"I want to hear about you," I say as we settle into our usual classroom for our lunch meditation that now has nothing to do with lunch or meditation. We are both on the broad windowsill, leaning up against the wall behind us. I have my legs up, my arms around my knees, my chin resting on them, and I am worrying on a hangnail that has been bothering me all day. I hate hangnails; once I get them, I can't stop torturing myself by making them worse. That probably says something about me, but I refuse to think about that.
Trow is sprawling a little bit as he responds, "I'm not that interesting."
"Of course you are. Don't you think that the boy the most interesting person in the state of Rhode Island finds interesting must be a pretty interesting person in his own right?"
"You get that kind of logic from your lawyer mom," Trow accuses me good-naturedly. Trow is smiling. I love how he is almost always smiling at me.
I can't help but smile back. "She has tried to be a tempering influence on me," I tell him. "Otherwise she says I'd grow up all flighty, like Mom. I need to get my yin and yang in balance."
"Your yin and yang, huh?"
"We talk like that in my house."
"I bet. Which one is your real mother? Or is either of them? Wait, is that question too much?"
"No." I'm used to questions like that; they don't bother me. "My mom is my birth mother. The yoga studio one. She was raising me on her own when she met my mother." I leave out the circumstances of their meeting. Sometimes people are funny about that. I like Trow and I trust him, but I'm not quite ready just yet to spill all of that.
"How old were you?"
The question catches me by surprise. "I…don't know," I admit.
Trow blinks. "You don't know?"
"No, I…" I'm confused, because shouldn't I know this? They tell me the stories of that time, and it all feels very long ago, but how long ago? "I must have been very young. I guess probably still a baby. Because I don't remember a time before Mother. But I don't know how old I was. I guess I never really asked."
"What about your father?"
"My father?" I echo.
"Yeah," says Trow. And then he abruptly backpedals, as if he realizes now that asking about my father was a faux pas. "Never mind, I didn't—"
"No, no, it's fine," I say automatically, because I think that's the response you're supposed to give, but actually I'm sitting there wondering about this myself. I've never asked about my father. Could that be right? I have no recollection of ever asking my mom about my father, ever. He's never been a part of my life, and she's never mentioned him, and I've just followed her cue and never asked.
Is that normal? That can't be normal. Then again, it's not like I've ever been super normal.
"Wait," I say as I realize it. "You're not going to trick me that easily. We were supposed to be talking about you today."
"Okay." He cocks his head to the side. "What if I told you that I have seven sisters?"
I consider that. "And how many brothers?"
He smiles. "None."
"So it's you and seven girls?
"It's me and seven girls."
"Theoretically," I say.
He chuckles a bit. "No, it's for real. I didn't mean to make it sound like it wasn't for real. I have seven little sisters."
"Seven little sisters." I try to wrap my mind around that. When you're an only child, having just one other person around with you seems impossible, never mind seven. Seven. Is that enough for a baseball team? Surely enough for some kind of sports team.
Trow nods and rattles names off. "Tabitha, Tacita, Taevyn, and Talon, Taheara and Taffy and Tam." There is a rhythm to the way he says the names, like they are part of a nursery rhyme. Probably he's just really used to reciting his sisters' names. Probably he needed some kind of mnemonic just to remember them.
"And how old are they?" I ask.
"I'm the oldest, and they're all younger. The triplets are the youngest; they're only three."
"Triplets," I echo. I can't even imagine this. I don't even have cousins. I'm not sure I would even know what to do with triplet three-year-olds. "Wow," I say. And then I say the first thing that comes to mind. "I bet your house is never quiet."
Trow laughs. Trow has a great laugh, rich and deep, like when you're out on the ocean and you look down and you can see the first layer and then you realize that there's another layer underneath—that's what Trow's laugh is like. He doesn't laugh very often, but I'm always happy when he does. "No," he agrees wryly. "Not frequently."
I wonder if that's why he looks so tired almost all the time. It must be exhausting to be the oldest of eight. It must be even more exhausting to be the oldest of eight when the youngest is still a baby. When the three youngest are still babies.
I also wonder if this is why he says he can't do things after school. I wonder if he has to go home and help out. That would make sense. I wish he'd just told me that, instead of being so enigmatic about it and making me think the worst. Never give a stargazer too little information; we fill it in with the most fanciful crises.
"Is your house very quiet?" he asks.
"Well, we do a lot of meditating, Mom and I. I'm guessing you don't really get meditation time at home."
"No." Trow grins at me. "We really, really don't."
· · ·
I never talk about Trow at home. Mom would normally be my natural confidante about him. But things have been weird between Mom and me since the night of the tarot card incident. It's been weeks now, but it still hasn't quite fixed itself. I wish that I could tell them all about Trow—I am bursting with things to say about him—but I can't talk about him because I am worried they will make less of him somehow. So I am careful not to say anything that might be out of the ordinary, anything beyond completely commonplace and dull. I don't want to give Mom any more reason to worry. And me talking about a boy would definitely be out of the ordinary, especially since it all started with me dealing tarot cards about the boy.
It would also be weird for me to start asking questions about my father. I know that. All my life, I've never bothered to ask a single question. To ask one now—when Mom is already on edge because of some perceived danger with the tarot cards—would definitely be a big red flag to them. I don't want them to think that Trow might be connected to that red flag, even though it is Trow's question that started me thinking about him. I don't want to do anything that might seem suspicious; I don't want to be the focus of any more attention than I already am. So I don't mention Trow and I don't ask any questions about my father and I keep my head down, and I go to school and come home from school and teach my yoga classes and do my homework, and that is basically my life.
And that has always been my life, so it's strange to me how empty and hollow it feels, now that Trow has been inserted into it. I imagine my life as being one enormous pie chart. There is a super big slice of it that is bright, sunny yellow—because yellow is happy—that is labeled "Time with Trow." And then there is this other slice of it that is beige that is labeled "Everything Else."
It's not like I have turned into one of those girls who is so obsessed with a boy that she drops everything else. I still teach my yoga classes and have dinner with Mother and Mom. But the truth is that I have never before had much in my life beyond that. I have always been kind of a loner; I have never really had friends. When I was little, Mother and Mom were worried about that and tried to make me have friends, but it never really worked out. And I wasn't sad about that, and I wasn't lonely, and eventually they made a decision that, well, life is about being happy, and if you're happy how you are, then what does it matter how society thinks you ought to be happy? That's what makes so many people unhappy, you know, chasing the things that society tells them should make them happy. I see it all the time with the people in my yoga class, working all day at high-powered jobs they hate because they thought it would be a good thing to get high-powered jobs. It is not a good thing, not all the time, not unless you love it the way Mother loves her job. If you love it because you love it, that's good; if you love it because you think you ought to love it, that's not so good. At least, that's what Mother and Mom always taught me.
All of this is a super long, roundabout way of saying that I was never lonely before I met Trow. And then I met Trow and I realized what people meant when they said they get lonely. Before, I was just, like, how could anyone be lonely when there was so much around you in the world? But I miss Trow when I'm not with him, even when I'm with Mother and Mom.
This is silly, right? I feel like it's silly. So I definitely don't tell Trow how I feel. But I am honest with myself, because that's important, and with myself, I admit that the time with Trow is the best.
We spend every lunch together, talking. Trow tells me about his sisters. It sounds like absolute chaos, but it's hilarious.
I tell Trow about the yoga classes, where there is one woman who refuses to do yoga from anywhere except up against a corner so that she can keep an eye out for gnomes that might creep out of the heating vents, and the acupuncturist, who has started a dating blog but is insistent she only date men who show up to the first date with blue shirts, which has meant a lot of rejection.
"How do you know so many crazy people?" Trow asks me, grinning, as I tell these stories.
I hesitate, considering. "Are they crazy?" To me, these are just the people I know. They are definitely no more crazy than, say, Sophie and her pack. In fact, they are way less crazy than Sophie and her pack, in my view. I wasn't really telling these stories to tell stories about crazy people; I was just telling these stories to tell Trow about people I know.
I don't really ask Trow why he's absent so much—because he still does miss a lot of school—and he doesn't volunteer any information. I think his family life sounds understandably insane, and maybe he needs to help out his mother, and maybe he's embarrassed to tell me that. I can understand being protective of parents who don't quite fit the mold. It's why I'm always so close-lipped about Mom. So I don't ask him, because I figure someday he'll tell me if it's important, and it's probably not important anyway. Trow is who he is, and I know who he is, and I don't need to know every detail of his home life to know that—any more than he needs to know about the time that I spend looking at stars through my eyelashes to try to get a feeling about my future with him.
I am teaching Trow yoga positions, slowly. We can't do much on the disgusting, dusty floors of the school, but we do variations on child's pose on the wide windowsill, and sometimes we spread out our respective sweaters and do legs up against the wall, lying on our backs next to each other and talking. I love this pose. It feels very cozy and intimate, just the two of us in an inversion, the blood rushing down and making our hearts beat and our heads buzz.
It is when we are in this position that I say it, finally. We're having a vague conversation in which Trow is talking about my yoga class.
"I would love to come to it someday, and at the same time, I think I would be offended when it turns out not to be a private class just for me." He grins across at me. "I mean, how dare you teach other people the magic of proper breathing?" he teases gently. And then, "What got your mom into yoga in the first place? Was it because it was trendy?"