Her Name in the Sky (8 page)

It’s like she’s in a trance. She sees Baker pushing ahead of her—the dark hair, the sharp movements—and she vaguely registers the people all around them trying to stop Baker, and then Hannah, to ask what’s going on. Hannah keeps moving, moving, moving, her legs and her heart carrying her, until she’s face to face with a tall door and the whip of Baker’s hair disappearing behind it.

“Hold on!” Hannah says, throwing her hands against the door to keep it from shutting. “Bake—you okay?”

Baker allows her into the bathroom with her. Hannah shuts the door behind them and locks it without thinking about it. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I’m fine.”

Baker sits down on the edge of the bathtub. Hannah walks toward her until she’s standing above her, able to look down at Baker’s eyelashes and the serious expression on her face. “Hey,” she says softly, tucking Baker’s hair back behind her ear. “What’s going on?”

Baker breathes in. Her eyelashes still; her lips stay parted around her breath.

“Is it Clay?” Hannah asks.

Baker closes her eyes. Hannah keeps tucking her hair back behind her ear.

“Bake, it’s alright. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me how we can fix it.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Baker says, keeping her eyes closed. “I just—do you ever just feel not right about something, but you don’t know why?”

Hannah sits down next to her on the edge of the tub. “Sure,” she says. “I think it just happens at our age. You know?”

“Maybe.”

“Was it—was it him trying to kiss you?”

Baker’s eyes open. Her eyes are dead; her expression is vacant. She doesn’t answer the question.

They sit in silence for a long minute. Outside of the bathroom, on the other side of the door, Hannah knows that the party is carrying on, that the music is pulsing, that people are laughing and singing and drinking and waiting to welcome her back. But she has no desire to leave this bathroom. So she looks down at her dark-washed jeans, at her black ballet flats, at the bathmat below them, and she waits.

“Maybe I’m just drunk,” Baker ventures after a few minutes.

“Maybe,” Hannah says.

“It’s a weird feeling. I like it, but I—I feel scared. Does that make sense?”

Hannah looks at her. The expression in her eyes is vulnerable and uncertain, and Hannah wants nothing more than to gather her in her arms and tell her that everything is alright. She takes her hand instead.

“It makes absolute sense,” Hannah says. “I feel the same way.”

Baker’s mouth shifts slowly into a smile. She presses her thumb against Hannah’s fingers. “Really?”

“Really.”

Baker raises her free hand, the one not holding Hannah’s, to Hannah’s face. She brushes her fingers down Hannah’s cheek, and Hannah’s heart beats faster. “I’m really glad you’re my best friend,” Baker says.

“Me too,” Hannah says. She leans forward and wraps Baker in a tight hug, losing herself to the smell of Baker’s perfume and the beat of Baker’s heart against her chest. “You’re the absolute best,” Hannah says, and then she kisses Baker’s cheek.

Baker pulls back from her until they’re looking at each other full on. And it’s startling, because all Hannah can see are deep, dark eyes, the eyes she has trusted for years, but tonight there is something blazingly different in them, something ancient and yearning, something that calls to a feeling deep inside of Hannah. Baker leans in and kisses Hannah’s cheek very slowly and gently—like she means it—and when she draws back Hannah sees that same something in her eyes again, and it prompts her to lean forward and kiss Baker’s other cheek. Baker’s skin is soft under her lips, and when Hannah pulls back she feels Baker touch her face again, her fingers gentle but commanding on Hannah’s jaw, and then they’re moving towards each other again, both of them wanting to kiss each other’s cheeks, except this time they’re facing each other directly.

They kiss each other’s lips, and Hannah feels the spring of creation in her body and blood.

It’s a bursting, awakening feeling. It’s so potent that it almost hurts, the way it feels to eat a morsel of food after a long period of starvation. Every nerve beneath Hannah’s skin—every deep, hidden crevice in her body—every tiny atom that makes her who she is—they all jazz to life, as if they had been long ago buried and were simply waiting to be called upon to arise. Hannah opens her eyes and finds Baker looking at her with a kind of breathless, frightened desire, like a child who just got caught with her hand in a cookie jar, so Hannah leans forward again before either one of them can think about it. She kisses Baker’s lips, and once again all her nerves spring to life, and her heartbeat quickens in her chest, and the drunken part of her sings
Oh, yes
even while the sober part of her warns
Oh, no.
Baker’s mouth moves against hers, and now they’re full on kissing, their lips sliding against each other’s while Hannah’s heart rises up to fill the room around them. And it’s magic, it’s sacred ritual, it’s God.

And now Baker’s making small noises, and her hands are running up and down Hannah’s arms, and her breathing is as erratic as her kisses. Her lips are wet and Hannah wants to kiss them, kiss them, kiss them, and in some distant, forgotten part of her mind, she finally understands what the big deal is, why people
want
to kiss, why this action communicates so much more than words ever could.

“Han,” Baker says against her mouth, and never before has Hannah heard her name pronounced with such fear and such reverence. She answers with another kiss, with a turn of her head, and Baker receives her kiss with a desperate eagerness Hannah never knew she possessed.

And then their tongues are involved, moving into each other’s mouths with exploratory fervor, and deep inside of Hannah there’s a voice that says,
This is your best friend, this is your best friend
, over and over, and it seems to intensify the physical feelings even more. They kiss and kiss and kiss, and Hannah hears soft whimpers and breaths escaping from Baker’s body, or maybe from her own, and she can’t think of anything except how much she loves this.

“Hannah,” Baker says, her voice more fearful than reverent. She draws away and wipes her fingers across her mouth, and Hannah sees that her hand is shaking.

“Baker—”

“Let’s go back out to the party,” Baker says, standing up and walking toward the door, her voice high and panicked like it is when she thinks she said the wrong thing to someone.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m just drunk—I think you’re pretty drunk, too—I think we’re both really wasted—”

“We’re okay—” Hannah says.

Baker looks into the mirror and rubs her fingers over her lips again. Her hand is still shaking. “I need some water,” she says. “I think I’m pretty drunk.”

Then she leaves the bathroom, and Hannah’s left sitting on the tub with her heart in her throat.

Joanie drives them home. “I’m
fine
,” she assures Hannah. “I only drank two beers and Luke made me drink, like, six cups of water before we left. What’s up with you, Baker? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Baker says, her voice high and breathless from the backseat. “Just drank too much.”

Joanie snorts. “That’s a first.”

Hannah’s mom calls down to them when they walk into the house. Hannah tries hard to sound sober and is grateful to Joanie for doing most of the talking. “Yes, Mama, we’re all heading to bed,” Joanie says, sounding exasperated as she kicks off her shoes. Under her breath, she says, “You’re driving next time, Hannah.”

Baker doesn’t speak to Hannah as they get ready for bed. They change in silence—both of them turn away into opposite corners of the room—and brush their teeth without looking at each other’s reflections. When Baker gets into bed and turns on her side away from Hannah, Hannah steps toward the door and says, “I’ll get us some water.”

“Thanks,” Baker says.

When Hannah returns with two plastic tumblers full of ice water, Baker is fast asleep, or at least pretending to be.

Chapter Four: Dirty

When Hannah wakes in the morning, she finds Baker packing up her overnight bag, the tumbler of water next to her.

“Hey,” Hannah says.

Baker doesn’t look up. “Hey.”

“You feeling okay?”

“I think I’m hungover.”

“Yeah. Me too. Just drink that water. Want me to put on some coffee for you?”

Baker hesitates; she snaps in an earring and looks down at the floor.

Hannah sits fully up in bed. “Look,” she says, tying her hair into a bun, “I know we’re both being weird about last night—”

“Don’t,” Baker says, her face scrunched up.

“Don’t?”

“Just—don’t try to bridge last night and this morning. You always do that. You always try to bring things out in the open. Just let it be, okay? It was a party, it was a late night, we were both really drunk, so let’s just leave it alone. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But we—”

“Hannah.”

Baker’s voice is sharp when she speaks. Hannah feels something sink in her stomach.

“Okay,” she says.

Then they exist in silence, and Hannah feels like they are two little kids sitting in a mud puddle, unsure of how this submersion feels, unsure of whether they’ll ever be clean again.

“I need to take Charlie out,” Baker says, standing up and swinging her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

“Have fun,” Hannah says, her voice sounding fake to her own ears.

Baker leaves the room, and Hannah retreats under the covers.

Later that morning, Hannah’s mom drags Hannah and Joanie to Ash Wednesday Mass at St. Mary’s. “We don’t want to
go
,” Joanie whines from the backseat of the car.

“Too bad,” their mom says.

“We don’t want dirt on our foreheads,” Hannah says.

“Stop calling it ‘dirt.’ Be respectful. With all the blessings in your lives, you should
want
to go thank God for everything you have.”

Hannah sits through Mass with knots in her stomach. Father Simon delivers a homily about the start of the Easter season, about what it means for them as Catholics, about how they should remember Christ’s deliberate sacrifice every day for these next six weeks. Hannah averts her eyes from the life-size Crucifix that hangs above the altar.

She falls in line to receive ashes, feels Father Simon thumb the ashes into a cross-shaped pattern on her forehead, hears the words—
Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return
—murmured all around her.

She returns to her pew and tries not to touch her forehead. To her left, Joanie and her mom seem unfazed by the ashes: Joanie picks at her nails and her mom closes her eyes in prayer. But Hannah cannot resist raising a hand to her forehead and pressing her fingers against the mark there. When she draws her hand away, her fingers are tainted with dirty charcoal. She does not look up at the Crucifix.

She still feels unsettled when they get home from Mass. Her mom pours herself a glass of sweet tea and goes into the study to check her e-mail. Hannah and Joanie shuffle around the kitchen, making themselves chicken salad sandwiches, Joanie chatting about how funny Luke was at the party last night.

Hannah pours herself a glass of water. Just as she’s about to take a sip, she remembers, with a jolt, how it felt to kiss Baker.

No
, she tells herself, blocking the feelings.
You don’t want that. No.

She plops down on the couch with Joanie, trying hard to feel carefree, trying not to look back at the memory she just discarded in the kitchen. Joanie turns on the TV, scrolls through the guide, and chooses an
E! True Hollywood Story
episode. 

“So what are you gonna give up for Lent?” Joanie asks at commercial.

Hannah takes a bite of her sandwich to buy herself some time. She drinks another sip of water.

“Nothing,” she says.

She falls into an uneasy sleep that night, her face buried in her arm and her body sweating under the heavy comforter. She sees Baker’s eyes again, dark and deep and startling, and then she is awash in the tactile memory of kissing her last night. Her body starts to ache all over—her chest aches, and her stomach aches, and, most concerning, the area between her legs aches. She tries to shut it down, to think of something else, but she wants to give into it, she wants to feel that mystical experience again.

She wakes, hours later, in terror. She sits straight up in bed with her heart sprinting in her chest. Her face and neck are damp with cold sweat. She sweeps the back of her hand across her forehead and remembers, with the force of a stone slinging down into her belly, that she had been dreaming about God.