Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) (5 page)

There was a noticeable reaction as we walked in together. The other kids were already seated and Mr.
Jefferson had just opened his mouth to speak. I hadn’t even thought about it, but Cruz and I looked like a couple. I must have blushed because there were snickers and some whispering. It was like a lame-ass sitcom. I couldn’t even look at Cruz as we took our seats next to each other. And I’m sure that he was feeling the same way.

Cha
pter 3

Dream #10: I discover a sparkling river that empties through a lush forest into a glowing lake. It had been there all the time but I never knew it existed.

The Friday I met Aranara was a cold, cold day. My hometown of Lancaster, Wisconsin is in some kind of microclimate and we rarely got snow, even in the middle of winter, so I wasn’t expecting the betrayal that lurked in the air that early October in New York City. Monday was balmy, but by the end of the week a biting wind had blown in from Canada, leaving Manhattanites shivering in flimsy fall jackets.

Over the previous couple of weeks I had tried to forget the weirdness of the double handshakes, the
Temple of Truth, and the tunnel behind the kitchen cupboard. It was all so effing insane, and when I ignored it, it seemed to go away. At school I crushed on Noon from afar, but that was all I could do – his distance was both fascinating and impenetrable. Cruz was another matter. He was down-to-earth and stereotypically handsome, but there was a tension, an inner struggle, that made me want to hold him by the hand and tell him that everything was going to be okay. It was an incredibly powerful feeling and the only thing that forced me to concentrate on schoolwork was the fact that Mom had such high expectations for me. And who was I to begrudge her that? She had worked like a dog ever since Dad died, never pressuring me, never making me feel like I owed her anything. The least I could do was to make a decent effort.

So I put my head down and studied. Literally. I didn’t even look at
Noon or Cruz before the bell sounded at the end of each class. And I guess that’s why I didn’t notice Aranara. But once I did notice her, I would never forget her.

The weekend was beckoning as I rushed through the school gates that bone-chilling afternoon. All I could think about was Skyping my
Wisconsin friends. I missed them but I could already sense that the big city was changing my friendships. They had no way to relate to my stories of Broadway musicals or Central Park strolls, and although I could laugh at their latest Glee Club goings-on, I felt as removed from the stories as from the TV show that inspired them.

I heard a shrill girl’s voice above the traffic hum: “Hey! Kari!” My shoulders were hunched up against the cold and I’d pulled my woolen hat down over my ears, so it was hard for me to tell where the shout was coming from. I scanned the cars lined up outside school: mostly rich-kid SUVs and smart sedans idling with the windows closed.

“Kari! Over here!”

One car caught my eye. Not just because the back window was down and a girl’s head was sticking out, but because it was long and black. I don’t know a thing about cars, but this one was... looming, somehow. It pulled away from the curb and crawled toward me, engine
purring. As it stopped beside me, the front tire crushed an apple that some kid must have tossed from their lunchbox. The fruit was obliterated into a pulpy mess.

The girl raised the window and opened the back door for me. “It’s me, Aranara,” she smiled. “You’re not dressed for this – you’ll catch your death.”

I hesitated. She looked familiar. She even sounded familiar. But I had no idea who she was. And she sure had the kind of name you would remember, right? She rolled her eyes like I was being spectacularly dim.

“I’m in your History class. And your Spanish class.
No mi recuerdos
?”

Nope. I didn’t remember her. But I was drawn to her. She had a wide smile and shining hazel eyes. Her long, blonde hair fell evenly on her broad shoulders. Her fur-trimmed red designer jacket fitted perfectly around her overdeveloped torso. Swim team? Cheerleader? Incredibly fortunate genes? Whatever her secret, she was the kind of girl that boys
dream about taking to the prom.

“Come on,” she said as she scooched over. “You’re on our way.”

I got in and closed the door. It was warm, leathery and comforting inside. In the driver’s seat was a salt-and-pepper-haired man in a dark overcoat with his hands clasped together on top of the steering wheel. I was brought up to be polite, so I said hi to him. He kept his hands together and looked at me with piercing blue eyes through the rear-view mirror. “Cilic,” he growled.

“Um
... Kari,” I responded, put off by his gruffness.

“Don’t mind
Dad, he’s foreign,” said Aranara, motioning with her head in his direction.

The car pulled away. I suddenly realized that it was beyond warm in there, it was stifling. As I took off my hat, I realized something else. “How do you know where I live?”

“Oh, we passed you one day as you were leaving your building with your mother,” she answered dismissively. “It’s The Warrington, right?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I lived there – it looks
so
cool,” she gushed.

I was somehow disturbed by her familiarity. “It’s
... it’s... I guess it is.” Uncomfortable silence. “Where do you live?”

She seemed bored by my question. “
New Jersey. Super glamorous.” I actually had no idea whether she was being ironic, so I just nodded.

She picked up my hat from the seat between us and twirled it around an extended index finger. “I
love
this!” She peered closely at the weave, picking at it with her perfectly manicured fingers. “Where did you get it? The East Village?”

I laughed inside. “Nowhere quite so hip. Thrift store,
Nowheresville, Wisconsin.”

She laughed out loud. “You’re a-
DOR-able!”

For all I knew she even had an exclamation point after her name. All the same, she was somehow irresistible. We chatted the rest of the way and soon arrived at The Warrington.

I opened the car door. “Thank you for the ride, sir.”

Her father re-clasped his hands on top of the wheel without acknowledging a word I’d said. A cold gust of wind billowed down the street and I clutched my hat, totally forgetting what I wanted to say to Aranara. I guess I also didn’t pay attention when she opened the locket around her neck and carefully put something inside.

* * * * *

The next day ended with Spanish class. Aranara wasn’t there. This was the one course that Cruz excelled in and he usually sat alone in a semi-walled-off section of the room with computer screens and headsets, enjoying
Latino movies and TV shows while the rest of us struggled.

I was pretty good at Spanish but nevertheless had somehow gotten the idea in my head to ask Cruz if he would help me out with a conversation session a couple of evenings a week. I waited till everyone else had left the language lab and poked my head around the half-wall that separated the regular desks from the multimedia section.

Cruz was engrossed in a movie. No idea what it was. My brain was in some kind of cloud when I knocked
on the back of his chair like it was
a door. He snapped out of his tunnel vision and yanked off his headphones.

“Hey, Kari.”

“Hey. Cómo está?” I ventured, proud of my effort.

He smiled, waited a second, then corrected me. “You mean, ‘Cómo estás?’”

“Oh,” I responded, crestfallen.

“’Cause we’re close. I mean
... you know me, so, like, you gotta use the familiar part of the verb,” he explained, pushing his chair back and turning off the movie.

“Right
...” I nodded. I actually thought I was going to impress him. Fat chance. I rolled my eyes, annoyed with myself. I decided to focus on my shoes while I gathered the courage to ask him. “So... I’m, like, totally into Spanish and, you know, I thought it might be fun to, like, study together? I mean, just talk, chat or whatever. Hang out and, like, shoot the breeze...in... Spanish. One evening. Sometime.”

Oh
. Em. Gee. I was barely able to string a couple of sentences together in English, let alone Spanish.

I looked up at him. Only then did I realize that even though he had seemed to be watching the movie, he had a pencil in his hand and a sketch pad on
the desk.

He put the pencil down
and responded, “Yeah, I’m down with that.”

“
Awesome!” I beamed back at him.

“I gotta get some shit done at home tonig
ht, but sure – maybe tomorrow?”

The pencil he’d been using was rolling slowly toward the edge of his desk. He didn’t notice its movement and it seemed like an eternity passed as it completed five or six revolutions before plummeting to the floor. Cruz saw the pencil out the corner of his eye as it fell. He made a lunge for it, but was just too late. As he jerked forward, the back of his chair pushed the sketch pad off the desk too. It fell open at a drawing, and he froze. Even upside-down I could tell that the image was a likeness of me. Not just me, but a ridiculously perfect version of my face. Like the doodles pinned up inside Cruz’s locker, the sketch was incredibly symmetrical. Disturbingly so.

He scrambled to pick up the pad, but he knew that I’d seen it. And I knew that he knew that I’d seen it. Regaining his cool, he bent down and closed the pad. He placed it back on the desk and leaned back in his chair, somehow expectant.

I remember feeling a wave of emotion wash over me. What was it? This was something I’d never felt before. Cruz’s eyes met mine for an instant and I held them. Heat coursed through my veins. Through my arteries. My stomach tightened but there was only one thought in my mind: kiss him. Kiss him like you’ve never kissed any
guy before. Like the rest of the world doesn’t matter.

So I did, and sure enough the rest of the world melted away. The kiss was as electric as the shivers that ran down my spine. I closed my eyes as he closed his. His lips were warm and
soft. Time stopped completely. I was lost in the moment and the moment was lost in our kiss. No idea whether it was seconds or minutes, but eventually our lips parted and our eyes opened. But we were still entranced by the rush of magic we’d felt. Our faces were inches apart, mine slightly above his as he leaned back in his chair. My hair fell around my face, the ends brushing against his chest.

A first kiss is always special, but this was beyond believable. It was as though my brain had been unanchored. I was floating. I looked down at my hand, still gripping Cruz’s forearm. Suddenly there was a noise – a chair scraping across the tiled floor – and I moved away, the current running between us interrupted.

“I have to go,” I said, flustered.

He nodded and looked down at his running shoes again. I didn’t have to go, but this was all I could think of to say. The moment
had overwhelmed me and I needed to leave before it became too much for me.

I stumbled past a couple of chairs, back into the main part of the classroom. No one was there. I swear I’d heard something. Not only was
there no one, but I now felt like a different person. The spell had been broken, dropped on the floor and stomped on. Reality hit me like a cold shower. I heard Cruz get up from his chair behind the half-wall and knew that I had to get out of there.

I ran out of the language lab and into the hallway. In fact, I think I probably sprinted all the way out of the building. I wasn’t sure what had come over me, but as the chill late-afternoon air hit me, I shook my head and blinked. I had exited through the side entrance into the almost-empty parking lot and looked around trying to get my bearings. A light caught my eye. Two, in fact – the brake lights of a sedan leaving the lot. My thoughts instantly jumped to Aranara. But as the car turned into the street I could see that it wasn
’t her father’s prowling limo. In fact it was a silver SUV. And a streetlight caught the person in the passenger seat before it joined the traffic flow. It was Noon. How could I be so sure? Because he turned and looked at me, his gaze piercing through the night and burying itself in my consciousness, even from a hundred yards away.

I stopped in my tracks. Was this a coincidence? There was literally no one else around. My mind turned back to Cruz. Already the feeling that I’d had in the language lab felt like a foreign country. The boys back in
Lancaster were drab at best. I’d kissed one or two in third grade but it was nothing like this. Nothing like the brain-numbing surge of hormones that I’d felt a few minutes ago. I guessed that that was the explanation – the out-of-body experience I’d had was all down to chemicals, right? I mean, I suppose love must be real, but Mom had brought me up to apply logic and scientific analysis to any unexpected situation. So that’s exactly what I did. I hardly even knew Cruz, but did that matter? Love is blind, and that’s how I felt when I was kissing him. I don’t even know what I was seeing while my eyes were closed and our lips were pressed together. Stars? Sparks? All the colors of the rainbow? It just sounded soooo cheesy, and as I pulled my fall jacket around me, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the whole thing was just a dream.