About a Girl (29 page)

“And women,” I said sharply, and he smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “And women. You grubby little animals with your tiny brains find questions in the heavens larger than those we have ever thought to ask. You have discovered the language of the universe and written out its laws. You built a machine under the earth seventeen miles in circumference and used it to shatter light into the smallest particles that exist. And even still you write symphonies, and paint pictures, and till the ground and make it fertile. It is not enough for you to have a single flower; you must breed a thousand kinds of rose. From our mountains, from under the earth, we can only covet what you have done with the short lives you have been given.”

“We didn’t discover the language of the universe,” I said. “It was already there.”

“But you have named it,” he said. “You have used it to write a story that can be told and told again. Newton’s equations hold true, at the greatest of distances and at the smallest scales, across the breadth of the universe; do you not think it is remarkable that your people are capable of such a marvel, Atalanta? All this rot and death surrounds you, and still you tilt your heads back to look at the stars, and say
how beautiful,
and teach yourselves to sail by their light, and even that is not enough; you must know what it is that makes them burn. Why do you ask these questions? Why do you make art? These labors have no bearing on your survival.” He tilted his head at me quizzically and I saw that the question was not rhetorical; he meant for me to answer, to explain to him what it meant to live for joy.

“Because that’s what makes us human,” I said. I was suddenly very sick of him, sick unto death. I stood up. “Goodbye,” I said; somewhere, some part of me waited for him to stop me, but he did not.

“Goodbye, Tally,” he said. I took a page from Maddy’s book, and I did not look back at him when I left.

*   *   *

My family and I took the train to Shane’s show, all four of us. It was too hot to worry much about what I was going to wear, and so I didn’t worry about it and wore the same clothes as always. Raoul had gone down and gotten the mail, earlier; there was a thick envelope covered in Jack’s familiar, spiky hand, and I thought it must be for me, but when I picked it up I saw with surprise that it was addressed to Aunt Beast.

“Well,” I said aloud. “Well, well, well.” I put the letter back on the hall table with a smirk, and then the three of them came into the hallway and Aunt Beast gave me a dirty look.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” I asked.

“Not around you.”

“Don’t you want to know what he
says
?”

“I’ve waited twenty years,” she said. “I can wait another night. Come on.” And with that she swept past me and I followed her out into the balmy night. We were quiet again on the train, but it was an easier quiet than the quiet home from the airport; something had lifted from us, the air around us easing. They were getting used to the person I was becoming and, I guess, so was I.

Brownies was on Avenue A, between 10th and 11th; I’d only been there once, years ago, when Shane had cajoled me into taking the train to Manhattan and sneaking in with him to see Peter Murphy play a show. Hearts pounding, we’d circled the block a few times; Shane was trying to play it cool, but I could tell he was as scared as I was, unused as we were to grift and intrigue. The guy working the door was a bored-looking metalhead in black and spikes who seemed like the sort of entity who would not think twice about thrashing the living shit out of two temerarious adolescents seeking ingress. We lurked down the street until the bouncer stepped away from the door, his back turned, to smoke a cigarette—“Come
on,
” Shane hissed, dragging me by the hand, and we made a run for it, imagining ourselves fleet-footed hares outstripping a hungry wolf, and ducked inside the door just as the bouncer ground out his butt and resettled on his stool with a heavy sigh. I barely even remembered the show, though Shane had been ecstatic; all that came to mind now, as I told the surly black-clad entity guarding the door my name (“I’m in the band,” I said breezily, hoping that Shane had remembered, that aping Maddy’s cool arrogant confidence would suffice if he hadn’t) and waited for him—The same bouncer? But smaller seeming now, less threatening; what had we been scared of?—to run his finger down a list of names and grunt assent. He made Henri and Aunt Beast and Raoul pay.

Inside was filthy—now that I thought about it, I remembered that much—and sweltering and dim, Christmas lights wound around up near the low ceiling lending a moderately flattering glow to what would otherwise have been a distinctly sordid scene. We were early, and the club was nearly empty; I spotted Shane immediately, standing on the low stage talking to a tall, beautiful girl with shaggy black hair and heavy eyeliner and the cool, radiant air of someone who was unmistakably on her way to being famous. And he looked different, too; calm, self-assured, unconcerned that the club was empty. They conveyed the impression of two people who knew exactly what they were doing and what they wanted. I called his name, and he turned and saw me and, to my great satisfaction, his entire face lit up with delight, and he leapt off the stage and ran headlong at me, sweeping me off my feet in an enormous hug and spinning me around as though we were in an old movie. “Jesus fucking Christ, don’t ever leave me like that again,” he said into my ear, and I nearly swooned.

“I’m going to college,” I said idiotically, and he said, “You know what I mean,” and I thought I did.

“I missed you,” I said.

“I missed you, too.” He held me at arm’s length and examined me. “You look different,” he said.

“I do?” My newfound maturity had lent me an air of grandeur, I thought, or all the sex I’d had over the summer had given me a ravishing and irresistible glow.

“Tan,” he said. “You look tan. You got a tattoo.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Did you find out—I mean, is he?”

“No,” I said. “It’s complicated. I have a lot to tell you. I saw him play, though.”

“Shut
up
.”

I could not help feeling smug. “It was pretty incredible. The thing about the wolves, in California? I think that might have been true.”

“You can tell me about it—god, I can’t believe you saw him
play,
that’s
unreal.
This is Karen,” he added, indicating the singer, who’d gracefully hopped off the stage and come over to join us. I took her measure; up close, she was even more arresting, possessed of the near-alien beauty of the bevy of colt-limbed models who flooded the subways every year during Fashion Week. I considered whether they were sleeping together, and whether I cared if they were, and found, to my dismay, that I did. Apparently I had not learned quite so many life lessons as I thought.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you, Shane hasn’t stopped talking about you all summer.”

“Oh,” I said again, uncomfortably.
But what did he
say,
exactly,
I thought, and kept my mouth shut. And then Raoul and Aunt Beast and Henri, who’d respectfully let us greet each other in peace, had to come over and congratulate Shane, and I watched him preen under their attentions as though I were seeing him for the first time. We’d grown up together so closely that it seemed as though in recent years we’d forgotten to look at each other, how to see the people we were becoming instead of the children we had been, and whatever I’d felt for him before I left was something larger and more complicated now than I knew what to do with. But I didn’t have to figure it all out, not now, because love wasn’t quantifiable; it was as vast and full of mystery and beauty and math and particles as the whole universe, and all the science in the world hadn’t taken the wonder out of that, either. I watched Shane hug Raoul with a big dopey grin on my face, and then caught Karen giving me a complicated, unreadable look of her own—
Oh well,
I thought,
we’ll all figure it out, sooner or later
—and then they had to go backstage because more and more people were coming into the club and it was almost time to start.

They were good, of course. They were better than good. They were great. They had a drummer, too, a serious-faced black girl with her hair done up in dreadlocks, in a white undershirt that showed off her skin and her arms, solid with muscle—where had Shane
found
these girls?—who played intricate, complicated beats so fast and so hard that you didn’t even notice there wasn’t a bass player, just Shane whipping out sledghammery, looping licks and the singer’s throaty banshee howl over all of it. The crowd was ecstatic, surging up against the stage with a giant roar by the middle of their second song, moving as one sweaty frenzy of bodies that turned the already-hot air almost unbearable. I shrank back against the wall with Raoul and Henri, shooting them worried looks, but they seemed perfectly happy, and Aunt Beast, to my total astonishment, gave a whoop of glee and threw herself headlong into the surging crowd, disappearing immediately in a melee of flailing limbs and hair.

And Shane, my Shane, beloved and best known, dark hair falling in his face—he played with that slouch-shouldered carelessness that belied how unbelievably good he was, a solid counterpoint to Karen, who spun across the stage like a dervish, whipping the crowd up into mania; he played like I had never heard him play before, polished and sure and brilliant. He looked so cool I could hardly stand it.
That’s my best fucking friend,
I thought, with such pride I thought my adoration must be visible, leaking out of my pores like light. Here we were again, the both of us, our lives in front of us: the rest of the summer to figure out what we were, or weren’t, and to get my job at the bookstore back, and finish the
Principia,
and think about whether or not I wanted to go see Jack again and make him teach me to sail by the light of the constellations we both knew, and whether Maddy would still be there if I went back—it didn’t seem likely, but you never knew, with monsters, where they might turn out to live.

It was William Herschel—with the tireless assistance of his sister, Caroline, who was as fine an astronomer as he was, though her own horizons were curtailed by the time in which she had the misfortune to be born, and her name is always footnoted to his—who, in the eighteenth century, first realized that looking at starlight was the same thing as looking backward in time. While his contemporaries focused obsessively on establishing the distances between planets and fussing over orbital calculations, Herschel taught himself to build the finest telescopes of his era (Caroline, tirelessly heating pitch with which to polish telescope mirrors, feeding him sandwiches as he worked, assisting him during long, frigid nights of observations, and going on to discover eight comets on her own in her off time) and used them to look farther than anyone had before him at the edges of the known. When his early theory that all nebulae were clusters of stars was proven wrong by his own observations, he responded not with vexation, but with glee. “But what a field of novelty is here opened to our conceptions!” he wrote, overjoyed that the cosmos was even more marvelous than he had dared to first imagine: He could spend his whole life devoted to what he called “this magnificent collection of stars,” and barely begin to understand even the right questions to ask. I had begun my summer certain I knew everything, and wound up in the same place I’d started, undone and remade and stitched together again with all the threads that made up the great stories: suffering, and love, and loss, and still—always—hope. I had found my mother and lost her again; discovered my father and given him up, too; I had traveled even further than Herschel into those great shoals of light, and somehow I was still the same girl in the same body, sweaty and confused, and loved, and brilliant, and here in the world with all the possible in front of me. And all around me the hot night waiting, spattered with bright stars and darkness, waiting for me to choose what happened next, now that I’d come home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am hugely indebted to Mike Brotherton, Christian Ready, Andria Schwortz, and the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop; to the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York; and to the work of a number of writers, particularly Timothy Ferris, Dennis Overbye, Amanda Gefter, and Richard Panek. Any errors in
About a Girl
are most emphatically my own.

Thank you: Everyone at St. Martin’s Press who’s worked on
About a Girl
: Alicia Adkins, Marie Estrada, Stephanie Davis, Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Bridget Hartzler, Elsie Lyons, Anna Gorovoy, and Lauren Hougen; my peerless editor, Sara Goodman, for trusting me with this story—and believing in it when I did not; my fantastic agent, Brianne Johnson; Sara Sams, for letting me steal the aunts; Hal Sedgwick, for the
Argonautika
; WORD Bookstore, Jenn Northington, and Molly Templeton; my dear friends and tireless support system—Melanie Sanders, Nathan Bransford, Mikki Halpin, Meg Clark, Kat Howard, Kat Broadway, Tahereh Mafi, Neesha Meminger, Meg Howrey, Bryan Reedy, Emily Barrows, Bojan Louis, Cynthia Barton, Clyde and Gigi and Carol, and Sarah Jaffe; my parents—I told you I knew what I was doing. Cristina, you already know, but I’ll tell you again over whisky. Justin, you treasure; I love you more than language.

And for all the girls who are part monster: This book is yours.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR