When the phone rang at two in the afternoon, I thought it might be my mother again, calling to apologize, at last. Calling to tell us she had come to her senses, that she was leaving Santa Monica and coming back home. But it wasn’t my mother calling.
“Merry Christmas, Michelle!” He sounded cheerful, even though I knew that Halle had broken up with him. She had told me about it just before break.
“He was bummed, but I think he took it better than I expected,” she had said.
“Hey, Nick.” I smiled now at the sound of his voice. At the knowledge that he was unattached and yet still managed to sound as chipper as always.
“What are you up to right now?”
“Right now? Not much.”
“Did you get any good presents?”
“Some money, some books. Nothing super exciting. You?”
“Want to see what I got? I’ll pick you up in ten minutes,” he said.
“Wait, Nick . . . where are we going?”
“You’ll see . . .”
It was one of those planes that you can fly with a remote. It was shiny and silver, fresh out of the box.
“It’s a Corsair—it’s modeled after the planes they flew in World War II.” He didn’t say a word about Halle, about their breakup, none of it.
“I had no idea you were such a nerdboy.” I laughed.
He grinned. “Wait till you see it.”
We parked his car outside Tod’s Point, jumping the fence, and climbed the jagged boulders that lined the lagoon in front of where Mr. Tod’s house once stood, situating ourselves in a grassy patch from which Nick launched the plane, clumsily flying it over trees, over fences, over the few electric wires in the vicinity.
“I’m still learning how to fly it.”
“Yeah, I can tell.” I laughed, watching that anomalous silver streak in the sky, a tentative mechanical bird. It was sluggish at first, dodging the highest branches of trees, but still oddly mesmerizing.
It took about fifteen minutes before it began to dive and turn. I laughed in delight. “It is cool,” I said, watching as it zipped over the horizon, turning this way and that.
“See? I told you. Want to try?” he asked, but I shook my head, lying back in a patch of dead grass. I looked toward the empty land before us, a rolling hill that once contained an estate, now razed to the ground.
“It’s kind of messed up, isn’t it? That he donated his land to the township, and in return, they tore down his house?”
Nick’s eyes were still on the plane. “It was a tax burden. Too much upkeep, or at least that’s what my dad told me.”
“I know, but they could have done something cool with it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, made it an artists’ colony.”
Nick laughed. “An artists’ colony in Greenwich? That’s a lot to ask.”
“Just saying,” I said, my feelings slightly hurt.
Nick picked up on it and took his eyes off the plane for a minute to look at me. “Let’s pretend it’s an artists’ colony. We’re flying our plane over an artists’ colony.”
“What kind of artist are you supposed to be?”
“Don’t sound so skeptical. I’m a highbrow photographer . . . super successful . . . very dashing.” Nick grinned as the plane circled over us, over the phantasmic rooftop of our mythical colony. “Who flies planes in his free time. What kind of artist are you?”
“A painter,” I said, watching the red plane soar through the gray sky above.
“Nah, that’s too predictable.”
“Okay . . . what sort of artist am I?” I asked.
“A sculptor.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Just pretend,” Nick said, landing the plane at my feet before he joined me in the grass, lying down beside me.
“You love to pretend.” I turned to him, laughing.
“You have the best laugh,” he said. And then, under the gray skies of our imaginary colony, Nick Osterman kissed me.
TWENTY-SIX
IT was freezing, and we laughed as we undressed each other.
“Your hands are way too cold.” He reached for me, touching my neck.
“Oh my God! Yours too.” I giggled.
Then his body enveloped mine. His hands intertwined with mine. I could see the heat rising off him, and we were both quiet for a minute.
Nick broke the silence, his voice tentative, shaking. I couldn’t believe he was nervous. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” he said, and my body arched to meet his, my fingers entangled in his hair.
“Me too,” I whispered.
“Have you ever . . .”
I shook my head. “But I want to.” I took his hand. “I want to with you.” I slid my thumb between his lips, parting them. “I really do,” I said, and then his hands were running down my back, over my thighs. His breath was cold, and the taste of his mouth—familiar and yet a revelation. I kissed him again and again, feeling the stubble of his chin scratching my neck, my cheeks. We were a secret in the cold of the woods, our legs braided together, our ankles knotted against each other. My breath quickening as he kissed me harder, with an intensity I had never before seen in him, a kind of hunger.
He was a different Nick. Not all laughs and lightness, but ardent and fierce. It was as though underneath that cheerful facade, there was another Nick—dark and alluring, fixated, obsessed.
“I can’t believe this is actually happening,” he said to me. I looked into his eyes and kissed him harder, recognizing that right there, with him, I was a different Tara. Not trapped in my head, all logic and rationalism. I was open and vulnerable in a way that I never allowed myself to be—all thoughts erased from my mind. Replaced by nothing but desire. All I wanted was him, enough to risk everything in that moment.
I couldn’t have known till then the things that unlock between people in the dark, who we are underneath our masks. I realized that he, like me, was caught too, held prisoner by who he appeared to be. But I could glimpse so many sides of Nick in his fervor, all those energies not yet harnessed, not fully integrated within him. Yet they were there. They always had been. Just as this part of me had always existed: unguarded and bare.
Afterward, he held me against his chest and stroked my hair. He was tender, his arms encircling me. He told me stories about other places, his voice a barely audible whisper. I wondered, as he held me, if maybe our world wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe I was the lucky Tara, a better Tara. Maybe this Earth was the one where people finally got the things they had always wanted.
It was dark by the time we left, running down the gravel path to the entrance, just as the gate closed behind us, a delirious laugh escaping my lips. I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed like that, felt like that, entirely without abandon.
“I’ll call you,” he told me, kissing me in my driveway. His hand was on my knee. There was a possessiveness in his voice. I traced his jawline with my finger.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t want him to leave. If it had been up to me, we would have stayed there just like that forever.
TWENTY-SEVEN
On Wed, January 1, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Megan Stevens
Tara!!!
Guess what?!? I’m back! Argentina was great, but in the end, I got so homesick. And Ernesto and Clara really started getting on my nerves. And talking in Spanish all day is really hard. Plus being around snobby Argentinian girls all day got really annoying.
But I’m so glad to be back! When can we hang out?!? I already left a message and a text for you. And I called your home phone too. Where are you?!? What did you do for New Year’s?
Call me!
Megs
On Wed, January 1, 2016, at 2:19 PM, Jennifer Krishnan
Hi, Sudeep!
Hi, Tara!
Happy New Year! May this year bring you peace, love, and the resolution of all challenges in your life. Hope everything is going great for both of you. Have some really big news to tell you in the next few weeks, but just wanted to give you a heads-up. In two weeks, I go into “Internal Reflection.” It’s much more intense than cleansing. This means that I’ll be cutting off contact (temporarily! Don’t worry!) for two months with the outside world. The purpose of this is to harness my inner power. Here at the Church, we believe that if we all do this, it’s almost like if you download an app on your phone that beams a signal into the cosmos. Now imagine if thousands of people do this. Okay . . . now imagine if the entire planet did this! Amazing, right?! Anyway, at the end of it all, we’ll have a big celebration. More news to come in the next few days (whoops, hope I didn’t give too much away!). Love you both! Miss you.
Mom/Jennifer
“Dad, she’s beginning to make no sense,” I said to my father. “‘Internal Reflection’? Cell phone apps?”
“It’s probably nothing,” he responded. But I could hear it—the uncertainty in his voice.
I got a text from Nick the day after Tod’s Point. Going away for a few days after X-mas. Will call you when I get back, it said.
Talk to you soon! I responded right away. I would come to lament that exclamation point, the immediacy of the response. Cringe at the thought of it. In the days that followed, I wanted to run miles away from that exclamation point. It betrayed the fact that my heart crackled with glee, like a colorful foil chocolate wrapper, the moment Nick’s name appeared on my phone.
Then again, what was wrong with that? For the first few days after Christmas, I told myself that maybe this was how things were always meant to be. I had always wanted him, for as long as I could remember. In that moment, he was there offering himself up to me. How could I have said no? Maybe I can trust Nick, I remember thinking. Maybe he knows what he’s doing.
But then he didn’t call after Christmas. Or on New Year’s. I thought about picking up the phone and calling him myself, but I found that with each passing day, the part of me that had opened up that afternoon at Tod’s Point was closing, paralyzed with fear. Something that had felt so easy just a few days ago—picking up my phone and tapping in his number—felt more and more impossible in the aftermath of what had happened. He said he would call, I chastised myself every time I reached for my phone, you just have to believe him.
But what did it mean that he hadn’t? That in seven days, Nick hadn’t called me? To distract myself, I spent the remainder of winter break in front of the TV, listening to NASA scientists talking about building a space probe that would travel to Terra Nova.
On the first day of school after winter break, Nick was nowhere to be found. Neither was Halle. By first period, that mild anxiety I had felt for days dilated to overwhelming dread.
“Who wants to explain to me the three-body problem?” Emerick scrawled “three body problem” across the whiteboard and turned to look at us. No one raised a hand. I was doodling in my notebook, trying to quell the rabid, aching panic within me. Halle never missed school. Nick rarely did either. That didn’t necessarily mean they were out together, I told myself. Or did it?
“All right, since it looks like no one did their reading over the holidays, I’ll simply tell you,” Emerick said in a condescending tone. “The classical three-body problem is the movement of a planet with a satellite around a star. Did anyone read the chapter about Newton’s laws of motion?”
Silence.
Maybe Nick was just running late. Some sort of emergency. Maybe Halle was traveling with her parents.
“Can anyone tell me what else the three-body problem pertains to?”
Love, I thought. All of a sudden, I realized that I was in the most intractable kind of three-body problem, the kind that was driving me to insanity right at that moment. It was probably nothing. He was always late to stuff anyway.
“All right, let’s just stick to Newton then. Right after Newton solved the differential equation for the two-body problem, which shows us why a planet moves in an elliptical orbit around the sun, he moved on to the three-body problem for the sun, Earth, and moon. What happened then?”
Just having to be in this class, looking at the empty seats where Halle and Nick usually sat, made me want to scream. Maybe Halle was really upset about it. Maybe she had even tried to convince him to stay with her. But why would she do that? They were broken up. She had another boyfriend now, right?
“Tara? What happened?”
I was tapping my foot rapidly against the leg of my chair, the tap-tap-tapping inadvertently drawing attention to myself, I realized. “He couldn’t solve it,” I said quickly, more to shut her up than anything.
“Why?”
“Why?” I repeated, looking up at Emerick from my doodle. For God’s sake! “Because the three-body problem . . . makes no sense. Its behavior is inherently unpredictable.”
“Thank you, Tara.” Emerick smiled at me.
“Mrs. Emerick?” I asked, raising my hand. “Can I go to the nurse’s? I’m not feeling well,” I said.
“Can it wait till after class?”
Why did teachers always ask that? “No. No, it can’t,” I insisted. If I had to sit here a minute longer, I would lose it. One more second talking about the three-body problem and I would tear my hair out or run out of the classroom in tears. I had no idea what I was capable of.
What would the Other Tara do? I desperately asked myself. She’d be cool and calm. Not agitated and driving herself crazy thinking of Nick. She’d be looking forward to seeing him. She’d be light and happy and excited.
I couldn’t shake it, the belief that all the answers I was seeking lay with her. That’s the thing about desperation—it’s like those fish that swim against the tide for miles just to spawn. I refused to believe in something easier, continued to hang on to the idea that there was a solution to my loneliness, my feeling of isolation, all my frustrations with the people around me—my mother, Halle, Nick—even if that solution was billions of miles away. In that way, I wasn’t so different from my mother. Maybe I was worse. She had traveled across the country to “psychically commune” with her parents. I couldn’t go anywhere, but I still felt strongly that there was another me up there, the only person who could possibly understand how sad and lost I felt.
But I couldn’t talk to her. And now, on the first day back at school, all I wanted was to get away from Brierly and never come back.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE moment I arrived in the student center, Treem accosted me.
“Tara! I was going to call you into my office today. Do you have time now?”
“I was heading to the nurse’s. I’m not feeling so well.”
“It’ll only take a minute. It’s important,” she said. She was the last person I wanted to see, but I followed her to her dank office.
“Sit, sit,” Treem said, flashing me that familiar toothy smile. “As I’m sure you know, there have been a handful of incidents of ‘vandalism’ around campus,” she said, making air quotes.
I nodded. My heart was racing at the thought of Nick. Where was he?
“Well, the faculty has decided to put together a safety committee to ensure that incidents of this sort don’t happen again. It’s considered vandalism, you know, tampering with school property, pulling a false alarm like that. And we still haven’t been able to find the perpetrator. We’re going to ask students to volunteer to man all the fire alarms during their free periods for a couple of weeks to show solidarity . . .”
“Mrs. Treem, I’m not sure how any of this concerns me . . .”
“Well, it’s about the committee. It was just formed, and it’s composed of parents and teachers. I’m the president.” She beamed. “But we need a student representative.” At this, she smiled again, that toothy, aggressive s
mile that always made me cringe. “The Safety First committee—that’s what we’re calling it. And I suggested you as our student representative.”
I sat in Treem’s leather chair, a chair that was far too nice for either this dingy office or for Treem. “Why me?” I asked, distracted by the chalkboard behind her. Someone had written “twat waffle” in the tiniest letters in the corner, making me smile involuntarily.
“Well, we’re hoping the student representative can rally students and enlist them to voluntarily man the alarms. And we’re still searching for the perpetrator, so we thought you’d put out feelers among your friends and fellow students. Anyway, your peers have a great deal of respect for you, Tara . . . You’re most likely going to be salutatorian of your class, you’re editor of the yearbook, on the swim team, and you bring . . . well, you bring diversity to the student body.”
“Diversity?” I repeated.
“Well, I have to tell you . . . I’ve been reading this book.” She rifled through the paperwork on her desk and produced a copy of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. “I just think there’s so much we could learn from you, from your culture!”
Treem had said a lot of stupid things to me in the past, but this was way past just stupid. “That . . . that’s not my culture,” I said, pointing to the book.
“Forgive me . . . that came out wrong.” She smiled before she continued. “What I meant to say was that I feel like your culture emphasizes a respect for authority that the students here could learn from.”
I felt a rage pulsating within me that couldn’t be controlled. “You want me to find out who did this and then turn people in to you because . . . I’m brown?”
“Tara, well, I would hardly put it that . . .”
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