Mirror in the Sky (17 page)

TWENTY-ONE

“
NICK,
can you tell me what a karass is?” Bucknell asked.

“It's a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even if on the surface, they don't have a lot in common. Like me and you, Mrs. Bucknell,” he said. “Oh no, wait, you and I are a
duprass
.”

Bucknell giggled in response. “Thank you, Nick.” Nick flirted with all our teachers, and they all loved it. Bucknell continued her interrogation as Nick tossed me a note written on a wad of lined notebook paper. I opened it. “I think Bucknell likes me,” it said, and I couldn't help but laugh. It was the type of funny note Nick passed to me in class often, the kind of note that literally made my day. “Tara, can you explain to us the basic tenets of Bokononism?”

“I, uh . . .” I looked up, Nick's note still in my hand. I began to talk, but that familiar shrill wail silenced my words, red and
white lights flashing all around us. It was the sixth fire alarm in four weeks, the tenth that year. They still hadn't caught the person who kept pulling the alarm.

“Not again,” Bucknell sighed as we scrambled to gather our things. “Okay, everyone form a line, we're going to head to the fire exit together . . .”

“Ugh, I hate these things,” Veronica said to me as she quietly slid her bag over her shoulder and made her way to the back exit. “Maybe we can sneak off campus till this thing is over.”

Bucknell was so busy lining people up, she barely noticed us. I looked back at Nick. He was still putting his books into his backpack. I lingered for a moment, waiting for him to join us, but clearly Veronica had no intention of hanging out with him.

“What are you waiting for, Tara? Let's go!” She looked at me with her impatient face, and I realized that now that we were friends, I would occasionally have to endure her scoldings. I followed her through the back door of the classroom, turning to look at Nick one more time. He was still stuffing his books into his backpack as we turned the corner out the corridor through the student center.

“Hey, where are you going? Stay with your class leader!” Mrs. Leonard called after us, but we were already making our way to the glass corridor.

“Let's go this way . . .” I said, pushing through the crowds, into the front courtyard of Brierly. The sky was a dour New England white, the kind that makes your eyes tear. It made me want to live someplace else, someplace where everything
and everyone wasn't monochrome. We dodged through a motley crew of students crowding the front lawn, clogging up the sidewalk, their backpacks clipping us on the shoulders, their familiar faces grimacing in the cold.

“God, all these fire drills!”

“I know, this is, what? Like, the tenth one? It's like one a week now!”

“I heard someone's pulling the alarm. And that graffiti outside the science wing? Did you hear about that?”

I shook my head.

“Nick told me. They called an emergency student council meeting over the weekend. Painted it over on Sunday before anyone could see it. Some sort of cryptic message about overthrowing all institutions. People are acting super weird. It's that Virginia Wool.” Veronica shook her head. “Starting a revolution here on Earth.”

But the fire drills had begun well before any of us saw the video. There had always been small acts of vandalism at Brierly—names carved into desks, the occasional pulled alarm. Last year Carter Anderson had called in a fake bomb threat and was expelled from Brierly, but Veronica was right, this was an unusually high incidence of weird behavior.

“Hey, you guys, wait up!” I heard a voice and turned.

“Oh my God, I can't believe she has the audacity to talk to us,” Veronica mumbled. It was Sarah Hoffstedt. She looked as uneasy as I felt at the sight of her. She had all but disappeared since our confrontation in the student center. Veronica looked into the space above her head, as though she couldn't see her.

“I just . . . I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Are you hurling yourself off a cliff, Sarah?” Veronica asked calmly.

Sarah ignored her. “I'm leaving Brierly,” she said to me. “All this Terra Nova stuff, and that thing you said, Tara . . . I'm not a racist. I'm not closed-minded. Or at least, I don't want to be. But I've been living in this tiny town my entire life, and I'm sick of it. I want to see the world. So Moira and I are going backpacking across Europe and Asia.”

“Who's Moira?” Veronica asked.

I looked away. Who would have thought that Sarah Hoffstedt, one of the most popular girls at school, would befriend Moira, who had spent half her life in the Brierly library? Then again, who would have thought that I would be having dinner at Veronica Hartwicke's house on a regular basis, or doing my homework with Nick and Halle?

“When do you leave?” I asked. I felt an unexpected pang of envy when I thought of Sarah as free—free of Brierly, free of Greenwich, free of all of us.

“After Thanksgiving break. I'm taking a year off. My parents were really upset about it at first, but then they realized I wasn't going to back down. And they thought it might be good for college. Hey, didn't your friend Meg go away for the year?”

Just the mention of Meg's name filled me with dread. What would I say to her when she returned next semester? Halle's crew had accepted me, but that didn't mean they were going to accept Meg. And then another thought occurred to me: I wasn't sure I wanted them to. I wanted to leave Meg behind, in
the past, just as she had wanted to leave me behind when she left for Argentina.

“Yeah. Listen, Sarah . . . about what I said that day . . .”

“It's okay.” Sarah looked at me. “I was upset, but it really made me think. I don't want to be stuck in this tiny little world anymore. Brierly is like a blip in the middle of nowhere—all our stupid little dramas, our dumb fights. But when you're here, you think it's everything. And it's not,” she said. “I know that now. But for the record . . . I didn't hit that dog.”

“Okay, whatever, Sarah.” Veronica waved a hand in the air.

“No, seriously. I didn't. There's no reason for me to lie about it.”

As we watched Sarah walk away, I couldn't help but wish that I were in her shoes. She seemed happy about her decision. She seemed carefree. She was going to see the world, and I was still stuck here at Brierly. Veronica turned to me and lit a cigarette.

“I give her a week before she flips out and comes back,” she said.

“I don't know. She seems pretty . . . self-assured.”

“Now's the time to do all the crazy stuff you ever wanted to and blame it on Terra Nova. Maybe you should use this as an opportunity to go after Nick.”

“I don't know what you mean . . .” But I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Of course I wanted to be with Nick. I thought about Virginia Wool on Terra Nova. Maybe my fate didn't have to be tragic either.

“Oh, come on, don't act dumb with me,” Veronica pressed.
“I see the two of you together, passing notes, giggling constantly. What are you doing, Tara?”

“Look . . . I know he's with Halle, okay? And I'm not going to break up a couple. If they have problems of their own . . .”

“That's not what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Stop being second wife.”

“It's not like that.”

“Of course it is. She's going to break his heart anyway, you know that, don't you? Are you just waiting to pick up the pieces when she does? Because that's a terrible strategy. Do you want to be his pathetic rebound, wiping away his tears?”

Of course the thought had crossed my mind, but it did sound particularly pathetic when Veronica put it that way.

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

Veronica placed a hand on her hip. “Maybe you need to take a page from Halle's book. She's strategic.”

“. . . and he loves her,” I finished. “And no amount of strategy is going to change that.” But I wondered for a moment if it could. I couldn't hear the conviction in my own voice, and by the way Veronica was looking at me, I could tell she could sense the lack of it too.

“Don't you see how she is? How she manipulates people to get whatever she wants? Nick, you, me, even that guy at the Indian restaurant?”

I had seen Halle work her charm from time to time, but then Nick was charming too. The thing about him was, it never seemed as though he had some sort of ulterior motive. Nick
just liked making people laugh—Hunter and Jimmy, teachers, all of us. With Halle, I wasn't sure what exactly she wanted, what she was seeking. I knew that her charm sometimes did feel manipulative, but in ways I couldn't necessarily articulate.

“That thing she did with Sarah—putting you on the spot like that. That was really uncool. And making me disinvite her from the party? And that thing she said about wishing someone would just ‘take Nick off my hands.' I mean, what do you think that was about?” Veronica made a face like she was trying to piece together a puzzle.

“I thought you said that Halle didn't know about my crush on Nick,” I said.

Veronica shrugged. “She doesn't. But it's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, why doesn't she just break up with him?”

“Because she doesn't want to break his heart?”

“She's afraid. She wants to look like she has it all together. The image is more important to her than anything.” Veronica shook her head. “You're the only one, Tara. You're the only one who understands what I'm talking about. You can see it. I can tell. Nick and Halle, they're my friends, but they're totally self-absorbed people. They'll take what they want and leave you with the crumbs. That's just what they do.”

I sensed that Veronica wasn't going to let this go unless I threw her a bone, but truthfully, I also wanted to confess my feelings about Halle to someone. “Sometimes . . .” I hesitated.

Veronica turned to me.

“Sometimes I just don't feel like I can totally . . . trust her, I guess.”

It was such a tiny admission, and I felt strange bad-mouthing Halle, but something about it felt good too. Especially since it was the truth. I didn't trust Halle. I had never felt like I could tell her my secrets. Then again, I didn't feel like I could tell anyone my secrets. I couldn't even imagine having a conversation with anyone about my mother, for example.

“Exactly. Because she's not being real with you. Or with me, or with anyone. I'm so glad someone else notices it too, finally!”

All around the globe, things were changing so fast, it was hard to make sense of it. Some said it was because of Terra Nova. That it had somehow changed the way we saw ourselves. That it made people question the very order of the world. Here, at Brierly, Veronica was beginning to do the same, and she looked at me as though I was an ally. I didn't understand why she was so angry with Halle—what had happened between them beyond that vague explanation she had given me at the party: that she was sick of Halle, sick of knowing her so well, sick of being her best friend all these years.

The wind whipped through my hair, and I buried my hands in my pockets, feeling exposed. “I want to go back in,” I said. “It's freezing.” But there was something else I felt in that moment, something that made me uncomfortable—it was the dangerous side of possibility. Halle was manipulative, but at least she was artful about it. Veronica's approach lacked that finesse.

And yet, as we walked down the street, I felt a mixture of guilt and release. Talking about Halle behind her back felt like
a welcome sacrilege. There was something heady and exciting about it, and yet it also felt tinged with an unfamiliar danger.

“Let's go get some hot chocolate at that coffee place on the Ave,” Veronica said.

“Ugh, do we have to? I'm already sick of you,” I joked, but it wasn't a joke. Veronica laughed, gently shoving me into a bush.

“No you're not. You love me,” she said, still laughing.

TWENTY-TWO

“
BABE,
I've been dying to catch up with you!” my mother declared. Her voice sounded cheerful and relaxed, as though she had just emerged from a spa. “It's wonderful here—you would love it. California's beautiful, and we meditate every morning. The cafeteria food is so good—all vegan and organic. We take turns working shifts to keep this place running.”

I was quiet, and she said, “Tara, I keep calling and e-mailing, but you won't respond to any of my e-mails! There's so much I want to tell you . . . and there's this event in the spring. I'd love it if you and your dad could come out to California and visit!”

I wanted badly to speak to her, to tell her about Nick, about my new friends, to ask her about that newest video transmission and what she thought of it. But when I heard her voice, cheerful and calm, my anger returned. What right did she
have to be cheerful? What right did she have to ask me questions about my life? My mother wasn't entitled to an answer, to any answers. If she wanted to know about what was going on with me, she should have stayed.

“Do you want to talk to Dad?” I asked coolly.

“Tara, next week we go into a month of—it's called ‘cleansing.' We just meditate and talk to people here at the church, but I won't be able to call home and talk to you as much . . .”

“They can make you do that?” I asked. “And they call it
cleansing
?”

“Well, it's part of the process.”

“Oh, the ‘process'—that's what it is?” I practically spat out, feeling a wave of outrage cresting within me. “You should ask yourself about this ‘process' of yours where people can tell you to stop calling home, and you listen. And they give it the same name as a juice diet to make it sound innocuous.”

“Tara, I . . .”

But I didn't give her a chance to respond. “I'm handing the phone to Dad,” I said and held the receiver out to my father.

I listened to them talking, my father's voice soft and tender. He even laughed a few times, fueling my rage. Had he forgiven her already? How could he have? My anger boiled as they chatted away, as though everything was fine. After about twenty minutes, my father got off the phone and turned to me. I was sitting on the kitchen counter, doing homework. It was a rare evening that I had decided to stay in.

“She misses you,” he said.

“Well then, she should have stayed,” I said, without looking up from my textbook.

“She says you would like it out there. She suggested we go out west in the spring, spend some time in LA. What do you think?”

I slammed my book shut and looked at my father incredulously. “Have you gone crazy?” I exclaimed.

My father flinched. “Tara, she's your mother. You can't stay angry for—”

“I can stay angry for as long as I want. And for you to even suggest going out there? It's ridiculous. She's broken this family, and we're supposed to reward her for it? Let her rot in California by herself. She's a selfish, horrible woman!”

My father looked at me, shocked. “I know you're extremely upset right now, but . . .”

“But nothing. The hell we're going to California!” I said, gathering my things before I marched into my room and slammed the door. I buried my face in my pillow, hot tears pouring out of my eyes.

The first snow of the year fell on Thanksgiving. It started early in the morning, the first flakes melting into the ground, sacrificed soldiers dropped from the sky along the beaches, making way for the others.

Because we had no large extended family to host, no elaborate dinner to prepare, the day usually lingered on, porous, its boundaries shape-shifting to embrace the only loose annual
traditions we had, a net cast into the sea, catching whatever waited in the depths below.

There were a few staples, placeholders to mark the occasion. A walk on Tod's Point. My father's turkey curry and rice. Our dining table set with an indigo batik-print tablecloth and a few white candles, my parents sharing a bottle of wine. But that wouldn't happen today.

The conversation I had with my father that night when I returned home and he was sitting alone in the dark was a litmus test I returned to again and again, inspecting that strip of red in my head. It was an alarm, a warning, an early signal, a precaution. While I couldn't seem to muster up any sympathy for my mother, and couldn't understand how he could, I felt an affection for my father now like never before. I felt as though my father was like a child, a little helpless, a little uncertain. Our lives were like a Jenga set, and my mother was a critical center piece, now removed. Everything hung in the balance. I would have to anticipate unpredictability; I would have to be the stable piece. And so, on Thanksgiving morning, I woke up and put aside my rage and decided to be there for my father, wondering if this very choice was a partial answer to that question “What will this do to Tara?”

I didn't know what the answer to that question was, what or who I would grow into, what buried rage and unrequited love and not fully trusting your friends and being the only Indian person at Brierly and the discovery of a mirror planet and thinking constantly about another version of yourself out
there in another world did to the shape and form of one's soul, but then, I didn't know yet that these wouldn't be the only defining incidents and qualities of my junior year. I couldn't have suspected that there was more to come. Perhaps I was too scared to even wonder beyond a certain horizon.

And so I kept my fears to myself. I went to the Church of the New Earth website every morning, looking for photographs of my mother, but I didn't find any. What was she doing? Was there some sort of induction ceremony? Did she have to wear a uniform? Did she eat lunch every day in that cafeteria she mentioned? Did she spend her hours hiking with the tan Amazonian women who graced the website? I wanted to know all these things, but I still didn't want to speak with her.

But what I learned, what stunned me, wasn't something I found on the Church of the New Earth website. I was scouring the Internet looking for new goggles to wear at swim practice when I came upon a small sports-equipment manufacturer based out of LA. For some reason the photographs on the site looked familiar. Blond people hiking through mountains, looking cheerful. My blood went cold.

“Dad!” I yelled.
“Dad!”

After the second call, he ran into my room.

“Dad, look!” I said. He stood behind me and peered at the cheery image. I could tell by the way his face fell that he recognized it too.

He took a deep breath. “Let's deal with this later,” he said, nervously running his hands through his hair.

“Deal with this
how
?” I asked. “It's a stock image! That means the photographs on the site aren't even real. They're not real people! Who knows what's actually going on there!”

“Let's go for a walk. Our annual walk, Tara. She's on that cleanse, remember? We won't be able to reach her anyway, and there's not much we can do right at this moment.”

“Are you kidding?”

“What would you suggest I do?”

“Call the police!”

“And tell them what? That my wife, your mother, voluntarily went to California to join an organization that's using stock images on its website?”

I glared at him for a minute. “Fine. I'll get my shoes. We'll just walk on the beach like everything's normal,” I said.

When we returned from our walk, my father checked on the turkey curry. I reminded myself that he missed my mother too, that this was hard for him too. I sighed and brought out the white ceramic pasta bowls we saved for special occasions. I had just brought the bowls into the living room and set them down on the coffee table when my phone rang.
UNKNOWN CALLE
R
, it said. My mother never called my cell phone. She knew better. The thing was, I was scared and worried after what I had discovered that day. I picked up the phone with a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach as I waited to hear her voice.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Why, hello,” said a voice that was distinctly not my mother's.

“Who . . . who is this?”

“It's Barack Obama, calling to wish you a happy Thanksgiving.”

My anxiety dissipated before it re-formed into anxious excitement.

“Hey, Nick.”

“Hey. Are you having a good Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah, we're just about to sit down and eat.”

“Oh yeah, you probably eat at, like, a normal time. We start dinner at four around here, for my grandparents and all the little kids.”

“Kids?”

“My nephews—my sister's kids—and cousins and . . . it's a huge event, like, thirty of us. Had to escape.”

“It sounds like fun. I'd love to have a big Thanksgiving,” I said, realizing my father could hear me. “Actually, could you hold on a sec?”

“Yeah, take your time.”

“Dad, do you mind if I take this? It'll be, like . . . ten minutes.”

My father smiled. “Go ahead. I'll be here.”

I went to my room and closed the door.

“I didn't know it was you . . .”

“Oh yeah. We have a blocked number. My dad hates getting work calls at home. I think he hates work, generally. Anyway, how's your Thanksgiving going?”

“Mellow. We took a walk on the beach, and we're about to have dinner now.”

“I'm not interrupting, am I?”

“No, no. Of course not,” I lied. I noticed I didn't mention a word about my mother. I was getting used to doing that. Never speaking about her or her departure to anyone, keeping the fact that my family had broken apart solely to myself.

“Yeah, well . . . I guess I was just sort of . . . in the mood to talk. It gets lonely, a few days out of school, you know? You guys are kind of like my family at school.”

“It feels that way sometimes, doesn't it?” I said.

“Yeah. I'm really glad you started hanging out with us this year, Tara. It's hard to believe that in just a year and a half, we're all going to go our separate ways.”

“It's a whole year and a half away, Nick. Don't start waxing nostalgic just yet.”

“But it goes by real fast. Or at least, that's what people tell me.”

“People?”

“My grandparents. They met in high school. Kind of romantic, huh?”

“Yeah. That barely happens to anyone anymore.”

“It still does, to some people . . .” he said, and I smiled, wondering for a moment if it could happen to me. “But we'll all remember each other, right?”

“Yeah, of course. We'll have memories of parties at Halle's and road trips and . . .”

“Road trips?”

I hesitated, wondering what was wrong with me to have let that slip. “No, just hypothetically, if we decide to . . . you know . . . but yeah, we'll have tons of memories.”

“Except Halle. She's going to forget all about me.” He laughed a little, and I didn't even have a chance to recover from my relief over his not dwelling on the road trips comment. I hesitated for a moment before I responded, uncertain of what I was being lured into.

“Why would she?”

“I mean, we've been fighting a lot. We never used to fight, and I don't understand what's going on. I tried calling her today, but she's not picking up. She barely ever picks up. I can never tell what the deal is with her, she's so hot and cold . . .”

“Have you tried to talk to her about it?” Why was I always encouraging communication between other people and Halle?

“Of course I've tried. She's impossible. Have you ever tried arguing with her? She always wins. Listen, has she said anything to you about . . . us? Like, is she upset with me, or did I do something to piss her off?”

I thought about Halle's discussion of Socrates and Plato that night at the restaurant. “She hasn't said anything to me,” I lied again.