Starry Night

by Isabel Gillies

  “I wish I hadn’t told you.” Now she was staring at me.

  “Fine!”

  “Fine.” She put her fork and knife on the tray to the side of her salad bowl, then she stood up and hoisted her Patagonia backpack over her shoulder. “I have reading to do. I’m going to the library.” She stood there for a minute like maybe she thought I might stop her. “If you see Vati, she is really upset, and Reagan isn’t even in school today.”

  “Yeah, I know. I already saw Vati. We’re walking home together.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  28

  Padmavati was already downstairs with her parka, hat, and scarf on, waiting by the front door, when I came down at 3:20.

  “Let’s go,” she said, unchanged from the weepy state I had seen her in hours before.

  “Have you signed out?” I asked trying to zip up my backpack and go through the mental list that I am supposed to go through every time I leave the school so I don’t space on anything.

  Homework (check)

  Reading book (check)

  Computer (check)

  Notes to parents from teachers (weren’t any, check)

  Sign out

  “Did it already,” she said.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said, forgetting to sign out.

  Vati leaned against the heavy glass door with its shiny brass fixtures, waiting to be buzzed out by Mr. Fisk, the young receptionist guy who sits in a little office in the front of the school and lets people in and out all day. We waved at him and walked through the foyer to the second set of doors to the outside. It was freezing.

  “I almost want to take a taxi home. I am so exhausted and starving,” Vati whined.

  “I have no money,” I said, and yanked out my scarf from the middle pocket of my backpack. I tried to tie it in the French way like Farah does, but failed.

  “I just have six bucks and my bus pass. Let’s take the bus then, six bucks won’t get you and me home.” Vati said. “It’s too cold to walk through the—”

  I was already at a dead stop because right outside the school, leaning against a car, with a guitar strapped to his back, was Nolan.

  “Is that Nolan?” Vati sort of shouted, like she had no impulse control.

  “Yes. Hi.” He was even better-looking than I remembered, if that was possible. It’s because teenagers in suits, even older teenagers, look awkward. There’s no way around it. That day he looked like a guy in a J.Crew catalog without the stupid we-have-a-perfect-life thing all their models seem to have.

  On the sidewalk, in between his legs, was a beat-up blue backpack, just like mine, which was a hand-me-down from Oliver.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi!” Vati said, and laughed, and snorted.

  Let me tell you that it is very, very rare to see a boy outside of our school. Maybe someone’s brother will come to a play, but that’s pretty much it. Our school is on a tree-lined side street on the Upper East Side. The boys’ schools, of which there are about three, are blocks and blocks away, and St. Tim’s, where Charlie and Oliver go, is on the west side. If girls met their boyfriends after school, it was far away in the park or at a remote pizza parlor. It was not customary for a boy, especially a lone boy, to be standing in full view of the faculty and student body as they left the building for the day. It wasn’t even a Friday.

  I could feel a flush of adrenaline and anxiety rise from my rapidly beating heart and get pumped into my cheeks like a frigging oil spill.

  Mary Turnbellow, a senior, walked out of the school, stared at Nolan either out of amazement or because he was so hot, and then gave me a skeptical look.

  “Bye, Wren,” she said. She had never really spoken to me before.

  A gaggle of eighth graders led by Molly Frankel came out of school. All of them stared at Nolan, and I think Sarah Smith’s mouth opened in amazement.

  I tried to rip my ponytail holder out of my hair so I wasn’t wearing a Wilma Flintstone bun on the top of my head. Please don’t let a teacher come out. Please don’t let a teacher come out. No such luck. Miss Bongiorno, one of the gym teachers, emerged from the side door with the track team on their way to a run in the park. I could swear she mouthed to me, Who is that guy?

  “I don’t have your number,” he said, and smiled.

  “I don’t have my phone,” I said, and smiled involuntarily at the sound of his voice. Vati pulled my scarf.

  “Oh, you remember Padmavati, right?”

  “Of course, hey, Padmavati.” Long silence as the three of us processed what was going on, or maybe just Vati and I processed. Nolan seemed very comfortable.

  “You guys walking home?”

  “Actually, we were just talking about taking the bus. What are you doing here?” Padmavati asked. Out loud.

  “I came to find Wren,” he said, as plainly as can be.

  “When do you get out?” That sounded weird. “Of school.”

  “I left a little early today.”

  “You left school early?” Vati blurted.

  “Not too early. I have rehearsal later, so.” Did he cut school? I thought to myself. Am I falling for some kind of juvenile delinquent?

  “I have to go home, like right now. My mother was furious with me last night.” Um, Vati? Maybe you could move away by just a few steps and check your phone or something?

  “I know, that’s why I’m here, I wanted to make sure you were all right. I got in touch with Oliver and he said you were in deep.”

  “You spoke to Oliver?” Vati’s voice turned to caramel, even though she was supposed to be mad at Oliver. Nolan nodded.

  “Forget the bus. Let’s walk,” I said, and started booking up the street, ahead of Nolan and Vati.

  Remember that kissing/body thing I was telling you about? So, at that moment on the street, I had none of those feelings. I felt that kissing/body thing dancing in the club, I felt it on the subway, but I did not feel anything like that walking up Eightieth Street toward Lexington Avenue in the cold. I was all brain. I was on the verge of panic that Nolan was at my school while I was in gallons of trouble at home. What on earth was I supposed to do with him now? Then Padmavati brought up Oliver and Reagan in minute one, and they were off and running.

  “I just can’t believe it,” she moaned to him, like he was Charlie or someone close to us. “I have had a thing for him for years, you know? I mean, I can’t believe that (A) Reagan, one of my oldest and closest friends, would butt in like that—that is so against the code, and (B)”—she paused to collect her thoughts—“that he would go there, knowing how I feel!”

  “How do you know he knows you like him?” Nolan asked. I looked back to see how she would answer that one. Padmavati eyed me sheepishly.

  “Well, I have sort of made it clear for almost a decade.”

  “Wren, do you think Oliver knows Padmavati has a thing for him?” I slowed so we were walking in a line, Nolan in the middle.

  “Uh, yeah, I think he probably does.”

  “Has he ever said something to you about it?” asked Vati. Nolan looked at me like, Has he?

  “No, well. I mean, Vati, I think he thinks of it in a sweet way, but I think he thinks of you like he thinks of me, maybe?”

  Vati looked crestfallen. “He does?”

  “We don’t talk about it that much!” Now I felt like I was going to be in trouble with Vati and that would mean I would be in trouble with everyone except for Dinah, and maybe Nolan? But at this point he was not included in the “everyone” category. Not yet.

  “But have you talked about me to him, and you never told me?”

  “No, we haven’t spoken about you, not really, not in words.”

  “Ooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Padmavati moaned. She marched heavily and dramatically up the street. Nolan smiled and winked at me.

  She whipped around.

  “What do you know about Reagan and Oliver?” She pointed at Nolan. Nolan held up his hands like she had a gun.

&
nbsp; “Nothing! I only caught a vibe last night that they hooked up. Don’t kill the messenger!” He laughed. “Did you guys even talk to her?”

  “She wasn’t in school,” Vati and I said in unison.

  Are you catching this? Nolan had in a matter of two blocks turned into a girl.

  “You caught a vibe?” Vati was still walking backward.

  Nolan put his hand to his heart and bowed a little, like he was so sorry to have to say “I did.”

  Padmavati looked sad and turned away from us.

  “You guys, I’m going to take a cab, all right? I’m freezing and this stinks and you guys are all—” She waved her hands around. “You probably want to walk alone.” By that point we were almost on Madison. Vati ran ahead to the street and hailed a cab like the true New Yorker she is. The taxi zoomed across two lanes and screeched to a halt. She whipped open the door, hopped in, and was gone.

  “Wow,” I said, watching the taxi barrel down the avenue and eventually nestle into a pile of traffic at the light. “You were brutal with her.”

  “Brutal?”

  “Yeah!” I smacked him with my parka-covered arm. “Yeah!” He looked shocked, and I was thinking, Are you kidding me? Vati had been in love with Oliver for years and Oliver had never done anything about it and none of us had ever said anything discouraging to her about it, and then in two blocks he did?

  “Your friend Padmavati is a sweetheart. I was just being honest, and anyway, Oliver did text me that he and Reagan hooked up. He said they made out after dinner next to some Egyptian coffins from like 1200 BC.”

  “What? Oh, that is gross.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  We stood there awkwardly.

  “Are you mad at me because I got you in trouble?”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way. “Oh, no. I’m not mad at you. I feel bad because I worried everyone, and now everyone is mad at me.”

  “I want to talk to your parents.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why? I totally made you come with me last night, which I am grateful for because I’m really into you.” I know it’s a cliché, but when he said that I really did feel my knees go weak. “But it’s my screwup and now you are in trouble and I want to face the music with you.”

  “I don’t think it will be music you are used to.”

  “How do you know? You’re funny.” (I so didn’t mean to be funny there.)

  “I have to go. I have to get home.” I said those words because they were true, but really I would have stayed there with him on the corner for the rest of my life.

  “Okay, look.” He checked his phone, which had been in his hand the entire time. “It’s four o’clock and all the cabs will be changing shifts.” I looked out into the sea of yellow taxis migrating north up Madison. Not one of them had its light on.

  “Let me walk with you across the park.” I looked at him like he was nuts. “Listen, if we hustle, we’ll be at your house in twenty minutes. That will be exactly one hour after you are dismissed from school, right?”

  “Yeah. How do you know when I get out of school?”

  “Oliver told me. So forty-five to fifty minutes is not an unusual amount of travel time if you took the bus home, right?”

  I thought to myself that it was a little longer than a ride home would usually take, but he was basically right.

  “Please? I want to help you with this. I want to take care of it with you so I’m not banished from your life. And I bet you anything that would be a major part of your parents’ plan of punishment.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what I would do if I were your parents.”

  29

  “Isn’t it weird, how yesterday we didn’t know each other, and now we are each other’s person?” Nolan mused as he walked through the gates into Central Park. I walked about ten steps looking down at the slate-gray path, processing this extraordinary statement.

  “How am I your person?” I said, stepping directly on a fallen acorn and crunching it under my boot. He smiled at me.

  “Well, you’re not mine, I guess, but here we are”—he reached his arms out wide—“in Central Park, and we’re, together.” He flopped his arms back down and put his hands on his backpack straps. We walked a few more feet. “And yesterday at this exact same time we were not.” I looked at him in astonishment. “I don’t know what it is—but here we are, right?” I could feel my face flush and my mouth widen into a way bigger smile than I would have ever planned.

  “I guess, yeah.”

  “Something happened to us last night, and now, we’re in it.”

  I let those words hang over me for a while and held my tongue literally with my teeth so I didn’t muck up that unbelievable moment. There were a few park workers in olive-green uniforms and neon-orange vests sawing up branches of trees that had fallen because of the big wind the day before. Blue jays were sweeping past us through the sky, resting on trees in pairs. Were we a pair, like the blue jays?

  “Look, there’s the echo bridge.” He ran ahead. As you leave the east side of the park to make your way into the middle, there is a bridge you have to walk under that looks like an illustration from a Grimms’ fairy tale. The acoustics are so good there is usually a musician under it playing saxophone, but not on that day. It was probably too cold and there were hardly any people around. It’s the kind of bridge that when you are beneath it, you have to yell, “Echo!”

  “I can’t believe you call this the echo bridge,” I said, out of breath, having run after him. We call it the echo bridge.

  “Doesn’t everyone in New York call it the echo bridge?”

  “I don’t know, does everyone in New York come to this part of the park?” I rocked back and forth on my low boots.

  “Touché.” He smiled. He had his hands in his jacket pockets.

  “So Oliver says you have such a good voice you don’t even have to go to college.”

  “He did, huh?”

  I nodded, smiling.

  “You were asking about me?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well, I’m not sure about not going to college. I don’t think my mom and pop would like that so much … I may take a year off though, so my band can tour this album we’re working on, see if we can get some buzz. But I want to go to college eventually.”

  “Yeah, you have to go to college, I guess.”

  “I don’t know if you have to go, but I’d love to go.”

  We stared at each other for a while. We were just smiling at each other. It’s such a crazy feeling to really like someone and they are there liking you too. It feels like time stops and you are attached to the other person not by touching or talking but by, like, happiness.

  “I want to go to an art program next year in France. You get to live and paint where van Gogh painted The Starry Night.”

  “What, like a junior-year-abroad type thing?”

  “Yeah, I’ll go for a semester. If I get in. It’s hard to get in.”

  “You’d be all the way in France?” He motioned his head in the direction of where I guess he imagined France was.

  “Yup. But I have to draw this self-portrait, and I don’t know if my grades are good enough.”

  “Where in France?”

  “Saint-Rémy—it’s in the south.”

  “France is so far away,” he said, like it was sort of a bad thing.

  “Well.” I looked down, trying to hide whatever goofy expression of joy or shock that he would be disappointed that I might go somewhere as far away as France a year from now, and that seemed strange and wonderful since at that moment France did feel entirely too far away from what was happening under that bridge. I thought he was going to kiss me. I wanted him to. I wanted to stay under that bridge forever in the unfamiliar wonderfulness. I could still hear a distant, tiny voice reminding me I was in a rolling boil of trouble at home, but I ignored it for just a few more moments.

  See
, that is what this guy did to me. He distracted me with unfamiliar wonderfulness and before I knew it I was as far off the path as Gretel.

  30

  Nolan came home with me.

  “Are you sure you want to come in?” We were on the bottom step of the staircase leading up to my house. The cheerful orange pumpkins and nubby gourds sitting on each step were no indication of the shit storm we would find inside. Nolan’s nose and lips were rosy from the cold and his dark brown hair was windblown from running through the park.

  “Absolutely.”

  “My mother can be sort of—” and then the door at the top of the stairs flung open to reveal Dinah, still in her uniform, hand on her hip, head cocked to the side.

  “You are going down!” she announced, not looking surprised at all that Nolan was standing there. I glared at her.

  “Is Mom home?” I whispered loudly as I trotted up.

  “Oh yeah, she is, and she’s on fire. She had to start knitting because you are so late! It’s a total ten.”

  “I’m not late.” I pulled off my wool cap and looked back at Nolan. We only had four feet of foyer left before we passed through the second door and entered the lion’s den.

  “Hey, Dinah, I met you last night, I’m Nolan.” Mr. Cool was whispering too. Dinah was the only one speaking at full volume.

  “Hi. You have balls of steel showing up here, man.”

  “Dinah! Shut up!”

  “What? You are going to get grounded for, like, ever. Dad came home from work to be here when you got home.”

  “What?” The last time Dad had left work early was when Oliver had broken his collarbone at some sort of after-school sports thing. I don’t even think Dinah was out of diapers. The second door opened and there was Mom. Her hair had held the blowout from the party the night before, so she looked mad as hell but pretty. She was wearing jeans and a long gray sweater, and in her right hand she was clutching a tangle of knitting needles, chunky yarn, and an unfinished scarfy thing.

  “Wren, it is astonishing to me that you are late coming home from—what is this?” She stuck out her pile of knitting at to Nolan.