Chapter Four
Fire, Speech: Sounds of Earth
I didn’t text you or anything. And you didn’t text me.
That was totally okay, and kind of nice, actually, since the waiting before the having can be almost as good as the having itself.
After that night, I was happy, carrying my smug anticipation around, because I was sure I was going to see you again.
Fate three times—in that office, the pizza, the mountain—it meant…
Well, it meant meaning. Like the Voyager spacecraft, launching at a specific time to travel at a specific distance to catch certain planets in a certain alignment, all in order to reveal previously hidden grandeurs of life…
I’m sorry, but how can you not see the parallels to two strangers falling in love?
The smallest human experiences and the largest natural truths just seemed to do that, reflect each other, offering metaphors.
Tornadoes, earthquakes, flowers blooming, leaves dying. But maybe I was just feeling so much.
Going back to school was strange after a big event like prom.
Everyone who was there had experienced something together, and the rest of us hadn’t.
Or rather, Addison and Priya had, but I hadn’t.
Maddie started eating lunch with us a few months ago, snitching Priya’s grapes as Priya pilfered her Goldfish crackers, but now Liam was at our table, too.
He made some gross comment about being the only guy, using the word harem.
Priya and I looked at each other, our eyes saying, Gross, but Addison ignored it.
She was already ignoring things, and I could feel him sticking his foot in a door and wedging it open wider and wider with bad behavior he’d probably get away with his whole life.
It was how things felt in general in the world—the big foot, the bad behavior.
But you could tell Addison was trying hard to keep some guy not worth keeping, tale as old as time.
She was better than him by miles, but she kept trying to prove herself worthy as he made comments about her talking too loud.
“How was your weekend, Margaret?” Addison asked. It sounded hesitant, and I understood why. What a knot. Do you not ask me and make everything seem like it’s all about you, or do you ask and risk hearing an answer that makes you feel like shit?
“Good,” I said, but nothing more. We talked about this, Winnifred Evans and me. Feeling sad about being closed off from people, but then acting closed off. “Really good.”
“Oh my God! You met someone!” Addison knew me so well. “Look at your face! What happened? Tell us!”
I wiggled my eyebrows as if I had a secret, but then I jetted my glance quickly toward Liam, as if to say, I’ll tell you later. Faces can say all that. Faces can say much more and barely move, too. My mom’s, for example.
“Margaret.” Addison gave a dramatic, exasperated sigh.
“Is this all you guys talk about? Relationships?” Liam swirled a plastic spoon in a pudding cup.
It was a ridiculous thing to say. Priya played every sport imaginable and kept beehives in her backyard, and Addison had organized a whole Get Out the Vote campaign at our school, and I was in DECA and generally loved books and music, and we talked about all of those things and more: Our fears and hopes, our families and friends.
Other people. Lots of talking about other people, especially the popular kids who ignored us to the point of borderline cruelty, like Severin Gyles and Gwynyth James and their friends.
Addy also loved to tell us about stuff she baked, and Priya drew comics, and you shouldn’t even get her started on Marvel, her dog, one of those big kinds with the hair like ropes. But, too—
“What’s wrong with relationships?” Maddie asked. Well, plenty, but she was right. Liam could fuck right off.
I looked down at my lunch. My mom had packed it, even though I’d told her a thousand times that I could do it myself.
There was a thick bagel sandwich piled with turkey and cheese and mayonnaise, a baggie of chips, cut-up fruit.
She’d never eat those things herself. She barely ate anything.
It’s a weird thing to say, because the not-eating was sad, and a torment (for her and her family), but it had a self-righteous quality, too.
Like she was somehow higher up than the rest of us mere mortals, mere mortals like me, who wanted this sandwich.
When I thought of my dad and his comments about girls and guys and sex, and my mom, with her feelings about women and food, it seemed like a lot of life was about wanting and not having, control and lack of control.
Keeping things that were too large and unmanageable at bay.
I took a big bite of that sandwich. It was delicious.
I could have scarfed the whole thing, but I didn’t.
“If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?” Liam asked.
I usually went to work around four-thirty, just before the dinner rush.
At Papa Angelo’s, drivers helped the prep cook chop vegetables and stuff, and, depending how busy we were, we sometimes made pizzas, too.
We did lots of other jobs, as well—cleaning, dishes, answering phones, taking out the trash, scraping pizza dough off of basically everywhere.
Delivery is harder work than you think. People assume you drive around listening to music and getting tips, ha.
That day, I got there early, though. It was our last week of school, so I didn’t really have any homework, and I wanted to catch George before the orders started coming in. Mostly, I wanted to talk to him before he organized our routes.
When I parked behind the restaurant, I saw George there with one of our cooks, Marv, wrangling the giant produce order we got from our wholesaler once a week or so: crates of mushrooms; peppers; wispy, bound stalks of fennel for a seasonal special; and bushels of onions.
Whoever ended up dicing onions…The worst job.
There were so many that your eyes burned, your throat, too, like being sprayed by mace by the time you were done.
“Hey,” George said. He held a bundle of fennel near his face, pretended it was a fringy mustache.
“Nice! Très seventies,” I said. He handed me a crate and picked one up himself as we headed inside.
That time period, the seventies, 1977 to be exact, was already on my mind after that night on the mountain.
I looked it up as soon as I got home: Voyager, the Golden Record.
It was an actual record, gold-plated, placed aboard the Voyager capsules, a message to any alien life-form that might find it as it traveled to the outer edges of the universe.
Everything on that record was meant to convey life on our planet, and so it was filled with sounds and images and even greetings in every language.
A Hey, friends! This is who we are! to whoever might find it.
Wow—I’d never even heard of it. Just wow.
I loved that you loved stuff like that. It conveyed your life on this planet.
What you cared about. Big stuff, you know.
The biggest. That goofy guy with the deep, warm eyes and the springy hair, you—you were a curious person.
George put the fennel back in the crate.
“That’s the only mustache I’ll ever grow after…
” George trailed off, and I snickered at the memory: George, in junior high, with the speckle of longish hairs on his upper lip that we all very fairly gave him shit about.
Now George and I hauled the crates to the cooler, where we kept the perishables.
“Why is our order coming in this late in the day?” I asked.
“They’re getting later and later. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” George looked tired, and the rush hadn’t even started yet.
“Hey, I was meaning to ask you…” I called this to George’s back, because he was ahead of me now, hurrying, working hard. “I haven’t been delivering to Eastlake for a while? Since my car got broken into, but also maybe because I have a friend out there, and Dad changed the—”
He looked at me over his shoulder, and winked.
“Got it. No problem. If you want to go that direction, we’ll fix it.
” And he would. George managed delivery logistics, too, making sure all the phone orders were registered before they went into the make-line, routed long before we shouted our out-the-door times and rushed to our cars.
Papa Angelo’s prided itself in its exceptional quality, fresh ingredients, and thirty-minute arrivals, so we were a well-run machine, unless some irresponsible delivery driver left her car doors unlocked in a sketchy neighborhood.
I plunked down my crate and wound through the kitchen, where the already-prepped dough, made a day ahead, was in the proofer, and the sauce—endless cans of tomatoes, tomato paste, and fistfuls of herbs and spices that we were supposed to keep secret—was mixed in those twenty-gallon tubs.
I could hear Maurice whistling in the dining area, and so I headed there.
The tables were set and ready, napkin holders filled, red pepper containers, too, but Maurice was on all fours, his rear end sticking out from underneath a table.
“Are you finally fixing that crap linoleum square?” I asked.
Maurice emerged, bonking his head on the table and holding a glue gun. “What do you mean, ‘finally’? It only chipped last week. You sound like Dad.”
I made a face, peered. “Looks great.” Honestly, I didn’t care about the linoleum. I wished we’d start talking about the night on the mountain, about you and Sandrine. It was all I wanted to talk about.
Maybe Maurice felt the same. “I’m so glad you’re here!
” Usually, his eyes seemed like he was contemplating sad things from the past or worries from the future, but now they were more like two kids on a trampoline.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, handed me a folded-up piece of paper. “I, uh, was wondering…”