It had been more than a week since the incident at the café, and Conn kept asking me questions. On the phone, in the few moments before or after English class. It was a thrill to hear Conn’s voice lift at the end of a sentence, and a comfort to answer him, because even though a question might be a hanger waiting to be jabbed into an electrical outlet, it can also be an outstretched arm, ready to curl around you and tug you close.
“No, I don’t,” I told him. My ears hummed with the sound of rain, a car hissing down the street, and Conn’s listening silence. “I don’t remember my parents. The DCFS was never able to track them down. Anyway, they’re dead.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was left outside in the middle of winter without a coat. Either my parents are dead or they should be.”
That kind of killed the conversation. Now Conn’s silence on the other end of the phone was stony, as if I’d said something unforgivable.
“It’s late,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
It was pretty obvious he was going to hang up on me. I felt a flare of resentment. “Who are you to judge? They’re my parents, not yours. You don’t know what it’s like.”
I turned off my cell phone. On the other side of the bedroom wall, Marsha’s snores stuttered, stalled, then kicked into gear again.
I wasn’t sorry for what I’d said. Lily once told me that her earliest memory was the sound of bells, because her mother had sewn little silver jingle bells onto her dresses. That filled me with a huge longing, though Lily, when she saw my face, added that she had been about three years old then, and it was probably the last time her mom had any idea about what made her happy.
“She doesn’t understand me,” Lily said. “I wish she’d leave me alone.”
I thought it might be nice to be misunderstood by a mother. Because if you snap at her and she’s still there in the morning to pour you coffee and say she hates your green hair, that’s something special. It’s forever.
I listened to Marsha’s snores, remembering how I’d huddled with cold outside the fire station as a five-year-old child. And even though Conn made my heart race as I lay in the dark, and even though I knew I had crossed some line with him by wishing my parents were dead, I could never take back what I’d said.
I closed my eyes, and my mind nuzzled its way into sleep. I had one last conscious thought, and it was sharp.
Tomorrow, he will avoid me.
11
I was wrong.
Conn was leaning against his motorcycle, parked by the last street corner I always passed on the way to school. A gust of wind blew through the trees, showering red and gold leaves. He walked up, close enough that I could see the hollow of his throat. He plucked a maple leaf from my hair and twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. It was a red, delicate, pointed star.
I had been angry with him the night before. Really angry. I only fully realized that now, as a knot in my chest disintegrated.
“I have a gift for you.” Conn let the leaf fall. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out something. His hand opened, and resting on his palm was a gleaming metal object the size of a plum. It was round, silvery, and looped by a brass ring. “It’s a planet,” he said. “For the sculpture. I thought of it because J. Alfred wonders what it would be like to squeeze ‘the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question.’”
“‘To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,”’” I quoted the next lines. “‘“Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.”’”
“Do you like it?” He tipped the planet into my open fingers.
I traced the cool, smooth, silver surface. “It’s beautiful. How did you make it?”
He grinned. “I’m good with my hands.”
Those words left me a little breathless.
“I stayed up late last night making it,” he said.
“I thought I had offended you.”
“Of course you didn’t.” He looked straight at me with an innocence so convincing it had to be fake.
“Conn, I may be socially dysfunctional, but I can tell when I’ve upset someone.”
“All right,” he said slowly. “Maybe you did. It seems like you hate your parents without knowing anything about them. Mine are important to me, so I couldn’t ever agree with your perspective. But I can’t fault how you feel when I don’t know much about you. And”—he paused—“I upset you, too.”
I was used to people disagreeing with the way I saw the world. That’s why my DCFS file was brick-thick and I would never be voted Prom Queen or Most Likely to Do Anything. I considered the idea that Conn could disagree with what I had said but would still try to understand how I felt. This seemed as rare and lovely as the planet I cradled in the palm of my hand.
“Let’s ditch school,” he said.
“Ditch?” I glanced at my watch. If we began walking now, I wouldn’t be late for first period. “I don’t know, Conn. I like Art.”
“I thought you were supposed to be working on Whatever You Want. Maybe you want to spend the day with me.”
I looked at him. Why did he have to speak so seductively, when he couldn’t mean it? Carefully, I said, “I don’t want to miss English. I also like English.”
“Ah, but you hate Pre-Calculus.”
He had a point. “What about lunch? My friends will be looking for me.”
“Your friends monopolize you.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. They’re like a fortress with a sign that says TOUCH DARCY JONES AND WE WILL DESTROY YOU. I find it surprisingly … touching, actually. I admire loyalty.”
“Destroy,” I scoffed. “They would never hurt anybody.”
“There are different ways of hurting people. Raphael would go the most obvious route, of course. He would fight with fists. James—no, you call him Jims, don’t you?—has a gift for psychological warfare. As for Lily, she is perhaps the most dangerous of the three, because she’s the decision maker, and the others will follow her lead. You couldn’t have chosen a better army.”
I stared. I had never thought about them in this way. “That’s not why they’re my friends.”
“Maybe not. But they can do without you for one afternoon.”