Laila’s mother didn’t push her to speak. She couldn’t have if she’d tried. Laila just looked blankly at the train tracks as she realized she was in love with Hannah. So in love she could have recognized the back curve of her jaw in a Times Square crowd. So in love she’d had to stamp it down a mile to call it anything else, that diminishing term, “complicated.” Right now this was so simple as to be insulting. The tracks rattled with the approaching train. Here came the rush of wind, and the bone-deep scream of motion.
24
Hannah’s father answered the door that evening with a frown. “Oh,” he said, sounding disgusted. Laila had forgotten how effortlessly rude and self-centered Hannah’s family was. And so efficient in displaying it. The type of people who made a waiter’s life hell for forty minutes and then tipped 6 percent.
Mr. Park smoothed the sides of his hair as he offered his sharp profile into the house. “Hannah,” he yelled. “Did you invite somebody over? I told you the Lewises were visiting for drinks.” Back to Laila: “We have guests due in an hour.” He strode away and up the stairs, leaving the door hanging open.
Hannah’s footsteps echoed down the hall. Laila considered backing down the steps. She squeezed her hands into fists and looked up at the brass numbers above Hannah’s door.
Then Hannah was eighteen inches away, and it became impossible to look at anything else. Laila always forgot how good summer looked when Hannah wore it. Black skirt, white tank top, suede sandals, a pristine light tan. Laila had spent so long examining herself in the mirror before leaving, going so far as to smooth mascara over her eyelashes, to pluck a few stray threads from her thick eyebrows. Had that mattered? Hannah knew how she looked. Hannah had never expected anything from her, had never pushed her, never tried to insinuate anything. “Let’s short-circuit in the rain. I loved you then, too.” Had everyone seen it except her? Had Felix always seemed so close to Hannah, despite their fights, because she’d told him she loved Laila and sworn him to secrecy?
“Your hair,” Laila said. The red dye had been stripped out of Hannah’s hair, replaced with a glossy black that didn’t quite match her hair’s natural luster.
“Yeah,” Hannah said, “they said they’d had enough of looking at it.” Which Laila thought was obviously melodrama, as Hannah’s parents saw her for—optimistically—ninety minutes a day.
“I got the note,” Laila said quietly.
“I figured.” For once, Hannah’s unflappable act wasn’t working. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands—which grasped her elbows—or her eyes—which fixed over Laila’s shoulder. “Come in.”
They slipped into Hannah’s bedroom on the second floor. Hannah dropped onto her sofa. Laila settled onto the other end, a safe buffer of three feet between them.
“So,” Laila said.
“Yeah.”
Laila swallowed, looking at the five-foot scroll of Hannah’s mirror, where her own terrified face looked back. She shouldn’t have been the scared one. She wasn’t the one with her soul laid bare on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.
“You still writing?” Hannah asked.
“Not for now.”
She could tell Hannah had to battle not to say, Thank God.
“Listen,” Laila said. “About our fight thing.”
“Yeah, I’m—”
“No, listen,” Laila said. “I’m sorry. And thanks for being worried about me. You were right to be worried.”
“Got it. Are you, you know. Okay?”
“I’m better than I was at graduation. Like, I’m here instead of lying in bed not having showered for four days, so there’s that.”
“That seems better.”
“I’m trying therapy for real,” Laila added. “And I’ve got this Lexapro prescription, so I guess we’ll see if that helps.”
For a second Laila wondered if Hannah would laugh, curl her lip at the idea of therapy. Sometimes the bits of Hannah’s parents that seeped out from her edges could still surprise.
But Hannah just nodded.
Laila ran her hand over the smooth velveteen cushion, remembering the last time she’d been in this house, downstairs, all four of them tangled up in one another.
“I got lost in the Catskills,” Laila said. “On my way back down.”
“Dude, what?”
“Yeah, I almost got killed by a bear.”
“A bear?” Hannah raised her eyebrows. “And you did not even bring the pelt as tribute, puny mortal?”
Laila loosed an exasperated sigh. “As I clearly stated in the Prophecy of Old, I shall only relinquish the pelt to you for the antlers of the Immortal Stag.”
Hannah smiled, and she couldn’t seem to stop smiling. The chandelier was dim overhead. Hannah looked built out of gold. Laila’s throat was tight.
“God, we’re weird,” Hannah said. “I miss being weird. You know how normal my family is? It’s so incredibly boring.”
“I don’t know if ‘normal’ is the word I’d use.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I do.”
Hannah was fiddling with the grimy pewter rings on her pinky fingers now. Although Hannah’s face was downturned, Laila saw her swallow and close her eyes hard for a moment before looking back up.
“Hey,” Laila said.
Hannah nodded.
“You know I love you, too,” Laila said.
She was quiet a second. Laila imagined a million words coming from Hannah’s lips. Words in configurations that would feel familiar, as they always did, but surprise her with every turn, take her aback with their shine. As they always did. Something clever or confessional. But when Hannah opened her mouth, all she said was, hoarsely, “Come here.”
Laila didn’t know how she arrived at Hannah’s side so quickly, some trick of magnetism, some gap in space-time that blinked them together, but suddenly her fingers were touching Hannah’s cheek, and Hannah’s fingers were touching hers. A summer formed between them, instant sun-bright heat. Laila’s heart felt twisted, overrun by brambles or strapped together by elastic, full of discomfort. Erratic beats tapped in her neck, in her stomach, in the tips of her ears. Hannah’s eyes were dark as oak, her eyebrows straight wisps, like feathers. Soft to the touch when Laila brushed one.
“Where are we?” Laila asked.
“We’ll figure it out,” Hannah said as she leaned in. The last hint of a word brushed Laila’s mouth before Hannah’s lips met hers.
They’d been slow and questioning on the bench. A drifting kiss, an exploration, that felt like a mirage in retrospect, something unreal. This was different. Laila felt the timeline wrapped around them, pulling them in opposite directions, and if they didn’t hold on tightly enough they would be torn apart. She curled her hand into Hannah’s hair and tightened her grip until a groan echoed low in Hannah’s throat, buzzing through her lips against Laila’s mouth. She wouldn’t let go. Hannah’s tongue pressed against hers, still an unfamiliar sensation, but one Hannah was so clearly used to, a neat swipe of slippery texture along Laila’s tongue. Laila pushed forward until Hannah reclined onto her back, shoulders pressing against the velvet, until her hair formed a splatter of black paint around her head, and the light gleamed like oil against her irises.
Laila’s forearms sank deep into the sofa, and her chin knocked into Hannah’s cheekbone. “Oops,” she muttered, and Hannah grinned, pulled her back in and drew lines up and down her spine with one nail. They kissed until Laila’s mouth itched, almost sore from the roughness of Hannah’s bitten lips, and strands of Laila’s hair were coming loose, corkscrewing down into her vision. As she broke back to smooth them into place, Hannah sat up and drew her tank top over her head. Laila stared, considered going still, considered panic. Hannah was wearing a gray slip of a bra, and Laila had seen her in swimsuits before, every summer, but she’d never looked this way, shadowy and close.
Laila wanted nothing more than to look, but then Hannah’s mouth was on her neck, and she let her head fall back again
st the cushion, let Hannah lift her shirt over her head and squeeze her breasts, pass her thumbs experimentally into her bra cups and across her nipples. Laila went rigid, feeling like she might burst, like she might just tear apart at the seams. Her palms on Hannah’s naked back, she felt too much. She needed too much, one hand grasping Hannah’s knee and pressing up against the smoothness of her thigh, under her skirt. Hannah’s motions slowed for a moment, but then she moved forward into Laila’s hand, reached down to take Laila’s wrist and urge her hand between her legs until her fingers met rough lace, heat, damp. Laila drew two fingers up, pressing hard into the softness there, and Hannah drew two sharp breaths. Suddenly they were still. Just for an instant, eyes locked, Laila wondering how this could be real, feeling—terrified—like she might wake up. “You have no idea,” Hannah said, “how bad I’ve wanted this.”
“Yeah, I do,” Laila said, and leaned forward, and said against Hannah’s lips, “I know.” Hannah’s arm slipped around her waist, and they pressed so tightly there was nothing between them, no dividing line, no thought or event or future that could exist in any potential universe. Only this, only here.
25
“My dad’s divorcing my stepmom,” Felix told them as they hiked up Cooper’s Hawk.
“Wow,” Leo said. “That’s big.”
“He’s building a great track record,” Hannah said.
Felix didn’t reply, and Laila wondered if that had been too much for Hannah to say. There was a particular grade of insult that Felix enjoyed toward his dad, but at a point, that hatred belonged exclusively to him.
“I think this is around where I got lost,” Laila said, spinning one of the yellow trail markers against the bark. “We’re not leaving the trail, though, forget that. I’m not getting lost again.”
“What happened to Adventurous Laila?” Felix said.
“She split off from me like a starfish arm and now leads her own life down in Ecuador.”
“Nice,” Felix said.
“Let’s go up to the lookout point instead,” Hannah called, already darting ahead.
All four of their T-shirts were soaked through with sweat by the time they reached the cliffside. White light slicked across their foreheads. Laila knew something was different, but didn’t pinpoint the absence of the thundering sound of thousands of gallons of water until they emerged from the trees. The waterfall had been choked by drought. A finger of water reached from the source and fractured the instant it left the mountain. Darts of refracted light shot out as the thin spray disappeared soundlessly.
Laila knelt in the spot she’d slept before. “Looks nicer when I’m not delirious,” she said, flicking a bug off her thigh. The Catskills rolled away from their perch, a mass of green felt humped smoothly over hidden objects.
“Yep, this is what I needed,” Felix said, spreading himself out on his back. Leo and Laila lay back, too, and examined the clouds splayed around the sun, whose fringes occasionally cast flickers of shadow.
“It’s so quiet,” Laila said, as Hannah’s fingers wound into hers.
“I know,” Leo said. “I can hear you guys breathing.”
“Stop listening to me breathing, weirdo,” Hannah said, and Leo laughed.
After a moment, Laila said, “Guys?”
“Yeah?” Leo said.
“We’ll keep in touch next year, right?”
“Yeah,” Felix said.
“Of course we will,” Leo said.
They didn’t hesitate, and sounded honest, but somehow Laila knew that they were just as uncertain as she was. She couldn’t make herself say more about it. They were quiet a while.
“You know,” Leo said, “if we just lie here until the sun sets, we’ll see an extra star.”
“What?” Laila said.
“A little over a thousand years ago there was this explosion,” he said dreamily. “Ages away, two stars collided and exploded, I mean, so far away that the light is just now reaching the earth, even at lightspeed. From last week through the next few months, there’s going to be an extra star in the middle of Sagittarius. What you’re seeing is two suns crashing into each other a thousand years ago.”
Laila’s eyes were beginning to water. She shielded them from the sun, but that didn’t help. She thought of those bolts of light ricocheting through the universe, ripping through the dark, sending echoes to the farthest corners of space. The hugeness of the idea overwhelmed her, and she felt as if she were sitting in the far reaches of the atmosphere, observing the smallness of the four of them against the face of the mountain. She wondered if she would remember this day after college, this and the taste of Hannah’s lip balm and the sound of her breath catching, this and Felix’s mom’s tiny apartment packed to the walls with people she’d never gotten to know, this and Leo leaping onto Hannah back-first, this and the day they’d all first met, Hannah having pulled them together in the nonchalant way she’d always changed Laila’s life. Would she remember this when she was Mr. Madison’s age? Her mom’s age? When she was about to die, would she keep hold of this mountainside? She imagined the nightfall, and imagined that star, burning through time to meet her eyes. It’s a miracle, Laila thought. A miracle that in the year 1006 this collision happened, and the light created in the aftermath is still pouring our way. A miracle that anything temporary could reach so far.
NAZARENKO ANNOUNCES NEW
BOOK FOR FALL 2019 RELEASE
by Eliot Sandberg,
senior correspondent
for Letters
Representatives for Pulitzer Prize–winning author Nadiya Nazarenko (Catalina’s Mothers, 2003; A Flight of Roses, 2017; et al.) have announced a fall release next year of her latest novel, to be titled May I. The publisher has described May I as “an audacious, kaleidoscopic romp spanning continents, generations, and realities.”
This story will be updated as details emerge.
26
The school during summer was a bizarre, free-feeling place, empty of social pressures or noise or signs of life. Two weeks after graduation, the teachers had nearly completed the great end-of-year purge. The walls were bare, the cubbies empty, the lockers agleam with antiseptic. Just teachers cleaning out their hobbit holes, all disproportionately pleased-looking not to be saddled with students.
“Piedra,” said Nazarenko, as Laila pushed the door open. She was still writing in that notebook of hers.
“Hi,” Laila said.
Nazarenko beckoned. “Yes?”
Laila walked up to the front of the room. The desks had been cleared away, leaving a linoleum plain. “The new book. I saw the announcement.”
“Yes. A project I’ve been tinkering with since I finished A Flight of Roses. It’s about young people in New York City. Your age.”
“That’s why you took this job?”
“That’s why I took the job, yes.”
“Were we useful?” Laila asked.
“Yes,” said Nazarenko.
“Am I in there?”
“In traces, but most things are.” Nazarenko closed her book.
Laila was quiet for a moment but didn’t feel the need to speak. She remembered how Mr. Madison would wait for her, and for a moment, she saw a flash of him in the woman on the stool.
“You’re still working on your story, I assume,” Nazarenko said.
“Yeah, in a way.”
“I’d be open to reading its next iteration, if you’re interested.”
Laila hesitated. She nearly frowned. There were no telltale symptoms of excitement, no leap of the heart, no instinct to blurt out immediate agreement. What had she come for, if not that?
After a moment, a question came loose, one she hadn’t realized she’d wanted to ask:
“Did you ever meet Mr. Madison?”
“No,” Nazarenko said. “You two were close, I assume.”
“Yeah. He loved your books, you know.”
Nazarenko idly brushed something off the cover of her notebook. For a moment, Laila thought she h
ad no answer, that Nazarenko considered his enjoyment too beneath her even to merit a response. But when Nazarenko spoke, she sounded different: thoughtful, tired, almost gentle.
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