“That’s what I’m going to do.” I filled a mug with water and stuck it in the microwave. “Me plus free time equals homework.” It probably wasn’t wise to mention that Conn was part of this equation. Marsha hadn’t exactly forbidden me to have boys over, but probably only because the thought of it had never entered her head.
I glanced at her and fought a foolish urge to tell her everything. I remembered how it felt to not feel Conn’s fingertips touch my hair. And I knew the exact nature of my hope. I saw its shape. I saw its size.
The microwave chimed. Marsha slurped down the milk at the bottom of her bowl and switched off the television. “Oh!” She looked at the clock. “I’m running late. Bye, Darcy.”
I lifted a hand and made myself wave. “Bye,” I said as she hustled out the door.
Alone in the sudden quiet, I dumped the remaining contents of a jar of coffee crystals into my mug, stirred, and choked it down.
Then I waited.
Stage One of waiting for Conn was a hot shower, during which I was so sleep-deprived and nervous that I used Marsha’s purple shower gel and emerged from the bathroom smelling flowery and way too flirty.
Stage Two was selecting clothes that would make me seem unimpressed by Conn’s presence. Something simple, careless. Black cargo pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. Done.
Stage Three was revising my strategy. Maybe I should look like I cared, a little? I tried to reproduce the elegant hairstyle Lily had concocted for me in the girls’ bathroom.
Stage Four: I failed. I looked ridiculous. I tore the pins from my hair and brushed it loose and smooth.
Stage Five: I curled up on the sofa with my sketchbook and cracked it open to a bare page. I drew a low stone house framed by a wrought-iron fence. The lines came heavy, hard, and fast, and I began to relax until I realized that this house, like everything else I’d been sketching lately, looked familiar yet impossible to recognize.
Stage Six: I threw the sketchbook onto the shag carpet.
Stage Seven: there was a knock at the door.
I stood slowly, moved toward the door slowly, and opened it slowly—not just because I didn’t want to seem eager, but also because I sensed that the moment Conn came inside, everything would change.
He held a cardboard box in his arms. Conn’s face was grim, and his breath fogged the air.
When he stepped into the living room, his gaze flickered, pausing on the three closed doors down the hallway: the bathroom, Marsha’s room, my bedroom. He raised the cardboard box, which ticked like a bomb. “Where should I put this?”
“The rest of the sculpture is in my bedroom.” I led the way. Determined to speak lightly, I added, “Marsha doesn’t like art to get all over the house, unless it comes in the form of an adorable portrait of a furry woodland creature.”
My room was small, but I kept it neat—except for the desk, which was strewn with pencils, a stylus, and an X-Acto knife, everything clustered around a tall, rectangular object I had sheathed in a pillowcase.
Conn set the box on the bed, and when the mattress sloshed he lifted his brows. “Is that … filled with water?”
“Very 1970s, isn’t it? Marsha was so proud when she first showed me this room. She thinks everybody wants a waterbed.”
Conn pressed his fingers against it, bewildered, as if he’d never seen a waterbed before. Then he shrugged and turned to shut the bedroom door. The sound thumped somewhere deep inside me.
He pushed up the sleeves of his gray sweater, revealing the tight muscles of his forearms, and slipped both hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “We should get started,” he said, his tone all business. He nodded at the pillowcased object on my desk. “Is that it?”
Grateful for something to do, I unveiled the sculpture.
It was a glass box encasing a human figure made from plaster, pinned by its feet to a wooden bottom. It was J. Alfred, and he could barely be seen through the ocean I had painted on the glass panes. Above the water, the glass walls were clear and speckled with tiny, gold-colored watch gears that I had wheedled out of the manager at the local jewelers. I had superglued the gears, one by one, into constellations above the ocean. The box had no lid.
Conn stepped closer and touched the painted mermaids swimming in the waves, their tails flowing like long dresses. “‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea,’” he quoted the poem’s final lines. “‘By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’ Darcy.” He looked at me. “This is beautiful.” His gaze held mine so fully that I felt as if his hands had cupped my face.
I forced myself to speak. “The shadow box isn’t sturdy. I used a hot glue gun to fit the four panes of glass into a rectangle, so the box won’t last forever, but I reinforced the base with copper wire. We’ll do the same to the top once you’ve inserted the clock mechanism. I should have used a small propane torch to fuse the glass together, but I don’t have one, and anyway, open flames make me twitchy. I don’t like … that is, I’m…” I trailed off.
“You’re afraid of fire,” he said gently.
“Yes,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“Don’t worry. We all have our weaknesses. I think the sculpture is perfect.”
“No, it isn’t.” I opened Conn’s cardboard box and lifted out a small, narrow machine. “But it will be.”
Reluctantly, Conn removed his hands from his pockets and took the clock. Once he held it, though, his shoulders relaxed. Maybe, like me, he was grateful to have something to do. He sat at the desk, lowered the clock into the shadow box, and began to attach it by squeezing metal clamps onto the glass edges. His fingers were quick and sure. Gifted. I watched them dance, and it was easy, too easy, to fall under their spell.
A bad idea. I tore my gaze away. I looked at the clock instead. As I studied its intricacy, I realized that Conn was an artist, too.
Then he leaned back, and I could see what we had done together. There were the coffee spoons, one painted and one plain, measuring the hours and minutes. There was the clock’s pendulum: the rusted spring we’d salvaged from the train tracks, dangling over J. Alfred’s head in a spiral like a strange halo. There was everything we had planned for a month, everything except—
“The planet,” I said. “Where should we put it? Maybe we could fix it to the top of the box, tilted at an angle? Or—”