Starry Night (33 page)

“I'm sorry, Wren,” Reagan said, tears falling.

“Sorry?” Now I felt like I was in a movie.
“Sorry?”

“Yes,” Reagan said.

I was out of breath and still clutching the sides of the tray. There was even some soup on my hand.

“Sorry doesn't mean anything, Reagan!” My mother says that to me sometimes when I mess up and say sorry defensively. “Unless you mean it!” I was panting.

“Well, I
do
mean it,” Reagan said steadily. I looked to Farah for some guidance or a snappy comeback. She had nothing but wide eyes for me.

“Are you together with Nolan?” I felt my ears get hot, and when that happens it means my chest is blotchy. I can never hide that I am upset, which is so uncool.

“Yes,” said Reagan. She kept looking at me. Vati put her tray down on the table and then put her hand on my back. All the burn came to my eyes and I started to cry.

“Well, I
know
that already and I have to say, that it Really. Hurts. My.
Feelings!
” I tell you, it did kind of feel like nursery school where you are encouraged to tell a friend you're having an altercation with how they are making you feel. I was using my words.

“I'm
sorry
,” she said again. It was her mantra. I didn't know what else to say so I sat down. Farah marched over to the condiment table, took about fifty napkins, came back, and cleaned up my soup. Vati sat down next to me and took a big bite of her cheesy bagel. You would think that Reagan might have gotten up, in shame or fear or something. But she didn't. After Farah helped me wipe up the chicken soup, she threw away the napkins and constructed a big colorful salad. And then the four of us ate lunch in silence. I didn't leave.

I wanted to storm out, turn my back, smack her, whatever, but I didn't do any of that stuff. I knew because of the Saint-Rémy fiasco what it was to be held accountable for something you did wrong and I guess I wanted answers from her.

“Um, so what did happen?” I asked Reagan.

Vati looked at me with the widest eyes I have ever seen her make, like she wasn't sure
at all
I should be asking such a risky question, and I sort of agreed, but it was too late. We both looked at Reagan, who responded by lifting her shoulders up to her ears with her head down.

“You are lucky that Wren isn't ripping all that black hair out of your scalp right now, Reagan,” Farah said. “I would look up and answer her if I were you.”

“What the hell, Farah?” Reagan looked around the table with her mouth formed in the shape of
Wha?

“Am I wrong?” Farah asked like a seasoned prosecuting attorney. “You are being exceedingly disloyal and Wren has been just taking it. Now she is asking you what happened, so I suggest you answer her.”

“
Okay
, it wasn't such a big deal,” Reagan said, and rolled her eyes.

“Yes, it is a big deal!” I burst out. “You always say things aren't a big deal, and lots of things are big deals. This is a big deal.” I pointed at her.

“Okay,
sorry
, but honestly it started by just talking.” When a girl throws down the “talking” card, it's code for, this is
serious.
If you “talked for hours” or “just talked and talked” to a cute boy, it's like declaring you will be married one day. Fooling around with a boy is a joke compared to talking. I felt like I would vomit. Reagan sat up straighter. I could see girls at other tables starting to clear their trays and carry them over to the dish slot. After ten years of eating lunch in forty-minute blocks you have a good sense of beginning, middle, and end, and this period was coming to its end. We needed to start talking faster to finish the conversation before we had to go to the next class.

“Okay. One night, after one of his shows, Nolan asked me if my parents were divorced, or something like that.”

I
couldn't believe
she said his name. It sounded so easy coming off her tongue. His name was
mine
to say,
I
had a boyfriend with a cool name and a guitar and a big smile and purple high-tops and a high IQ that I talked to all night.
I
did, not her. I felt breath fill my lungs and get trapped.

Reagan continued. “I said my parents had been divorced for a long time, and then Nolan said that
you
had said I was alone a lot.”

A sharp feeling of betrayal shot into my gut like an arrow.
How could he tell her what we had spoken about?
All the breath pushed out of my lungs and I held on to the sides of my tray to steady myself. The orange plastic felt greasy from the cleaned-up chicken soup. I thought I might have a panic attack.

Reagan resumed. “Then he, Nolan—”

“
I know who he is!
” I said sharply.

“Okay.” She took a big breath and kept going. “He said his parents were divorced too. Then he asked why I was the last one of us”—Reagan looked at Vati and Farah, so they must have been there that night too—“at the gig, and I said my mother was out and I didn't have to be home. And then, I don't know, we started talking about all that stuff. I guess he didn't have to be home either.”

“And what, you had so much in common because of your no-curfew-Facebook-cooler-than-me lives, you just forgot that you were my friend and I was his
girlfriend
?”

“It's not like we did anything that night. We just talked.”

“Oh god, forget it. You're together, right?” I asked again, standing up.

The bell rang.

“Yes,” Reagan said very simply. It was hard to hear her with the increasingly loud sounds of chairs being pushed away from tables, trays clattering loudly down, the lunchroom staff replacing food on the metal racks for the next class, teachers moving girls along, laughing, books closing, sneakers thwacking on linoleum, but through all of that noise, it was clear. She definitely said, “Yes.”

 

60

So Nolan and Reagan fell
in love
and it was stronger, or better than the love that he and I had. Even his mother said that to me. I did the thing you are not supposed to do: I called the boy who dumped me. I couldn't help it. I called him on his mother's home number instead of his cell phone. I did that because even though it was almost February, I was reading the note he gave me (the one with the Bruce Springsteen lyrics) over and over again in lovesick pain. His home number was written on it. Remembering our late-night conversations on my grandmother's old Chanel No. 5 phone, I decided to use it one last time hoping it might have some 1970s magical powers that would change his mind. Jessica Nolan answered.

“Hi. It's Wren,” I said.

“Oh, Wren.” She sounded sorry for me. “Hello.”

“I was just calling to see if Nolan was there.”

“He's not, dear. He's at school. There's a basketball game.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, well.” I started to cry.

“Oh, Wren,” she said again, but that time her voice dropped an octave when she said “Wren.”

“I'm sorry, this is so stupid. I should go.”

“No, no. Please talk to me for a little. I would really like that.”

Maybe because she is a shrink, I stayed on the phone. Or maybe it was because it was his mother and that was the next best thing to talking to him.

“I'm just so
sad.
” I wept. If you think I was crazy for telling his mother I was sad, you are sort of wrong. It was comforting to speak to her.

“I know. It must feel awful.”

“I just don't get it.”

“Well…” She sounded like she was really considering my statement. “I'm not sure there is anything to get. It's just the way the world works sometimes.”

“But it's unfair.”

“Yes, it is unfair. And I am not proud of how Nolan handled it, but he and Reagan”—those three words stung worse than a real bee sting—“truly have feelings for each other.”

“But he told me he had feelings for me.”

“
He did!
He did have feelings for you. He had big feelings, Wren.” That made me cry even harder. “I know he did. I could tell.”

“But those feelings can go away, and it can just stop?” I blubbered.

“I don't know that it stops, but especially at his age, and your age—you are both so young—really at any age—sometimes, even if you have very strong feelings and commitments to one person, another person can come along and challenge them. And sometimes, for whatever reason, things change.” Her voice sounded soft and gentle, and it occurred to me Nolan's dad had chosen Elaine over Nolan's mom. Even though his parents had been married, even though they had Nolan and his Kermit the Frog–green bedroom and a promising life together in Pittsburgh.

“Okay.” I guess sometimes things stink but you have to live with them.

“I know it doesn't make anything better, and I know it hurts.”

“I feel like I did something wrong.”

“You didn't, Wren. It must feel that way, but you didn't. Nolan feels like he did something wrong, you know. He did do something wrong.”

“Oh.” That
did
make me feel better, but sad too. It seems like none of us knew what we were doing, not really.

“Please don't tell him I called, okay?”

“If you don't want me to, I won't.”

“Or tell him.” I laughed at my confusion. “I don't know.”

“Okay.” She laughed a little too. “Goodbye, Wren.”

I hung the heavy cream-colored phone receiver in between the plastic holders. Its weight sank down on two little clear knobs and disconnected the call. That was probably my favorite part of using that old thing. Hanging up was so satisfying.

*   *   *

It was that night that I drew my self-portrait. I walked up the stairs to my room, got out my drawing pad and charcoal pencils, and sat in front of the mirror on the back of my bathroom door. I could hear the voices and music of my family on the floors below me like a layer cake. I took in a big, deep breath.

There must have been something about me that he had loved. Where was it? How could I find it? I looked and looked into my eyes, right into their centers. It felt like they were pools that I could jump into. And I did. Suddenly I was inside myself. I was at the museum as a little girl running through the halls. I was in fourth grade, struggling and frustrated with punctuation. I was lying on the floor with Vati daydreaming about our weddings and laughing with Farah in the hallways of Hatcher. I was a Turtle in fold-over white socks and a bob haircut. I was in my father's arms reaching for the light and I was at my mother's dressing table getting the knots brushed out of my almost waist-length hair. I could smell Dinah's first chicken potpie and hear Oliver's thumping music from behind his closed door. I could see Mrs. Rousseau's silver rings on her fingers as she adjusted a line I had drawn almost correctly, and I could hear Charlie's sweet voice bucking me up whenever I lost my footing. I even saw Reagan and that hair of hers. I felt sorry for her that she had done something seemingly so mean and hurt my feelings. Maybe she couldn't help it; maybe she is just trying to figure out everything too. She still felt like my friend. Maybe she was. Or maybe she would be again, someday. I felt my body lift up to press against Nolan's. I felt how much I loved standing next to him and feeling his hand take mine. I saw his smile. At least I got to know what that kind of love felt like. I could feel my whole life, and when the time was right, I looked down and there I was on the page. Imperfect and hopeful.

 

Epilogue

I didn't go to France
during my junior year, but that self-portrait got me into an art program in Savannah, Georgia, for the summer. It's a
great
art school—one of the best in the country. They say if you do the summer program you have a better chance of getting into the college, and I hope that is true.

I'm in Savannah now. It's warm here, hot. I have a funny roommate named Marni who comes from New Jersey and wears a real diamond engagement ring on her wedding finger. Her mother gave it to her so she wouldn't get married too early just for a piece of jewelry. I think it's a sparkly reminder that her life is her own.

At night the students hang out on a quad in the middle of campus. There are ancient trees with sage-colored moss hanging from the branches like shredded old blankets. Apparently they have been there since the Civil War. We all sit around and talk about the teachers and what we did in studio that day. We drink endless Dr Peppers that we get in the machine in the dorm and we always have our sketchpads, like bird-watchers have binoculars. There is even a kid I think might have a crush on me. His name is Vernon Veve if you can believe it. He's from Virginia Beach. We have gone on walks a couple times. I don't know for sure if he likes me, but I think he does. He's quiet and sweet. He's a really good artist.

On clear nights, like tonight, I'll take my pad and walk up the hill where there is a sturdy bench. You can even lie down on it it's so big. From there you can see the back of the campus, and beyond, a road that leads to town. If you lean back and let your head rest on the wood, there are the infinite stars peering at you through the darkness, shining and steady. I think about van Gogh painting the same stars so long ago. I think about all the artists and lovers and just regular people who have looked up at them, wished on them, found direction from them. And then I think wouldn't it be fun if the stars are watching us too, watching what we do and waiting for what will happen next.

 

Acknowledgments

My wonderful mother
worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was very young. I would like to thank her from the bottom of my heart for taking me to that place, and many other places, and pointing out big and very small extraordinary things throughout my life. She is the one who taught me how to marvel at this beautiful world. And I would like to thank my boundlessly enthusiastic, supportive, and loving father, who believed that a dyslexic kid could, and indeed should, reach for the stars. And while we are on the subject of parents, love and thanks to my terrific in-laws, Ellen and Stanley Lattman.