Girl Who Read the Stars Page 4

  • • •

  Coffee. Coffee seems doable. Not that I drink coffee, but maybe Trow does and I can find something else to drink. It doesn’t feel like me, because it just feels so normal, and I have never felt normal, but maybe Mother’s right. Maybe I just need an opening to convince Trow to give me a second look. To think me of that way.

  And to be honest, to make sure I want to think of Trow that way too.

  So the next time he’s in school, I don’t give myself time to overthink it. Operation Trow’s new mission is: ASK HIM OUT FOR COFFEE AS SOON AS YOU SEE HIM. So that’s why he hasn’t even sat down yet before I blurt out, “Do you want to go for coffee?”

  He blinks at me and says, “Oh. I. When? Now?”

  I think I’m probably blushing. “No. Not now. Whenever. I mean. Sometime in the future, of course.”

  Now he looks amused. “Well, I didn’t think it would be in the past.”

  “The near future,” I amend, hearing myself talking more and more and more to try to make it better. I keep doing this with him! Talk more and more and more to make it better and I end up just making it worse! “Like, maybe, after school. Can you do after school?”

  Trow hesitates. He drops his eyes from me and looks out the window. I always know where Trow’s eyes are looking because I love when they’re looking at me and I resent when they’re looking at anything else. Even though whenever they do look at me, I make a complete idiot of myself. “After school’s tough for me,” answers Trow finally.

  “Today?”

  “Every day,” he says, and then he looks at me.

  And now I wish he weren’t looking at me, because I’m sure that the impact of what he said is visible on my face; like a hot iron being slapped against my cheek, it burns and stings horrendously. This is another magic power that it would be useful to have. Some people have it and I am phenomenally jealous of them: the power to stop blushing.

  “Right,” I stammer. “Right. Fine. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Sorry—”

  “I don’t mean it like—”

  “No, no,” I say, attempting to be breezy. Shanti, I tell myself. Take a three-part breath. Find distance. Clear it all out of your head. “No big thing. Doesn’t matter.”

  “No, Merrow. It does—”

  It’s the first time he’s said my name, and it sends a weird vibratory ring through me, like I’m a bell he’s just struck. It’s weird, because all he did was say my name, but it feels…odd. Tingly. Something like the pleasure-pain sensation of waking up your foot after it’s gone to sleep on you.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say through the smile that’s now plastered on my face. Back when I had an Operation Trow, it was all about the smiles, I remind myself. Operation Trow is over now, of course, because I really need to stop being desperate and pathetic, but no need to stop smiling. In fact, smiling is the best way not to be desperate and pathetic. I’m sure I read that on a fortune cookie somewhere or something. “Really, really doesn’t matter.”

  The bell rings. Trow leans over, closer to me, and I shrink back instinctively, because it is unforgivable to me that he should enter my personal space for the first time after brushing me off again.

  “No,” he insists. “What I mean is—”

  “Señor Reading? Señorita Rodriguez-Chance? Care to acknowledge the existence of homeroom?” Señora Trillo calls to us.

  Homeroom is stupid and I have never once cared to acknowledge it, but today I am seized with the fierce conviction that homeroom is the most important class ever because it means that Trow has to stop talking to me.

  Trow frowns and reluctantly takes his seat, reluctantly faces the front of the classroom. I refuse to look at the untidy mop of his wheat-blond hair the way I usually do. It’s a stupid view and I don’t want anything to do with it anymore. Stupid Trow Reading, who keeps turning around to hiss at me as if we have things to discuss when he has made it quite clear—twice—that we have nothing to discuss. I reinforce the fact that I have a test in history next Thursday by writing the word test in purple ink over and over again, until the letters actually cut through the paper, and I refuse to look up.

  The bell rings, and I say to Trow again, “Doesn’t matter,” and send him another bright-white smile, and then I dart away.

  • • •

  Trow finds me while I’m not meditating at lunch. I mean, I should be meditating, but I am sitting there staring out the window and going over every interaction with Trow and being mortified by how much I’ve been throwing myself at him and how much he’s been showing me he’s not interested and how much I’ve been ignoring the signs. Me! I read signs in everything! I read signs in stars dancing through my eyelashes, in the spill of salt and pepper together when you shake them! Worst. Julius Caesar. Ever.

  The knock on the door startles me out of this reverie, and I am even more startled when I look up and Trow is there.

  He looks uncertain. “Um,” he says. “Can I come in?”

  And I feel my temper snap. Bad enough that he doesn’t want anything to do with me, but now he insists on talking to me about how he doesn’t want anything to do with me. Shanti can go to hell, because I am furious right now and not interested in finding peace to counter it.

  “No,” I snap.

  He looks surprised, as if he expected me to be all meek and devastated and mopey and invite him in. “What?”

  “No.” I uncross my legs from where I have been sitting on top of a random desk and march over to the classroom door and slam it in his face.

  I enjoy the look of surprise on his face. Possibly I enjoy it too much. I may be feeling a bit smug as I turn away from him.

  Then he opens the door back up, and I really can’t believe his audacity. (Audacity is a good word and I’ve been meaning to use it more often, and I guess I should be glad Trow gave me the opportunity.)

  “What can you possibly want?” I demand in disbelief, turning on him.

  “To talk to you,” Trow retorts. “Which you’re making amazingly difficult to do.”

  “Not true!” I shout. “We could have done a lot of talking over coffee! I was making that super easy for you!”

  “And now you’re making it super difficult for me to talk to you about the coffee!” he shouts back.

  “Because you didn’t want to go to coffee!” I remind him angrily. “I asked you to go to coffee, and you said you couldn’t go to coffee, and now you want to talk to me about how you don’t want to go to coffee? Sorry, I don’t want to rehash how you don’t want to hang out with me. I don’t think we need to get into the specific reasons why you don’t like me. I don’t need any more details.”

  Trow blinks at me for a second, as if he cannot believe that my opinion is that I don’t want to hear any more about his opinion of me. “You think that’s what this is about?” he asks finally.

  “You wanting to come in and talk to me about not wanting to go to coffee with me?” I don’t understand what he’s so confused about.

  “I like you,” Trow says.

  Yeah, I think. Sure. Easy enough for him to say because he can say it while saying the but after it. I like you, but… He’s trying to let me down easier than he did this morning in homeroom, and that’s nice of him, I guess, but I’m not in the mood to let him. I don’t want his pity. I don’t want him to think I’m some kind of excitable girl like a member of Sophie’s pack who needs to be treated gently in case I go rabid and snap.

  Well, I consider. Maybe I have gone a little bit rabid and snapped on him here.

  I take a three-part breath, and when I open my eyes, Trow is looking at me warily, like he doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. Good. I like to keep people guessing. Wouldn’t do to be too written in the stars, would it?

  “It’s fine,” I say and try a smile on for size again. “It’s fine. It was just a silly—I mean, never mind. We don’t have to�
��”

  Trow takes a few steps closer to me, close enough now that he is in my personal space entirely. He is taller than me, just slightly, and I have to lift my eyes a little to maintain eye contact with him. His eyes are hot and bright, and even though he isn’t touching me at all, I feel like he could be. And I feel like he has sucked the air out of the space around us, like we are suddenly in a vacuum, floating up among the stars, and I couldn’t try a three-part breath if I wanted to—I couldn’t even inhale.

  Trow says firmly, eyes blazing down at me, “No. I like you. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone even remotely like you.”

  And then what Trow Reading does is kiss me. Like, seriously. I am not even joking here. He just cups his hands around my face and presses his lips to mine, and he is the world’s most excellent kisser, and he certainly kisses like he really, really likes me.

  When he’s done kissing me, I’m confused, and I don’t think it’s just because he’s kissed me.

  “But you don’t want to go to yoga,” I say and then can’t resist leaning up to press my lips back up against his.

  “In fairness,” he says, his lips curling into one of his wry smiles against my lips, and how amazing is that, “that invitation caught me off guard.”

  “You don’t want to go to coffee,” I say.

  “I can’t,” he says and shakes his head a little bit. “I’m not good at… My life is…”

  I think of my two mothers, one a fortune-telling hippie and the other a straight-laced lawyer. “It can’t be any crazier than my life,” I tell him.

  He laughs a little bit without amusement. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Try me,” I challenge him.

  He looks down at me for a second, his eyes searching all over my face, as if he’s going to find the answer written there, as if my face contains the constellations, the dancing dust motes, salt and pepper, and cinnamon and sugar. “Maybe I will,” he says musingly.

  I wait, barely breathing, but Trow doesn’t tell me about his life. He takes a few steps away from me—a situation that I don’t necessarily support—and perches on the teacher’s desk and says, “So. Yoga, huh? Tell me how that got started.”

  “My mom owns a yoga studio,” I reply and sit up on the desk next to him, feeling daring for doing it.

  “That is very cool,” says Trow.

  “And my other mom is a lawyer,” I say, figuring I should get all the confusing aspects of my life out of the way immediately.

  “Two moms.” Trow gives me a look that is caught between confusion and something else I can’t quite place. “You have a profusion of moms.”

  “I’m just super lucky that way,” I say, and I say it lightly but actually I really mean it a lot.

  Trow smiles again and says, “Which of them is the Rodriguez and which of them is the Chance?”

  “The lawyer’s the Rodriguez. The yoga teacher’s the Chance. She likes to tell me that her name is the most appropriate name in this world, Chance.” I can’t believe (a) how much I’m talking, and (b) how coherently I’m talking. This is the easiest I’ve ever felt with Trow. I guess it did us good to get the first kiss out of the way quickly.

  “It’s a pretty great name,” Trow agrees with me.

  “Reading’s not so bad.”

  “It confuses everyone.”

  “Oh, and Trow doesn’t?”

  “You’re one to talk, Merrow.”

  “So our moms both have strange taste in names.” I shrug. “I like having an odd name. Don’t you?”

  “Not really.” Trow says it thoughtfully. “I think I’d rather blend in. But I can see how you’re made to stand out.”

  I’m a little bit embarrassed by that assessment. “Not really,” I say.

  Trow lifts an eyebrow at me. “You expect me to believe that? You’ve got rainbow hair. And you don’t dress like anyone I’ve ever met. You’re so you; it’s fantastic. You’re not like any other girl here.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “Of course it’s a good thing.”

  I look from Trow to the window. Outside, cars are passing. I automatically start counting red ones, in order to have something to think about that’s not Trow and what I’m saying to Trow. “No one really seems to notice me.”

  “How can you say that? How can anyone not notice you? You’re the only interesting thing in this entire school. Maybe in this entire state.”

  “Well,” I say, trying to maintain lightness as I look back at him, “there’s no need to go that far. There’s no need to be ridiculous.”

  Trow grins.

  I hear myself saying, “I don’t know why no one notices me. I feel like their eyes all pass right over me. Like I don’t factor into the world for them. Or maybe I feel that way. I’ve just always felt like I don’t belong here.”

  Trow looks at me for a second. And then he says, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  • • •

  That night, I am walking on air, and all the tension about the tarot cards seems very far away. I expect Mom or Mother to sense the change in my mood and ask questions, but they don’t and I am relieved because I kind of don’t want to answer these questions right now.

  The next day, Trow brings coffee into homeroom, and he gets into trouble for it but not before he is able to give me one of those heart-stopping grins, and I face the facts: probably, regardless of what the tarot cards say or don’t say, I am in love.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I want to hear about you,” I say as we settle into our usual classroom for our lunch meditation that now has nothing to do with lunch or meditation. We are both on the broad windowsill, leaning up against the wall behind us. I have my legs up, my arms around my knees, my chin resting on them, and I am worrying on a hangnail that has been bothering me all day. I hate hangnails; once I get them, I can’t stop torturing myself by making them worse. That probably says something about me, but I refuse to think about that.

  Trow is sprawling a little bit as he responds, “I’m not that interesting.”

  “Of course you are. Don’t you think that the boy the most interesting person in the state of Rhode Island finds interesting must be a pretty interesting person in his own right?”

  “You get that kind of logic from your lawyer mom,” Trow accuses me good-naturedly. Trow is smiling. I love how he is almost always smiling at me.

  I can’t help but smile back. “She has tried to be a tempering influence on me,” I tell him. “Otherwise she says I’d grow up all flighty, like Mom. I need to get my yin and yang in balance.”

  “Your yin and yang, huh?”

  “We talk like that in my house.”

  “I bet. Which one is your real mother? Or is either of them? Wait, is that question too much?”

  “No.” I’m used to questions like that; they don’t bother me. “My mom is my birth mother. The yoga studio one. She was raising me on her own when she met my mother.” I leave out the circumstances of their meeting. Sometimes people are funny about that. I like Trow and I trust him, but I’m not quite ready just yet to spill all of that.

  “How old were you?”

  The question catches me by surprise. “I…don’t know,” I admit.

  Trow blinks. “You don’t know?”

  “No, I…” I’m confused, because shouldn’t I know this? They tell me the stories of that time, and it all feels very long ago, but how long ago? “I must have been very young. I guess probably still a baby. Because I don’t remember a time before Mother. But I don’t know how old I was. I guess I never really asked.”

  “What about your father?”

  “My father?” I echo.

  “Yeah,” says Trow. And then he abruptly backpedals, as if he realizes now that asking about my father was a faux pas. “Never mind, I didn’t—”

 
; “No, no, it’s fine,” I say automatically, because I think that’s the response you’re supposed to give, but actually I’m sitting there wondering about this myself. I’ve never asked about my father. Could that be right? I have no recollection of ever asking my mom about my father, ever. He’s never been a part of my life, and she’s never mentioned him, and I’ve just followed her cue and never asked.

  Is that normal? That can’t be normal. Then again, it’s not like I’ve ever been super normal.

  “Wait,” I say as I realize it. “You’re not going to trick me that easily. We were supposed to be talking about you today.”

  “Okay.” He cocks his head to the side. “What if I told you that I have seven sisters?”

  I consider that. “And how many brothers?”

  He smiles. “None.”

  “So it’s you and seven girls?

  “It’s me and seven girls.”

  “Theoretically,” I say.

  He chuckles a bit. “No, it’s for real. I didn’t mean to make it sound like it wasn’t for real. I have seven little sisters.”

  “Seven little sisters.” I try to wrap my mind around that. When you’re an only child, having just one other person around with you seems impossible, never mind seven. Seven. Is that enough for a baseball team? Surely enough for some kind of sports team.

  Trow nods and rattles names off. “Tabitha, Tacita, Taevyn, and Talon, Taheara and Taffy and Tam.” There is a rhythm to the way he says the names, like they are part of a nursery rhyme. Probably he’s just really used to reciting his sisters’ names. Probably he needed some kind of mnemonic just to remember them.

  “And how old are they?” I ask.

  “I’m the oldest, and they’re all younger. The triplets are the youngest; they’re only three.”

  “Triplets,” I echo. I can’t even imagine this. I don’t even have cousins. I’m not sure I would even know what to do with triplet three-year-olds. “Wow,” I say. And then I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I bet your house is never quiet.”