Her Name in the Sky (25 page)

“I’m gonna hit Clay,” Wally says, “but I don’t give a shit, either.”

Hannah can’t fully see his face—not in the darkness, with only the lights on the back porch casting a dim blanket over the backyard—but she suspects his cheeks are red. “It’s okay,” Hannah says, affecting nonchalance. “You know Clay just likes to make people feel awkward.”

“Should we head in?” Wally asks, extending his hand again.

They walk back over the damp grass. Wally doesn’t let go of her hand. Just before they step onto the patio tile, he stops walking and pivots towards her.

He wants to kiss her. She knows it in an instant, even before she sees the look in his eyes.

Wally doesn’t say anything; he just looks at her, his eyes making contact with hers before flitting down to stare at her mouth. There is a hunger in his expression, and though Hannah has always caught glimpses of it, tonight she sees the full manifestation.

She stands unsteadily on the grass, unable to look away from his mouth, unable to make a decision. She wrestles with her instincts, remembering Baker and the beach, but also remembering Baker kissing Clay on the dance floor tonight.

Why should she fight this? Why fight it when Wally is standing in front of her, wanting to be with her? Wally, who is kind, and loving, and who believes in good things even though he doesn’t always receive them? Wally, who sees her, who wants to understand her, who makes her feel like she might be better than she is?

“Hannah—” he says breathlessly, and when he says her name, she thinks,
Maybe this can be enough.

So she arches her neck up to kiss him. His lips are warm and tinged with the minty flavor of the Altoids she saw him eating in the car. She kisses him hard, like she means to, and he kisses back hungrily, and though her gut has no reaction, and though she feels no burst of magic, she at least feels safe, and like she is standing, for the first time in months, on solid ground.

They kiss for several minutes, until the kiss turns heated and Wally pulls back from her. “Wow,” he pants, his eyes wide behind his glasses. “Did I mention I’m glad you’re my prom date?”

He stoops to pick up his socks and shoes. He picks up Hannah’s heels, too. “Come on,” he says, nudging her with his arm, “let’s go in before Clay comes out and acts like an ass again.”

It’s past midnight now, and everyone at the party has changed out of their formal attire. Wally looks down at his tux, then over at Hannah in her dress, and says, “Guess we ought to follow suit?” He grins. “No pun intended.”

Hannah smiles. “That was awful.”

He shrugs, still grinning, and hands her her overnight bag. “I’ll see you in a minute.”

She takes the bag and winds her way through the forest of people in the house, her eyes on the staircase that leads upstairs to the second floor. She scoots around Ted and Kristen, who hug her as she goes by, and then, just before she reaches the stairs, she sees Baker.

Baker sits on the floor, her legs splayed out over the beige carpet, her hair taken down out of its elegant updo so that it now cascades down her back. Clay sits next to her, muttering something into her ear, his arm positioned behind her back. They sit in a larger circle of people, all of whom are paired off boy-girl, and Hannah notes the flask they seem to be passing around the group when they think no one is looking. At that moment, right when Hannah moves into their line of sight, Baker meets her eyes.

Her expression is hard to read. She doesn’t move a single muscle in her face; she simply stares directly at Hannah, her eyes deep and loaded with a meaning Hannah can’t understand. She seems almost hurt, and Hannah wonders for a lightning-quick second if Baker saw her kissing Wally in the yard.

But then Baker breaks eye contact and the moment is gone. Hannah keeps moving, walking toward the stairs, plastering a fake smile on her face when the other people in Baker’s circle call hello to her. “Where you been?” they ask, some of them clearly tipsy already, and Hannah answers, “Outside,” without pausing to explain. She waves at them all and promises to return, and then she makes herself climb the stairs to the second room. She carries the image of Baker’s eyes the whole way.

Hannah spends most of the night huddled with Wally in a section of the family room, munching on Chex Mix and listening to David, one of their friends from their AP classes, tell stories. All around them, boys and girls flirt with each other, kiss each other, sneak outside or into bathrooms to hook up with each other, taking advantage of the fact that Clay’s parents have surrendered to sleep.

Around two in the morning, with the party around them still in full swing, Wally asks Hannah if she wants to go for a walk.

“Right now?”

“Yeah,” he says. “If you want to.”

They walk the streets of Clay’s neighborhood, accompanied by the whispers of water sprinklers and nighttime insects. Wally ambles along with his hands tucked into the pockets of his drawstring pajama pants, and Hannah holds her hands in her sweatshirt and reminds her heart that it should be here, with Wally, and not back at Clay’s house. 

“I like you,” Wally says suddenly, after they’ve wandered down a couple of streets. “I’ve liked you for a really long time.”

They reach the outskirts of the neighborhood, cross a quiet street, start a path toward the LSU lakes. Hannah wrestles with her instincts again, trying to think of an appropriate response to his admission.

“I guess I want to know,” Wally says, kicking a pebble along as he walks, “do you like me back? Or am I just the friend you occasionally make out with?”  

They reach the edge of the lake. She senses him looking at her, but in the darkness, it’s hard to read his expression. They sit down on the earth and stare straight ahead at the lake—a dark mass reflecting the light of the moon. At this late hour, with only the two of them sitting calmly in front of the water, everything in the world feels predicated on hope, on possibility, and Hannah thinks, for the second time that night,
Maybe this can be enough.

“I like you, too,” Hannah says, and as soon as she speaks the words, she feels calmer, safer, like she’s finally fitting into the world. For now, in the quiet peace of this night, she and Wally are the only two humans who exist, and it’s easy to imagine that she could always feel this way. He’s Boy, she’s Girl, and maybe her teachers have been right all along, and maybe the churches have been right all along, and maybe Wally has been the divinely anointed one for her all along, ever since the beginning of time.

Wally kisses her there alongside the lake, and Hannah feels safe, and like she finally belongs.

They walk back to Clay’s house with a looser quietness between them. Wally holds her hand and occasionally brushes his warm arm against hers, and Hannah’s body and mind feel calmer, even relaxed. 

When they walk back into the house, they find their classmates asleep on various parts of the floor. There is one lone light turned on near the staircase, and Wally leads Hannah toward it, both of them moving silently through the landmine of sleeping people.

“Looks like it’s just guys down here now,” Wally says. “Can I walk you upstairs?”

“No, I’ll be okay,” Hannah smiles.

He kisses her goodnight, and she tries to take that feeling of safety up the stairs with her.

She shines the light of her cell phone as she tiptoes up to the second floor. When she reaches the landing, she nearly bumps into a shadowy figure about to descend the stairs.

“Who’s there?” the figure asks, and Hannah realizes, with a jolt, that it’s Baker.

“It’s me,” Hannah answers. She raises her cell phone to shine its light on Baker. “What are you doing?”

Baker stands rigidly, as still and silent as a long-forgotten phantom. “Nothing,” she says, her voice shaking. “Getting some water.”

Hannah studies her in the weak light from her cell phone screen. She looks like she might have been crying. Her overlarge pajama shirt hangs loose and limp on her body. Just when Hannah’s about to ask if she’s okay, Baker opens her mouth and looks like she’s on the verge of crying out, or begging for something, or spitting up something bad that she accidentally swallowed. For one heart-stopping moment, Hannah thinks Baker is going to let her in again.

But then Baker shuts her mouth as abruptly as she opened it and brushes past Hannah. She hurries down the stairs, her head bowed, and Hannah watches her forlornly, resigned to this new dynamic.

She finds the linen closet at the end of the upstairs hallway, just next to Ethan’s old room. She grabs a dark cotton sheet and a thin flannel blanket, grateful to have something to warm her tonight.

She’s walking past Clay’s room when his door opens, startling her so that her heart lurches in her chest. “Whoa!” Clay shout-whispers, jerking back from the doorway. “Who is that?!”

“It’s Hannah,” she says, raising her cell phone to cast the dim light on herself. “I was just getting some blankets.”

“God, you scared the shit out of me, Han.”

Hannah doesn’t apologize. She shines her cell phone light on him instead, noting his naked torso, which glistens with sweat, and his messy hair. He is wearing his boxers and nothing else.

“What are you doing?” Hannah asks.

“Nothing,” he says hastily. “I was just brushing my teeth and everything.”

“Oh.”

A sick feeling spreads in Hannah’s stomach—a kind of instinct that hints to something she doesn’t want to know.

“Come on,” Clay says. “Let’s go to bed. I don’t want to wake up my parents.” 

Hannah hesitates. That sick instinct fans out around her whole body, slipping up into the pipeline of her throat, making her think she might throw up.

“Your boxers are on inside-out,” she whispers.

They stand in uncomfortable silence. “Oh,” Clay says, fiddling with the waistband of his boxers. “Yeah. I pulled ‘em on kind of quickly. Thanks.”

He hurries away from her and sneaks down to the first floor. Hannah shuffles like a zombie to the second floor guest room, where she curls up in a ball on the floor, clutching her blanket around her.

Mrs. Landry cooks French toast for everyone the next morning, seeming to work with an infinite number of eggs and bread slices in order to feed all the hungry teenagers in her kitchen. Hannah feels like she’s watching a modern interpretation of the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fish. Clay monitors the coffee pot, pouring mugs of dark roast for all of his many friends, his hair tousled and his eyes glazed with tiredness.

“He was up late,” Wally says, following the direction of Hannah’s gaze. “He didn’t come to bed until after you and I got back.”

“I know,” Hannah says. “I bumped into him upstairs.”

“Wonder what he was doing.”

“I don’t know,” Hannah says. She picks apart the French toast on her plate and tries to focus on the here and now, especially the feeling of Wally holding her hand under the table. She squeezes Wally’s fingers and commands herself to stop watching the hallway that leads to the stairs.

But it doesn’t matter anyway: despite the scraping of silverware and the loud voices of the classmates around them, Baker never wanders into the kitchen.

Joanie comes into Hannah’s bedroom when she gets home that morning. She folds her arms over her chest and watches Hannah unpack her overnight bag and hang her dress on the door of her closet. “How was it?” Joanie says, her voice full of acid. “Did you have a
wonderful
time?”

“It was fine,” Hannah says tiredly. “Not that exciting.”

Joanie’s voice quivers with anger when she responds. “Yeah, well, it was probably better than watching
Dateline
re-runs with Mom and Dad and trying to ignore all the pictures people were posting online. Oh, and trying to forget about the beautiful prom dress I had hanging in my closet—”

“I get it, Joanie, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say other than that.”

“—Not to mention Luke still hasn’t talked to me at all, and yesterday was his parents’ wedding anniversary, which is one of the main reasons he wanted to go to prom so badly. So he could forget about it.”

Hannah’s heart sinks. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re going to have to come up with something better than that,” Joanie says, her face contorted with bitterness. She spins on her heel and storms away.

That week at school is a tough one. Baker continues to avoid Hannah; Clay speaks to her only sparingly; Joanie ignores Hannah altogether; and Luke, when Hannah tries to apologize to him, simply blinks at her a few times and then wanders away. Only Wally, with his concerned eyes and his warm hand wrapped around Hannah’s, continues to talk to her.

It makes it harder and easier for her to make her college decision. She sits on the floor of her bedroom, barefoot and wet-haired from the shower, and fans her college decision letters in front of her. She eliminates three of them within minutes, and then she’s left staring at her letter from Emory and her letter from LSU.

She reads through their admissions literature again. She browses their websites for hours, reading about libraries and campus life and student groups. She downloads course catalogs and lies on her stomach while she scrolls through class listings.