“Four.”
“I bet I can swing that,” he says. “Even if I’m a little late.”
“That would be awesome,” she says.
Mom says, “I can’t make it.” Even though she works upstairs. And she can. Totally. Make it. “But if you want, we can go shopping this weekend.”
We all go back to eating aubergine casserole. For the record: The last time Mom took me shopping on a whim was never. And it’s not like Ellis has grown out of her clothes. The saddest part is that Ellis still pretends they have the perfect relationship Mom wants them to have. Because Ellis is her last chance, and they both know it.
“It would be nice to see you in the paper,” Mom says. “They’re always concentrating on boys’ sports or the kids who get scholarships.”
“I’m a midfielder,” Ellis says, which she knows Mom won’t understand, so I don’t know why she says it.
“But you’re talented,” she says. “I’m going to get in touch with Mike at the paper and see what he can do. We do each other favors. He could get you in there,” she says, pointing with her fork.
“I don’t really want to be in the paper,” Ellis says.
“Everyone wants to be in the paper!” Mom says. “And it’s not like it’s the Times. No need to be modest.”
I can’t figure out if that’s an insult or a compliment.
When it’s my turn to talk about my day, I share lit mag news.
“We got a few poems today that were half decent,” I say. “And there’s a kid in freshman AP English who writes these great fantasy short stories, and he submitted a few of them. I picked one of those, too.”
“Fantasy?” Mom says. “Seriously, Astrid. You’re the editor. You should set the bar.”
Instead of replying with my usual open-your-mind speech, I send love to my mother. Mom, I love you even though you are a critical, unforgiving horror show. This casserole sucks, but I like the way you roasted the walnuts.
“We’re starting the first unit of the Socrates Project in humanities next week, and I’m kinda excited,” I say. Mom nods, even though she has no idea what the Socrates Project is… because I haven’t told her. “I think I’ll just be happy to stop talking about Zeno and his dumb motion theories.” I haven’t told her about Zeno, either.
“And how’s Kristina?” she asks. She’s using the Kristina tone—a weird mix of jealousy and I-know-something-you-don’t-know because she and Kristina text each other a lot and she thinks I don’t know this.
“Fine.”
“Any word on Homecoming?”
“We vote Friday.”
“I know Kristina’s really excited about it.”
“Yeah.”
“I think she has a real chance to win. She has all the right qualities,” she says.
I am annoyed that she thinks she knows more than I do about Kristina. Believe me, if she knew half of what I know, she’d probably choke on this awful aubergine casserole and die right here in her four-hundred-dollar shoes.
“What qualities are those?” I ask.
She takes a sip of her wine. “You know. She’s just such a great representation of what this town is all about.”
“True,” I say. Because it’s true. Kristina is exactly the opposite of what she seems, and that’s a perfect representation of Unity Valley.
Then Dad tells us about how boring it is to work in his new office cubicle all day, talking to people on the phone about microprocessors and systems analytics while looking over his shoulder for the outsourcing memo. (His last job lasted eight months before the company moved to Asia. The job before that lasted eleven.)
“To top it all off, while I was at lunch, someone borrowed my stapler and broke it.”
“Aw, poor Gerry,” Mom says.
“Hey, that was my favorite stapler. It was ergonomic,” he says.
Without a moment’s sympathy, Mom launches into her day (hellish clients, dumb photographers, bitchy magazine editors) between gulps of wine and mouthfuls of eggplant. She could go for an hour, I bet.
We all eat as fast as we can to get out of here.
Then, after the dishes are done and the kitchen is cleaned, Ellis goes for her nightly jog on well-lit Main Street with two of her small-town teammates, Dad sits down in the quiet room to read a book, Mom goes back to her office, and I go out into the backyard to talk to the passengers.
3
ASTRID JONES SENDS HER LOVE. FROM A PICNIC TABLE.
I MADE THIS PICNIC TABLE with Dad the summer before junior year. I was sick of making birdhouses. Seriously. How many birdhouses can two people make before they run out of things to say? Before they run out of space to put them? Our backyard was an ode to nesting and flight—part bird zoo and part art exhibit.
They’d say: It’s very unique.
Dad had the whole summer off on account of his temporary unemployment, and Mom was staying with friends back in New York City to do some well-paid consulting for a month. Ellis was at summer sports camp for a week, and it was just Dad and me. Dad hadn’t discovered pot yet. He was a late bloomer, I guess.
So we built the table and moved it to the back patio, and even though Mom hates eating outside, she lets us do it about twice a summer just to be normal small-town people, the way she wants us to be.
The rest of the time, the table just sits here with nothing to do. So I lie on it and I look at the sky. I see shapes in the clouds by day and shooting stars by night. And I send love to the passengers inside the airplanes. It makes me happy. Anyone looking on might think I was smoking Dad’s pot, I bet. Lying here, grinning.
But it feels good to love a thing and not expect anything back. It feels good to not get an argument or any pushiness or any rumors or any bullshit. It’s love without strings. It’s ideal.
Tonight I spot a small jet and I concentrate on it and I stare at it and smile. Its very existence proves Zeno of Elea wrong. If motion was impossible, there would be no such things as airplanes. Or departure times. Or arrival times. I send my love up in a stream of steady light and in my head I think: I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
PASSENGER #4657
HEIDI KLEIN, SEAT 17A FLIGHT #879
NASHVILLE TO PHILADELPHIA
I stare at him because I can’t believe he just said that.
“What?” he asks.
“Did you really just say that?” It’s rhetorical, that question. I know what he said.
“What?” he says again, this time smiling that smile at me because he knows I can’t resist it. This is how he convinced me to let him move into our apartment. He said he’d rather sleep on the couch and pitch in rent than stay in that shitty dorm room with his dorky roommate. Then he smiled just like this.
“I’m fighting with you over how you can’t cook anything and how I have to come home from chem lab to a stinky apartment and no dinner and you tell me this now?”
“Yep.”
“You love me?”
“Uh-huh.”
I can’t help but smile back at him. “We only met two months ago.”
“So?”
“So you can’t love me,” I say.