Girl Who Read the Stars Page 5

  Trow laughs. Trow has a great laugh, rich and deep, like when you’re out on the ocean and you look down and you can see the first layer and then you realize that there’s another layer underneath—that’s what Trow’s laugh is like. He doesn’t laugh very often, but I’m always happy when he does. “No,” he agrees wryly. “Not frequently.”

  I wonder if that’s why he looks so tired almost all the time. It must be exhausting to be the oldest of eight. It must be even more exhausting to be the oldest of eight when the youngest is still a baby. When the three youngest are still babies.

  I also wonder if this is why he says he can’t do things after school. I wonder if he has to go home and help out. That would make sense. I wish he’d just told me that, instead of being so enigmatic about it and making me think the worst. Never give a stargazer too little information; we fill it in with the most fanciful crises.

  “Is your house very quiet?” he asks.

  “Well, we do a lot of meditating, Mom and I. I’m guessing you don’t really get meditation time at home.”

  “No.” Trow grins at me. “We really, really don’t.”

  • • •

  I never talk about Trow at home. Mom would normally be my natural confidante about him. But things have been weird between Mom and me since the night of the tarot card incident. It’s been weeks now, but it still hasn’t quite fixed itself. I wish that I could tell them all about Trow—I am bursting with things to say about him—but I can’t talk about him because I am worried they will make less of him somehow. So I am careful not to say anything that might be out of the ordinary, anything beyond completely commonplace and dull. I don’t want to give Mom any more reason to worry. And me talking about a boy would definitely be out of the ordinary, especially since it all started with me dealing tarot cards about the boy.

  It would also be weird for me to start asking questions about my father. I know that. All my life, I’ve never bothered to ask a single question. To ask one now—when Mom is already on edge because of some perceived danger with the tarot cards—would definitely be a big red flag to them. I don’t want them to think that Trow might be connected to that red flag, even though it is Trow’s question that started me thinking about him. I don’t want to do anything that might seem suspicious; I don’t want to be the focus of any more attention than I already am. So I don’t mention Trow and I don’t ask any questions about my father and I keep my head down, and I go to school and come home from school and teach my yoga classes and do my homework, and that is basically my life.

  And that has always been my life, so it’s strange to me how empty and hollow it feels, now that Trow has been inserted into it. I imagine my life as being one enormous pie chart. There is a super big slice of it that is bright, sunny yellow—because yellow is happy—that is labeled “Time with Trow.” And then there is this other slice of it that is beige that is labeled “Everything Else.”

  It’s not like I have turned into one of those girls who is so obsessed with a boy that she drops everything else. I still teach my yoga classes and have dinner with Mother and Mom. But the truth is that I have never before had much in my life beyond that. I have always been kind of a loner; I have never really had friends. When I was little, Mother and Mom were worried about that and tried to make me have friends, but it never really worked out. And I wasn’t sad about that, and I wasn’t lonely, and eventually they made a decision that, well, life is about being happy, and if you’re happy how you are, then what does it matter how society thinks you ought to be happy? That’s what makes so many people unhappy, you know, chasing the things that society tells them should make them happy. I see it all the time with the people in my yoga class, working all day at high-powered jobs they hate because they thought it would be a good thing to get high-powered jobs. It is not a good thing, not all the time, not unless you love it the way Mother loves her job. If you love it because you love it, that’s good; if you love it because you think you ought to love it, that’s not so good. At least, that’s what Mother and Mom always taught me.

  All of this is a super long, roundabout way of saying that I was never lonely before I met Trow. And then I met Trow and I realized what people meant when they said they get lonely. Before, I was just, like, how could anyone be lonely when there was so much around you in the world? But I miss Trow when I’m not with him, even when I’m with Mother and Mom.

  This is silly, right? I feel like it’s silly. So I definitely don’t tell Trow how I feel. But I am honest with myself, because that’s important, and with myself, I admit that the time with Trow is the best.

  We spend every lunch together, talking. Trow tells me about his sisters. It sounds like absolute chaos, but it’s hilarious.

  I tell Trow about the yoga classes, where there is one woman who refuses to do yoga from anywhere except up against a corner so that she can keep an eye out for gnomes that might creep out of the heating vents, and the acupuncturist, who has started a dating blog but is insistent she only date men who show up to the first date with blue shirts, which has meant a lot of rejection.

  “How do you know so many crazy people?” Trow asks me, grinning, as I tell these stories.

  I hesitate, considering. “Are they crazy?” To me, these are just the people I know. They are definitely no more crazy than, say, Sophie and her pack. In fact, they are way less crazy than Sophie and her pack, in my view. I wasn’t really telling these stories to tell stories about crazy people; I was just telling these stories to tell Trow about people I know.

  I don’t really ask Trow why he’s absent so much—because he still does miss a lot of school—and he doesn’t volunteer any information. I think his family life sounds understandably insane, and maybe he needs to help out his mother, and maybe he’s embarrassed to tell me that. I can understand being protective of parents who don’t quite fit the mold. It’s why I’m always so close-lipped about Mom. So I don’t ask him, because I figure someday he’ll tell me if it’s important, and it’s probably not important anyway. Trow is who he is, and I know who he is, and I don’t need to know every detail of his home life to know that—any more than he needs to know about the time that I spend looking at stars through my eyelashes to try to get a feeling about my future with him.

  I am teaching Trow yoga positions, slowly. We can’t do much on the disgusting, dusty floors of the school, but we do variations on child’s pose on the wide windowsill, and sometimes we spread out our respective sweaters and do legs up against the wall, lying on our backs next to each other and talking. I love this pose. It feels very cozy and intimate, just the two of us in an inversion, the blood rushing down and making our hearts beat and our heads buzz.

  It is when we are in this position that I say it, finally. We’re having a vague conversation in which Trow is talking about my yoga class.

  “I would love to come to it someday, and at the same time, I think I would be offended when it turns out not to be a private class just for me.” He grins across at me. “I mean, how dare you teach other people the magic of proper breathing?” he teases gently. And then, “What got your mom into yoga in the first place? Was it because it was trendy?”

  I am almost offended on Mom’s behalf. “She was doing yoga long before it became trendy,” I defend her. “She’s always been doing yoga.” I consider. “I think it…I think it connects her to the other world.”

  “What other world?”

  I’ve never actually asked. Mom says stuff like that and I don’t ask questions, because why would I? To me, when she says things like that, they make a vague sort of sense that doesn’t need to be challenged. “I don’t know, the world that’s not this one,” I answer. “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Miss what?” Trow looks quizzical, but in a gentle way, like I am amazing and remarkable, and he’s quite happy with me and all my strangeness. I don’t think it’s strangeness though. I think it’s strange that other people
don’t live this way.

  “Miss…the world that’s not ours. Don’t you feel like there’s something more, something more than all this, and you just can’t get there? But it would be so lovely if you could. You wouldn’t feel half a step behind everyone anymore; you’d just be…you’d just be you and you’d be home. Sometimes I feel homesick and I’ve lived in the same place my entire life.” I want to hide my face—I can feel myself blushing—but I don’t. Trow looks so open and accepting and fond, and I can’t look away from him. “I must sound crazy.”

  “No. You sound exactly like you. Which is…charming and magnificent. And flexible.”

  I laugh, because I can’t help it. Then I hear myself saying, “At night, do you ever just sit and look up at the stars?” I look up at the ceiling, seeing a carpet of stars over my head, not the gross drop ceiling littered with marks.

  “No,” says Trow.

  “You should,” I say.

  “Is that where the other world is?”

  I close my eyes, seeing the stars the way I see them, hazy in my lashes, swaying through my vision. “When I look up at the stars, they dance.”

  There is a moment of silence. “Dance how?” Trow is speaking in a hushed tone, and I understand why. It feels like ,if we were loud, at this moment, it would ruin everything.

  “If you knew how to read them the right way, they would tell you everything. Everything you could ever need to know—the future, the past, all of it. Right there in the stars.” I open my eyes and turn my head to look at Trow.

  He is gazing at me solemnly. He doesn’t look like he thinks what I’m saying is silly. In fact, he looks deeply impressed by it. “What do the stars say about us?” he asks, his voice hoarse.

  “It’s unclear,” I admit. “But I ask them every night, just in case this is the night when it changes.”

  Trow smiles at me. It used to be that Trow’s smiles were always tired, but now when he smiles at me, they are bright and unshadowed. I wonder if anything in the history of time has ever been as important as making Trow Reading smile like that.

  Trow says, “What if I start asking the stars every night too?” And then he kisses me, a soft, lovely press of his lips against mine, and I could sink into him and stay there until every star fell out of the sky. I feel like I can see the stars falling out of the sky, there behind my eyelids.

  I say, against him, “Let me know what they say.”

  “I think they’ll say, ‘It’s a good thing you got that girl coffee,’” says Trow.

  Trow is too good with lines sometimes, I think. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love them all anyway.

  • • •

  “So,” says Mother as she sits on my bed and grins at me.

  I look at her over the top of my book. It’s Mythology. Because you can never know too much about mythology. It can be super useful when it comes to the stars.

  “This boy you’re seeing,” Mother continues.

  I feel myself blush. Stupid blushing.

  “I’m not really ‘seeing’ him,” I say.

  “I’m a lawyer, Mer,” says Mother. “I read people for a living. You think I can’t tell when my daughter has a crush that’s going well instead of being frustrating with the boy, the way she used to be?”

  Mother is in cross-examination mode. I know better than to try to fight that mode. “Fine,” I relent. “Yes. It’s going well-ish.”

  “Well-ish.” Mother looks amused. “Don’t get carried away now.”

  “I don’t want to jinx anything!” I protest.

  “Wow,” says Mother. “It’s going that well, huh?”

  Ugh, trust her to be able to read something into everything. If I just stopped talking now, she’d be able to infer from that too. It’s so frustrating having one mother who’s a lawyer and another who fancies herself able to tell the future. You can’t really keep anything to yourself.

  But suddenly, with Mother looking so pleased and supportive about the whole thing, I want to talk about Trow. I don’t have friends to talk to about this stuff, after all. And although I’ve never felt lonely, I do feel full right now—full of things I can’t get out of me. And I can’t get those things out of me by talking to Trow, because they are things about Trow. You can’t exactly say to your quasi-boyfriend-person, Hey, so I think you’re pretty great. What do you think about that? Actually, what I’d like to say to him is, Are you my boyfriend at all? It’s not like we go out on dates or something, because Trow says his home life is too crazy for him to manage that. I feel like it’s super easy to know when you have a boyfriend when you actually get to go out on dates with him.

  All of this means that I put my book down and I lean forward, ready to gush. “He’s great,” I say.

  “Yeah? So when do we get to meet him?”

  “Oh,” I say, “I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it. I mean, his life is kind of crazy…” Even as I say it, as I see the look on Mother’s face, I realize it sounds terrible and lame and awful. Trow’s too busy to meet my mothers? He’s too busy to go out on dates? Suddenly I wonder if Trow is lying to me, what Trow’s proclamations of busyness actually mean. And I’ve never wondered that before, never doubted that before. But I abruptly feel like an idiot for never having thought to question why I can’t be with Trow anywhere but in a deserted classroom at lunchtime.

  “Well, I think we should meet him anyway,” Mother says, and she has her serious-lawyer face on, the one that says she’s read too many cases about the terrible things that can happen to girls like me whenever we leave the house. Mother always says it’s only because of Mom’s calming influence that she’s able to let me go out into the world ever on my own.

  And she’s probably right. I do like Trow and I actually think my mothers would like him, even if the thought of getting through the initial discussion with Mom about him fills me with dread, because Mom isn’t predictable anymore. I’m sure Trow isn’t lying to me about anything; I’m sure it’s nothing sinister, his busyness. “Yeah,” I say. “I know. His schedule’s tough. He has seven little sisters, can you imagine—”

  “The boy,” Mom says from the doorway, startling me.

  I look up at her and hesitate but figure the cat’s out of the bag now. “Yeah.”

  “The one you thought you might be in trouble with.” Mom moves into my room, staring at me intently. That look on her face is one I don’t like. Why can’t she just look at me like I’m her daughter, instead of like I’m some particularly horrible spill of salt? “The one you were dealing the tarot cards for.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not trouble, Mom. He’s—”

  “He has seven sisters,” says Mom.

  “Yeah,” I say and smile brightly, because maybe Mom is actually going to express interest.

  “Like the constellation,” she says flatly.

  “Oh.” I realize: the constellation Pleiades. In Greek mythology, the seven sisters who had been placed in the sky by Zeus. “Yeah, I guess so. I never thought of that before—”

  “You must stop seeing him,” Mom interrupts.

  I blink. “He’s not—”

  “No. I never liked the idea of you seeing him. Didn’t you see the tarot cards you dealt about him?”

  “Yeah,” I say, confused. “They didn’t say much about him at all. They—”

  “And now you tell me that he is written in the stars. Do you not see?” She practically shrieks it at me, and her eyes are wild and wide, the whites showing in a frightening fashion. I actually shrink away from her instinctively, terrified.

  “Hey—” Mother begins, putting a hand on her arm.

  Mom shakes her off. “Do not tell me to calm down. Do you not see what is happening here? Do you not see? Oh, how can you be so blind? How can I have married someone so blind?” Mom turns to me abruptly. “She is blind, she cannot help it, but you should se
e—”

  “Mom.” I try to say it calmly; I try not to let my voice tremble too much. But Mom feels…insane to me. Like she’s come unhinged. I suddenly realize that it’s possible my mom has been walking a tightrope all of her life, between this world and the other world she senses so clearly, and now she’s lost her balance and is plummeting. And I’ve let her walk this tightrope. I’ve encouraged her, telling her that I can see the stars dancing and can deal out tarot cards and can read the lines of spills of salt and pepper. I might have caused this somehow. “Mom, you know that’s not real. He’s not written in the stars. He just happens to have seven sisters—”

  Mom tears the book out of my hand and throws it against the opposite wall, where it strikes my mirror. And a single crack shows up there, launching its way across the glass as if in slow motion, creeping with a crinkling noise like the crunching of ice underfoot on a cold day.

  I stare at the mirror in shock. So do Mom and Mother. For a moment, there is nothing but complete and utter silence in my bedroom.

  And then Mother says, “Okay, it’s okay,” playing automatic peacekeeper as she rolls off of my bed. She takes Mom’s hand. Mom is still staring at the cracked mirror. “It’s okay,” Mother says again.

  “What have I done?” demands Mom, white-faced.

  “It’s okay,” says Mother, as if by saying it enough times, something magical will happen and she can erase the last few minutes of our lives.

  But she can’t erase them. I sit on my bed, staring in shock at the cracked mirror, feeling too numb to even move. Mom got so upset that you’re seeing a boy with seven sisters that she did that, I think to myself. I try to make sense of that in my head, but it makes no sense at all. How can that make sense? It is the opposite of sense.

  “It’s okay,” Mother says again, and I can feel that she’s directing that one toward me with a worried glance. We’re in this together, that look seems to say to me. Say that it’s okay.

  “It’s okay,” I say automatically, even though I think everything about this is anything but okay. In fact, it’s super not okay, let’s be honest.