Mirror in the Sky (21 page)

THIRTY-THREE

“
I
brought you flowers. And juice. They're from my mom's greenhouse. The tulips. Not the orange juice. That's Tropicana.” It was Sunday evening, and Alexa was standing at my doorstep.

I had been home an entire week now, feigning illness, avoiding phone calls, and watching
Roman Holiday
no less than five times, eating my father's mulligatawny soup. Nick left twelve messages, all starting with “Tara, please, you have to call me. I need to talk to you,” or “Tara, I know you're upset. Just call me,” or “Listen, Tara, I know I'm probably the last person you want to talk to, but I really would appreciate it if you could just . . .” I deleted them all, telling myself that this was what resolve looked like. Then I cried some more.

“Oh, good, you look like you're feeling better. Let's go for a drive,” Alexa declared now.

I was so shocked that I conceded, throwing a coat over my pajamas and sneakers over my wool socks.

We drove toward the Riverside Yacht Club, but halfway there, Alexa pulled her car to the side of the road.

“I've been sad lately,” she said. “It's the malaise. It hits every year around this time, right after the New Year. Can you feel it?”

That was New England winter. The days melded together, indiscernible and gray.

“You call it the malaise?”

She nodded. “Veronica has it too,” Alexa said. “It makes her bitchier than usual. So if she snaps at you, that's why. Halle's the only one immune to it. I think she's incapable.”

“Incapable?”

“I sometimes think Halle is immune to sadness.”

“That's not . . . possible. No one is immune to sadness,” I said to her. I thought for a moment about the day Halle waited for me in the locker room.

“Do you want to tell me why you're sad?” she asked tentatively.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Now Alexa looked at me with sympathetic eyes. “I'm not an idiot, you know,” she said. “Look, I wouldn't even ask, but you were out of school for a week, and you haven't returned anyone's phone calls. And . . . I don't know . . . I just got this feeling.” She shrugged. “I'm sensitive. I was going to say something that day at school, but I thought you might want to be alone.”

“It's . . . nothing. I was just . . . having a bad day.”

Alexa nodded. “You're my friend, Tara. I don't want you to be sad.”

That was all it took, a tiny kindness for me to double over. Within minutes I was tearing up. Alexa handed me a Kleenex.

“How about I guess . . . and you nod if I'm right.” Alexa took a deep breath before she asked me. “This is about Nick.”

I hesitated for a minute, and then slowly, I nodded through my tears.

“You like him, it's obvious. Did something happen with you two?”

I nodded again, and Alexa looked at me carefully before she asked her next question.

“Did he kiss you?” she asked, her eyes wide. Either she really was an idiot savant or I was more transparent than I thought, but either way, it all came out in a slurry of tears and snot. Alexa listened to me describe seventh grade and Michelle and Barack Obama and Halle's party and Nick's deck and the telescope and his toy plane and our kiss. I told her everything. Everything except the part I couldn't bring myself to say to anyone, the part that kept me up late at night, sobbing into my comforter. How Nick was the first person I was ever with. How it meant everything to me and nothing to him.

“This is Nick's fault,” she said at the end. “I can't believe how . . . dodgy he's being. You have to say something to him . . .”

“I can't!”

“Then you have to tell Halle.”

“NO!”

“But if you don't, it's just going to eat at you, Tara. It's all
lies. Their relationship, your relationship. How can you stay friends with either of them?”

“I guess I just have to. I have to act as though everything's fine. And besides, this is my own fault. I shouldn't have gone with him to Tod's Point. I should have stayed home on Christmas. It was all a huge mistake. Just . . . when Halle told me they were broken up . . .” At this, I stopped, realizing I had just revealed Halle's secret.

“Wait . . . Halle and Nick broke up? When?”

“I don't know . . . before Christmas. And besides, they're back together now.”

“I can't believe she didn't tell me!”

“Promise you won't tell anyone,” I asked Alexa, and she promised, a series of concerned creases across her forehead.

THIRTY-FOUR

“
HEY,
girl! Feeling better? I was worried,” Veronica said. “You didn't return any of my calls.”

“Or mine,” Nick added, but I ignored him.

“I was just resting. Needed a few days off. But I'm much better now. Any idea what this emergency assembly is about?” My voice was calm, but my hands, in my pockets, were shaking.

“Beats me. Probably Pessanti wasting our time.”

“Food drive for the indigent of Terra Nova,” Nick joked, but I avoided looking at him. I sat down on a seat farthest away from him, next to Jimmy.

“Wait a sec,” Jimmy said, and he reached for my cheek, his fingers sweeping under my eye in a
C
. The gesture was so intimate and so gentle that it startled me.

“You had an eyelash,” he said, holding it out on the tip of his finger. “Here,” he said, reaching for my hand as though he
was helping me board a raft. He placed the eyelash on the back of my hand. “Make a wish,” he said. I looked at him tentatively. He was grinning, and for a moment, I thought he was having fun at my expense, but I slowly realized that he was being genuine.

I looked down at my hand and quickly blew the eyelash into the air. I didn't consciously make a wish, but it somehow managed to slip from my heart, speaking as though on its own.
I want my mother to come back home
.
I want Nick to love me. I want so many things I can't have.

As if on cue, Jimmy opened his mouth. “My mom always makes me do that. Wish on eyelashes.” I nodded, my face turning red.

I saw Veronica grin, but she didn't look up from her binder. “Bushnell's totally going to quiz us today. Pop quizzes are so philosophically flawed.” She shook her head.

“I know. That whole ‘in life, you don't get to prepare' idea is so pointless. It's not life. It's school,” Nick said, and he pulled up a chair between me and Jimmy.

“Then again, you can always wish on an eyelash for an A,” Veronica said. I looked at the bemused expression on her face.

“I tried calling you, like . . . fifty times,” Nick whispered. Veronica looked over at us, raising an eyebrow, but then returned her gaze to her notes. “I get it if you're mad at me . . .”

“Not mad, just . . .” I shook my head. “I don't know. Listen, I can't talk now . . .”

“You have something more important to do?”

“It's more like . . . I don't want to talk to you,” I told him.
“I'm heading over to the auditorium,” I said aloud, and Nick grabbed his backpack to follow me.

“Oh. Okay. See you guys later,” Jimmy said.

We were already by the stairwell when Nick spoke again. “Listen, Tara, it got complicated. She wanted to go up to Nantucket . . . she wanted to get back together. And she's my . . . girlfriend.”

“Funny, you seemed to have forgotten about your girlfriend at Tod's Point on Christmas,” I said, picking up my pace.

“We were broken up. Now we're not. What was I supposed to say to her?”

“How about ‘I slept with your friend Tara on Christmas,'” I said.

Nick dodged the crowds packing the glass corridor in order to keep up. “You could tell her too, you know?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Would
you
have wanted that? Would you prefer it if everyone knew?”

“I don't know, Nick. I just don't want to talk about it with you, okay?” I said as loudly as I could before I stormed off. I caught a look at his crumpled face before a group of freshmen stepped in front of him, obscuring my view of him. He looked as though he hadn't slept in days. I hated myself for feeling a tiny flash of sympathy for him.

I found a seat in the back of the auditorium and threw my bag on the ground, falling into my seat with a thud and profanity.

“Nice kicks,” I heard. I knew the voice even before I turned. “Looks like a lot changed while I was away in Argentina.”

It was the last thing I wanted to deal with in that moment. I turned to look at her. Meg had changed too. Her eyes were heavily mascaraed, and she was tanner. Her hair was longer. It fell all the way to her back now. But even if I physically looked the same as I did a semester ago, I knew that I must have seemed to her a different person.

“Yeah,” I responded. I could hear the weariness in my voice. “I guess it has.”

She squinted at me, her eyes an accusation. “I saw you guys. On the first day back. You and . . . Nick and Halle and Veronica and Alexa? You were all palsy in the student center.”

I thought back to that first day back at school—that moment when I learned that Halle and Nick were returning from their reunion-moon in Nantucket. To anyone on the outside, it was a lovely tableau. We were figurines in a dollhouse, acting out some sort of play. Halle with her arm around me, Veronica in a good mood for once, Nick watching, all of us . . . friends.

But the reality lay buried in the tiniest of gestures, the most fleeting of glances. You had to be on the inside to understand how much between us was unspoken, to know that nothing really means what you think it does. What to me had been a grotesque moment might have looked lovely, even enviable to Meg.

“Looks like life is treating you pretty well these days,” she said. “I mean, why would you want to return any of my calls or e-mails when you've got a whole new popular set of friends?
I hear you've been hanging out with them all year.” There was hurt in her eyes, and my instinct had always been to make Meg feel better.

“Look, I'm having a day, okay? I just need to get through this assembly,” I said to her. The casual brush. I had seen Halle and Veronica do it so many times to so many people.

Meg changed her tack, as though she believed that chumminess would bring us closer. “It's something about this moronic Safety First committee. Pointless waste of time. If people want to pull alarms, they'll find a way to. They're always fighting the tide.”

I was the one fighting the tide. For whatever reason, I couldn't seem to escape the hamster wheel of my life. I looked at Meg. It had been hard being an outcast, but I wondered if this was harder, pretending that I didn't care about Meg, that I didn't want to know about her semester abroad, pretending I was mad at Nick when all I wanted was for him to apologize and declare his love and tell me he had made a mistake, that he wanted me, not Halle. Pretending that Halle was one of my friends when secretly I just wanted her to go away. I was always pretending. And yet it still never seemed to do me any good—the things I wanted felt so far out of reach.

Pessanti made her way to a podium, and the auditorium went silent. “As all of you are aware, in early September we had an incident of vandalism on the Brierly campus. Since then, we've had nearly a dozen false fire alarms and more graffiti outside the science wing. We still have not been able to identify the perpetrator or perpetrators, but we know that it is
most likely a Brierly student who is responsible for these acts. Incidents like these waste our time, they endanger students and faculty members, and they are a waste of taxpayer money.”

There were some snickers across the audience, but Pessanti continued. “In response to the incident, we have decided to put together a Safety First committee. We're asking students to man the alarms for the next week as a show of solidarity. It's symbolic, but it shows the perpetrator that we, as a community, will not be messed with.”

“This is so insanely stupid,” Meg said.

“And now I'd like to introduce you to the student representative of the Safety First committee, Halle Lightfoot.”

“Seriously?” I whispered.

Meg made a face as Halle got up in front of the podium, shaking Pessanti's hand. I looked at Meg. She had always observed Halle as though she were a starlet on the cover of
Us Weekly
. But now, that admiration had been replaced by distaste. I wondered how much of it had to do with the fact that Halle and I were friends now.

Halle looked out into the crowd with that typical Halle confidence. She was wearing skinny black leather pants, an oversized white gossamer T, and a checked scarf around her neck. Her hair was blown out.

“Hey, guys!”

“Hey, Halle!” a handful of people called out.

“So when Mrs. Treem and Mrs. Pessanti asked me to take on this position, I was like, ‘Hmmmm . . . do I really want to be the student rep of the Safety First committee? Do I really want
to be urging people to man the fire alarms?' Is that really the best use of our time?”

“Fuck no!” someone screamed out, causing an avalanche of laughter in the crowds.

Halle laughed too, which made her seem even more charming than usual, if that was possible. “Come on, you guys. This isn't about the incident, and it's not about the alarms. This is about solidarity. We, at Brierly—we're a community. We're a family. We have to look out for each other. We have to . . .”

But I couldn't sit through any more of this nonsense. I collected my bag and slid down the aisle.

“Hey, where are you going?” Meg called out, but I didn't turn back. I made it to the door, but Mrs. Bushnell was blocking the exit.

“Tara, you can't leave. We're all required to be here for this.”

“I need to leave right now, Mrs. Bushnell.” I had learned that when you looked directly at someone's eyes and spoke with a particular tone of authority, it didn't matter who you were speaking to or what they were trying to make you do. Bushnell opened the door and let me through.

I was halfway across campus when I heard her voice again.

“Tara . . .” Meg was following me across the quad. “Listen! Wait up . . .”

She ran behind me, and we quietly walked together to the edge of the woods. It was freezing cold, and with the snow we had gotten over the holidays, by now a carpet of icy black sludge was piled up in every corner. I trudged through murky
pools of decomposing leaves and branches and finally found a tree stump to sit down on. Meg stood there, watching me.

“She's your best friend now? Halle?”

“No,” I said to Meg. “Honestly, Meg. What do you want me to say?”

“I want to know why you couldn't even send me an e-mail when I was away, during the hardest semester of my life. I want to know why you didn't return my calls. I called you, like, twelve times over winter break! I want to know why or how they're now your friends, and I'm not . . .”

“YOU were the one who went to Argentina to become a better person. YOU were the one who insisted that we'd grow apart.”

“Yeah, and looks like we did,” Meg said.

“What was I supposed to do? Wait around for a year for you to come back so you could tell me you're all cool and cosmopolitan now because of your year in Buenos Aires?”

“It wasn't a year, and honestly, it sucked. And now . . . this sucks. This sucks more than anything.” Her eyes began to tear, and she sat down next to me.

“I don't have an answer for you, Meg.” I felt guilty, but I couldn't take on Meg's desperation. My own desperation was enough.

“They're all bullshit, that crowd. I can't believe you're friends with such liars. They're all full of shit,” she said, lighting a cigarette and passing it to me.

I looked at it, hanging off the tip of her fingers, a wisp of smoke slowly dissipating into the air.

“When did you start smoking?”

“Since I stopped caring about anything.”

“That's original,” I muttered.

Meg brought the cigarette back to her lips. “You don't know anything about them. And the whole thing with that alarm . . . God, if that idiot Halle chick only knew who it was . . . what does it matter anyway? They're all bullshit. The teachers here, Pessanti, your crowd. You used to think so too.”

I looked at Meg, the girl who used to come over to my house for sleepovers in the seventh grade in her flannel pajamas and her glasses, and I wondered if I should tell her that I still thought it was all bullshit. I felt a wave of shame wash over me. Did Meg think I was bullshit too?

“What is it like, hanging out with them, being friends with them?” There was curiosity in her eyes, and when I looked at her face, I realized that she assumed I was still an outsider, looking in. To her, I wasn't one of them. And even if that was exactly how I felt too, I was angry at her for sensing it.

I took a deep breath. Maybe I wasn't like Halle and Nick, but
we
were different now too, Meg and I. She didn't know about my mother leaving home, my father's moods. She didn't know about what had happened between Nick and me. She didn't know how I really felt about Halle or about the nights I spent awake in bed, thinking about another Tara on Terra Nova. It had all changed, and one thing was clear: We were most certainly not the same, not anymore.

“They're my friends,” I said. “Things changed, Meg. Everything changed, and you weren't here.”