We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand that if your grade point average drops, Princeton could retract your offer?”

  “It was just one test.”

  “If it can happen once, it can happen again.”

  “Well, the world wouldn’t end if I didn’t go to Princeton,” Anita said, and cringed inwardly in preparation.

  Her father stood up. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but when he got this worked up, he looked like a giant. “Young lady, we made our decision as a family, and every time you question that decision—”

  “I’m not—” she tried to say.

  “Every time you question that decision, it shows a lack of respect for everything this family has done for you. Everything we’ve sacrificed so that you could be in the position to attend a good university. Are you really that ungrateful? Do you really have that little respect for the investments we’ve made in your future?”

  That was the funny thing about her father. He made investments for a living, and somewhere along the line, he’d started to mistake his daughter for just one more of them. And how did an investment work? You put some money in up front, and then, somewhere down the line, you expected a return. Hence the SAT tutors and the weekly reading assignments and the Saturday-morning French classes. Hence the curfews and the lectures and the “dictionary dinners” (during which Anita’s father asked her to reel off the definitions of obscure words while her food got cold). In fact, the only reason Anita had attended Hamilton High in the first place was because the admissions adviser her father had hired insisted she’d have a better chance of being accepted at Princeton if she graduated from a public school. Every single thing Anita did had to be about the bottom line: jacking up the return on her father’s investment. Only it wasn’t more money he wanted. It was success. It was prestige. It was a good little black girl with an Ivy League degree and a serious career—doctor, politician, entrepreneur.

  Well, maybe I don’t want any of those jobs, Anita wanted to scream. Maybe I don’t think I should have to do whatever you say just because I live under your roof!

  Most people her age were already engaged in the difficult task of transforming the parent-child relationship, of turning a strict ­dictatorship into something more like a democracy. But Anita still couldn’t help but see her father as a kind of god. A petty, arbitrary god, but a god nonetheless. And on any other day, if she’d had to stand there, listening patiently while a god called her a disappointment and a disgrace and a delinquent, she would have been in tears. But not today. Today, Anita was strong. Today, Anita was composed. Because today, Anita was lying. She’d never gotten a C in her life.

  It had been Suzie O’s idea. Anita had gone to see her because she’d felt herself teetering on the brink of a mental breakdown. The past three years had been one oasis-less desert of excruciating effort. Anita had hoped it would all end when she got into Princeton, but it hadn’t. If anything, expectations had only risen to keep pace with her newly enhanced prospects. It was as if someone had challenged her to hold her breath underwater for as long as she could, and when she finally broke all the world records and started swimming back up to claim her trophy, she discovered that the surface had frozen over.

  “Maybe you need to disappoint him,” Suzie had said.

  “What do you mean? Like, flunk something?”

  “You don’t even have to do it. You could just pretend.”

  “What for?”

  “Because then you’ll see that the world doesn’t end if your dad doesn’t approve of something. And maybe he’ll see that too.”

  “He won’t, though. I know he won’t.” The tears had come before she could remember to hold them back. And then that slacker kid, Andy Rowen, had caught her in the act. He’d looked so surprised, like he never would have guessed that she was capable of normal human emotions.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not worth it,” he’d said.

  Wise words, in spite of the source. They were what gave her courage now, to walk out of her father’s office right in the middle of his denunciation.

  “Young lady?” he called out after her. “Young lady, where are you going?”

  She escaped to her bedroom and stood very still, waiting for her father to chase her down and continue to berate her. But he didn’t come; the only explanation was that he was paralyzed with shock. Anita closed and locked the door, then took Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black off the shelf. It was her secret de-stressing ritual—switch on the turntable, turn up the volume as loud as it would go without bleeding downstairs, and, finally, shut herself in the closet.

  She didn’t do it to be alone, though it was nice to be alone. And she didn’t do it because the closet was dark and warm and cozy, though it was all of those things. She did it because the closet was the only place—in the entire world, it sometimes felt—where she could sing without being overheard.

  Since the age of eight, Anita had dreamed of being a singer. And ever since her parents had discovered that dream, they’d been hell-bent on thwarting it. There had been piano lessons, but only until Anita’s teacher made the mistake of allowing an Alicia Keys song into the repertoire. Within a week, the piano in the sitting room had been replaced with a solid oak table, and Anita was taking ballet. In middle school, chorus had been mandatory, but somehow there was always an important family event scheduled for concert nights, so the choir director never gave Anita any solos. As a freshman at Hamilton, she’d tried out for the school musical—Into the Woods—and had been cast as the Witch. But when her father found out, two weeks into rehearsals, he marched into the school and took the director aside, explaining that they had a strict rule in their house—curriculars before extracurriculars. The part ended up going to a skinny white girl named Natalie.

  Anita’s father knew he couldn’t afford to give her so much as an inch, because music ran in the Graves bloodline. Anita’s uncle, Bobby, was a professional saxophonist, touring the country with whatever band would have him. He had no roots, no family—no investments at all. Benjamin Graves would have set fire to every jazz club in ­Seattle before he’d let his daughter end up like that.

  But no one could stop her from singing in the closet. In the closet, there was no distinction between dreams and reality, no need to choose one path or another. There was just the heavenly lift of the strings, the sharp shriek of the horns, the twinkle of the guitar, Amy Winehouse’s iniquitous voice blasting its way across the divide between life and death to duet with Anita’s. And high school and college and the ponderous, bloated look on her father’s face all faded away. She sang through the whole record—every verse, every chorus, every bridge—high as a heroin addict until the last note warbled and died.

  Whatever it is, it’s not worth it.

  Anita felt something strange overtaking her, a sense of self-­determination that had been swelling ever since Andy made that offhand comment outside Suzie’s office. It was a bit like how she felt on those nights when there was a full moon and suddenly she was manic or depressed or pissed off and there was just no other explanation for it but the stars. Before she could second-guess herself, she slipped back downstairs, past her father’s office, past Luisa and her mother and the smell of roast chicken, out the front door, and into her car. Her father hadn’t technically grounded her, but that would be scant defense when she got home.

  She drove slowly past Swedish hospital and down into the city, windows open even though it meant drops of rain prickling her arm. Esperanza Spalding was playing all this week at Jazz Alley, and Anita was going to go see her. Anita knew about Esperanza from YouTube. She’d been a musical prodigy, teaching at the Berklee College of Music by the age of twenty. Now she was a star.

  The crowd at Jazz Alley was older, mostly in their forties and fifties. Anita took a seat at a small round table and ordered a Shirley Temple.

  She’d hoped that watching Esperanza perform would
fill her heart with resolve and inspiration, but as the show went on, she only got more and more depressed. Here was this ridiculously talented artist living her life as loud as a bullhorn. And here was Anita, watching from the darkness, destined for an insignificant and utterly silent existence. At the beginning of application season, Anita had suggested she might apply to a couple of music schools alongside all the Ivy League universities her father was so excited about. The resultant tantrum had been so huge that Luisa later swore she’d picked up the phone and dialed the first two-thirds of 9-1-1.

  When Anita got out of the club, she realized she hadn’t looked at her phone in hours. Sure enough, there were two dozen missed calls and almost as many messages, all from HOME. She listened to one, but stopped it after the first few furious words and cleared her in-box with a tap.

  It was a weeknight, so there weren’t many people out on the streets. Anita wandered down toward the water, into the heart of homeless Seattle. Cardboard boxes and sleeping bags. Unkempt hair and ­hollow faces and clothes the color of pigeon wings. From under the bench of a bus stop, a white fragment of eye followed her across First Avenue. She went all the way down to the wrought-iron fence, bent into curlicues and spirals, beyond which Puget Sound sparkled blackly, and grabbed hold of the smooth metal bars. She lifted herself off the ground, imagined rising up and up and over the topmost prong and out into the water.

  “Hey, sister.”

  She turned around, for some reason expecting to find a friend. But the man standing behind her was a stranger, tall and black, with a long scar snaking across the bottom half of his face.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You looking for someone?”

  “No.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone out here this time of night. It’s not safe.”

  Before she could say anything else, there was the sound of a car door slamming, and a cop was making his way toward them with a long, aggressive stride.

  “There a problem here?” he asked.

  “No problem,” the stranger said.

  The cop looked at Anita.

  “No, sir.”

  He didn’t seem to believe it. “Why don’t you come along with me, miss? As for you”—he pointed at the stranger—“you stay there. My partner wants to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Whatever, man.”

  Anita and the cop walked across the street, past the festive flicker of the cruiser.

  “What are you doing on your own down here, young lady?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You need a ride?”

  “My car’s just up the street.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “You go straight there, okay? Pretty girl like you should be more careful.”

  “Thanks.”

  She climbed back up to First Avenue; the incline was so steep that it bent her backward, pointed her at the sky like a telescope. A lone blue star floated out among all the white ones, like a mutation. Anita felt pinned in place, caught between the dead eye of that star and the cold care of the police officer behind her. She didn’t want to go back to the car, but she didn’t want to stay where she was, either. She would have been happy just to disappear.

  Whatever it is, it’s not worth it.

  She said the words aloud, but they were hollow now, no more meaning in them than in that distant will-o’-the-wisp adrift in the sky. Suzie O was wrong. Anita wasn’t miserable because of the way things were. She was miserable because she kept hoping things would change. If she could eradicate the hope, she could eradicate the sadness.

  It was time to go home.

  Eliza

  WAS THERE ANYTHING IN THE whole entire world worse than waking up next to someone you didn’t want to wake up next to?

  His name was Parker—at least she could remember that much. He was asleep on his stomach, blond hair curling around his ears like cotton candy, another little patch at the base of his spine. Eliza was careful not to wake him as she rose from the bed and got dressed. It took her fifteen minutes in front of the bathroom mirror to scrape away the telltale signs of an alcohol-fueled one-night stand. She brushed her unwashed hair into a wild bun and stuck it with a pair of black chopsticks. The result was presentable enough, though all the primping in the world would do nothing for the pounding headache. For that, there was only her traditional mixture of coconut water and Red Bull—what her friend Madeline used to call a Bull Nuts. Breakfast accomplished.

  Which only left the question of what to do about Parker. With all the discharge forms and final check-ups, Eliza’s dad wouldn’t be home before two or three in the afternoon, but this skeeze had to be gone by then. And he’d have to go on foot, because Eliza had driven him here. She left a note on the bedside table: If you’re reading this, you should be out of my house. Too mean? Maybe. But she was way too hungover to care.

  It wasn’t until she saw the digital clock in the car that she realized how early it was. Still, spending an extra hour at school was way better than spending it alone in the house with a passed-out mistake. She turned the radio to the news—a monotonous recitation of international catastrophes—then flipped the station. Eighties music was undoubtedly better for the soul.

  The parking lot at Hamilton was mostly empty. Eliza turned up the radio, got a blanket out of the trunk, and laid it across the warm humming heat of the hood. She leaned back against the wind­shield . . .

  Someone was shaking her by the foot. Eliza opened her eyes to a gray-white sky, uniform but for that wicked blue speck of light. What was it still doing up there?

  “Good morning, Mr. Magpie.”

  She sat up and practically collided with the implacable grin of Andy Rowen. He was wearing baggy jeans and an unzipped gray hoodie over a T-shirt featuring the pale, spaced-out faces of the Cure.

  “Rough night?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “Didn’t Blondie deliver the goods?”

  She ignored the question. “What time is it?”

  “By my watch”—he pulled up his sleeve and stared hard at the empty white expanse of his wrist—“about halfway through first period.”

  “Seriously? Fuck!” Eliza jumped down from the hood.

  “What’s the big deal? I always get to school around this time, and lo, the world continueth to spin.”

  Her book bag wasn’t in the backseat, or in the trunk. In her rush to get away from Parker, she must have left it at home.

  “Shit!” She slammed her fist into the side of the car.

  “Whoa,” Andy said. “Chill out, man. It’s just class.”

  Eliza took a deep breath, then spoke with quiet scorn. “This may come as a shock to you, but some of us actually care about stuff. I’m sure you think that’s lame or gay or whatever, but we can have another talk about it ten years from now, when you’re still living in your mom’s basement and working at Chipotle and the rest of us have lives.”

  She stormed off toward campus, already feeling guilty for lashing out; it wasn’t Andy she was pissed at.

  “Jeez,” he said, “that must have been some shitty sex.”

  “It was,” Eliza said, without stopping.

  But she was glad to hear him laughing behind her.

  She couldn’t focus during chemistry class. The blue star kept popping back into her head, like the memory of a bad dream. And every time it did, her heart began to race.

  She didn’t think to ask about it until lunch, and only then because she happened to pass by the table in the corner of the lunchroom, farthest from the windows. Maybe it was judgmental, to think of it as the “nerd table,” and yet there was no getting around the fact that a school had its factions, and one of those factions happened to consist primarily of intelligent, not very attractive, not particularly socially capable boys, along with a few girls who hadn’t yet learned how to dress or put on make
up or pretend to be dumber than they were. It was the girls who eyed Eliza with suspicion when she sat down at the table, as if she were an emissary from a tribe of Amazon women sweeping in to steal the menfolk away. The boys tried to look blasé, but they couldn’t hide a bubbling undercurrent of fandom.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Eliza.”

  A boy with thick brown hair styled in an unfortunate mullet reached out a hand. He had an air of authority about him, confident in his element.

  “Hello, Eliza. I’m James.”

  “Hi, James.”

  He introduced the rest of the table, but Eliza didn’t absorb any of their names.

  “You’re here because of Ardor, aren’t you?” James’s eyes had the bright, almost manic intensity of extreme intelligence. Eliza knew she was reasonably smart, but brilliant people still freaked her out. She didn’t like the idea that somebody might be seeing more of her than she wanted them to see.

  “What’s Ardor?”

  One of the girls answered without looking up from some Japanese comic. “It’s JPL’s name for the asteroid. ARDR-1388.”

  “Ardor,” James said, “is a near-Earth object, or NEO, a category including asteroids, meteoroids, and comets that orbit close to our planet. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory keeps tabs on all of them. It’s part of their job.”

  “Is it big?”

  “Big enough to wipe us all out.”

  “So why haven’t I heard about it before?”

  James raised his eyebrows. “You regularly visit the JPL website for updates on NEOs? You keep up with contemporary astronomy journals?”

  “I do not.”

  “So there you go.”

  Eliza did her best to smile through this meteor shower of condescension. “Thank you, James. That was very helpful.” She stood up. Across the lunchroom, Peter Roeslin and his still-girlfriend Stacy looked over at Eliza at exactly the same time. She pretended not to see them.