Starry Night (21 page)

*   *   *

Thanksgiving is also Dinah's day to shine.

“Vati—Vati—
Padmavati!
No! No no no no no. You can't cut the fennel in such large chunks. And look at these, they are
slivers
! No, they must be uniform, like this.” Dinah pushed Vati away from her cutting board, took the knife from her, and systematically sliced the white bulb into perfect one-inch fennel wedges.

“Dinah, you are a tyrant, man. Padmavati is only trying to help.”

Oliver stepped in, coming to his lady's defense. “I
like
it when some parts are burnt.”

“We aren't
roasting
this fennel, Oliver, we're braising it in
milk.
You don't want to have some pieces that are mushy nothings and some that are as hard to bite into as a tree root in Central Park, do you?”

“Sorry, Dinah,” Vati said, and smiled at Oliver knowingly, like,
Oh, Dinah, you little culinary lunatic.

“Should I baste, Dine?” I said from my perch on the island.

“Yes! Baste the turkey now, and then set the timer for ten more minutes, so you don't have to
keep asking me.
I have to poach the pears and that will take all my concentration.”

The doorbell rang. May erupted in barks and skidded to the door.

“Oh my goodness, who could that
be
?” yodeled my mother as she ran down the stairs in her bathrobe and with rollers in her hair. “It's only nine-thirty. God almighty, it smells divine down here. Is it the wine delivery? Oh, hell's bells, I'm running out of time!” She tucked her robe more closely around her and opened the door.

“Nolan, hello.” She blanched and looked at all of us like
What the—?
Nolan was supposed to be on a flight to Pittsburgh that very moment, not that my mother knew that, but I did. That morning I had been daydreaming about him at the airport. Would he have breakfast there? Would he be reading a book? Would he be thinking about me? I hadn't seen him in fifteen days, but we had spoken on the telephone for an hour the night before.

“Oh my god,” I barely said.

“Oh my god!” Vati pretty much screamed.

“Oh my god,” Dinah said, like the fun had just begun.

Nolan was dressed up in a tweed blazer with a checked-blue collared shirt, an orange tie, brown cords, and on top of it all was a thick houndstooth overcoat, hanging open, that looked like it must have been his grandfather's. He was holding a weekend bag. His guitar, as ever, was strapped to his back.

“Nolan.” I slid off the island and wished no one were around so I could run into his arms.

“Come in, come in, Nolan. May! Down!” My mother got it together. My punishment had ended that very day. I was waiting for her to give me back my phone and then I would have texted him, but there he was, ten feet away from me. “It's freezing out there,” she said, making a wide circle around him to shut the door as if he were a wet, muddy dog. May plopped down at Nolan's feet, panting with her tongue flopping out of her mouth like he was about to give her a piece of bacon.

“Hey, man!” Oliver went and gave him a man hug. “What are you doing here?”

“Hi, everyone. Sorry, Mrs. Noorlander, for just showing up here unannounced.” He looked helpless and embarrassed. “I, well, I just found out that my stepmom's mom died.”

“Oh, goodness, I'm so sorry, Nolan. Here, Oliver, take his bag. Take your coat off.” Mom wrapped her bathrobe around herself again, while at the same time trying to signal to Nolan that he should walk farther into the room.

“She had been sick for a while. I guess they weren't expecting that she would die today, and she did, so now my father and stepmother have to go to where she was in Florida.”

“So you're not going to Pittsburgh?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He held out his phone in his hand. “My dad just called and said that I shouldn't come. He has to go with Elaine and Bruno. They left the house already. I was on my way to the airport.” He looked confused and like a four-year-old teenager.

“And my mother left to go to my aunt's house in Vermont yesterday, so.” He looked at me. “I have no place to have Thanksgiving.”

And then I walked over fast and hugged him. Right in front of my mother. He smelled like trees.

“Nolan,” my mother said eventually. “You must stay here and have lunch with us. Please, you are welcome.” She said that very nicely.

I let go of him and looked into his eyes, which were pooling.

“Thanks, Mrs. Noorlander. I am so sorry to barge in like this.” He wiped the tears away before they fell. “I just, I, well, I didn't know where else to go.”

“Here, let me get this,” Oliver said and took his bag.

The shrill, clamorous ring of the timer went off.

“Wrenny! The
TURKEY
!!!!” Dinah screamed from a footstool where she was hovering over the steaming poaching liquid for the pears. Nothing, not even Nolan showing up unannounced on Thanksgiving Day, would distract that girl from her dessert.

*   *   *

Mom immediately put us to work peeling sweet potatoes. The garbage can was placed in the middle of Vati, Oliver, Nolan, and me. There was a brown paper bag of potatoes next to us on the island. Each of us had a peeler. The amount of cooking shit we have in our house because of the show is unreal.

“You guys were incredible the other night,” Vati said, scraping away. She had gone to see the Shoppe Boys with Oliver.

“No kidding, man. It was so fun,” Oliver said, and looked at Vati goofily.

“Thanks, guys. I wish you could have been there, Wren,” Nolan said. I was still getting used to him standing right there in the middle of my kitchen. Just so you know, I could not have been in a less attractive outfit. I was wearing my worst dark gray sweats that make me feel like an elephant and a dumb, ill-fitting white T-shirt, that I wear to sleep only if everything else is dirty.

“Yeah, me too. But I'll go to another one soon, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, you will.” He elbowed me with the arm his sweet potato was in and bumped me with his hip.

“Hey, watch it! My peel just went on the floor!” I squealed in my most attractive, flirtatious way.

“Didn't Reagan send you the video?” Vati said.

“Huh? Reagan went?” All the squeal drained out of my voice. They nodded or said yeah. “No, my phone was confiscated. I didn't know she was there.” Grrrr.

“What? How did she not tell you at school?” Vati stopped peeling.

“I don't know, I've been in the art studio a lot and I don't know, I go home right after school.” Now I was annoyed. Peel, peel. I thought to myself while peeling the living daylights out of the sweet potato,
That is exactly what parents have in mind when they ground you. They separate you from the herd
—peel, peel—
make you have a wicked-bad case of FOMO
[fear of missing out—school shrinks talk to us about it all the time.]
All of them were there, all of them saw Nolan, all of them are now ahead of me and closer to each other. They knew it too—they couldn't even tell me at school. Reagan totally should have told me and she didn't. That is weird and wrong.
Then I thought I was being paranoid. I looked at Nolan.

“Yeah, she was there, so was Farah. Didn't I say that on the phone?” He looked so sincere.

“No,” I said softly, and looked to see if Dinah was listening, which she totally was. Mom and Dad were upstairs. “Whatever, Farah has been so weird lately,” I said.

“I
know
! She's a total sketch train!” Vati was now madly peeling her sweet potato.

“Did she go to London yet or is she still at that guy Cy's house?” Nolan said, finishing one potato and reaching into the bag for another.

We all stopped peeling.

“Excuse me?” I whispered. Nolan looked like he'd said something he shouldn't have.

“That guy she is seeing? From the museum? The artist?”

“Are you guys done?”
Dinah said, with her hands over her head like she was way at the end of her rope. “Can someone
baste the turkey
? Gosh!
Am I the only one focusing on the fact we have like one hundred people coming to lunch in three hours?
”

“Oliver, you deal with the turkey.” I signaled with my potato for Vati and Nolan to come over to the stairs out of Dinah's earshot.

“What are you talking about?” Vati and I were looking at Nolan like a team of detectives interrogating the perp on
Law & Order.

“Okay, hold on.” Nolan got really mellow and cool. “We were just talking at the gig.”

“Who was talking? You and Farah?” Vati was almost hysterical.

“Yes.” He continued speaking to us like you would talk to a crazy person—slowly and calmly. No sudden moves. “She said she had been seeing that guy, Cy Dowd, since the party and they were having a thing.” Vati and I looked at each other with that eyes-wide-open-mouth-open-shut-the-front-door face. Like Scooby-Doo and Shaggy when they see the ghost. I hadn't heard a word about Cy since that day at lunch. I had hoped it was a one-night-weird-Farah thing and we would never hear of it again. But then again, I had been in brownstone prison. We looked at Nolan to keep going.

“Did she not tell you guys this?” he asked in his girl/guy way.

“No!”
we shout-whispered.

“She told me that she was going to spend the night with him the night before Thanksgiving, last night. Then wake up there today, before she flew to London to go see her dad. You didn't know that?”

“No, no, we didn't. Or I didn't,” I said. Vati looked at me like,
Me neither.

“Oh my
god
, I have to tell Oliver.” Vati bolted to the kitchen. I sat down on the bottom step. Nolan sat down next to me.

“How could you not talk to me about that on the phone?”

“I don't know, Wren. I … I guess we were talking about other stuff. I wasn't thinking about your friend.”

I could sort of see Farah confiding in Nolan, because A) he is the kind of guy that you confide in because he sort of has girl mojo, and B) he's older than us and Farah was doing something out of our sophomore-girl league. I scraped at some gunk in the crevice where the banister met the stair, and we sat in silence for a few minutes.

“And, Wren,
you
never even brought Farah up.” That made me scrape the gunk faster.

“I didn't?”

“No, if anything, I thought we were talking about, I don't know, that school in France? Your parents? Not your friends.” He took my hand that was scraping and put it in his.

“You want to come up to my room, just for a second?” I said. I looked at him and then, in a paranoid way, up the stairs, in case my mother heard me through the ceiling. “I want to show you something.”

“Yeah. I
totally
want to come up to your room.”

 

36

We stealthily climbed up the stairs,
very quickly and smoothly passing my parents' open door. They must have been getting dressed in the bathroom because I didn't see signs of either one of them when I looked in before we beelined past it. I led Nolan up the last flight of stairs to my room and down the hall lined with the artwork from when I was little.

“Hey!” he whispered. I turned around and shushed him with my finger to my lips. “Did you do these?” He pointed at the frames. I nodded and smiled. He mouthed, “Wow!”

The door to my room was open and there, as big as lights, was my unmade bed. What if there was underwear from the night before thrown on the floor, or a box of tampons out in the open? Or a slobbish pile of clothes, an errant apple core…? But before I could worry too much about it, Nolan tumbled into the sheets and duvet and put his arms under his head like he was a sultan on an inflatable pool raft. I closed the door nervously.

“God, I never close the door up here.”

“This is an awesome room!” he said, a bit too loudly. “Look at your great windows!” He turned around, pointing at them. “Where are we looking, west? It's like a tree house up here!”

“I always think of it like a greenhouse.” I stood between the bed and bathroom, hoping I had remembered to flush the toilet. “I, um.” I darted in there for a second to make sure. All clear. “
Totally
lucked out.” I came back in. “I used to share Oliver's room with him, then Mom said one of us could have this room and for some weird reason he didn't want it, so.”

“He's an idiot not to take this place.”

“He wanted to be closer to the kitchen.”

“So did you really have something you wanted to show me or was that just an excuse to get me in your bed?” He laughed. I almost threw up.

“No! God!” Suddenly I was blushing and bolting for the door. I had never had a boy in my room before. Charlie had been there, of course, but not a boy like Nolan.

“Sorry, come here.” He jumped up and got me. “I am so happy to be up here with you, in your place.” He led me back to the bed.

“I didn't bring you up here to—oh, I feel so stupid!”

“Nah.” His voice got soft. “That was a dumb thing I said.” We sat on the bed.

“What did you want to show me?” he asked. I looked at him and scrunched up my nose. “Come on. Please show me.”

“Okay, well.” I stood up, slid my hand behind my desk, and got my drawing pad.

“Can I look?” he asked, reaching out. I nodded. “Come down here next to me.” He patted the bed then moved over and leaned against the wall, propping himself up with his knee. It was funny seeing him all dressed up for Thanksgiving, in my room, in my bed, in my sheets that I had just gotten out of.

I took a deep breath and nestled myself beside him. He lifted the cover of my drawing pad and started to look at drawing after drawing of my foot.