Starry Night (5 page)

 

9

Like a herd of goats,
we galloped up the familiar stairs to my room on the fourth floor.

My parents, Oliver, Dinah, and I live in a five-story brownstone my parents bought when my father became the museum's director. One of my mother's favorite things to say about it is “It's too much house, but we thought we would need to entertain more for David's job and the children could be upstairs.” She stops talking and does this fluttering thing with her hands indicating that we would all be up “there” somewhere and they would be downstairs amusing the art world. Then she pushes her hands away from her in a whooshing motion, like all of that was garbage, and says, almost showing off about the closeness of our family, “But we are always piled in this kitchen whether there is a party going on or not, so we didn't end up needing all the floors.”

Oliver's room is on the second floor, where the living room is. To Padmavati's dismay, the door was shut. The muted music was the only way you would know he was in there.

Vati looked at me with a sad-dog face.

“Oh, all right,” I whispered to her. Reagan, Farah, and Charlie passed us and continued up to the third floor, where Dinah's and my parents' bedrooms are, then the fourth, where my bedroom is. And the fifth floor is just a tiny landing that has a door to the roof, which we are forbidden to go on.

I knocked loudly. Nothing. I knocked again. He usually opened it just a crack so I wouldn't know whatever he was doing in his room. He was in a “private stage,” my mother would say, as she reminded Dinah and me to respect it and not bother him. Maybe he was masturbating. Gross.

I knocked for the third time and the door opened, and a guy that totally wasn't Oliver was standing there.

“Oh—hi, um—”

Oh my god, what-the-fluke is going on?
This was no random friend of my brother's, this was—he was in a whole other category. He was extraordinary.

“Hi, I uhh—” I am stammering. I'm disoriented. I actually heard Padmavati take a sharp breath in as if she had seen Justin Timberlake.

“Um, I—” I continued pathetically.

Who are you who are you who are you who are you?

He was so beautiful.

His beauty, and a cool-guy vibe that I had not yet encountered in real life, only in movies, assaulted me. He was tall, taller than me. He had once-my-hair-was-normal-boy-length-but-I-let-it-grow-out-like-two-years-ago long choppy brown hair that fell below his shoulders. His bangs were studied. He swept them to the side with his hand, tucking them up and around his ear, which had a perfectly round, small golden hoop imbedded in it. When he tilted his head ever so slightly forward, his bangs fell off his ear and covered his enormous root-beer-brown eyes. His eyes looked Italian, like Michelangelo eyes, big lids, soft. Can you picture those? Have you ever seen Michelangelo's David? This boy had eyes from the Renaissance, and they were looking right at me. He was wearing a worn athletic-gray
BRONX SCIENCE
T-shirt. Bronx Science is a really good public high school in New York. I think it is one of the best schools in the country. I think geniuses go there. Did this guy go to Bronx Science? An unfamiliar feeling shot through my gut, as if an octopus had darted from one end of it to the other.

“Hi there.” His voice was friendly, and a little gritty. It was the voice of someone older than he looked like he was.

Oliver popped his head into the hall, breaking the spell.

“What's up, Wren?”

I looked at him like,
Um, who is this?
Because the thing is, this guy wasn't Samson or Benjer, Oliver's goofy friends that had been coming over after basketball practice and playing Dungeons & Dragons in Oliver's room for the better part of the last fifty Saturdays. This guy was
new.
It was like Oliver had brought home the
Twilight
guy.

“This is Nolan.”

“Oh. Nolan. Hi.”
Nolan.
Who would have thought that I would ever meet someone named Nolan?

“Hi, Oliver!” Padmavati almost shouted.

“Hey, Padmavati,” Oliver said, with nothing in his voice but a hello.

“Mom said we should be ready to go to the … um…” I was almost positive
Nolan
was kind of
smiling
at me. He had put his arm up so it rested on the frame of the door. I had to take a very subtle deep breath—unlike Padmavati's earlier sharp and loud one. “… party.”

“I know. It will only take us five minutes to get ready. We have, like, almost two hours. It's not even five.” Oliver shot a glance at Vati, which she would be using as proof of interest for the next few hours.

We?
Was this guy coming to the party with Oliver?

“Okay, well, I'll, we all will be, you know,” and I pointed my finger upward.

“Yup,” Oliver said. Nolan, who didn't say a word, gave me an honest-to-god real smile, revealing adorable kind of big teeth, one of them chipped in the front. Oliver closed the door. Padmavati and I stood looking at the door in our face. The music got louder from behind.

“Oh my god, Wren. Who was that?” Vati said. “He has a chipped tooth, and still his hotness is devastating.”

I looked at her, speechless. My heart started beating a strong, distracting beat, like there was someone furiously pounding on a door in my chest. It felt exactly like I was about to recite a poem that wasn't one hundred percent memorized in front of a class, or even like I was riding a bike down a steep hill and was just out of control enough to be unsure of my outcome. Or it was as if I had lost my footing climbing and almost fell out of a tree. Have you ever felt any of that? Like something thrilling was about to happen?

 

10

The instant Nolan's mouth
formed a smile in my direction, I wanted to tell Charlie and the girls. My first impulse is to tell. I am very impulsive. I blurt. I am a teller. I am an impulsive teller. But this time, I used my hard-won-in-therapy tools and pulled myself back. If this were any other day, I would have put Farah's hand on my heart so she could feel the new beat, discuss, and figure out what was to be done about it. I would have shouted up two flights of stairs, “Guys! Something is happening to me and it's because of some guy in Oliver's room!”
But I didn't do it.
Padmavati and I did rush up the stairs, but with each step I took, this fast-acting, unfamiliar feeling of wanting to be private and keep him to myself was building in my bloodstream.

When you get to the last flight of stairs before my floor, along the walls of the stairway are my drawings. Some are framed, some I just stuck up there randomly with blue wall tape. It's my “gallery.” My mother gave it to me as a free space in the house that I could use any way I wanted. I mean, my room has my drawings all over it too, but there are too many of them. I had overflow. There were some drawings up there from as far back as third and fourth grade, and some from as recently as last week—black chunky cityscapes with yellow dripping windows, antelopes jumping, and many pictures of the stars in the night sky.

I had run past those drawings countless times, and seeing them was like looking in a mirror. But that day, they all looked unfamiliar. As if I was someone new. As if meeting Nolan had changed who I was even from that morning. Why the big change? I don't know. Why do dogs that look like they are just checking each other out suddenly erupt in a growling explosion? Why do you sometimes have such a violently bad dream you bolt into your parents' bed even though you are fourteen? Why can a song—a really cheesy one that you hear by mistake while your parents are watching the Country Music Awards on TV—make you cry, and move you so much you then download it so you can listen to it for the rest of the night up in your room?
I don't get it
, but I am here to say that life—or a person—can unexpectedly change who you are very, very quickly.

I had only minutes to process this feeling before we got to my room. It wasn't enough time. Padmavati rounded the corner into my bedroom at the end of the hall and jumped on the bed where Charlie and Farah were lying platonically all over each other.

“Reagan, get in here!” Vati called to Reagan, who was in the bathroom showering. Vati was going to blow it about Nolan and there was nothing I could do. I closed the door and flopped on the window seat on the far side of my room. It's my go-to place of safety. Good for daydreaming, texting, and sketching the rooftops of the Upper West Side. Not good for homework, as my mother tells me almost every day.

“So something is up downstairs,” Vati said, sitting crisscross applesauce on the bed.

“We were assuming you were spying on Oliver,” Charlie said, unearthing himself from under Farah's leg and putting one of my European squares behind his back. Farah, still reclining, shoved a sausage-link-shaped pillow embroidered with loopy pink ribbons under her head.

“Well, first of all, I really think Oliver looked at me—like,
looked at me.
It was ever so slightly different than any time before. He looked at me like this.” She relaxed her body, slouching like Oliver does, and said, “Hey, Vati.”

“Whoa hay hoe,” Charlie teased. “I see a marriage proposal any day now.”

“No, no, I'm quite serious. He has never given me this look before.” She relaxed again and then smiled with one corner of her mouth tilted up, exactly like Oliver does.

“I saw it, it was a nice smile,” I said from the window seat, hoping that maybe Vati was going to run with the telling-everyone-about-Oliver thing and forget to mention Nolan.

“Yeah, thanks, Wren, it was the real deal, I think. But—
but
, there is this
other
guy down there …
Nolan
, and he is so freaking gorgeous. He was wearing this Bronx Science shirt, like all cool and faded and worn in. And he had purple high-tops on, and he had this long, cool sort of black-brown hair and he's tall, right?” Vati looked at me for confirmation.

“That is Nolan Shop. I'm sure of it,” Reagan said in a towel, standing in front of my
Starry Night
poster with my Tweezerman in her hand.

“How do you know?” I asked, with a little more edge to my voice than I meant to have. (That's another ADD thing, or maybe it's a big-feeler thing, but not having a lot of control over the emotion in your voice.) That is what Reagan is like. It can't just be my thing that I had an encounter with a hot guy in my house, of course Reagan knows him. It felt like she was ever so slightly taking something from me. She does it even with random things, like magazines. I'll have just cracked open a brand-new issue of
Vogue
and she'll ask to see a picture for “just a second” and then she'll end up reading the whole thing.

“It's
got
to be him,” she said, gesturing with the tweezers she was holding like some teachers do with their reading glasses. The octopus in my tummy was going bananas.

“There's a sort of famous Nolan that goes to Bronx Science. How many Nolans could there be? He's all over Facebook. And Facebook is all over him,” she said. I felt like I was going to murder my parents that I had to wait until I was sixteen to have a Facebook page. I rushed into the bathroom to look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror that was completely steamed up because of Reagan's shower.
Who am I if I don't even know what is all over Facebook?
The mirror had no answers. All I saw through the steam was that my hair looked wild and unruly from the wind.

“
Who.
Is. Nolan. Shop?” I heard Farah say from the bed. I saw my eyes in the mirror open wider and then I kept going with that and opened my eyes as wide as I could. I mouthed
Nolan Shop
so I could see my lips form his name.

“Oh! I think I know who that is!” Charlie chimed in. I turned away from my reflection and looked back into the room to see Reagan whip her hair up over her head and then back down again so I got sprayed with tiny darts of water.

“He's in a band,” she said.

“Yes!”
Charlie jumped off the bed.

Reagan opened her towel to readjust, showing everyone on the bed the Crenshaw melons that are her boobs.

“They're called the Shoppe Boys—like P-P-E shoppe—because his last name is Shop: S-H-O-P,” Reagan said.

“
Yes!
Yes, yes, yes—my guitar teacher totally told me about them. They're still in high school but they are incredible. Yes, that is definitely him,” said Charlie, who got back on the bed happy that he knew what he was talking about. He was oblivious to Reagan's boobs, which I couldn't believe because I could hardly stop myself from staring at them.

“You seem to know a lot about that band, Reagan,” Farah said, like she was getting to the bottom of something. I leaned against the sink to listen. But before Reagan could answer, I heard someone pounding on the door of my room.

“Wren!” Dinah yelled, at the top of her lungs. “Mom wants you to come downstairs and try on
the dress
!”

“Dinah! Come in here.” Farah and my other friends had spent so much time with Dinah she was like everyone's little sister. Dinah skipped in, followed by May.

“Did you see anyone come home from school with Oliver today?” Farah asked her.

“Um, no? I was
shooting
, if you didn't notice.”

“I know, you little fish fryer, I just thought you could be helpful to us, but … never mind.” Farah plays Dinah like a tiny fiddle. The last thing I wanted was Dinah getting all up in my business, so I intervened.

“Shhh, you guys, come on. Let's go see the dress.” I left the bathroom, passing Reagan, who was headed back in.

“I hear he's adorable,” Reagan said.

I felt a flash of annoyance rip through me again, as if she had just taken my magazine.