Her Name in the Sky (29 page)

“Because now I won’t have to take Calculus in college,” Hannah answers distractedly. “I can just take all the English and humanities classes I want.”

“Yeah, and I can nerd out with even crazier math classes,” Wally says.

“That’s why we love you, Wall,” Joanie says. “But don’t expect me to root for the Yellow Jackets.”

“I would never lay that ridiculous expectation on you, J. But I might expect you to come visit.”

“Are you kidding? Fucking duh. I’ll be there anyway to see Han. We can all hang out together.”

“Yeah,” Wally agrees, nudging Hannah’s leg under the table. “It’ll be awesome.”

On Tuesday, after her Theology final, Hannah spots Luke standing alone at his locker. “Hey,” she says, approaching him tentatively. “How’d you do?”

Luke turns around in a daze, like he wasn’t prepared for her to speak to him. “Hey,” he says after a moment. “I did okay. How about you? Did you blow it out of the water?”

“I think I did alright.”

“I forgot a lot of that stuff about Vatican II.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot to remember.”

“So then I just played dumb and wrote down that Vatican II was the sequel to a really bad sci-fi movie.”

Hannah grins for the first time in a long while. “Did you really?”

“No,” he laughs, and she sees that old familiar hitch in his smile, and for a second she forgets that anything ever came between herself and her friends.

But then Luke’s grin shrinks into an expression of sadness, like he has just remembered himself. “Anyway, I better go,” he says, swinging his booksack over his shoulder. “See you later, Han.”

He walks away before she can think of anything else to say to him. 

“I didn’t think the end of high school would be like this,” she tells Joanie when they’re washing dishes on Tuesday night. 

“Like what?”

“Like—so messed up. So fragmented. I mean, just a few weeks ago we were all getting drunk together and talking about our future trips to Destin. And now our group’s totally split up. I always imagined the end of high school would be bittersweet, not just bitter.”

Joanie is silent as she towel dries a saucepan. “Yeah,” she says finally.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah says hurriedly. “I didn’t—sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I talked to him today.”

“You did?”

“At the lockers.”

“How was he?”

Hannah tells her about the joke Luke made, and Joanie takes on a soft, yearning expression. “I miss him so much,” she says.

“I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay. When it all comes down to it, it’s my fault.”

“Do you still want to be with him?”

Joanie doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Every second of every day,” she says, and Hannah knows exactly what she means.

Hannah and Wally sit for the national AP Calculus exam on Wednesday morning. It’s a grueling exam—long and full of complicated problem sets—and by the end of it, Hannah’s wrist aches from writing, and the eraser on her mechanical pencil has been beaten down to a nub. “I am so done with math,” she tells Wally afterwards, when they’re walking back to their classes. “Like, don’t even show me another number for the rest of my life.”

Wally holds up three fingers. “What number is this?”

“Stop,” she laughs, hitting him in the ribs, and he recoils and pretends like she hurt him. And then, right there in the hallway, with the rest of the student body still in their regular classes, Wally kisses her.

“Oh,” Hannah says in surprise.

“We haven’t done this in way too long,” Wally says against her mouth.

“Maybe here isn’t the best place.”

They hear a catcall, and both of them whip around to see a handful of their AP Calculus classmates crossing down a perpendicular hallway. “Get it, Sumner!” David calls, and Wally turns red and raises his middle finger.

“One,” Hannah says.

“What?”

She laughs. In the middle of this hallway, where her classmates just spotted her kissing Wally, she feels wholly normal and beautifully conventional. “One,” she repeats, her voice giddy now. “You just held up one finger.”

Wally’s face breaks into a huge smile. He kisses her again, and Hannah lets him, and she feels so, so safe.

When she gets home from school that day, Hannah pours herself a bowl of Apple Jacks and eats the green and orange cereal bits one by one, striving to keep an even ratio between the two colors. She studies a page from her AP Literature notebook (“Notes on ‘The Friar’s Tale’”) and focuses her eyes away from the sketch of a bald, dumpy little friar, drawn in blue ink pen, that Baker had scribbled on her paper in the middle of class that day (
Where’s my hair?
the friar’s speech bubble reads).

“Han,” Joanie says, coming into the kitchen and clutching her cell phone in front of her body, “have you seen the news today?”

“No,” Hannah says, only half-listening.

“The president came out in favor of same-sex marriage.”

“What?”

“I just saw it on my news feed. I read the transcript. Look—”

Hannah reads the transcript of the president’s words with her heart beating fast in her throat. Joanie hovers over her shoulder and reads down the screen with her. 

“Wow,” Hannah says when she’s through.

“This is great,” Joanie says earnestly. “Hannah, this is really, really good. He’s the first president in history to support same-sex marriage—”

Hannah slams her notebook. “Yeah,” she says, standing up at the counter, her mind racing and her heart still hammering. She carries her cereal bowl to the sink, turns the faucet on, waits for the water to turn from cold to hot.

“Aren’t you excited?” Joanie asks.

“Can we not talk about this right now?”

“What’s wrong? Don’t you want to get married one day?”

“Who says I can’t, Joanie? Just because I’m—I mean, just because I told you about all this confusing stuff with Baker, doesn’t mean I’m—like, I might not even be—”

“What?”

“You know ‘what.’”

“I’m not gonna say it for you.”

Hannah jams her cereal bowl into the dishwasher. “Maybe I still want to marry a guy, okay? Maybe I don’t have to be this way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wally’s been really great to me. He’s a good person and he understands me. And we’re both going to be in Atlanta for the next four years. Don’t you think that’s significant? Don’t you think maybe it’s a sign?”

Joanie scrunches up her face in distaste. “A sign about what?”

“That maybe that’s the right path for me! I mean, just because I feel a certain way, doesn’t mean I have to indulge it—doesn’t mean I have to go down that life path—”

“Are you saying you like Wally now? Like,
really
like him?”

“You ask that like it can be a straight answer.”

“It
is
a straight answer.”

“I could grow to like him! I really feel like I could. I love him in a way. I really do. He’s smart and sweet and totally devoted to his family—”

“Does he make you happy?”

“What?”

“Does he make you happy?”

Hannah hangs on the question. “Of course he does,” she says.

Joanie narrows her eyes at her. She picks up her cell phone again and moves her thumb over the screen.

“Does he make you happier than this person?” she asks, thrusting her phone at Hannah.

Hannah stares at the picture on the screen. She and Baker stand in front of Baker’s birthday cake, their arms around each other’s shoulders, Baker’s other arm looped around Hannah’s stomach. The picture captures them mid-laugh, with Hannah gesturing down at the King Cake, her mouth open in sheer joy, and Baker looking at Hannah, her eyes lit up and her smile conveying absolute happiness.  

“Well?” Joanie prompts.

“What do you want me to say? This—” she jabs at the picture with her index finger—“is not a possibility.”

“It could be.”

“In what world, Joanie?”

“In this world! Things are starting to change!”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

Joanie flings her cell phone onto the counter. She steps nearer to Hannah, her eyes blazing and her arms folded. “You need to talk to her.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t!” Hannah shouts, her arms extended in front of her in madness. “Joanie, do you not get it? Everything is different between us! We’re not the same people we used to be! I don’t know what we are to each other anymore. I don’t even know if it’s
okay
for us to be what we are—”

“Stop it!” Joanie yells, pushing Hannah back against the sink. “Stop! Stop saying that!”

“It’s true!”

“It’s not true!”

“THEN LOOK ME IN THE EYE,” Hannah roars, “AND TELL ME, WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, THAT HOW I FEEL ISN’T WRONG, THAT IT’S NOT BAD, THAT IT’S NOT DISGUSTING AND PERVERTED AND FUCKED UP—”

“IT’S NOT!” Joanie screams, shoving Hannah hard.

Hannah falls back against the sink; at once, she feels a bruise bloom on the skin of her back. Joanie glares at her, her eyes still blazing, and Hannah breathes heavily and blinks against the warm tears forming in her eyes.

“I don’t believe you,” Hannah says.

Joanie screws up her face and flares her nostrils. Her chest rises and falls rapidly, the St. Mary’s logo on her Oxford shirt moving up and down with the motion. When she speaks, her voice quivers.

“Start believing.” 

Hannah hears the quick intake of her own breath. She swats at the tears in her eyes and leans forward off the sink, her back aching with the new bruise from Joanie’s push. “I need some ice,” Hannah says, trying hard to steady her voice.

Joanie gathers some ice cubes into a Ziploc bag and wraps a dishcloth around it. Hannah hitches up her shirt and presses the cold compress to her skin. Joanie turns away as Hannah continues to swat at her tears and sniff against her sinuses.

“You should probably just let it all out,” Joanie says in a deliberately cavalier voice. She opens the refrigerator but stands listlessly in front of it.

“I don’t need to let anything out.”

“Don’t make me push you again,” Joanie says, still staring into the refrigerator. “I’ll hurt you worse than Baker did.”

Hannah starts to cry in full. She tucks her face into the collar of her uniform shirt and heaves great, expansive sobs into the fabric. Her sinuses clog, her throat aches, her eyes floods with tears.

Joanie shuts the refrigerator door and sits down at the counter. She rests her chin on her hand and looks away toward the family room.

Hannah tries to stop crying, but she can’t stem this release. She cries for a long three minutes while Joanie waits at the counter.

When Hannah’s sobs slow, and when she’s able to take gulping breaths down into her stomach, Joanie stands up and walks back over to her. “Here,” she says, proffering a tissue box. “You have disgusting snot all over your face.”

Hannah laughs, short and hiccup-like, into her tissue. She laughs in that sweet way of finding the shore after the storm, of tethering herself to something she knows.

“Feel better?” Joanie asks.

“Yeah,” Hannah breathes.

“Hannah…you need to talk to her. You’re both hurting. But I worry that she’s not as strong as you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” Joanie says, her face falling. “I’m worried that she’s going to hurt herself even more. If she’s not eating, and she’s destructively drinking, and she’s not talking to her best friend—”

Hannah turns away to throw her tissues into the trashcan. “Joanie, I can’t make sense of how I feel about this. It feels like the whole world has rolled over in the air and I can’t tell which way is up. So how am I supposed to talk to her when I haven’t even figured out what I believe? I don’t know the truth anymore. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“Jesus, Han,” Joanie says. “Nobody knows that.”

Late that night, Hannah lies on her stomach on her unmade bed and watches the news clip of the president five times in a row. His words flow through her headphones and into her ears, and her heart pounds fast, and she holds her hands together in front of the screen, her palms turned upward as if yearning to receive the Eucharist.

Maybe…
she thinks, but she pulls herself back when she’s right at the edge of that possibility. It’s still too unfathomable. Or perhaps it’s just too miraculous to think about.

But the possibility stays with her as she finally tucks in to sleep, and she wonders who the president was thinking about when he spoke those words. Was he imagining a scared teenaged girl in Louisiana? Was he imagining her?