Chapter Five
“We wish you everything good from our planet.”
—Serbian greeting
“Come on,” you said when we separated again.
“Let me show you around. It’ll take all of five minutes.
” You didn’t have to even move to show me, the place was so small.
“Living room.” You gestured to where we were standing, to that blue couch that had seen better days, and a rocking chair, and a kilim rug on the wood floor.
“Dining room.” A table by a window, piled with mail and a plant and a pair of place mats.
“Kitchen.” You pointed. “Let’s not go there. Frank will get all wild to see you.”
“That’s okay. I love dogs. Hi, Frank.” I waved.
“He’d wave back if he could. He’s been totally depressed and not himself since our other dog, Jesse James, died.”
“Jesse James? He was some kind of outlaw, right?”
“It’s from a song? ‘Frank and Jesse James’? My mom’s a big Warren Zevon fan.”
“Got it.” I remembered. The same guy from that other song that was playing before: “Keep Me in Your Heart.”
“I like him, too, honestly. I think it’d be cool if Solar Flare did their own version of some of his stuff.
Okay. Onward! Follow me.” You actually lifted your arm when you said Onward, a finger in the air, haha.
It made me want to grab your butt, that cute one going down the hall in those denim shorts.
I realized that Asher hadn’t been my type at all.
You were my type—a combo of dweeby and messy adorable.
“Okay!” I said with an overabundance of enthusiasm. My happiness was spilling like a fountain.
“Mom’s room,” you said. We only poked our heads in oh so briefly to be respectful.
There was a mattress on the floor, and a tornado of clothes everywhere.
A tall basket of laundry stood in one corner, clean or dirty, hard to tell.
An array of undies was scattered around it, like fallen flower petals.
Janite had either gone hunting for her favorites, or aimed and missed.
A large purple crystal, slightly swinging like a pendulum, hung in the window.
A clock on a nightstand had stopped at nine-fifteen.
“Nice,” I said, to be polite.
“And mine.”
We stepped into your room. For a minute, I felt a nervous energy, us there alone.
The bed was this large, shouting thing, because I was suddenly thinking of what we might do in it.
I mean, we could do it anywhere, but bed was somehow the big forbidden object.
The specter of my dad appeared. Just, you know, how pissed he’d be at me for even being here.
How his pissed-ness and control might really make me want to do everything he’d be furious about.
But also, as I stood there, I realized with terror, and whatever is the opposite of terror, that I wanted it on my own.
There was that energy, too. We barely knew each other, but I felt it, desire, like an electric current.
It was a cliché, but how else to describe it?
You couldn’t see it, but it was so obviously there, crackling and zinging, and you knew it could potentially start a fire or maybe destroy you.
And you…You seemed a little nervous, too.
About us being in there. You jammed your hands in your pockets and took them out again, and your forehead got a little sweaty, and you knelt on the bed to open the window above it.
When you got up again, you smoothed the covers back in place.
You weren’t planning on us having wild sex there or anything, were you?
Not yet, haha. I mean, you didn’t bring me in there for that purpose like some guys might.
Like Severin Gyles might. Severin, the most popular guy in my class, stereotypical bad boy, super good-looking but a streak of cruelty, like a line of fat in meat.
His whole body was a sneer, and there were rumors of him drinking a lot, all that, girls doing whatever because he wanted it.
This is the wrong way to explain it, good/bad, no sex/sex, you know.
I just mean, I never understood liking bad boys.
They seemed like those gross kids in the third grade who drilled holes in the desk with their scissors and shoved girls and tried to look up their dresses, only larger.
I liked guys like this. Like you. Sweet and smart and curious.
Friendly and kind and open. Who maybe didn’t get stuff right all the time and wouldn’t expect me to, either.
But then…I stopped thinking about us being alone, and sex, and liking, really liking, you already, because a stark realization slammed me.
Your room—it was the exact opposite of the one we’d just seen, your mom’s.
The exact opposite. Like, my own room was somewhere in the middle, with my vintage travel posters and Be Kind to Your Mind wall art that Maurice gave me, with the girl watering her head made of flowers.
With my messily made bed, and stuff on my dresser, earrings, lotion, school binders, and yesterday’s outfit over my desk chair.
Your room was pure order, as your mom’s was pure chaos.
Everything was in place, the bed tightly made, the drawers crisply shut.
On your shelves, the books had their spines aligned, and the framed photos were placed at purposeful angles. No disarray anywhere.
It told me a story right away. A story that maybe involved Dr. Quentin Baleaf.
I mean, I could see the tornado right next door, and the way, in that room, you were fighting the tornado.
Instead of boarded-up windows and sandbags, candles and matches, you stockpiled calculated order.
It probably told many stories. Someone once warned me—I can’t remember who, someone who I believed, anyway—that it was the edges you had to worry about.
The extremes. One end or the other. Not much happened in the middle.
The middles were fine. The middles were mostly safe and okay, but the edges…
If you’re over there about anything, something’s going on.
It’s either too much, or, in my mom’s case, too little.
It didn’t make me worry about you or us or what was coming. It made me sad. Like, my heart ached. I could already see how hard you tried, and what you were up against.
The edges cause trouble, though. Big trouble.
“Voyager!” Now I noticed the poster that covered the whole side wall of your room.
I moved in front of it to examine it more closely.
It was purple and titled Voyager: The Grand Tour and Beyond, and it featured the timeline of the space probes and the planets they’d pass.
I could tell you’d had that poster for a long time, and that it had been in lots of places.
One corner was ripped off, and there were lots of tiny pinholes in the others, as if it had been put up and taken down again multiple times.
“Yeah,” you said. “And look what Sandrine gave me a while back.”
It was a framed album. A gold record. It looked like the kind you’d see in the fancy houses of famous musicians.
Only, it had mysterious etchings on it. A starburst, a circle that looked like a toy train track, another that resembled a tiny keyboard.
Two that could have been the heartbeats on a hospital machine: one too fast, the other too slow.
It took me a minute. I don’t know why. I could sometimes be a bit behind everyone else, the last to catch on to the joke; but there were also a lot of distractions, namely you.
“The Golden Record,” I realized. A replica. “I read up about it.”
“You did?” You seemed shocked. You even scrunched your face in disbelief. But I could see how pleased you were, too. “That is so cool.”
“I didn’t see a picture. This is what it looks like, huh?”
“All of the images on it…They’re basically directions. They tell the alien life-forms how to play it.”
“Huh.” No idea.
“See this?” Without touching the glass, you pointed to the circle that looked like a train track.
I could tell that this record was very precious to you.
“This represents the record, and shows where they should place the stylus. The symbols communicate in the universal language of math? Any civilization intelligent enough to find this should be able to decipher it.”
“I don’t know. If I stumbled upon it in a space thrift store, I’d probably make it into one of those clocks you see on Etsy and totally miss the major discovery. You and Sandrine are close, huh?”
“We’ve lived with her and my aunt when my mom has been, uh, between things. Once when I was little, then around twelve or thirteen? And then again last year. Sandrine’s like a sister to me. My aunt Gwen is like a mom to me, too.”
It was a funny thing to say when you had a mom of your own, I thought, and tucked it away in my more-info-needed brain file.
I strolled in your room like it was a Mars Museum, examined your bookshelf and the stuff on it: astronomy books, a few shells and rocks, a photo of baby you in your mom’s arms, a ticket that read Santa Cruz Boardwalk, which had been laminated and made into a key chain.
Also, a greeting card with an image of those Sky Glider rides, legs of the riders hanging down.
There was lots of writing in it. Girl writing.
It went on and on. In the framed photos, I spotted you with groups of friends, tubing at a lake, sitting on bleachers, sprawled out on a beach.
So many friends! Huh—the same girl was in all of them.
I felt a little flare of jealousy. I wondered if all that handwriting belonged to her, too.
Maybe this was a red flag. Or not a red flag exactly, but a maroon one. Meaning, a reason I might be marooned.
“Friends from my old school,” you told me. And then you pointed right to her, the girl. “This is Ella. She was my closest friend. Is? Was? After we moved, we stayed in touch, but not much anymore. We tried to date a little, but it didn’t really work out.”
“Oh,” I said. It made me feel terrible, but also great at the same time, because you just said it, you know.
Right out there, right away. Supposedly, I didn’t make Asher feel special, but the whole time we’d been together, his old girlfriend had been texting him and stuff, and I’d had zero clue she even existed.
You picked up the key chain and smiled down. “I went on a trip here with her and her family. They were really great.”
I wondered if you’d say that about mine. There were reasons, parent reasons, why that might be unlikely. It was perhaps another maroon flag.
“Whoa,” I said. I’d just noticed your top shelf, which was full of trophies—little gold people kicking balls and throwing balls and hitting balls. A medal or two, also. I started to worry about the ways we seemed very different. The friends, the sports. “You must be a really good athlete.”
You snorted. “I suck.”
“They give trophies for sucking?”
“Look closer. Participation. But, hey, one or two Most Improved. And my pride and joy, Most Inspirational, for track in my freshman year. Long jump and high jump?”
“That’s a lot of jumping.”
“Look at these babies.” You waggled a skinny leg. I smiled. I liked those legs a lot, but they didn’t scream athlete. “Actually, my long was short, and I never made it over the bar once. When it clatters down and you land on it…Fuck, it hurts.”
“Ooh. Your pride, too?”
You shrugged. “Don’t care much about that. Like I said before, the more people, the more connection, right? That’s what matters to me most.”
It seemed even more brave than facing that high bar.
Oh, we were different, all right. Opposites, those unnerving ends of the spectrum again, maybe.
I moved on from the bookshelf, continued my Mars Museum visit.
I stopped at another framed photo—one on your bedside table, the most important spot.
It was the only thing on it, aside from your clock.
The surface was clean, no messy tubes of ChapStick or water bottles.
No stray pen caps or candy wrappers. Just this photo of a man.
He was wearing a tan turtleneck with a blazer over the top.
His hair was parted on the side like a newsman, and his chin was resting thoughtfully on his hand.
“Is this your dad?” Man, he had the kindest eyes ever.
You started laughing, you butt. You laughed so hard, you had to raise up one hand, like please forgive me.
I felt kind of embarrassed, but glad at the same time.
I mean, your laugh was just so nice. You wiped your eyes, like whew.
“It’s Carl Sagan,” you said. “The astrophysicist? He played a leading role in Voyager and oversaw the creation of the Golden Record. Lily actually got to work with him.”
“Wow. How cool. He looks so nice.”
“Right? His face is just calming. Mr. Rogers of the cosmos.”
I laughed. “I can see why you’d want it by your bed.”
“You can?” You couldn’t believe it.
“A hundred percent.” It didn’t seem weird to me at all.
And maybe we were more alike than it first seemed.
I sometimes watched the video of Mr. Rogers singing “You Are Special” when I felt like I sucked.
It was such a comfort. I believed him. I liked how Mr. Rogers always fed his fish before his show started, too, like even they were his friends that deserved respect.
Maybe that’s what you felt when you looked at that photo.
A kindness toward all humanity, including your own messed-up self.
“So, change of subject,” you said. “Because I can only think of one thing right now.”
If you were Severin Gyles, or even Asher Allen, I knew what would have happened next, but you were not Severin Gyles or Asher Allen. Not by a long shot.
“I give up,” I said, though I hadn’t even tried to guess.
“There’s a pizza in the other room we’re totally ignoring. I’ve eaten plenty of them, and they’re incredible. And it’s sitting on the couch like it’s nothing, when it’s something. Something special.”
“Well, come on. Let’s have some, then.”
Honestly, it was true. That pizza was special. I could be so sick of it sometimes, but I wasn’t right then. I was suddenly starving.