by Meg Leder
He rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m not dressing up as half of the periodic table,” he said. I cringed, remembering our spectacularly dorky fourth-grade Halloween costume, one suggested by our parents.
“Fine. But no raptors, either,” I said, referencing another year’s ensemble. We’d ended up looking like garbage bags with wings.
“The things I do for you,” he muttered under his breath,
I resisted the impulse to seize his shoulders and jump up and down in sheer glee, and instead looped my arm through his, pulling his elbow close as we started walking down the hall.
“It is going to be awesome. I promise.”
Star stickers
Stella stickers
New York, New York
Cat. No. 201X-7
Gift of Jane Marx
FIVE DAYS LATER, THE DAY of the party, October the first, I was 100 percent freaking out.
“Nothing is awesome right now,” I said to Audrey as she brushed out her long hair. She looked perfect: flared polyester pants, a plunging plaid shirt, big shiny hoop earrings, brown high-heeled boots.
“I told you—we only have two Charlie’s Angels. You should be our third.”
“Bosley would be more like it,” I mumbled under my breath, glancing briefly in the mirror at the unruly mess of my hair next to Audrey’s shiny mane, before heading across the hall in a funk.
It was four short hours before party go time. I was costumeless, pacing the empty space in my room—a pretty limited pacing zone, considering the clothes I had thrown in frustrated piles on the hardwood floor. I shoved items on the rack in the closet and pulled down an old vintage blue dress, holding it up and assessing its potential. Alice in Wonderland? But it was polyester, and showing up at Keats’s house stinky with anxiety sweat would probably not help my already terrible flirting skills.
I tossed it over my shoulder.
“Watch it!” Eph said from the bed, looking up irritably from his comic and throwing the dress on the floor.
“Sorry,” I said.
He shook his head and turned back to his comic, mouthing the words to himself as he read, a habit I’d noticed soon after we first met. When I told my mom I thought it was weird, she sat my six-year-old self down and explained about reading disabilities. A week later, when Wayne Pinslaw teased Eph about it on the playground, I kicked him in the shin, drawing blood and earning my only visit to the principal’s office. I had to apologize to Wayne, but Wayne had to apologize to Eph, making the whole thing totally worth it.
I stared at Eph, envying the fact that he already had a costume, though whether it actually qualified as a costume was debatable. He was dressed in all black—black jeans, black knit hat, black boots, long-sleeved black T-shirt, black thermal on top of it.
“I’m the dark night of the soul. Or a black hole. Or something like that,” he’d said when I’d asked him earlier.
“You’re copping out,” I said.
“How is being in more than one costume copping out? I’m actually so invested in this, I am in an infinite number of costumes. It’s meta and crap.”
I rolled my eyes and resumed scanning the Internet for costume ideas.
That was an hour and a half earlier, when I’d still had five and a half hours to create the perfect costume, the one that would get Keats to notice me at his party. Now it was seeming like there might be another black hole wandering around with Eph.
“I’m so, so glad you guys are coming,” Audrey called out from under the noise of the blow dryer across the hall. “I told Cherisse she should get Keats to invite you. I’m so glad she did!”
I was willing to bet the gold charm bracelet my grandma gave me—my number one thing to grab in a fire after my parents and Ford the Cat—that Cherisse had not talked to Keats on our behalf. Divine intervention from Zeus or Thor or Buddha or the patron saint of single, unkissed sixteen-year-old girls seemed more likely.
“I think it’s great you guys can hang out with Cherisse more . . . ,” Audrey continued.
Eph pointed at himself and in a low voice said, “Tall. Handsome. Hottie. Right here.”
I tried to smile, but it came out all grimacey. I had no costume.
“Your neck is getting all red and splotchy again.”
“Telling me that doesn’t help anything.” I rubbed at my neck.
“Audrey, Pen is panicking.” He flipped lazily through his book.
“I’m not panicking!”
Audrey’s voice was calm but forceful from across the hall. “Pen, stop panicking. You’re not going to think of anything if you’re running around like a rooster with its head cut off.”
“Chicken,” Eph and I both said simultaneously.
I flopped down on the bed next to him, hoping that if I rubbed my forehead hard enough, the magic idea would simply arise.
“Eph, what am I going to be?”
“High School Junior.”
“Eph,” I said.
“Girl Without a Costume?”
“Eph,” I repeated more insistently.
He sighed, put his comic book down, and propped his elbow up, head on his hand, and studied me. I saw a stray eyelash on his cheek, Orion’s belt across the bridge of his nose.
“If you give me one more bad suggestion, I’m going to sic Ford on you.”
“That cat hates me.” He frowned, contemplating Ford’s inexplicable disdain for and fury toward him, before resuming. “No, what I wanted to say was fuck them. If anyone gives you a hard time? Fuck them. We’ll leave, okay?”
That wasn’t what I was expecting.
I stared at his face until it blurred, everything behind him sharpening: the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, the white Christmas lights I had strung around the edge of the room.
“Whoa,” said Audrey when she saw Eph leaning so close over me.
I scrambled guiltily up, even though there was nothing to be guilty about, and in the process knocked my skull squarely into Eph’s nose.
“Ow, fuck!” he yelled, falling back and covering his face with both hands.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I’m so, so, sorry!”
“Why do you keep trying to kill me?” he moaned from behind his palms. “You already broke my nose once.”
“God, it was fourth grade! Besides, you instigated that one,” I couldn’t resist reminding him, thinking back to how he lifted my skirt in front of half the class.
Eph pushed himself up, still cradling his nose, and Audrey leaned down and pulled away his hands.
“You’re not bleeding, so that’s good.”
The bridge of his nose was a little red, but aside from the cranky expression on his face, he seemed pretty much unharmed.
“Eph, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” I hid my head in my hands. “You know, this whole evening is a mistake. I don’t know what to wear; I hate parties; I nearly killed Eph. We should have gone to Coney Island.”
“Too late,” Eph said. “Besides, I only saw stars for like four seconds. It’s probably only a minor concussion.”
“Wait, what’d you say?” Audrey asked him.
“Only a minor concussion?”
“No, before that.”
“It was an accident, I only saw stars—”
“That’s it!” Audrey yelled.
Eph and I flinched.
“Pen, does your mom still put those little gold stickers on the papers she grades?”
“Yeah?”
“Get them!” Audrey said. She checked her watch and frowned. “I have to leave in like five minutes. I’ll meet you in the bathroom.” She started digging through my dresser, held a navy tank up, frowned, and discarded it on the floor.
I checked Eph to make sure we were okay, and he spun his finger, making a cuckoo motion in Audrey’s direction.
“Go, go, go, Pen!” she shouted over her shoulder.
I burst out into the hall and halfway down the steps, yelling over the banister, “Mom, can I borrow some of your teaching supplies?”
Once I had a packet of stickers, Audrey met me at the bathroom door. She shoved my black boatneck pocket tee, short pleated black skirt, black tights, and maroon-but-so-beat-up-they-were-practically-black Docs into my arms, while somehow pulling her jacket on at the same time.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said, grabbing the stickers and starting to put them over the skirt.
“Can’t you stay a little longer?”
“I wish I could! I told Cherisse I’d head over with her. But you can do this.”
She leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.
“You’re the best ever, Vivien,” I said to her.
“You’re the best Everest, Delphine,” she replied.
We hooked pinkies before she ran out the door, yelling, “See you at the party, Eph!”
Fifteen minutes later I emerged. Eph was sitting up on my bed, drawing, and from where I was standing in the doorway, I could tell he was working on one of his dinosaur cityscapes.
“Eph?” I asked.
He looked up from his drawing, his eyes going wide.
Picking up where Audrey left off, I had stuck gold and silver star stickers all over me. Stars on my boots, a few stars on my cheek, stars over my heart. I was covered in constellations, like Eph’s and my ceilings. I had three stars in a row on my sleeve, like the freckles across his nose, like backup. My hair was twisted up into crazy knots with sparkly bobby pins.
“The planetarium?”
“Or the Milky Way. Or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s an infinite number of costumes,” I said.
He nodded appreciatively, shutting his notebook and offering me his arm.
New York City subway token
New York City subway tessera
New York, New York
Cat. No. 201X-8
Gift of Ephraim O’Connor
I SHOULD HAVE ENJOYED THE journey to Keats’s West Village brownstone. I was going to a party, a party thrown by the potential love of my life. Several people, not counting the man on the corner muttering to himself about pork rinds, had already stopped to compliment me on my costume. Eph was in a good mood, chattering most of the way there about comic books and skateboard decks, and when we got out at West Fourth Street—“Holy crap, check out the moon!” And the moon was luminous: big and oddly, precisely circular, like it was a space hole-punched out of the sky. People in sweaters and boots were smiling pleasantly around us, all the frustration of the summer humidity suddenly forgotten.
Like I said, I should have enjoyed it.
The climate inside my head, though, was distinctly terrible.
My lip gloss was tingling unpleasantly, and I was pretty sure I was having an allergic reaction and would end up with lips that were swollen but not in an appealing Angelina Jolie way.
My Docs suddenly felt like the heaviest shoes in the world, like I was a fat horse clomping on the sidewalk.
A few stars had fallen off, and I felt bad about littering, but I was too busy second-guessing my costume to stop, thinking of how I’d appear amid all the sexy vampires and slutty Dorothy Gales and at least two hip Charlie’s Angels who’d be there.
Dinner was not sitting well in my stomach. I was heading to possibly the most momentous event of my sixteen years to date, and my breath reeked of the Chipotle that Eph and I had shoved down thirty minutes ago. Things were gurgling ominously down below.
Two doors from the address, I flat-out froze.
He looked back at me.
“Let’s go home.”
He waited.
I gnawed on my lip and bit at the sore spot on the inside, tasted the iron tang of blood, and wiped my clammy palms on my skirt. A few more stars fell off. I imagined a giant white hand hurtling through the universe, wiping out entire galaxies.
“I’m sorry for dragging you out. I’m sorry I made all this stupid fuss.”
He sighed, patiently exasperated. “You want to go. You dig Keats.”
“No, I don’t,” I said automatically.
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, so you’re a total party animal now—that’s why you wanted to go in the first place?”
I sighed and shook my head, trying not to meet his eyes, trying not to be all weird and watery-eyed, and totally failing.
“God, you really like this guy, don’t you?”
I bit my lip so hard it almost bled. “I do.”
I waited for him to joke how it was about time I got a boyfriend or to make a loud fart noise or something else terrible, but instead he nodded, studying me carefully, his eyes taking me in like I was something new.
“All right. I was saving this for myself, but . . .” Eph pulled his wallet out from his back pocket and dug through the billfold. His hand emerged with a small, round piece of metal, the center cut out.
“An old subway token?”
He nodded, pleased with himself.
“Thanks, I guess?”
“You ‘guess’?”
“Sure?”
“Pen, I won that in a game of cards with the Bearded Lady at the Coney Island freak show. It’s full of totally sick magic.”
“The Bearded Lady? Oh, please.” I studied the token in my hand.
“It’s true! We were playing a round of five-card draw, and Rufus the Sword Swallower and Serpentina had already folded.”
“You are so full of it.”
“My sketchbook was up for grabs, and now that you’ve seen my latest stuff . . .” He raised an eyebrow. “You know it’s worth millions.”
“Um-hmm. So now we get to talk about it?”
He ignored me. “So the Bearded Lady had her lucky subway token on the table—the one you currently have in your clammy hands. Turns out she had never been beat, thanks to that very token. And of course she was winning—she was crushing me. I thought me and my dinosaurs were toast. And I was convinced she was fucking stacking the deck. Her beard? Huge. There could have been a whole deck of cards hidden in there. But no way could I accuse her with Rufus there—I mean, his lady’s reputation was at stake. I would have ended up with a sword through my spleen.”
“The Sword Swallower and the Bearded Lady were a couple?”
“Totally head over heels in love with each other.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, and to be honest, I probably could have gone home with Serpentina. She was giving me sex eyes.” He wiggled his tongue, snakelike, at me.
“Gross.”
“Occupational hazard of being a tall, handsome hottie. Anyway, so she puts down a straight flush, all smuglike, and I can see her, practically reaching for my notebook, when bam, I crush it with a royal flush.”
“I don’t know what any of this card stuff means, you know.”
“The Bearded Lady was mega pissed, couldn’t believe I had won, especially with all her cheating, and I grabbed the token, right as Rufus shot his sword down into the table, only fucking millimeters from my hand. My life flashed before my eyes—sort of like when you pushed me off my skateboard? Or tried to give me a deviated septum by ramming your skull in my face? Or broke my nose?”
“I was ten!”
“But Serpentina held up her hands. ‘Rules are rules; the wager was made; promises must be kept.’ Damn, she was hot.” He sighed wistfully. “So I shoved the token in my pocket and got the fuck out of there. And now I’m bestowing it on you. I mean, the Bearded Lady landed Rufus with the magic in that token, Pen. That’s some powerful shit there.”
I unfurled my fingers, studied the totally average-seeming old subway token.
“Not that I’m comparing you to the Bearded Lady,” he added hastily.
Eph was so full of it.
But he was waiting, expectant, and I felt a trace of the things you can’t hold glowing around me: glimmer and potential and maybe.
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said, and slid the token into the pocket over my heart.
• • •
As we climbed the stoop to Keats’s brownstone, I patted the
token against my chest for reassurance. The thump of the bass on the other side of the door was so loud I felt it in my ribs. I reached for the doorbell, but Eph pushed in.
The first person we saw? Cherisse.
Not an auspicious start.
Her blond hair was curled in feathery seventies waves, held back by a terry-cloth headband, and she was wearing a white tennis dress—the pleated skirt so short I worried about potential hygiene issues for her lady parts. Nestled deep in her cleavage was a gold charm on a gold necklace, all glittery in the light.
“Ephraim!” She pulled him into a hug, giving him a kiss on each cheek.
She squinted at me. “Are you an arts-and-crafts project?” The drunk slur in her voice made it sound like she had called me an arts-and-craps project. Though it was Cherisse we were talking about—maybe she actually had.
“Hey, Cherisse,” I said, edging around her. “No, I’m the night sky.”
“Oh my God, Penny, that’s so cute!”
Okay, she called me Penny, but had she actually complimented me? Maybe she wasn’t so bad.
“I could totally see my little cousin in kindergarten rocking that!” No, she was indeed still the worst.
“Is Audrey around?” I asked, stretching on my tiptoes and scanning the immediate crush of partiers in the front room, searching for Audrey but also for Keats. I saw scantily clad nurses swaying their arms overhead rhythmically to some electronic music, two big guys dressed in drag sitting wide-legged on the couches, sweaty beers in hand, eyes glazed over appreciatively, crowds of people bouncing to some loud music. It was pretty much my idea of hell.
Cherisse stumbled off and Eph pumped keg beer into a plastic cup.
“Can you get me one?” I asked him above the noise.
“You don’t like beer.”
I shrugged, holding my hand out until he gave me a cup.
I didn’t like beer. Or any alcohol, for that matter. But even more than that, I hated the idea of being the only person in the room not holding one.
I scanned the crowd again, and then I saw, like a lighthouse on the shore, Grace and Miles of Dead Poets Phone fame huddled in the corner of the room. She seemed kind of miserable, and he looked totally bored. Across a group of guys dressed as zombies, Grace met my eyes and raised her hand.