As I climb into an unfamiliar bed, a wave of dismay sweeps over me, replacing the fatigue. This could be it. This could be my last moment here. The thought makes my stomach churn. I don’t want things to change again. I want to stay on this path long enough to see where it leads. I want it so badly I can taste it on my sake-numbed tongue. My phone lights up with a text, and I reach for it in the dark.
Michael: SWEET DREAMS, BIRTHDAY GIRL.
I can see it so clearly in my head, but I pull up the photo anyway, the only one I have from tonight. Michael’s on the dance floor, belting out the lyrics to a Salt-N-Pepa song, and even with his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth wide open, he looks ridiculously cute. Marissa and Ben are in the background, barely visible in the dim light, dancing and laughing with their arms around each other. The tip of Caitlin’s elbow is at the bottom corner of the frame. I was laughing when I took it, so hard I couldn’t keep my phone still, and forgot to use a flash. But though it’s dark and blurred a little, it captured the moment I didn’t want to lose.
“Let me stay here,” I whisper in the dark. The closest thing to a prayer I’ve said in a while. My phone goes dark, and I slide it under my pillow, wanting it close. If the photo is there in the morning, I’ll know reality hasn’t changed overnight.
From where I’m lying, I can see a sliver of the night sky through the window. It’s cloudy, so the sky has this greenish tinge to it. I think back to that night, a year ago yesterday, when I stood on my parents’ back porch, staring at the stars, feeling as though I was hovering on the brink of something significant. But then, that wasn’t really me who stood there. And those stars weren’t of this world, but hers.
I close my eyes, finally giving in to the fatigue.
4
THERE
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2008
(thank God it’s Friday)
“As a general policy, I don’t turn down free beer,” Tyler says, dipping a potato chip in ketchup and popping it into his mouth. “Makes these decisions easy.” He takes a swig of chocolate milk. Caitlin makes a face.
“This is Ilana we’re talking about,” she points out. “She won’t even have beer.”
I’m only half listening to their conversation. Astronomy starts in nine minutes, and I still haven’t finished last night’s reading assignment.
“It’s a party. Of course she’ll have beer.”
“The girl lives off Diet Coke and Altoids,” Caitlin replies. “She carries Splenda packets in her purse.”
“So?”
“White wine and vodka. Sugar-free Jell-O shots if you’re lucky.”
“You’re crazy. There’s no way she’s throwing a party without a keg,” Tyler replies. Caitlin just smiles. Whatever you say.
Tyler looks over at me. “What are you doing?”
“Astronomy homework,” I reply without looking up. Two more pages to go.
“Waiting till the last minute. Nice. Glad to see my study habits are finally rubbing off on you, Barnes.” I ignore him and keep reading.
“So what’s the occasion, anyway?” Caitlin asks. “Don’t her parents go out of town all the time?”
“She got the lead in the school play,” Tyler answers, mouth full. “This is her victory bash.” Caitlin makes a gagging motion, then returns to her salad.
“So, what time are you ladies picking me up tonight?”
“Sorry,” Caitlin replies. “We are otherwise engaged.”
“Oh, yeah? Doing what?”
I glance up at Caitlin. We have no plans.
“Movie,” we say in unison.
Tyler just shakes his head. “Lame.”
“You realize there’s no way the cops aren’t coming to that party,” I say, speed-reading through the last few paragraphs.
“Man, you guys are a complete and utter buzzkill today. Even more than usual.” There’s a pause, then I hear Tyler say, “But you look especially hot, so maybe it’s a wash.”
Whoa. I look up and see Tyler smiling at Caitlin in a very un-Tyler way. Scratch that. It’s a very Tyler smile, but it’s the one he reserves for girls whose pants he’s trying to get into. I glance over at Caitlin, expecting her to look as uncomfortable as I feel. But she just makes an adorably flattered but still demure face and smiles in his direction.
What is happening right now?
Just then, the bell rings, and the moment is over. Tyler grabs his backpack and is gone, so unceremoniously that I wonder if I was reading too much into their exchange. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was just paying her a friendly compliment. Tyler wouldn’t blatantly hit on Caitlin while he’s hooking up with Ilana, and Caitlin has a very strict rule about flirting with guys who are taken. (Two summers ago, Caitlin spent six weeks in Huntsville interning with NASA, where she fell in love with this guy, Craig, who she thought was a college intern. She found out after she slept with him—her first and only time—that he was a twenty-six-year-old postdoc with a wife. She was different after that, in ways I’ll never fully grasp. So when I say she has a very strict rule about flirting with guys who are taken, I mean she doesn’t do it. Period.)
“You coming?”
Caitlin is standing a few feet away, clearly wondering why I’m sitting at the lunch table thirty seconds after the bell. My textbook is still open on the table. I run my eyes over the last paragraph of the chapter, then shove the book in my bag and follow her out.
Astronomy is different from any class I’ve ever taken. We have at least thirty pages of reading every night—sometimes closer to fifty—but there aren’t quizzes or questions to complete at the end of each chapter, forcing us to keep up. Dr. Mann seems to just assume that we will. And it’s not like he walks us through what we’re supposed to have read. His lectures are more like philosophical discussions in which he asks more questions than he answers. It’s actually kind of fun. I just wish our teacher had better face-name recall. He insists on calling us by our last names, but he can’t remember all of them. So he makes us sit in alphabetical order and uses the class roster as his cheat sheet, putting me five rows and two seats away from Astronomy Boy Wagner.
Why couldn’t Josh’s last name have been Barney or Barr or Bartlett?
I get to class a few minutes before the warning bell rings. Most of the seats are already filled, their occupants scrambling to get through the reading before class starts. Josh’s seat is empty as usual. He always slips in right before the late bell, carrying nothing but his notebook and a pencil. No backpack, no textbook. Just the notebook and a pencil. I’d assume he was a total slacker were it not for the fact that he’s fairly vocal in class, always raising his hand and participating, but only when no one else is. It’s like he waits to make sure that the rest of us aren’t going to answer, then puts his hand in the air just before Dr. Mann becomes Mr. Hyde (the man is a teddy bear, but does not like it when he asks a question and no one responds).
Smart and cute and considerate. And totally not interested.
Things seemed promising the day we met. Pointing at the empty seat next to him, all that talk about fate and the stars. It felt like the start of something. But I must have misread it, because Josh hasn’t made any effort to talk to me since then, despite the fact that I’ve casually lingered at my desk every day after class.
I am That Girl.
More evidence? The fact that I am now completely turned around in my seat, blatantly staring at the classroom door, just waiting for him to walk through it. Less than a minute later, he does. Pencil behind his ear, notebook under his arm, brown T-shirt tucked neatly into khaki shorts. He meets my gaze and smiles. I quickly drop my eyes, mortified that he caught me looking at him again. It’s the third time this week.
Okay, seriously, it’s getting to be kind of ridiculous. All he has to do is look in my direction, and my insides get all fluttery and my eyes go hot, and all I can think about is how badly I want to touch him. The inside of his forearm, the dip in his upper lip, the place where his earlobe meets his neck. It’s borderl
ine creepy how preoccupied I am with this boy’s body. He, meanwhile, doesn’t seem at all preoccupied with me. Right now he’s thumbing through his notebook, looking for a blank page.
The late bell rings, and Dr. Mann appears. “Parallax,” he begins. “Miss Watts, define it for us, if you would.”
The smiley blond girl behind Josh scrambles for the definition. She’s flipping pages so fast I’m surprised she hasn’t ripped one.
“Uh . . . parallax is, like, the difference in how you see something,” the girl stammers, hiding behind her blond curls. “Like, when a star seems like it’s in one place, but then you look from another angle, and it’s somewhere else.”
“Correct!” Teacher and student look equally surprised that she got it right. Dr. Mann turns to the rest of the class. “As Miss Watts has explained, parallax is the difference in the apparent position of an object viewed from two different angles. The name—‘parallax’—and the fact that we use terms like ‘arcsec’ and ‘parsec’ to determine it—makes the concept sound more complicated than it is.”
“What the hell is an arcsec?” someone behind me mutters.
“How is our perspective skewed? That’s the deeper question we must ask,” Dr. Mann declares. “Let’s begin with an illustration. Please select someone at least two rows away from you. Make sure you choose someone you can see clearly from where you sit.”
I force myself not to look at Josh. Instead, I focus on the girl Dr. Mann called on.
“Now close one eye,” the old man instructs. “With your hand in a thumbs-up position, move your arm until your thumb blocks your view of your subject’s face.” Smiley blond girl disappears. “Now open the closed eye and shut the open eye. Your subject should appear to have moved from behind your thumb.” Voilà. Smiley blond girl reappears.
I slide my thumb up the aisle until Josh comes into view. He’s looking right at me, one eye closed, arm outstretched, face obstructed by his upright thumb. When our eyes meet, it takes considerable effort not to grin. There are forty-two people in our class, and he picked me.
Smiley blond girl is forgotten. I close my left eye and inch my thumb forward until Josh’s face disappears behind it. I close my right, then slowly open my left. There he is again, left ear just grazing my thumb. I watch as he mirrors me, aligning his thumb with mine. We stay like that for a moment, right eyes closed, arms outstretched, just staring at each other. At this distance, I can just make out the mole beneath his left eye. I inch my thumb toward it.
“It is all a matter of perspective,” I hear Dr. Mann say. I switch eyes again, and Josh’s face disappears. Why do you assume he’s not interested? the voice inside my head asks. He smiles at you every day.
“Miss Barnes?” Dr. Mann’s voice jars me back to reality. Crap! I have no idea what he just asked.
“Um, would you mind repeating the question?” I ask, bracing for the old man’s reaction. I hear several snickers.
“I have yet to ask one,” our teacher replies. “I was simply going to invite you to put your arm down.”
The snickers turn to chuckles.
My left eye flies open as I quickly drop my arm. With Josh’s face hidden behind my thumb, I hadn’t noticed that he’d looked away. Or that the rest of the class had started staring at me, the only person in the class still facing backward.
I spin in my seat. “Sorry, I was just . . .” With no coherent way to end that sentence, I trail off, dropping my eyes to the metal surface of my desk and feigning preoccupation with the two boobs someone has scratched into it. Fortunately, Dr. Mann quickly resumes his lecture, so the collective attention soon moves on. I, however, remain mortified. So you were staring at him for an inordinate amount of time. So what? For all he knows, you were looking at the guy in front of him. I steal a glance at Josh’s row. The guy in front of him has cystic acne and a unibrow. And I’m pretty sure he’s wearing eyeliner.
When the bell rings at the end of the period, I shove my textbook into my bag and beeline for the door, desperate not to make eye contact with Josh.
“Abby!”
No such luck.
Josh is a few steps behind me when I turn around. As I wait for him to catch up, my heart goes from steady beating to wild pounding. Thrown off by his nearness and by my own jitters, I forget that he’s the one who called out to me and immediately start talking.
“I just wanted to see what you were up to tonight,” I say. A perfectly normal thing to say when you’re the one initiating the conversation. A little weird when you’re not. Josh just goes with it.
“Oh, you know,” he replies. “The usual. Back-to-back reruns of CSI. Maybe some Pringles.”
“Are these your preferred weekend plans?”
We step aside as the room clears. “‘Preferred’ implies a preference among several choices,” Josh points out. “I’m the new guy, remember.”
“Why don’t you come to Ilana’s party?” The words pop out without my planning them. Never mind that I’m not actually going to the party I’ve just invited him to. This is what happens when I don’t have a plan. I cannonball into disaster.
“A party, huh?”
Not: “Sure, I’d love to!” or “Yeah, sounds great!” Just: “A party, huh?” How does one even respond to that? Is it a question? A stall tactic until he can figure out how to let me down gently? I backpedal.
“Yeah, a bunch of us are going,” I say quickly. “It’s a group thing.”
“Cool,” he says. “Sounds fun.”
“Okay, great! We’ll pick you up around eight.” I turn to go, expecting him to follow me out. But he just stands there. I look back at him, not wanting to be rude but not wanting to be late to journalism either. Our adviser is super laid-back, but not about lateness, especially not when the tardy staffer is her editor in chief.
“Don’t you need my address?” he asks.
“Oh! Yes. Duh. Your address.” I rip a piece of paper from my notebook and hand it to him just as the warning bell rings.
“So who all is going?” he asks. He, unlike me, appears to be in no hurry to get to his next class.
“The whole senior class, practically,” I tell him, willing his pencil to move faster. “Well, except the hermits.”
“The hermits?”
“The people who never go out.” I watch the clock on the wall behind him. Forty seconds till the late bell. Forty seconds to get from the A Hall all the way to the newspaper lab at the end of G. If I don’t leave now, I’m going to be late.
“I meant with us,” Josh says, finally handing me the paper. “You said ‘we’ll’ pick you up. Who’s the ‘we’?”
“Oh. Right. I don’t think you know any of them,” I say distractedly as I move toward the door. When is it acceptable to break into a run? “So I’ll see you later?” I’m out the door before he can respond.
Despite the fact that I haul ass to get there, I’m still late to sixth period. I mumble some excuse about having to stay after class for astronomy (not technically a lie), then slide into my seat, where I spend the rest of the period mentally rehashing my conversation with Josh while pretending to review page layouts for the Oracle’s next issue.
As soon as class is over, I sprint to Caitlin’s car. She emerges from the building a few minutes later, balancing a ridiculous stack of textbooks. “Don’t you have cross-country practice?” she asks when she sees me.
“I wanted to talk to you first. About tonight.”
“Can we ride and talk?” She drops the books into her trunk, then nods at the growing line of cars waiting to exit the parking lot. “Keep in mind that I use the term ‘ride’ loosely.”
“Sure.”
We get in. Caitlin pulls out of her primo parking space and joins the stalled exit line, then looks over at me. “So, tonight. What’s up?”
I try to sound casual: “I invited Josh to go with us to Ilana’s party.”
“Who’s Josh?”
“Josh Wagner. Astronomy Boy.”
“You in
vited Astronomy Boy to go with us to a party we’re not actually attending. Interesting strategy. Shall I bring the boyfriend I don’t actually have?”
I shoot her a look. “Ignoring that. So will you drive? And can we take Tyler, too?”
“Why do I have to go?”
“Because I told him a bunch of us were going.” Caitlin just looks at me. “He hesitated when I invited him! I wasn’t sure what it meant.”
“Of all the things you could’ve invited him to, you picked this?”
“I don’t know where it came from!” I moan. “I opened my mouth and . . . blah. There it was.”
We’ve finally reached the main road. The crossing guard stops us to let street traffic pass. “Am I taking you to the field house or are you getting out here?” Caitlin asks.
“Getting out here,” I say, already pushing open the passenger door. “We don’t have to stay long. We’ll go, we’ll see how lame it is, and we’ll leave. Okay?”
“You realize how ridiculous you are, right?”
“See you at seven forty-five!” I blow her a kiss and shut the door.
Cross-country practice is predictably brutal. Our first meet is next Thursday, so we started fast-paced runs yesterday. Which means unless I want to sit through Coach P’s annoying Tortoise Only Wins in the Fairy Tale speech, I have to really push myself.
It’s a rough six miles, especially in eighty-degree weather, but it feels good to turn my brain off for a while, to focus on nothing but my breath and the steady, calming sound of my sneakers hitting the asphalt. Running is the one thing I can count on to quiet my unceasing inner monologue. If I couldn’t run, I’d probably overthink myself into a nervous breakdown.
The mental quiet never lasts. By the time I pull into the driveway after practice, my brain is cluttered again. Astronomy Boy. Astronomy homework. AP Calculus test on Monday. Northwestern application. Northwestern application essays. The SAT. Astronomy Boy. Astronomy Boy. Astronomy Boy.
My mom is in the kitchen, sorting the mail.
“You’re home early again,” I say, dropping my bag on the table.
Parallel Page 9