she said, taking it from me and putting it on top of the TV, the old-fashioned kind with a giant screen in some hideous block of wood.
The screen was filled with animations of the planets. “What’s that?”
“Duh, you dipshit. It’s Cosmos.”
“You didn’t used to talk like that, Tonya,” I said quietly. I didn’t know why dipshit made me feel worse than all the other adorable insults she’d uttered over the last two months. But it did.
“Neither did you.” She turned the TV off and then it was just me and her and her dank living room, which she started tidying in an aggressive way.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been through a few things since then,” I said.
“Yeah, well, me too.”
I sat down, even though she hadn’t invited me to. Aging copies of Reader’s Digest were spread across the coffee table—all the furniture looked like it had been there since 1963.
“Let’s see. There was the alien abduction—that whole anal probe thing. A close second in the Miss America contest, which was truly devastating. Oh, wait—that was the Junior Husky Miss America contest, but it still stung. And, um, what else? Still getting over the fact that I missed the episode of General Hospital where Luke and Laura got married, which is so devastating that even though it was six years ago I’m still not over it. So, yeah—try to top that.”
Even though I hadn’t laughed, I said, “I forgot how funny you are.”
“Right.” She was sorting the mail, not making eye contact with me.
“Really, I did. I love my friends, but none of them are funny.”
“I guess it’s not cool to be funny.” She put the mail in one neat pile on top of the TV.
“Maybe it’s not. I don’t know. It seems like it would be, right?”
“Yeah. If you were actually cool, you would be into people who were funny. Otherwise you’re just a dipshit.”
“You don’t have to call me that.”
“This is a hypothetical dipshit we’re talking about. Wait—is that one of your band names?”
“‘Hypothetical dipshit?’”
“Yeah.”
“No, Tonya. That is not eligible for entry into the contest for great band names.”
“Thought I’d try.” She collapsed next to me on the couch, leaning over to straighten the magazines on the coffee table but still not really looking at me. “Beats Piece of Toast.”
“Everything beats Piece of Toast. They’re as good as their name.”
“Finally. You are coming to your senses, dipshit.” I rolled my eyes at her, but we were managing to almost smile. “You know what the worst part of this whole year of suck was?” she asked.
“Besides your dad’s thing and having to take care of your grandmother?”
“Yeah, besides that,” she said.
“What?”
“I didn’t have anyone to talk to when that Mars rover disappeared. You know? That was something you and I would have talked about forever.”
“Yeah, that sucked. That really sucked. I felt like we were going to learn so much about the mysteries of the universe with that guy—really. The real mysteries of the universe.”
“Yeah, it was just a giant bummer of a day for astrophysics nerds everywhere,” she said.
“Are they everywhere?”
“Yes,” Tonya said, with such certainty that I believed her. “They’re everywhere. We’re everywhere. We just have to find each other.”
As I made my way to the door, Tonya said, “So, yeah, looks like we’re in the homestretch.”
“Yeah, the end of the chain gang,” I said. “Three days left.”
“No, I meant the comet—it’s going to leave the Northern Hemisphere soon.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “It’ll be back to the humdrum story of the solar system, while it hides behind Neptune for a few decades again. We could totally be alive the next time it comes back,” I said. “We’ll be a hundred and thirteen. We’ll still be digging ditches in the park for minimum wage.”
“That is not my vision of my vocational future,” she said. “But enjoy that ambitious side of yours. Anyway, Jimmie’s dad has one of those Celestron telescopes, if you want to come see it tonight.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Next time.”
“You mean in ninety-five years?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Ninety-seven.”
“Okay, see you then.”
I pressed the screen door open but then I stopped and turned around. “What about tomorrow?”
“What about it?”
“You want to do something tomorrow? Something wholesome, involving disco?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, circumspect but curious, I thought. “You know what band is good?”
“I’m looking forward to hearing,” I said.
“Jimmie’s band. The Disco Balls.”
I resisted saying the name was only a marginal improvement over Piece of Toast. “Oh, I thought you were going to say Duran Duran.”
“I’m not to
tally ready to concede that point yet. Jimmie’s band is really good. And he’s a great drummer.”
“This is surprising news, I must say.”
“So you want to go see them tomorrow night, or what?”
“Well, I was supposed to go to Soo’s.” It was not true, but it was what came out of my mouth.
“Yeah, okay,” Tonya said, waving her hand at me, a combination of Goodbye and Go screw yourself.
“But, no—wait. Yes. I want to go. I can totally go. I’m going. Yes.” For some reason I was kind of hopping in the doorway, as if she had looked away and I wanted her to see me once again.
“Okay, nimrod, I get it. You’re coming. Fine.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
When I got home that night, still slightly fumey from the polyurethane, Rosie was sitting in the kitchen, organizing her school supplies. She was the only person I knew who was psyched for school to start. She’d be starting junior high in a week. She held a rainbow pencil between her teeth.
“This came for you,” she said, shoving an envelope my way.
I took it but didn’t open it. “Did you get one too?”
“Of course.”
“What is it? It doesn’t smell like caraway.”
“Star flowers,” Rosie said, not looking up. “They’re supposed to bloom well in shade, so says her little card.”
“Are we throwing these out, as usual?” I asked. What went on in that twelve-year-old head? I wondered. She hadn’t lived with her mom for months, and here she was acting like it was normal to keep getting these seeds from her, but pretty much nothing else, save for—maybe—the chaperoning of a future field trip.
“No,” she said. “Don’t throw it out.”
“No?”
“No. Just grow it. See what blooms. She says they’ll come up even in fall. When she’ll be back.”
“Huh.” I opened the barely stocked fridge to see what was inside. Very old peanut butter, very old jelly, and some not-that-old bread. “You hungry?” I asked. “You want me to fix you something?”
Rosie lifted the left side of her mouth in skepticism. “Did you learn how to cook since last time I saw you? Because I don’t think you’ve ever made me anything to eat in my entire life.”
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