Chapter 2 The Orchard #4
It calls up the rainbows Laurel saw as a child: bright half rings hung high, as if conjured by invisible magicians.
Those summer days were drowsy and fairy-like, mossy green trees and benevolent shadow, a feeling of gilded fertility: the whole orchard glowed.
Rain, when it came, was warm and fleeting.
Sound acquired strange qualities, so that someone on the next farm over seemed to be speaking into her ear.
Yet the Arc is its own phenomenon. There is the strangeness of the shape, not a line but a dome—and then there’s what it does to her.
When Laurel focuses like this, she almost feels that she can see inside it, as though the Arc is a shell enclosing some uncanny tissue.
It seems to pulse, even to breathe. In her it sparks what science used to: a hungry, looming excitement.
The firefighters pass a bag of pretzels, the stewards a smuggled-in bottle of bourbon, but conversation is notably scarce. There is an air of spectacle, even pilgrimage, as strangers come to Mecca or Jerusalem.
“The firefighters think it’s an alien,” Louis whispers.
“Maybe it is,” says Charlie.
“There’s a sentient ocean in Solaris,” Laurel says.
“All right,” says Louis, standing. “I’m going back to the dorms.”
“Without the Terra Bus?” asks Charlie. “Good luck.”
Louis plops down again. They sit together until the other campers drift back to their quinzees. When Laurel crawls inside again, she doesn’t feel quite so trapped in her head. Louis unrolls fleece liners, and she puts their sleeping bags on top.
Charlie uses her backpack to block the door. “No funny business.”
“I don’t like touching people,” says Louis, indignant, though Laurel remembers how he kissed her cheek at Gallagher’s, the sudden sweetness of it.
He falls asleep with his knees in the crook behind hers.
When Laurel wakes up, blue light filters through the quinzee, and her arm is touching Charlie’s.
In the hazy moment between sleep and wakefulness, she can almost believe she’s back at home, with Eli in bed beside her—Eli, who sometimes reached out, while sleeping, to squeeze her hand in the dark.
Laurel knew of Eli long before they ever spoke.
He was a junior-year transfer to McFarland High—an exotic specimen already—and when Laurel stayed late to work in the art room, she often saw him skateboard in the parking lot.
He was tall, with olive skin and dark brown curls.
Laurel had heard girls make fun of his nose, the bump at its bridge, but she thought it made him interesting.
In class, Eli rarely volunteered to answer questions.
Laurel didn’t blame him. There were rumors that he’d won a prize from MIT for high school students, the result of a science project back in Chicago, which was not something to flaunt in suburban Wisconsin.
At McFarland High, sports were king; academics were to be tolerated, not enjoyed.
In biology, Laurel assumed a dull stare to hide her interest, though she dropped it guiltily when the teacher looked her way.
She was shocked to see Eli’s name on the sign-up list for the senior talent show.
Maisie and Laurel speculated about what his talent might be.
Yo-yo, Maisie suggested. Skateboarding, said Laurel, though it was unclear how this would translate to the auditorium.
On the day of the performance, the girls’ bathroom was a hub of activity.
Only Maisie noticed how painstakingly Laurel applied makeup: curling her eyelashes, adding liner to her Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick.
They filled paper sleeves with popcorn and chose seats in the back of the theater.
The stage was flanked by two decaying velvet curtains, which rippled as the lights dimmed overhead.
Eli was the last performer before intermission.
He walked out holding a guitar in one hand and a wooden stool in the other, which he placed in the middle of the stage.
(“Serious,” Maisie observed. “Acoustic.”) Then he sat down on the stool and closed his eyes.
He wore a T-shirt and a leather necklace, his right hand grazing the guitar.
“La la la la la la la la la,” he sang. “La la la la la la la.”
Titters came from the auditorium. Laurel didn’t know whether they were laughing because they knew where Eli was going or because they didn’t. His voice had a gravelly, venturing quality, like a mellow Chris Cornell.
“When you’re feeling”—he paused—“sad and low.”
Having finished her own popcorn, Maisie reached a hand into Laurel’s. “Is this what I think it is?”
“We will take you where you gotta go,” Eli sang.
His tone was as melancholic as Radiohead.
By the time he reached the chorus, people were laughing outright.
It was the best rendition of “Spice Up Your Life” that Laurel had ever heard.
The girls’ soccer team stood up on their chairs, swiveling their hips in accordance with the lyrics until the principal’s secretary waved them down.
Eli tilted his head toward the guitar until the chorus. Then he looked up, his lower lip brushing the mic.
“Jesus,” said Laurel, sliding down in her chair.
Maisie slouched until her mouth was level with Laurel’s ear. “Did we know that Eli is hot?”
“I did.”
“Brag, why don’t you,” said Maisie.
Laurel had eaten all of the lighter-colored popcorn, stockpiling a trove of highlighter-yellow kernels. She tipped the popcorn into her mouth. “I shall.”
For the rest of the month, she hoped for an opening.
But the chair next to Eli was always taken in biology, usually by an admiring girl who had noticed him for the first time at the talent show.
He sat with his friends at lunch. Given the timing of his transfer, Eli had only made two: Noah Takahashi and Riordan Salter.
Laurel had known Riordan all her life. Their fathers were cousins, and the two families spent holidays together.
While the adults talked upstairs, Laurel and Riordan played crazy eights in his basement, which had wood-paneled walls and squishy orange carpeting and smelled, no matter what, like Cool Ranch Doritos.
Riordan’s parents, Gary and Maureen, were computer programmers, but Riordan had little interest in the future.
His hobbies were of the past: the dinosaurs; the Renaissance faire, at which he bought collectible goblets and daggers; and Magic: The Gathering, though the latter was not exactly historical (“So far as we know,” Riordan was fond of saying).
At school, he and Laurel pretended not to know each other, but in private, they gossiped with pleasure.
“Eli Rosen,” said Laurel, on Thanksgiving. “What’s he like?”
They lay on beanbag chairs, woozy from stuffing and pie and the wine their parents allowed on special occasions.
Riordan folded his hands over his prodigious belly, thinking.
He often paused before speaking, but this one ventured long enough that Laurel wondered whether wine was the only substance he’d consumed that evening.
“He wants to be an astronaut,” said Riordan.
“Huh.” Laurel set this fact beside the other things she knew about Eli: the science project, the talent show. He was the only student in school with a Jewish last name. “Why?”
Riordan considered this. “I get the sense that he isn’t…happy here.”
“Here,” said Laurel, “as in on Earth?”
It was such a preposterous idea—and such a preposterous solution—that they both started to laugh. Laurel and Riordan had grown up with Midwestern mores. Satisfaction was to be found in their parents’ values: home, hard work, neighborly community.
Riordan shrugged. “He doesn’t seem very happy in his own house.” His tone had become confiding; Laurel suspected that he wouldn’t say this to another boy. “I mean, his parents are nice, and they’re obviously smart. I just don’t know if they ever, like, hug him.”
“Really?” asked Laurel, stricken. If she lived with Eli, she would never stop hugging him.
On the night of graduation, the senior class gathered for a bonfire, but Eli didn’t come.
Maisie went home with Noah Takahashi; Laurel kissed a pole vaulter named Kurt.
They didn’t have much to talk about, but talking was not the point.
That summer, they swam at Devil’s Lake and drove through cornfields, Pearl Jam flying out the windows.
It was Laurel who suggested they have sex, an event she did not find pleasurable so much as intriguing: the unfamiliar pressure, two shapes fit suddenly together.
One Friday in August, she took her father’s pickup truck to McFarland High. Ms. Guillard, the art teacher, had organized a summer exhibition for senior students. Now it was time for Laurel to retrieve her project.
Laurel and Maisie idolized Ms. Guillard, who had arrived from Paris in September with her accent and rakish short hair, her penchant for the surrealists.
Sometimes they stayed after school to work on their projects, and Ms. Guillard told them the story of Hilma af Klint, who held séances in Stockholm with four other female artists.
They had called themselves the Five. It was the turn of the twentieth century: Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen’s X-rays had allowed physicians to peer inside the human body, and Marie Curie had discovered a substance so radioactive it glowed in the dark.
The Five used a psychograph to contact spirit guides and practiced automatic drawing, emptying their minds of thought to access the subconscious realm below.
In 1906, a spirit ordered af Klint to begin a series called The Paintings for the Temple, meant to be shown in a space of her own design: a round building with three levels, linked by a spiral staircase.
“The Five counseled her against it. They worried that such effort would drive af Klint to madness,” said Ms. Guillard, one gloomy afternoon in February. Snow obscured the windows, and the radiator clanked: her retelling felt like a séance itself. “But she insisted.”