“Well, you guys heard about the accident and poor Tara, right?” Ariel, Alexa, and Janicza turned to look at me.
“Did she really hit Halle’s dog?” Janicza asked.
I opened my mouth to respond, but Veronica spoke for me. “She’s been disinvited from the party this weekend.”
“What do you mean, disinvited?” Alexa asked. “How can you just disinvite someone?”
“Halle doesn’t ever want to see her again. I have been asked to deliver the message. She doesn’t even want to speak to her.”
Alexa raised her eyebrows at Janicza, who shrugged but didn’t say anything.
I was in AP English when my phone buzzed. Meg never texted or e-mailed me during class. In fact, no one texted or e-mailed me during class, and so I was surprised when I saw the text from Veronica.
OMG. You have to see this, it said. There they were, in my hand, on my phone—the e-mail about Halle’s party, and a series of texts between Veronica and Sarah—like a primer on the social dynamics of the most popular group of people at school.
To: Alexa Vanderclift
On Sun, August 31, 2015, at 9:25 PM, Halle Lightfoot
My loves,
In celebration of my parents’ anniversary (and their annual trip to the Vineyard), our promotion to upperclass life, and the discovery of Terra Nova, I invite you to join me for an Aquarian Age fete at the Farm! Hooray!
Time: 10:00 PM this Saturday
Place: 33 Upper Cross Road, Conyers Farm 06831
Bring: yourselves, your lovers, and something from your parental bars
Forward this: to anyone you deem worthy
Drive: slow and with your brights. Deer on the loose.
Let’s show those aliens how we do it on Earth!
Much love,
Halls
I couldn’t help myself. I read and reread that e-mail hundreds of times that day—in between class, in the bathroom, once I got home. Again and again, feeling the same rush of voyeuristic intimacy wash over me with every read.
And then there were the forwarded texts between Veronica and Sarah.
Umm, can you believe this? She is such a monster! And seriously, the denial makes everything so much worse!
Just want to let you know, don’t bother coming to Halle’s on Saturday night.
Ummmm . . . why would I not come?
Because no one wants you there, you are an animal killer, and Halle hates you.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, Veronica.
We all know what you did. Nick told us. Come and I’ll make your life a living hell.
What the hell, Veronica? You’re being such a crazy bitch.
We’re all through with you. Don’t bother coming, or hanging out at our table, or reaching out to anyone. DO NOT try to talk to Halle. She’s through with you. Seriously, Sarah. What you did was the final straw. Unconscionable.
What did I do?
You know what you did. You killed that dog. Halle is heartbroken. Poor Tara is traumatized. And Nick too. I care about my friends, and you only care about yourself. Bye.
What dog? Seriously, V. I don’t know what you’re talking about!!! And I don’t know why you’re always being Halle’s henchman. Can’t you see that she’s ALWAYS using you?
Sarah. Stop. Seriously. Stop it right now. People are appalled at your behavior. You’ve changed.
Is this because of that thing that
But here the screenshot cut off. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t see Sarah at Halle’s party. I had seen the way Veronica snubbed people in the past. It was surgical, clean, the mess contained, if only because no one wanted a face-off with Veronica. She could be volatile, cold, or outright cruel, but once someone was cut from the group, they were gone for good. I had seen it happen to Jesse Ballantine last year, and he ended up transferring schools second semester, effectively erased from the halls of Brierly.
Everyone was acting in bizarre and strange ways. My mother was glued to the TV instead of dancing and worrying. Nick and Veronica were being nice to me. And I—me—Tara Krishnan—I was invited to a party at Halle’s house? It went against every notion of order and logic that overnight, Sarah Hoffstedt, one of the most popular girls at Brierly, had suddenly become an outcast, and I was invited to Halle’s party. Against my better judgment, I sought affirmation from Halle herself.
The next day, I saw Halle warming up on the quad on my way to swim practice. She had been on the track team since freshman year, and she had that easy sprint you saw on Nike commercials. Her form was perfect and unlabored; even her face was serene as she circled the track. She was the kind of runner who made you want to take up running. Like everything else she did, she made it look effortless.
I approached her slowly, trying to think of what I would say to her. She was doing a quadricep stretch, her heel tucked under her backside, her lithe shoulders thrown back. The sun was catching the gleam of her shoulders just so, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was at once stately and special, yet still just a regular sixteen-year-old girl on the trajectory of her life. For a moment, her world was as open as a clamshell washed on the shoreline.
“Hey, Halle?” I didn’t mean for it to come out like a question, my uncertain voice meeting her powerful stance.
“Oh hey, Tara. What’s up?” She smiled, looking up at me and gently placing her foot back on the ground.
“I’m sorry about your dog.”
“Yeah, well. I’m sorry too,” she said.
I waited for a moment before I awkwardly got to the point of the conversation. “Listen, Veronica told me about the party at your house.”
“Yeah, are you coming?” she asked. So she did know. Or if she didn’t, she was being polite.
“I was planning on it. Ten o’clock, right?”
“Yeah.” She paused for a moment as she lifted her other leg behind her. “Are you driving?” she asked, her brow furrowed.
“I was just going to have my dad drive me.”
She quickly released her foot. “No, that won’t do. Your dad’s going to want to meet my parents, or he’s going to hear all the noise and freak out. Don’t you have a car?”
I stiffened. We only had one car, and my father would need it to drive to the restaurant after dropping me off. I opened my mouth, trying to think of how I could explain this to a girl who had a garage full of gleaming vintage cars in her home, a garage built specifically to house them, but thankfully, I didn’t have to.
“Just have Nick drive you,” she said, placing her hands on the ground as she leaned down in a lunge.
“Nick?” I asked. I could practically hear the stupidity in my tone. “So should I just ask him?” I looked at her, nervously tugging at the strap of my gym bag.
“I’ll let him know. He’ll pick you up at nine thirtyish.”
It was only when I reached the pool that I realized Halle hadn’t batted an eyelid about offering up Nick as a chauffeur to the party. But then, why would she? I was hardly a threat to her. Nick was smitten with her.
I wondered what it must feel like to be adored like that. Of course, I knew how Halle felt: bored beyond imagination. Bored enough to send Nick on an errand picking me up from my house on a Saturday night, her kitchen scraps the very thing I felt starved for. Something about this made me feel ashamed, even as I couldn’t believe that Nick Osterman was my ride to Halle’s party.
ELEVEN
“EXCITED about your party tonight?” my mother asked, a grin on her face. She was standing in the kitchen, wearing a
yellow dress and making a fruit salad. The mere sight of her showered and dressed and not in front of the TV shocked me. She had even gone to the local Asian store to buy starfruit and lychee and guava, my father’s favorite fruits. I had mentioned the party to her in passing, uncertain that she was even listening. But she looked different today than she had in more than a week—relaxed and happy and genuinely enthusiastic for me. She pushed a strand of her long honey-colored hair out of her eyes with her forearm, and her blue-gray eyes twinkled in a way that made her look as though she were the one attending a high school party.
“Yeah . . . how come you’re not all in front of the TV right now?”
“I got tired of watching, I guess. Anyway, I was going to walk to the farmers’ market to get some eggs. Your father’s still asleep. Want to come?”
“I’m in my pajamas,” I said, but the thing was, today I actually wanted to sit in front of the TV and watch the latest news. I wanted to know anything I could about that other Tara. Of course, CNN wasn’t going to report on this per se, but I could extrapolate, I could take any crumbs that were thrown at me. I wanted nothing more than to play with this puzzle that had been tossed in my lap—in all our laps.
But my mother had other ideas. “Get dressed. It’ll be fun,” she insisted. “We haven’t had a chance to catch up in so long.” I looked at my mother, her wide eyes watching me with a kind of curiosity I hadn’t seen in days, beyond her curiosity about Terra Nova. And it was the first time this week that she was dressed in something other than sweats. I grudgingly agreed to go with her.
A handful of protestors blocked the entrance to the market. There weren’t that many, but they looked menacing, holding signs declaring: GOD CREATED ONLY ONE EARTH FOR MAN, and DON’T BELIEVE NASA’S LIES, and IT’S A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY.
“Outside the farmers’ market? Really?” my mother asked as she reached for my hand. “What a nuisance!” she whispered to me. “Excuse me,” she said loudly as she pushed through the cluster.
One of them stepped in front of us. “Excuse me, miss. Do you believe that Jesus Christ is our savior?”
I tried to sidestep him, but he kept talking. “There’s only one God, and he created only one Earth.” His voice was young, and when I turned to look closely at him, I realized he was probably in his twenties, but his skin was leathery and weathered, and he had a long beard and stringy hair tied back in a ponytail. He was wearing all black.
“I’d just like to buy some groceries,” my mother told him.
“Don’t believe what NASA tells you, little girl,” he said, getting in my face.
“I’m not a little girl.” I scowled.
I followed my mother into the bustling market, my heart racing. My mother shook her head.
“Idiots,” she said. “They don’t get it.” She shrugged. She looked unfazed, but my hands were shaking. Confrontations, especially unexpected ones, always threw me off guard. “I feel sorry for them,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We’re all looking for answers, something to hold on to. I get that. But trying to convince someone what you believe? That’s just fruitless.”
I found myself silently agreeing with her. I considered telling her what I thought of Terra Nova—how I couldn’t stop thinking about an alternate version of me—but I was certain that my mother would widen her eyes and agree with everything I felt, and this would somehow diminish the validity of my belief. My mother was the least scientific person I knew, and my father, the opposite. Validation from my mother on my ideas seemed to mean that there was something flimsy about them. But my father would force me to investigate my thoughts from every angle, to articulate them in the clearest way, to measure and inspect them until there was no magic left. Sort of the way he made me chop onions or potatoes at the restaurant.
“That’s not a quarter-inch dice,” he would tell me. “That’s more like a half inch.”
“This is the proper way to chop okra.”
“You’re putting in too much salt. This is what half a teaspoon looks like.”
Then he would laugh. “All right,” he would say. “I suppose you’re just going to do it your way.” But that was the thing. I didn’t really know what my way was. It was somewhere between my mother’s way and my father’s way, and I still hadn’t found it.
We wove through the market. Flower vendors sold orange and magenta sunbursts of dahlias, whimsical poufs of hydrangea, sculptural pink and purple lilies; merchants meted out golden samples of honey on tiny wooden spoons; and pyramids of shiny apples and pears, the first of the season, sat before us.
“I absolutely love flowers,” my mother said, pausing to smell them. “They’re such a luxury,” she said as she selected a bouquet of hydrangea. “You know, when I first moved to New York, I had no money to buy anything, really. But it was this insanely glamorous city, and I wanted to be a part of it. There was this one day, right at the beginning . . . I walked into this fur shop to try on furs, just for the fun of it, and the owner, this ninety-year-old guy—Hamish was his name—he knew I didn’t have money, and he didn’t want to embarrass me, so he said I could borrow a fur if I went out dancing with him.”
“Eeew.”
“No.” She laughed. “It wasn’t like that. He was old; he had just lost his wife. He loved to dance . . . ballroom dancing. And he could tell I was a dancer . . . Anyway, one day he just gave me this fur to keep. My lucky fur, I called it . . . I had so many adventures wearing it out on the town. I still have it. I was wearing it when I met your dad.” Her eyes scanned the market now. She seemed restless again.
“Tell me again . . . how you met.” I had heard it a million times before, but I loved hearing this story.
She paused, tasting a sample of Fujis. “It was at a party on West End Avenue. I snuck in. A duplex that belonged to some famous Columbia professor. It was gorgeous. There was music, and I started teaching people the samba, the calypso. I was chatting everyone up, having fun. Those grad students really needed to lighten up. Anyway, no one seemed to catch on to the fact that I completely didn’t belong there, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. Your dad was just standing in a corner, this shy grad student, and I went up to him and asked him when he was planning on asking me out to dinner. He was so cute, such a handsome guy. He seemed so . . . proper. He got all tongue-tied. But I was . . . certain.” She sighed. “I was like, I’m going to end up with this guy, whether he wants to be with me or not. I was beyond smitten,” she said, fishing some dollar bills out of her purse. “We talked for hours. He was so intense, so grown-up. He seemed like a real adult to me, even though he was only a few years older than me. Not the type of guy I usually went for, but . . . I was so carefree then. Had nothing to lose. Literally nothing. Just a few dollars in my pocket and a borrowed fur coat,” she said wistfully. “Anyway, tell me what’s going on at school.” She quickly changed the subject.
There was something restless in my mother’s voice as she relayed the story she had told me so many times. I wondered for a moment if my parents were beginning to fray at the edges, caught in the relentless middle of their time together. They were hemmed in by a past that had begun brilliant and shiny, and a future of . . . what? It was hard to say. Something about the hint of this was upsetting, and I had to turn away and take a deep breath before I answered.
“Ummm . . . I like physics. We’re learning about this thing called ‘seeding,’” I told her.
“What’s that?”
“It’s like . . . as the solar system moves through the Milky Way, it hits these dust clouds filled with comets. The comets are, like, remnants of other planets, and they’re filled with microbes.”
“Mmm hmmm.”
“So when comets hit the Earth and make contact with water, the frozen microbes come back to life.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, apparently. Any
way, so the comets actually ‘seed’ the planet, plus, they launch remnants of our planet into space, and so other planets get our microbes. It’s like this continuous cycle. And now scientists are trying to figure out how the seeding process might relate to Terra Nova. I mean, are there exact DNA copies of us up there? Or slightly different? And the big question is, did they derive from the same source? And what is that source to begin with?”
“You’re so brilliant. Just like your dad.” She sighed. “I wasn’t the best student. Maybe I could have been . . . I don’t know,” she said, and her voice trailed off for a minute before she added, “I know high school has been tough for you, but I really think that’s going to change with being invited to this party and everything. I like Meg, but it’s good you’re meeting new friends.” My mother knew how much I hated Brierly, but we rarely talked about it. My time with my mother was always fun. We didn’t linger on the bad stuff. “I guess everyone goes through tough spells,” she added. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, settling on four Pink Lady apples, handing the vendor a couple of dollar bills. “I haven’t talked to your father about it yet, but I thought I should share it with you first,” she said, giving me a look like she was about to tell me a secret. I loved it whenever she shared secrets with me. It made me feel privileged, special. She packed the apples into a net bag she pulled out of her purse.
“So . . . I’ve decided to go away for a little while.”
I stopped, watching her as she carefully counted her change. “What do you mean, ‘go away’?”
“It’s just a few months, and it’s California, babe. Not a big deal. I think it’s time for me to have an adventure.” She didn’t look up as she placed the change in her purse.
A jolt ran through my body, a shock that left me shaking, and I felt an impulse to start crying, right then and there, surrounded by strangers. “A few months? In California? An adventure?” I asked, swallowing hard. My mother is leaving me.
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