by Nicola Yoon
Mr. Waterman bustles in looking merry but harried, like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve just before the big ride. The decontamination process makes him cold, so he’s rubbing his hands together and blowing on them for warmth.
“Madeline,” he says happily, clapping his hands together. He’s my favorite of all my tutors. He never looks at me pityingly and he loves architecture like I love architecture. If I were going to be something when I grew up, an architect is what I would be.
“Hi, Mr. Waterman.” I smile awkwardly, not really knowing how to be around someone who’s not Carla or my mother.
“So what have we got here?” he asks, gray eyes twinkling. I place my last two tiny shoppers next to a toy store and stand back.
He circles the model sometimes beaming, sometimes frowning, all the while making weird clucking sounds.
“Well, dear, you’ve outdone yourself. This is quite lovely!” He straightens from the model and is about to pat me on the shoulder before he catches himself. No touching allowed. He shakes his head slightly and then bends over to examine some more.
“Yes, yes, quite lovely. There are only a few things we should talk about. But, first! Where is our astronaut hiding?”
Whenever I make a new model I make a clay astronaut figure and hide him in it. Each figure is different. This time he’s in full astronaut gear complete with airtight helmet and bulky oxygen tank, sitting in the diner at a table piled high with food. I’ve made miniature banana split sundaes, blueberry pancake stacks, scrambled eggs, toast with butter and marmalade, bacon, milk shakes (strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla), cheeseburgers, and fries. I’d wanted to make curly fries but I ran out of time and had to settle for just regular fries.
“There he is!” Mr. Waterman exclaims. He clucks at the scene for a few moments and then turns to me. His merry eyes are a little less merry than usual. “It’s just wonderful, my dear. But how will he eat all that scrumptious food with his helmet on?”
I look back at my astronaut. It’d never occurred to me that he’d want to eat the food.
EVERYTHING’S A RISK
CARLA’S SMILING AT me like she knows something I don’t know. She’s been doing it all day whenever she thinks I’m not looking. Also she’s been singing “Take a Chance on Me” by ABBA, her absolute favorite band of all time. She’s breathtakingly out of tune. I’ll have to ask Olly the probability that she could miss every single note. Shouldn’t she hit one just by random chance?
It’s 12:30 P.M. and I have a half hour for lunch before my history tutor comes online. I’m not hungry. I’m basically never hungry anymore. Apparently a body can exist on IM alone.
Carla’s not looking, so I tab over to my Gmail. Thirteen messages from Olly since last night. They’re all sent around 3 A.M. and, naturally, he doesn’t write a subject. I laugh a little and shake my head.
I want to read them, am dying to read them, but I have to be careful with Carla in the room. I glance over and find her staring back at me, eyebrows raised. Does she know something?
“What’s so interesting on that laptop?” she asks. God. She definitely knows.
I draw my chair closer to the desk and place my sandwich on the laptop.
“Nothing.” I take a bite of the sandwich. It’s Turkey Tuesday.
“It’s not nothing. Something is making you laugh over there.” She inches closer, smiling at me. Her brown eyes crinkle at the corners and her smile reaches the edge of her face.
“Cat video,” I say through a mouthful of turkey. Ugh, wrong thing to say. Carla lives for cat videos. She thinks they’re the only thing the Internet is good for.
She comes around, stands behind me, and reaches for the laptop.
I drop my sandwich and hug the laptop close to my chest. I’m not a good liar, and I say the first thing that pops into my head. “You don’t want to see this one, Carla. It’s bad. The cat dies.”
We stare at each other in a kind of shocked standoff for a few seconds. I’m shocked because I’m an idiot and I can’t believe that I said that. Carla’s shocked because I’m an idiot and she can’t believe that I said that. Her mouth drops open comically, like a cartoon, and her big round eyes get even bigger and rounder. She bends over at the waist, slaps her knee, and laughs like I’ve never heard her laugh. Who actually slaps their knee while laughing?
“You mean to tell me the only thing you could think to say was that it was a dead cat?” She’s laughing again.
“So you know.”
“Well, if I didn’t know before I would surely know now.”
She laughs a little more, slaps her knee again. “Oh, you should’ve seen your face.”
“It’s not that funny,” I grumble, annoyed that I gave myself away.
“You forget I have one of you at home. I always know when Rosa is up to no good. Besides, you, Miss Thing, are not any good at hiding things. I see you checking your e-mail and looking for him out the window.”
I put my laptop back down on the desk. “So, you’re not mad at me?” I ask, relieved.
She hands me my sandwich. “It depends. Why were you hiding it from me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry about me getting sad again.”
She eyes me for a long second. “Do I need to worry?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not worrying.” She brushes my hair back from my shoulders. “Eat,” she says.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER
“MAYBE HE COULD come over for a visit?”
I’ve surprised myself by asking, but Carla’s not surprised at all. She doesn’t even pause from wiping away nonexistent dust from my bookshelf.
“Teenagers are the same all over. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”
“Is that a no?” I ask.
She laughs at me.
TWO HOURS LATER
I TRY AGAIN. “It would only be for half an hour. He could get decontaminated like Mr. Waterman and then—”
“Are you crazy?”
TEN MINUTES AFTER THAT
“FIFTEEN MINUTES?”
“No.”
LATER STILL
“PLEASE, CARLA—”
She cuts me off. “And here I thought you were doing fine.”
“I am. I am doing fine. I just want to meet him—”
“We can’t always get what we want,” she says. From the flatness of her tone alone, I know it’s a phrase she uses on Rosa all the time. I can tell she regrets saying it to me, but still she doesn’t say anything else.
She’s leaving for the day, halfway out my bedroom door when she stops. “You know I don’t like saying no to you. You’re a good girl.”
I rush right through this opening. “He’d get decontaminated and sit across the room, far, far away from me and only for fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes at the most.”
She shakes her head, but it’s not a firm shake. “It’s too risky. And your mother would never allow it.”
“We won’t tell her,” I say instantly.
She gives me a sharp, disappointed look. “Do you girls really find it so easy to lie to your mamas?”
TO THOSE WHO WAIT
CARLA DOESN’T SAY anything about it again until just after lunch two days later.
“Now. You listen to me,” she says. “No touching. You stay on your side of the room and he stays on his. I already told him the same thing.”
I understand the words she’s saying, but I don’t understand what she’s saying.
“What do you mean? You mean he’s here? He’s already here?”
“You stay on your side and he stays on his. No touching. You understand?”
I don’t, but I nod yes anyway.
“He’s waiting for you in the sunroom.”
“Decontaminated?”
The look on her face says what do you take me for?
I stand up, sit down, and stand up again.
“Oh, Lordy,” she says. “Go fix yourself up fast. I’m only giving you twenty minutes.”
; My stomach doesn’t just flip, it does high-wire somersaults without a net. “What made you change your mind?”
She comes over, takes my chin in her hand, and stares into my eyes for such a long time that I start to fidget. I can see her sorting through all she wants to say.
In the end all she says is: “You deserve a little something.”
This is how Rosa gets everything she wants. She simply asks for it from her mother with the too-big heart.
I head to the mirror to “fix myself.” I’ve almost forgotten what I look like. I don’t spend a lot of time looking. There’s no need when there’s no one to see you. I like to think that I’m an exact fifty-fifty mixture of my mom and dad. My warm brown skin is what you get by mixing her pale olive skin with his richer dark brown. My hair is big and long and wavy, not as curly as his, but not as straight as hers. Even my eyes are a perfect blend—neither Asian nor African but somewhere in between.
I look away and then look back quickly, trying to catch myself unawares to get a more accurate picture, trying to see what Olly will see. I try out a laugh and then smile, with teeth and without. I even try out a frown, though I’m hoping I won’t have cause to use it.
Carla watches my antics in the mirror, amused and bemused at the same time.
“I almost remember when I was your age,” she says.
I don’t turn around, talking instead to the Carla in the mirror. “Are you sure about this? You don’t think it’s too risky anymore?”
“You trying to talk me out of it?” She comes over and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Everything’s a risk. Not doing anything is a risk. It’s up to you.”
I look around my white room at my white couch and shelves, my white walls, all of it safe and familiar and unchanging.
I think of Olly, decontamination-cold and waiting for me. He’s the opposite of all these things. He’s not safe. He’s not familiar. He’s in constant motion.
He’s the biggest risk I’ve ever taken.
FUTURE PERFECT
From: Madeline F. Whittier
To: [email protected]
Subject: Future Perfect
Sent: July 10, 12:30 PM
By the time you read this we will have met. It will have been perfect.
OLLY
THE SUNROOM IS my favorite room in the house. It’s almost all glass—glass roof and floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out onto our perfectly manicured back lawn.
The room’s decor is like a movie set of a tropical rain forest. It’s filled with realistic and lush-looking fake tropical plants. Banana and coconut trees laden with fake fruit and hibiscus plants with fake flowers are everywhere. There’s even a babbling stream that snakes its way through the room, but there are no fish—at least no real ones. The furniture is aged white wicker that looks like it’s been sitting in the sun. Because it’s meant to be tropical, my mom keeps a heated fan running and a slightly too-warm breeze fills the room.
Most days I love it because I can imagine that the glass has fallen away and I’m Outside. Other days I feel like a fish in an aquarium.
By the time I get there, Olly has managed to climb halfway up the rocky back wall, hands and feet wedged into crevices. He’s pinching one of the large banana leaves between his fingers when I walk in.
“It’s not real,” he says to me.
“It’s not real,” I say at the same time.
He lets go of the branch but remains where he is on the wall. Climbing for him is like walking for the rest of us.
“Are you going to stay up there?” I ask, because I don’t know what else to say.
“I’m thinking about it, Maddy. Carla said I had to stay as far away from you as possible and she doesn’t seem like the kind of lady that you piss off.”
“You can come down,” I say. “Carla’s not as scary as she seems.”
“OK.” He slips effortlessly to the floor. He puts his hands into his pockets, crosses his feet at the ankles, and leans back against the wall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so still. I think he’s trying not to spook me.
“Maybe you should come in,” he says, and then I realize that I’m still in the doorway holding on to the knob. I close the door but don’t take my eyes off him. His eyes track my movements as well.
After all the IMs I felt like I knew him, but now with him standing in front of me it doesn’t feel that way at all. He’s taller than I thought and way more muscled, but not bulky. His arms are lean and sculpted and his biceps fill the sleeves of his black T-shirt. His skin is a tanned golden brown. It would be warm to touch.
“You’re different than I thought you’d be,” I blurt out.
He grins and a dimple forms just under his right eye.
“I know. Sexier, right? It’s OK, you can say it.”
I guffaw. “How do you manage to carry around an ego that size and weight?”
“It’s the muscles,” he shoots back, flexing his biceps and raising a single comical eyebrow.
Some of my nervousness falls away but then comes right back when he watches me laugh without saying anything for a few seconds too long.
“Your hair really is so long,” he says. “And you never said you had freckles.”
“Was I supposed to?”
“Freckles might be a deal breaker.” He smiles and the dimple comes back. Cute.
I move to the couch and sit. He leans against the rock wall across the room.
“They’re the bane of my existence,” I say, referring to the freckles. This is a ridiculous thing to say because, of course, the bane of my existence is that I’m sick and unable to leave my house. We both realize this at the same time and then we’re both laughing again.
“You’re funny,” he says after our laughter subsides.
I smile. I’ve never thought of myself as a funny girl, but I’m happy that he thinks so.
We are awkward together for a few moments, unsure what to say. The silence would be much less noticeable over IM. We could chalk it up to any number of distractions. But right now, in real life, it feels like we both have blank thought balloons over our heads. Actually, mine’s not blank at all, but I really can’t tell him how beautiful his eyes are. They’re Atlantic Ocean blue, just like he’d said. It’s strange because of course I’d known that. But the difference between knowing it and seeing them in person is the difference between dreaming of flying and flight.
“This is some crazy room,” he says, looking around.
“Yeah. My mom built it so I could feel like I was outside.”
“Does it work?”
“Most days. I have a really excellent imagination.”
“You really are a fairy tale. Princess Madeline and the Glass Castle.” He’s quiet again, like he’s trying to build up to something.
“It’s OK to ask me,” I say.
He’s wearing a single black rubber band around his wrist and he pulls at it a few times before continuing. “How long have you been sick?”
“My whole life.”
“What would happen if you went outside?”
“My head would explode. Or my lungs. Or my heart.”
“How can you joke…?”
I shrug. “How can I not? Besides, I try not to want things I can’t have.”
“You’re like a Zen master. You should teach a class.”
“It takes a long time to learn.” I smile back at him.
He crouches and then sits, back against the wall, forearms on his knees. Even though he’s still, I can feel the need to move coming off of him. The boy is kinetic energy.
“Where do you want to go the most?” he asks.
“Besides outer space?”
“Yes, Maddy, besides outer space.” I like the way he says Maddy, as if he’s been calling me that my whole life.
“The beach. The ocean.”
“Want me to describe it for you?”
I nod more vigorously than I expected to. My heart speeds up like I’m doing something illicit.
/> “I’ve seen pictures and videos, but what’s it like to actually be in the water? Is it like taking a bath in a giant tub?”
“Sort of,” he says slowly, considering. “No, I take it back. Taking a bath is relaxing. Being in the ocean is scary. It’s wet and cold and salty and deadly.”
That’s not what I was expecting. “You hate the ocean?”
He’s grinning now, warming to his topic. “I don’t hate it. I respect it.” He holds up a single finger. “Respect. It’s Mother Nature at her finest—awesome, beautiful, impersonal, murderous. Think about it: All that water and you could still die of thirst. And the whole point of waves is to suck your feet from under you so that you drown faster. The ocean will swallow you whole and burp you out and not notice you were even there.”
“Oh my God, you’re scared of it!”
“We haven’t even gotten to great white sharks or saltwater crocodiles or Indonesian needlefish or—”
“OK, OK,” I say, laughing and holding up my hands for him to stop.
“It’s no joke,” he says with mock seriousness. “The ocean will kill you.” He winks at me. “It turns out that Mother Nature is a lousy mom.”
I’m too busy laughing to say anything.
“So, what else do you want to know?”
“After that? Nothing!”
“Come on. I’m a fount of knowledge.”
“OK, do one of your crazy tricks for me.”
He’s on his feet in a blink and begins assessing the room critically. “There’s not enough room. Let’s go out—” He stops himself midsentence. “Crap, Maddy, I’m sorry.”
“Stop,” I say. I stand up and hold a hand out. “Do not feel sorry for me.” I say this harshly, but it’s too important a point. I couldn’t stand pity coming from him.
He flicks his rubber band, nods once, and lets it go. “I can do a one-armed handstand.”