Who are you who are you who are you who are you?
He was so beautiful.
His beauty, and a cool-guy vibe that I had not yet encountered in real life, only in movies, assaulted me. He was tall, taller than me. He had once-my-hair-was-normal-boy-length-but-I-let-it-grow-out-like-two-years-ago long choppy brown hair that fell below his shoulders. His bangs were studied. He swept them to the side with his hand, tucking them up and around his ear, which had a perfectly round, small golden hoop imbedded in it. When he tilted his head ever so slightly forward, his bangs fell off his ear and covered his enormous root-beer-brown eyes. His eyes looked Italian, like Michelangelo eyes, big lids, soft. Can you picture those? Have you ever seen Michelangelo’s David? This boy had eyes from the Renaissance, and they were looking right at me. He was wearing a worn athletic-gray BRONX SCIENCE T-shirt. Bronx Science is a really good public high school in New York. I think it is one of the best schools in the country. I think geniuses go there. Did this guy go to Bronx Science? An unfamiliar feeling shot through my gut, as if an octopus had darted from one end of it to the other.
“Hi there.” His voice was friendly, and a little gritty. It was the voice of someone older than he looked like he was.
Oliver popped his head into the hall, breaking the spell.
“What’s up, Wren?”
I looked at him like, Um, who is this? Because the thing is, this guy wasn’t Samson or Benjer, Oliver’s goofy friends that had been coming over after basketball practice and playing Dungeons & Dragons in Oliver’s room for the better part of the last fifty Saturdays. This guy was new. It was like Oliver had brought home the Twilight guy.
“This is Nolan.”
“Oh. Nolan. Hi.” Nolan. Who would have thought that I would ever meet someone named Nolan?
“Hi, Oliver!” Padmavati almost shouted.
“Hey, Padmavati,” Oliver said, with nothing in his voice but a hello.
“Mom said we should be ready to go to the … um…” I was almost positive Nolan was kind of smiling at me. He had put his arm up so it rested on the frame of the door. I had to take a very subtle deep breath—unlike Padmavati’s earlier sharp and loud one. “… party.”
“I know. It will only take us five minutes to get ready. We have, like, almost two hours. It’s not even five.” Oliver shot a glance at Vati, which she would be using as proof of interest for the next few hours.
We? Was this guy coming to the party with Oliver?
“Okay, well, I’ll, we all will be, you know,” and I pointed my finger upward.
“Yup,” Oliver said. Nolan, who didn’t say a word, gave me an honest-to-god real smile, revealing adorable kind of big teeth, one of them chipped in the front. Oliver closed the door. Padmavati and I stood looking at the door in our face. The music got louder from behind.
“Oh my god, Wren. Who was that?” Vati said. “He has a chipped tooth, and still his hotness is devastating.”
I looked at her, speechless. My heart started beating a strong, distracting beat, like there was someone furiously pounding on a door in my chest. It felt exactly like I was about to recite a poem that wasn’t one hundred percent memorized in front of a class, or even like I was riding a bike down a steep hill and was just out of control enough to be unsure of my outcome. Or it was as if I had lost my footing climbing and almost fell out of a tree. Have you ever felt any of that? Like something thrilling was about to happen?
10
The instant Nolan’s mouth formed a smile in my direction, I wanted to tell Charlie and the girls. My first impulse is to tell. I am very impulsive. I blurt. I am a teller. I am an impulsive teller. But this time, I used my hard-won-in-therapy tools and pulled myself back. If this were any other day, I would have put Farah’s hand on my heart so she could feel the new beat, discuss, and figure out what was to be done about it. I would have shouted up two flights of stairs, “Guys! Something is happening to me and it’s because of some guy in Oliver’s room!” But I didn’t do it. Padmavati and I did rush up the stairs, but with each step I took, this fast-acting, unfamiliar feeling of wanting to be private and keep him to myself was building in my bloodstream.
When you get to the last flight of stairs before my floor, along the walls of the stairway are my drawings. Some are framed, some I just stuck up there randomly with blue wall tape. It’s my “gallery.” My mother gave it to me as a free space in the house that I could use any way I wanted. I mean, my room has my drawings all over it too, but there are too many of them. I had overflow. There were some drawings up there from as far back as third and fourth grade, and some from as recently as last week—black chunky cityscapes with yellow dripping windows, antelopes jumping, and many pictures of the stars in the night sky.
I had run past those drawings countless times, and seeing them was like looking in a mirror. But that day, they all looked unfamiliar. As if I was someone new. As if meeting Nolan had changed who I was even from that morning. Why the big change? I don’t know. Why do dogs that look like they are just checking each other out suddenly erupt in a growling explosion? Why do you sometimes have such a violently bad dream you bolt into your parents’ bed even though you are fourteen? Why can a song—a really cheesy one that you hear by mistake while your parents are watching the Country Music Awards on TV—make you cry, and move you so much you then download it so you can listen to it for the rest of the night up in your room? I don’t get it, but I am here to say that life—or a person—can unexpectedly change who you are very, very quickly.
I had only minutes to process this feeling before we got to my room. It wasn’t enough time. Padmavati rounded the corner into my bedroom at the end of the hall and jumped on the bed where Charlie and Farah were lying platonically all over each other.
“Reagan, get in here!” Vati called to Reagan, who was in the bathroom showering. Vati was going to blow it about Nolan and there was nothing I could do. I closed the door and flopped on the window seat on the far side of my room. It’s my go-to place of safety. Good for daydreaming, texting, and sketching the rooftops of the Upper West Side. Not good for homework, as my mother tells me almost every day.
“So something is up downstairs,” Vati said, sitting crisscross applesauce on the bed.
“We were assuming you were spying on Oliver,” Charlie said, unearthing himself from under Farah’s leg and putting one of my European squares behind his back. Farah, still reclining, shoved a sausage-link-shaped pillow embroidered with loopy pink ribbons under her head.
“Well, first of all, I really think Oliver looked at me—like, looked at me. It was ever so slightly different than any time before. He looked at me like this.” She relaxed her body, slouching like Oliver does, and said, “Hey, Vati.”
“Whoa hay hoe,” Charlie teased. “I see a marriage proposal any day now.”
“No, no, I’m quite serious. He has never given me this look before.” She relaxed again and then smiled with one corner of her mouth tilted up, exactly like Oliver does.
“I saw it, it was a nice smile,” I said from the window seat, hoping that maybe Vati was going to run with the telling-everyone-about-Oliver thing and forget to mention Nolan.
“Yeah, thanks, Wren, it was the real deal, I think. But—but, there is this other guy down there … Nolan, and he is so freaking gorgeous. He was wearing this Bronx Science shirt, like all cool and faded and worn in. And he had purple high-tops on, and he had this long, cool sort of black-brown hair and he’s tall, right?” Vati looked at me for confirmation.
“That is Nolan Shop. I’m sure of it,” Reagan said in a towel, standing in front of my Starry Night poster with my Tweezerman in her hand.
“How do you know?” I asked, with a little more edge to my voice than I meant to have. (That’s another ADD thing, or maybe it’s a big-feeler thing, but not having a lot of control over the emotion in your voice.) That is what Reagan is like. It can’t just be my thing that I had an encounter with a hot guy in my house, of course Reagan knows him. It felt like she was ev
er so slightly taking something from me. She does it even with random things, like magazines. I’ll have just cracked open a brand-new issue of Vogue and she’ll ask to see a picture for “just a second” and then she’ll end up reading the whole thing.
“It’s got to be him,” she said, gesturing with the tweezers she was holding like some teachers do with their reading glasses. The octopus in my tummy was going bananas.
“There’s a sort of famous Nolan that goes to Bronx Science. How many Nolans could there be? He’s all over Facebook. And Facebook is all over him,” she said. I felt like I was going to murder my parents that I had to wait until I was sixteen to have a Facebook page. I rushed into the bathroom to look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror that was completely steamed up because of Reagan’s shower. Who am I if I don’t even know what is all over Facebook? The mirror had no answers. All I saw through the steam was that my hair looked wild and unruly from the wind.
“Who. Is. Nolan. Shop?” I heard Farah say from the bed. I saw my eyes in the mirror open wider and then I kept going with that and opened my eyes as wide as I could. I mouthed Nolan Shop so I could see my lips form his name.
“Oh! I think I know who that is!” Charlie chimed in. I turned away from my reflection and looked back into the room to see Reagan whip her hair up over her head and then back down again so I got sprayed with tiny darts of water.
“He’s in a band,” she said.
“Yes!” Charlie jumped off the bed.
Reagan opened her towel to readjust, showing everyone on the bed the Crenshaw melons that are her boobs.
“They’re called the Shoppe Boys—like P-P-E shoppe—because his last name is Shop: S-H-O-P,” Reagan said.
“Yes! Yes, yes, yes—my guitar teacher totally told me about them. They’re still in high school but they are incredible. Yes, that is definitely him,” said Charlie, who got back on the bed happy that he knew what he was talking about. He was oblivious to Reagan’s boobs, which I couldn’t believe because I could hardly stop myself from staring at them.
“You seem to know a lot about that band, Reagan,” Farah said, like she was getting to the bottom of something. I leaned against the sink to listen. But before Reagan could answer, I heard someone pounding on the door of my room.
“Wren!” Dinah yelled, at the top of her lungs. “Mom wants you to come downstairs and try on the dress!”
“Dinah! Come in here.” Farah and my other friends had spent so much time with Dinah she was like everyone’s little sister. Dinah skipped in, followed by May.
“Did you see anyone come home from school with Oliver today?” Farah asked her.
“Um, no? I was shooting, if you didn’t notice.”
“I know, you little fish fryer, I just thought you could be helpful to us, but … never mind.” Farah plays Dinah like a tiny fiddle. The last thing I wanted was Dinah getting all up in my business, so I intervened.
“Shhh, you guys, come on. Let’s go see the dress.” I left the bathroom, passing Reagan, who was headed back in.
“I hear he’s adorable,” Reagan said.
I felt a flash of annoyance rip through me again, as if she had just taken my magazine.
“Who’s adorable?” Dinah has ears for boy-talk like a bloodhound has a nose for a missing person.
“Wren’s got a crush on a rock star in Oliver’s room,” Reagan said, popping her head out of the bathroom.
“Reagan!” I looked at Padmavati like, Thanks, and she looked at me like, What?
“That is just so wrong,” Dinah said, cracking up.
“Let’s go to your mom’s room and look at the dress,” Farah commanded.
“I’m doing my makeup,” Reagan called from the bathroom.
“I think I won’t go into your mother’s boudoir while she’s dressing, thank you,” Charlie said, and pulled a math textbook out of his knapsack.
“What is going on? Who does Wren have a crush on?” Dinah whined, scrambling to follow Farah.
“Dinah, please—go downstairs and do something else! We have to get ready.”
“‘We have to get ready,’” Dinah mimicked, rolling her eyes and following May out the door, her blunt bob swinging. Dinah wasn’t invited to the party.
11
Anytime someone compliments our house, my mother mentions what a wreck it was when she and Dad bought it. My first memory is being held by my father and looking around the kitchen that had eggplant-colored wallpaper peeling off the walls and very heavy drapes the previous owners had left on the French doors to the garden outside. I must have been two years old. I remember the feeling of his scratchy tweed blazer on the bottom of my thighs and putting my hand out to touch the dust drifting around in the light coming through the French doors. The scattering of particles in air is called the Tyndall effect—I learned eleven years later in Mr. Chin’s eighth-grade Earth Science class, but as a child I had no idea it was dust or particles, I thought it was just what light looked like up close. The glass in one of the panes was broken and Dad must have thought I was going for the sharp edge. He pulled my hand back and said, “Don’t touch it, my darling, it will surely cut you.” Sometimes both my parents think I am going to do something dangerous when I am really just trying to touch the light.
Now the glass in the windows is clear and storm-proof, and the walls are a deep butter-yellow—“like Rome in an August sunset,” my mother often sighs. There are Persian rugs running down the halls, and under those rugs the beaten-up floors are made from smooth, wide wooden planks. Photographs and paintings hang on the walls from the floor to the ceiling, all mixed up. There is a picture of Oliver in his purple West Side Little League uniform, right next to a Sylvia Mangold drawing of a tree—a present my father gave my mother when I was born. In every room (including my parents’ bathroom), deep, soft upholstered chairs and sofas are arranged so you can gather and talk, read, or take a nap—and you are encouraged to do all of those things. And on every side table are lamps with kraft-paper lampshades. All the lamps are different: eighteenth-century Dutch white and blue porcelain tabac jars, Italian owls from Siena, metal milk jugs found in barn sales, blown thick smooth Simon Pearce glass. It’s a real mishmash, but the shades are exactly the same. “Having uniform shades saves this room from looking hodgepodge,” I can hear my mother saying. We don’t have any overhead lighting because that is for hospitals and department stores—not for homes.
The real reason why we live in such a big house and have all those beautiful things is not only because my father has an important job, it’s also because long ago, back in Holland, my great-grandfather made a boatload of money as a banker. That money is why we can live where we live in New York City, and why most of my family can work in the arts.
Mom was seated at her dressing table in a pale pink silk robe, getting her hair blown out by Dinah’s hair-and-makeup person, Rachel. Hanging on the door of the closet was the red dress. Compared to the mayhem of my room, my parents’ spacious creamy wall-to-wall-wool-sisal-carpeted room, with the whirring white noise of the hair dryer, was peaceful and calming. Even Farah and Vati quieted down when they came in. It was a sanctuary of grownup-ness.
“Do you girls want your hair done? I’m almost through here,” said Rachel, with a soft lisp from her tongue piercing.
“Yes, girls—you should take advantage of marvelous Rachel and have her do something fantastic with those locks,” Mom called over the hair dryer, signaling to Rachel in the mirror that her hair was done and to wrap it up. I lay down across the bottom of my parents’ bed to stare at the dress. I would never flop on their pillows that were plumped to perfection by Hailey, our housekeeper. I had been taught that lesson a thousand times. I’m not sure my mother has a harsher bark for someone who messes up the pillows, but like May, I am always allowed to sit or lie on the goose-feather duvet folded at the foot of the bed. The hair dryer came to a stop.
“It gets more beautiful every time I look at it!” my mother said, getting up from her little
upholstered dressing-table chair and gliding over to the dress.
“I know. I can’t believe it.” Flashes of Nolan in the doorway assaulted me. I felt like I had to squeeze my stomach.
“It’s a rocking dress,” said Rachel.
“It’s huge!” said Padmavati, as she sat in my mother’s chair and considered her hair. Rachel swept Vati’s long black hair up in both her hands and twisted it into a chignon. Vati smiled.
“I wish I was Indian. Look at this hair!” Rachel tumbled Vati’s heavy, thick hair in her hands like every strand was solid gold. She practically put her face in it and rubbed it all around, looking like she might weep. “Hair like this is the reason I get up in the morning to do my job.”
“Put the dress on!” Farah flopped next to me, dangerously close to the plumped pillows, and pinched my butt. My mother clapped her hands like a preschooler and reached over to take the dress off the hanger. Farah leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I bet Mr. Music Man is gonna love it,” so I smacked her on the bottom as I sat up on my knees.
“Shouldn’t I take a shower or something first? I feel so dirty and yucky.”
“No, no, you can quickly try it on to see if it fits and then take a shower. Don’t you want Rachel to do something with this?” Mom came over and took a handful of my unbrushed hair and held it up to Rachel, who looked over with bobby pins clenched in her teeth and raised her eyebrows.
“No, no, I’m going to wash it and then let it dry with that stuff in it so it curls a little. It will be fine, Mama.”
“Up to you,” she sang in an I-don’t-think-you-are-making-the-right-choice voice.
“It’s my hair,” I sang back to her. We looked at each other in a standstill.
She tweaked my nose. “Okay, Wrenner. Take off those clothes.”
I undid my uniform skirt in the back and wiggled out of it so I was standing in my leggings. I pulled off my sweater and tank top at the same time and threw them on the bed. Then Farah pulled them apart and folded each one properly. She could work at the Gap. I was wearing a camisole top with a bra thing in it. I really don’t have enough boobs to wear a real bra. Truthfully, it felt awkward standing there, like a little girl in a dressing room with her mother trying on school clothes.
Starry Night Page 4