The Night of the Comet (26 page)

“I guess so.”

So it was true. I’d suspected it all along, but to have it confirmed made me angry and sick to my stomach. Speaking as though it barely concerned her, Gabriella explained how she’d known Mark for years. Her father and his father were old friends. They were doing some oil business deal together—Mr. Mingis was a contractor or driller or something important like that. When they needed a boy for their ball tonight, Mark was the obvious choice. The Comet King and Queen: their parents all thought it was the cutest thing in the world.

“The whole king and queen thing has kind of gone to his head, though,” she said. “He seems to think we’re practically married now—which is a little creepy, considering we’re only in high school. But that’s how Mark is. If I don’t phone him every night, he gets mad at me.”

She phoned him every night: so that’s who she’d been talking to all those times I’d seen her with my telescope. Of course. I looked down at Mark through the window, in his blue blazer and turtleneck, and if I could have, I would have vaporized him with my eyes.

She sipped from the bottle. “He’s got a new Camaro. Did you see it? It’s outside. He just got his license. He’s going to teach me how to drive as soon as I get my permit.”

“Oh, really? Gosh, that’s great. That’s great news. Thank you for sharing that with me. I can’t wait to see you and Mark driving around town in his new Camaro. I’ll be sure to wave.” I took the bottle from her and paced the yellow carpet.

She laughed. “Oh my god, you hate him, don’t you? Why do you hate him so much?”

I couldn’t think of a polite way to say “He’s a mean, dumb, smug son of a bitch,” so I just said, “He’s boring. All he ever talks about is football.”

“Well. That’s kind of true. But he’s a nice boy. Really, he is. Everyone likes him. Everyone but you.”

“You probably go to the country club together. Play tennis, go horseback riding.”

“We do.”

I stopped. “Really?”

“In Thibodaux. Something wrong with that? Give me the bottle.”

“Really?”

“Yes! Give me the bottle.”

“He goes to dinner with you?”

“Sometimes.”

“And tennis? You play tennis together?”

“You’ve never played tennis?”

“No!”

She shrugged. “You should. It’s fun.”

“I bet it is.”

She drank from the bottle, then looked at me shrewdly. “You’re jealous.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“It’s true. You’re a jealous boy. You’re burning up with jealousy.”

“Well—why shouldn’t I be?”

She shook her head. “Don’t be. Where is he now?”

“Mark? He’s down there talking to your dad.”

“And where are you?”

I looked at her. She smiled and nodded. “See? Aren’t you glad you’re you?” She raised the bottle to me and took another sip.

Dear god
, I thought.
How did any girl my age get to be so cool? So clever? So pretty?

She hiccupped. “Whoops. Excuse me. Too much. Here, take this.” She handed the bottle to me and then slid off the ottoman, lay on her back on the floor, and flung her arms out.

“Oh my god, I think I’m drunk now.”

THIS
was turning into a night of surprises. It was like walking through her house: there’s a room … there’s a room … there’s another room. And look, around this corner, what’s this? A girl lying on her back on the floor. She looked like an angel lying there. She’d crashed in through the French doors and landed on the floor, her purple velvet dress rumpled around her bare legs, her dark hair scattered extravagantly around her head.

She opened one eye and peered up at me. “Don’t stare at me like that.”

“Sorry.”

I dropped down onto the floor and sat with my back against her yellow trunk. My head felt heavy and the edge of my vision was blurry. I stretched my fingers out and looked at them. “Ooh. Look at that. I can feel everything. I can feel my bones under my skin. I can feel my teeth.”

“Junior’s drunk, Junior’s drunk.”

I crawled over and lay down next to her on my back, and then turned
my head on the carpet to look at her. Her ear! Her ear was small and perfectly formed, like a pink seashell. A white pearl pendant earring dangled from the lobe, trembling slightly with her breath.

“Are you staring?”

“No.”

I reached out and touched her earring. It reminded me of Christmas, like a miniature Christmas tree ornament. On her left jaw was a small, pale birthmark, the size of a nickel. It was exquisite.

“You are the queen.”

“That was dumb, wasn’t it? The costumes?”

“But you looked good. You looked very royal.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“I think it was my mother’s.”

Electromagnetic waves of beauty emanated from her body and spread across the carpet to warm my face. I peeked down and saw her hand resting inches from mine on the carpet. Her fingers moved up and down, like her hand was signaling to my hand to hold it. I was scooting closer when she began to talk again. She spoke as though she were thinking aloud.

“Do you ever get the feeling … Do you ever get the feeling that you’re just acting out a part in someone else’s play?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, everyone’s got these ideas about what you should do and how you should act—go here, do this, wear that. It’s like your whole life is arranged for you by someone else. Never mind what you want.”

“We’re only in high school. We have no choice.”

“My mom, for instance, I swear, she has my whole life planned for me: who I’ll marry, where I’ll live, how many kids I’ll have.”

“Really? Who will you marry?”

“A rich college boy from a good family in New Orleans. Preferably a doctor or a lawyer. We’ll live in the Garden District, halfway between Uptown and Downtown, not directly on St. Charles Avenue but on a quiet, respectable side street. We’ll have two kids, a boy and a girl, both in private schools. They’ll wear uniforms.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s—”

“Her plan, not mine. She wants to send me away to a boarding school. Did I tell you that?”

“No. Wait. What? You’re going? Where? When?”

“Not yet. She’s just talking about it. There’s a Catholic girls school in Grand Coteau. She says it’d be better for me there. She hates Terrebonne. She never wanted to move here in the first place. She’d rather be back in Shreveport where all her society friends are, with their hats and dresses and garden clubs.

“My dad, on the other hand, he likes it just fine here. He’s got plans for me, too. He wants me to marry a good old boy like Mark, someone he can go into business with, preferably. They’ll go fishing together, join a hunting club. Go to all the football games. He can hardly wait. If it was up to him, we’d be married tomorrow.”

I might’ve been discouraged hearing all of this, but she was speaking with such intimacy and trust that I only felt closer to her. She was sharing her secrets with me, telling me things she wouldn’t have told anyone else.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She rolled her head on the carpet to look at me.

“See, that’s just it. How can I know what I want? Or what I’ll want ten years from now? How can I know anything? I can barely even decide what clothes to put on in the morning. Everyone says, ‘Oh, you have to think about your future,’ but that’s ridiculous. It’s too soon to be worrying about the future. We should be having fun, enjoying ourselves. Don’t you think?”

I would’ve agreed with anything she said just then, if only because she looked so pretty saying it. But I was impressed by her thoughtfulness; her life, her problems seemed altogether more serious and sophisticated than mine. The band outside was playing a song, a gently rocking number that seemed to have been going on for ages. I found her hand on the rug, closed my fingers around it, and squeezed. She squeezed back.

“Comet Boy, Comet Boy,” she sighed, and turned her face back up to the ceiling and shut her eyes again. “I never want to grow old.”

We lay there holding hands and floating on our backs on the floor of
her bedroom. The warm feeling flowed back and forth between us. Old age seemed impossible, nothing but a scary story told to frighten children. We would never grow old, obviously. We would be young forever.

After a while I heard a strangely familiar voice drifting on the air. It seeped in through the windows and filled the room around us, like water fills a pool.

“Listen. Do you hear that?”

“Mm. Someone’s singing.”

“That’s … It’s my sister.”

“She’s got a pretty voice.”

I wanted to explain how my sister used to sing but she didn’t anymore, not since her ruined date with Todd Picou, and how she redecorated her room and put up a poster that said
LOVE
shot through with bullet holes, and how she hated everything, but tonight I’d found her smoking pot with the boys from the band down by the water, and they seemed really cool, not like criminals at all, and so I had tried it, too, yes I did, just a puff.…

But it was too much and too complicated to explain, and anyway, it hardly seemed necessary. We held hands. My sister’s pretty voice washed down on us like liquid gold, singing,
“Ooh love … Ooh love …”

“If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you be?” I asked her. “Right now.”

She thought about it. “Florida. Miami. I’d like to be in Miami. I’d like to be lying on the beach in Miami. On the sand. In the sun.”

We both lay there in the sun for a minute, enjoying that thought.

“Where would you be?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?” She rolled her head and looked at me.

“Nowhere else in the world. I’d like to be right here, with you, just like this. Forever.”

Her eyes changed and her face went soft. I saw something there that I’d seen that afternoon in the planetarium, a certain tenderness tinged with sorrow—a depth of feeling that seemed at odds with her youth
and beauty, but that also seemed to mirror my own feelings, feelings I hardly recognized in myself until I saw them in her.

I drew my hand up and traced a finger along her hairline. I touched her forehead, and then her eyebrows. She didn’t flinch or move away. I touched her nose; she wrinkled it. I touched her birthmark on her cheek, and then her chin, and then her lips. She puckered them.

I knew then that I could kiss her if I wanted to. I lifted myself up on one elbow and leaned over her. She looked up, studying my face, her eyes curious and trusting. I bent down, and as our lips came together, I understood why people made such a big deal about this. First there was the novelty of it: the weird sensation of my lips pressed against hers, and the warm air sighing in and out of our noses, and the mysterious dark hollows behind our teeth. After that came the disappearing. The walls of the room fell away, the ceiling vanished, and we floated up, up to the stars, suspended in a clear crystal bubble while my sister sang a lullaby in our ears. Our kiss contained us, it contained all of our hopes and fears and wants, and even more. It contained the world: Indians praying to painted gods, and skinny Chinese men pedaling their bicycles to work, and the glossy black water of a bayou at night, where, above it in a soft yellow room, a boy kissed a girl for the very first time while the silver-and-gold sparks of a comet rained down on them.…

Gabriella twisted her face away. Her chest rose and fell as she stared at the ceiling, catching her breath.

“Oh, boy,” she said. “Oh, no. Oh, wow.”

“What?”

“Oh no, no, no, no.”

“What? You didn’t like that?”

“I did. I liked it. I liked it a lot. But—”

“But what?”

I leaned in and tried to kiss her again, but she slid out from under me. She got up and went to the French doors. She opened the curtain and peeked out.

“What’s wrong?”

She worked her feet on the carpet. “Nothing. I just—” She glanced at me and then back. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

“Somebody might.”

“Who’s going to get hurt?”

“Can’t we just be friends?”

“We are. We are friends.”

“Good. Good, because I like you. I like you a lot.”

“I like you, too.”

What the hell
, I thought.
A minute ago we were kissing, everything was great, and now—?

I got up and stood beside her. I tried to kiss her again, but she wouldn’t let me.

“No. Wait. Stop. Look at the party with me.” She rested a finger against the windowpane. “Look. There.”

My sister stood on the floor of the gazebo with the band, both hands shoved down into the pockets of the jacket she’d borrowed from Greg. Her head was tilted back, her eyes closed as she sang into the microphone. The white lights in the trees around the gazebo looked like low-flying stars snagged in the branches.

“Pretty,” Gabriella whispered.

I took some of her hair in my hand and twirled it in my fingers like I’d seen her do. She leaned sideways against me and slid her finger along the windowpane to point across the bayou.

“There’s your house. Which room’s yours?”

“Who cares?”

“Don’t be like that. Which one’s yours?”

“The one on the right.”

“Can you see me from there?”

“No.… Maybe. Sometimes.”

“With your telescope, I bet. Were you spying on me? You were. You were, weren’t you? I knew it! I’m going to keep my curtains closed from now on, so you can’t see me.”

Leaning against her, I had begun to shiver. My legs shook, my arms shook—I didn’t know why.

“What’s wrong? Are you cold?”

“No. I don’t know. It’s nothing.”

“Ooh, you’re shaking all over.” She briskly ran her hands up and down my sides. “Is that better?”

“Not exactly.”

I rested my head on her shoulder, burying my nose in her hair and smelling her perfume. We stayed like that for a while, leaning on each other and sighing in and out. “We should go back down,” she said at last. “People will wonder where we are.”

She pulled back, straightened up, and put out her hand, official-like. “Friends?”

I took her hand. “How long do we have to be friends before we can kiss again?”