We arrived at our first-period class, AP English, and took our customary spot in the front left-hand corner of the room. Actually, it’s not just our customary spot but the only one where we fit. Each of our classrooms has one extra-wide, deep bench, custom-made for us by the guys in woodshop, behind two desks that are almost side by side, but angled away from each other. The trick is to pull the desks out, slide-shuffle ourselves onto the bench, and then pull the desks back toward us.
Right next to us, Kim and Amber giggled and whispered, and occasionally one of them would cry out “No!” or “Yes!”
Hailey had the good fortune to be sitting next to the wall (she’s always to my left, and by “always” I mean abso-freaking-lutely always), so I was closer and more vulnerable to getting sucked into the mindless void of their conversations, which generally flitted around among such topics as nail polish, cute animal videos, reality TV, and who had thrown up in the Taco Bell parking lot over the weekend.
I tried to focus on getting my notebook and Invisible Man out of my messenger bag. As usual, Hailey and I had each worn a bag slung over our inside shoulders, so the bags hung on our outside hips. After sitting down, we pulled our bags in front of us to take out our stuff, but then we had to take turns leaning down to set the bags on the floor. We had to pay attention to each other’s timing to avoid getting jerked around.
Kim turned to me. “Clara, have you and Hailey seen the new guy yet?”
“Nope. Heard about him, though.”
“Anything juicy?”
I thought about it. “Well, I mean, you know about the thing with his face, right?”
“What thing?” Kim pursed her cherry-red lips and raised her overplucked eyebrows all the way up to her bangs, leaning forward in a way that gave her serious cleavage. I guess just talking about this unseen, unknown guy was enough to put her into seduction mode. I’ve known Kim since kindergarten, and even then she was kind of a tramp.
Wait, let me unbitchify that statement. What I mean to say is, sure, Kim and I are friendly, and we’ve known each other a long time, but we’ve never been particularly close.
Yeah, that’s much better.
Since I hadn’t answered her question, she leaned forward even farther and stage-whispered it. “What thing?”
“Well, the fungus?” I said, like I didn’t really want to mention it. “Not that I really know anything about it. I mean, it sounds like it doesn’t cover his whole face.”
Kim and Amber looked at each other with alarmed expressions, and then they both started giggling in a nervous way, probably wondering whether this was one of those occasional-but-not-too-frequent times when Clara Cannot Be Trusted; and that was when he walked in.
Juanita’s description had been completely wrong. He was tall, like she’d said—almost awkwardly so—but he wasn’t “kind of cute.” He was Cute with a capital C. Cute in a sweet-looking, gangly, 97-percent-grown-but-still-3-percent-boy kind of way, with deep blue eyes like the sky before sunset, when it’s just about to throw itself open and let in the stars.
Also, there was absolutely no visible fungus on his face whatsoever. Go figure.
I checked Kim’s reaction first, and she was all attention. Amber’s lips were parted, and her eyes were wide. Then I twisted to look at Hailey, though I could really see her only in profile. She shrugged and actually said out loud, although without looking in his direction as she said it: “Meh.”
Kim and Amber couldn’t control their laughter at that, but because they were still looking at this tall, cute guy who had just walked in, you could tell he thought they were laughing at him.
Also, he didn’t know where to sit.
Luckily, the teacher, Miss Young, walked in right behind him. She held out her hand to him and cried, “You must be Max!”
Was she actually batting her eyelashes at him, or was I projecting?
“I am,” he agreed, shaking her hand.
She introduced herself and told him where to sit, at the back of the class.
As Max walked in our direction toward his seat, he caught my eye, and I felt myself turning red. Two reasons: First, he’d caught me staring at him, and while half the class was probably staring too, I of all people should have known better. And second, in our small town I usually saw only people who were used to me and Hailey. In the presence of a new person, I couldn’t deny being a spectacle. Or half a spectacle. But a gigantic one. Like a car crash on a freeway where a car is turned upside down and another one is wedged under a semi, and you can still see the smoke. I was half of that.
But for some reason I didn’t look away from Max as quickly as I meant to, and maybe that was good, because he smiled at me. And his smile was like, I don’t know, whatever thing would magically wipe away that huge car crash and turn it into some kind of stellar rock concert, and before I could even think about it, I smiled back.
4
Hailey
“But it turns out he’s really weird,” Bridget announced at lunchtime.
We were eating on a couple of picnic blankets spread out on the grass, as usual—me and Clara, Juanita, and Bridget. It’s not exactly easy to plop ourselves down onto a blanket, but it beats the awkwardness of trying to sit at a picnic table with an attached bench, like the rest of our class.
I could feel Clara tensing up behind me right away, but I jumped in with what we surely all wanted to know. “Weird like fascinating? With an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure Norwegian comedians? Or weird like scary, with a private taxidermy station in his basement?”
Bridget gave me a blank look. “Are those the only choices?”
Bridget is a very sweet girl, but keeping up with a conversation is not her strong suit. It’s funny, because she looks like one of those precocious little kids you’d see in a movie. She’s tiny and dark-haired, with thick bangs and black-rimmed glasses that hide most of her itty-bitty face. She’s smart, too, but in a grades kind of way, not an on-the-ball kind of way.
“Never mind. What’s weird about him?” Juanita asked as she bit into a baby carrot.
Bridget poked at her pasta with a plastic fork. “Well, for one thing, there’s the fact that he switched schools during October of his senior year of high school. Who would even do something like that?”
“I doubt it was his choice,” I pointed out. “Something must have come up with his parents.”
“I guess so,” Bridget conceded, “but how do you explain the fact that he’s, like, seven and a half feet tall but he claims he doesn’t play basketball?”
Juanita patted Bridget on the arm. “Sweetie, he’s not seven and a half feet tall. I’m pretty sure he’s not even six and a half feet tall.”
Bridget shrugged. “And then also, he moved here from LA, right? But in history class Amber asked him if he had ever seen any stars when he lived there. She was thinking maybe he’d seen one of the Hemsworth brothers when he was standing in line at Starbucks or something, right? But he was like, ‘No, are you kidding me? There’s way too much light pollution in LA to see many stars at all.’ I mean, what does that even mean?”
My head whipped toward Clara, but I couldn’t see her expression. Because of the way we’re conjoined, we can never look at each other’s faces straight-on, unless it’s in a mirror or a photograph. If we both turn our heads as far as we can, we can come pretty close to a full view. But mostly we just catch glimpses of each other—at best a profile.
So when Max had walked into our English class earlier, I hadn’t actually seen Clara’s pupils widen. But I’d caught sight of her smile. I could tell she thought he was cute. And now we were to learn that he was a stargazer, too? She was bound to be intrigued by that bit of news.
“Come on, Bridget,” Juanita said. “You know what light pollution is. That’s when the city lights keep the night sky from getting totally dark. Right, Clara?”
Clara set down her turkey sandwich and clicked into Junior Professor Mode. “Yes, that’s the most common definition. Remember the observ
atory at Sutter College?”
“Oh yeah,” Bridget said. “We went there, what, like six months ago? You could see a ton of stars.”
“That’s because it’s so far away from any big cities,” Clara explained. “You’d never be able to see so many stars in LA.”
Bridget took a big swig from her water bottle and nodded thoughtfully. Her little face was all tight with concentration behind her giant glasses. “Yeah, I figured it was something like that, because then he also said that he was totally relieved to get up here in the mountains, where he could get a decent look at the Andromeda galaxy. But I still don’t understand why he would even think that was what Amber was asking him.”
Clara shrugged. “Hey, if you think movie stars are more exciting than a spiral galaxy that’s on a collision course with the Milky Way, you’re entitled to your own opinion.”
I studied Juanita for a minute, wondering if she was really serious about not being interested in Max.
Juanita caught my eye, and a hint of a smile twitched at her lips. “You know what I was thinking?” she said. “I bet Max would love that observatory we visited. I wonder if he even knows about it yet.”
Was she talking about inviting Max up there for Clara’s sake? Or for her own? Did she understand that Clara was interested in him? And even if she did understand, would it occur to her to treat it seriously—to back off if she did like him, like she would for another friend? I had no history to go on here.
“Someone should tell him about it,” I said slowly, looking for clues in Juanita’s expression.
Bridget lifted her tiny eyebrows behind her giant glasses and leaned forward eagerly, as if in great suspense—which she probably actually was. “But who?”
Juanita smiled. “Here’s what I’m thinking. We tell him we’re going up there to see it, and we invite him to go with us. You know, just a casual group thing, no big deal.”
“Really?” Clara asked without looking up, and with maybe just the slightest quaver in her voice. “I thought you said you were done with boys.”
Juanita’s laugh verged on a slight cackle. “Oh yeah, I’m done with them, but you’re not.”
I almost cackled myself. Of course, I should have known that Juanita would be on top of this, and totally on my side. She didn’t want to invite Max to the observatory because she was interested in him herself; she wanted to invite him so Clara could get a chance to know him. In a dark, quiet, beautiful place, where my sister would be totally in her element. And where, because of the darkness, our conjoinment would become all but invisible.
Clara stiffened for a moment, but it passed. “Nice try,” she said, her voice so close to normal that I was pretty sure I was the only one who could hear its thin, sharp edge. “But the observatory is sacred. I won’t go there with just anyone.”
“Who says he’s just anyone?” Juanita asked. “Don’t you want to find out?”
Clara shook her head. “Not particularly, no.”
And this was such a freaking pathetic lie that I couldn’t take it anymore. “Well, I do,” I said, “so we’re going. That’s that.”
“Really?” Juanita looked puzzled. She looked at me, at Clara, and back at me again. “Um, okay, then when should we go?”
“Friday night,” I said.
“Hailey!” Clara hissed. “Cut it out! I don’t want to go.”
“But I do,” I said, “and Juanita does, and Bridget does. Right, Bridge?”
“Sure,” Bridget said, “it’ll be totally fun. I like the observatory. Plus, it’s the perfect place for Clara to ask Max to the Sadie Hawkins dance.”
I cocked my head to one side. Had Bridget just pulled a random idea out of left field, or was she actually a step ahead of us all?
“Ha!” Clara said. “Now, that’s a good one. I’m sure one of the cheerleaders has snatched him up for that already.”
She jerked her head in the direction of the senior A-list picnic table, where at that very moment Max was surrounded by a veritable swarm of cheerleaders and jocks.
Bridget frowned behind her heavy glasses. “Maybe they haven’t gotten around to asking him yet. Or maybe cheerleaders aren’t his type.”
Clara shook her head sadly at Bridget’s hopeless naïveté. “Bridge,” she said, reaching over to pat Bridget on the knee, “you know I don’t like to dance.”
By which she meant that she—we—had never danced. Not once. Not even in the privacy of our bedroom.
“Maybe you could go and not dance,” Bridget suggested. “Maybe he would understand.”
Clara froze for just a second, then started talking rapidly, with forced cheerfulness. “You know what I was actually thinking? This whole Sadie Hawkins concept is pretty sexist and backward. Girls can ask guys out anytime they want, so why do we need a special occasion for it? Maybe we should all boycott this event on feminist grounds.”
Juanita stared at Clara, her eyes alight. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you seem to feel very strongly about this all of a sudden. What’s up?”
“Nothing. Could we just please change the subject? Please?”
Juanita squealed. “Oh, look at you! You’re nervous because you want to ask him out! Otherwise you would just be ignoring us.”
Clara shook her head, and her voice rose to an unnaturally high pitch. “I don’t even know him! I haven’t even spoken to him!”
“Yeah, I know,” Juanita said. “But you think he’s cute, don’t you? Cute plus telescopes—what more do you need? So it seems that Bridget has once again accidentally hit the nail on the head. You are definitely asking Max to the dance.”
“Can anyone hear me?” Clara asked. “Am I not speaking out loud? That is not going to happen, I promise you.”
“Sure it is,” I answered, brushing the crumbs from my fingers. “Because if you don’t ask him, then I’m going to ask him for you.”
5
Clara
My main priority for the rest of that day was to avoid Max at all costs, which was a little tricky, since I didn’t even know which classes he was in. I wasn’t sure if Hailey was serious about asking him to the dance on my behalf, but I wouldn’t have put it past her. This was the girl who had convinced our fifth-grade teacher to make me go first for every class presentation, in order to help me get over my stomach-churning stage fright. Which didn’t even work.
I had spent the last seventeen years trying to camouflage my shocking self with all the bits and pieces of normal life I could grab. My wardrobe was bland but never out of style; my musical tastes were borrowed from my classmates. My opinions, often sharp inside my head, were normally softened before being spoken out loud. When people talked about doing things that, because of my situation, I couldn’t possibly do—driving a car, riding a bike, skiing, kissing a guy—I tried not to point it out to them. I tried not to make anyone uncomfortable.
And this, of course, included never attending a school dance, let alone asking a boy to one. I wasn’t sure what it would look like if Hailey and I tried to dance, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a sight that anybody needed to see.
Hailey, on the other hand, followed none of my rules. And she adored making people uncomfortable.
So when I saw Max walking in the hallway up ahead of us, grinning and chuckling at something that Lindsey Baker was saying to him, my fear was instantaneous and instinctive. Before I even had time to think about it, I was babbling something to Hailey about needing to go back to our locker, and yanking her bodily away from Max and Lindsey.
Later, when I saw him crossing by a few yards away, I was more prepared, and managed to distract Hailey with some questions about a recent scandal in the art world.
The closest call came when he turned up in our fourth-period physics class. He arrived just as the teacher started to lecture, so Hailey couldn’t accost him, but all through class I didn’t hear a word that anyone said. Luckily, as soon as class ended, some guys got him involved in a discussion about sports. Hailey didn’t try to break in
.
Finally we arrived at our last and most pointless class of the day—art.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, art is probably the most unique contribution of the human species, now that we know that chimpanzees can create tools and dolphins have a type of language. Art may, in fact, be the one thing that elevates us above our animal natures.
I heartily despise it.
“You know why you hate art?” Hailey asked me as we walked into the art room.
“Cut that out,” I said. “I hate it when I’m thinking about something and then you just start talking about it, like you can read my mind. Try to remember that we’re not telepathic, okay?”
“I’ll tell you why,” she said as she led me over to the cabinet where she always stashed her favorite paints and brushes. “It’s because you suck at it.”
“Well, obviously I suck at it,” I said. “That’s a given. But also, art itself sucks.” Okay, I don’t always soften my opinions when it’s Hailey that I’m talking to.
She shook her bright pink head. “You just don’t get it.”
“Or,” I suggested, “maybe there is nothing to get.”
I helped her carry her paints and brushes over to her easel, where she had already sketched out and begun to paint a portrait in the medieval style.
This was something she’d been doing since the end of junior year. She’d copy the painting techniques from the Middle Ages, back when nobody had figured out things like perspective to give dimension to things, so it all looked flat and depthless. Back then the one thing that everybody wanted to paint was the Madonna and child. So Hailey adapted that format to paint things like a curvaceous pop star holding a tiny photographer on her hip, or in this case, a woman in a burka cuddling a naked baby girl.
If it were anybody else, I would have guessed she was just pretending to have a point, but Hailey is always sincere. Still, when it comes to her art, she keeps her words to herself. Whatever she’s trying to say, she says it only with paint.
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