I am almost offended on Mom's behalf. "She was doing yoga long before it became trendy," I defend her. "She's always been doing yoga." I consider. "I think it…I think it connects her to the other world."
"What other world?"
I've never actually asked. Mom says stuff like that and I don't ask questions, because why would I? To me, when she says things like that, they make a vague sort of sense that doesn't need to be challenged. "I don't know, the world that's not this one," I answer. "Don't you miss it?"
"Miss what?" Trow looks quizzical, but in a gentle way, like I am amazing and remarkable, and he's quite happy with me and all my strangeness. I don't think it's strangeness though. I think it's strange that other people don't live this way.
"Miss…the world that's not ours. Don't you feel like there's something more, something more than all this, and you just can't get there? But it would be so lovely if you could. You wouldn't feel half a step behind everyone anymore; you'd just be…you'd just be you and you'd be home. Sometimes I feel homesick and I've lived in the same place my entire life." I want to hide my face—I can feel myself blushing—but I don't. Trow looks so open and accepting and fond, and I can't look away from him. "I must sound crazy."
"No. You sound exactly like you. Which is…charming and magnificent. And flexible."
I laugh, because I can't help it. Then I hear myself saying, "At night, do you ever just sit and look up at the stars?" I look up at the ceiling, seeing a carpet of stars over my head, not the gross drop ceiling littered with marks.
"No," says Trow.
"You should," I say.
"Is that where the other world is?"
I close my eyes, seeing the stars the way I see them, hazy in my lashes, swaying through my vision. "When I look up at the stars, they dance."
There is a moment of silence. "Dance how?" Trow is speaking in a hushed tone, and I understand why. It feels like ,if we were loud, at this moment, it would ruin everything.
"If you knew how to read them the right way, they would tell you everything. Everything you could ever need to know—the future, the past, all of it. Right there in the stars." I open my eyes and turn my head to look at Trow.
He is gazing at me solemnly. He doesn't look like he thinks what I'm saying is silly. In fact, he looks deeply impressed by it. "What do the stars say about us?" he asks, his voice hoarse.
"It's unclear," I admit. "But I ask them every night, just in case this is the night when it changes."
Trow smiles at me. It used to be that Trow's smiles were always tired, but now when he smiles at me, they are bright and unshadowed. I wonder if anything in the history of time has ever been as important as making Trow Reading smile like that.
Trow says, "What if I start asking the stars every night too?" And then he kisses me, a soft, lovely press of his lips against mine, and I could sink into him and stay there until every star fell out of the sky. I feel like I can see the stars falling out of the sky, there behind my eyelids.
I say, against him, "Let me know what they say."
"I think they'll say, 'It's a good thing you got that girl coffee,'" says Trow.
Trow is too good with lines sometimes, I think. It doesn't mean that I don't love them all anyway.
· · ·
"So," says Mother as she sits on my bed and grins at me.
I look at her over the top of my book. It's Mythology. Because you can never know too much about mythology. It can be super useful when it comes to the stars.
"This boy you're seeing," Mother continues.
I feel myself blush. Stupid blushing.
"I'm not really 'seeing' him," I say.
"I'm a lawyer, Mer," says Mother. "I read people for a living. You think I can't tell when my daughter has a crush that's going well instead of being frustrating with the boy, the way she used to be?"
Mother is in cross-examination mode. I know better than to try to fight that mode. "Fine," I relent. "Yes. It's going well-ish."
"Well-ish." Mother looks amused. "Don't get carried away now."
"I don't want to jinx anything!" I protest.
"Wow," says Mother. "It's going that well, huh?"
Ugh, trust her to be able to read something into everything. If I just stopped talking now, she'd be able to infer from that too. It's so frustrating having one mother who's a lawyer and another who fancies herself able to tell the future. You can't really keep anything to yourself.
But suddenly, with Mother looking so pleased and supportive about the whole thing, I want to talk about Trow. I don't have friends to talk to about this stuff, after all. And although I've never felt lonely, I do feel full right now—full of things I can't get out of me. And I can't get those things out of me by talking to Trow, because they are things about Trow. You can't exactly say to your quasi-boyfriend-person, Hey, so I think you're pretty great. What do you think about that? Actually, what I'd like to say to him is, Are you my boyfriend at all? It's not like we go out on dates or something, because Trow says his home life is too crazy for him to manage that. I feel like it's super easy to know when you have a boyfriend when you actually get to go out on dates with him.
All of this means that I put my book down and I lean forward, ready to gush. "He's great," I say.
"Yeah? So when do we get to meet him?"
"Oh," I say, "I don't know. We haven't really talked about it. I mean, his life is kind of crazy…" Even as I say it, as I see the look on Mother's face, I realize it sounds terrible and lame and awful. Trow's too busy to meet my mothers? He's too busy to go out on dates? Suddenly I wonder if Trow is lying to me, what Trow's proclamations of busyness actually mean. And I've never wondered that before, never doubted that before. But I abruptly feel like an idiot for never having thought to question why I can't be with Trow anywhere but in a deserted classroom at lunchtime.
"Well, I think we should meet him anyway," Mother says, and she has her serious-lawyer face on, the one that says she's read too many cases about the terrible things that can happen to girls like me whenever we leave the house. Mother always says it's only because of Mom's calming influence that she's able to let me go out into the world ever on my own.
And she's probably right. I do like Trow and I actually think my mothers would like him, even if the thought of getting through the initial discussion with Mom about him fills me with dread, because Mom isn't predictable anymore. I'm sure Trow isn't lying to me about anything; I'm sure it's nothing sinister, his busyness. "Yeah," I say. "I know. His schedule's tough. He has seven little sisters, can you imagine—"
"The boy," Mom says from the doorway, startling me.
I look up at her and hesitate but figure the cat's out of the bag now. "Yeah."
"The one you thought you might be in trouble with." Mom moves into my room, staring at me intently. That look on her face is one I don't like. Why can't she just look at me like I'm her daughter, instead of like I'm some particularly horrible spill of salt? "The one you were dealing the tarot cards for."
"Yeah, but he's not trouble, Mom. He's—"
"He has seven sisters," says Mom.
"Yeah," I say and smile brightly, because maybe Mom is actually going to express interest.
"Like the constellation," she says flatly.
"Oh." I realize: the constellation Pleiades. In Greek mythology, the seven sisters who had been placed in the sky by Zeus. "Yeah, I guess so. I never thought of that before—"
"You must stop seeing him," Mom interrupts.
I blink. "He's not—"
"No. I never liked the idea of you seeing him. Didn't you see the tarot cards you dealt about him?"
"Yeah," I say, confused. "They didn't say much about him at all. They—"
"And now you tell me that he is written in the stars. Do you not see?" She practically shrieks it at me, and her eyes are wild and wide, the whites showing in a frightening fashion. I actually shrink away from her instinctively, terrified.
"Hey—" Mother begins, putting a hand on her arm.
Mom shakes her off. "Do not tell me to calm down. Do you not see what is happening here? Do you not see? Oh, how can you be so blind? How can I have married someone so blind?" Mom turns to me abruptly. "She is blind, she cannot help it, but you should see—"
"Mom." I try to say it calmly; I try not to let my voice tremble too much. But Mom feels…insane to me. Like she's come unhinged. I suddenly realize that it's possible my mom has been walking a tightrope all of her life, between this world and the other world she senses so clearly, and now she's lost her balance and is plummeting. And I've let her walk this tightrope. I've encouraged her, telling her that I can see the stars dancing and can deal out tarot cards and can read the lines of spills of salt and pepper. I might have caused this somehow. "Mom, you know that's not real. He's not written in the stars. He just happens to have seven sisters—"
Mom tears the book out of my hand and throws it against the opposite wall, where it strikes my mirror. And a single crack shows up there, launching its way across the glass as if in slow motion, creeping with a crinkling noise like the crunching of ice underfoot on a cold day.
I stare at the mirror in shock. So do Mom and Mother. For a moment, there is nothing but complete and utter silence in my bedroom.
And then Mother says, "Okay, it's okay," playing automatic peacekeeper as she rolls off of my bed. She takes Mom's hand. Mom is still staring at the cracked mirror. "It's okay," Mother says again.
"What have I done?" demands Mom, white-faced.
"It's okay," says Mother, as if by saying it enough times, something magical will happen and she can erase the last few minutes of our lives.
But she can't erase them. I sit on my bed, staring in shock at the cracked mirror, feeling too numb to even move. Mom got so upset that you're seeing a boy with seven sisters that she did that, I think to myself. I try to make sense of that in my head, but it makes no sense at all. How can that make sense? It is the opposite of sense.
"It's okay," Mother says again, and I can feel that she's directing that one toward me with a worried glance. We're in this together, that look seems to say to me. Say that it's okay.
"It's okay," I say automatically, even though I think everything about this is anything but okay. In fact, it's super not okay, let's be honest.
"See?" says Mother as she leads Mom from my room. "It's okay." Mother closes the door, but I can still hear her murmuring to Mom as they walk down the hall together.
I stay still for a long time, not doing anything. I'm not even thinking. My mind feels blank, wiped clean by everything that happened. Eventually, after a long time, I pull my knees up, wrapping my arms around them and pressing my face against them. I am breathing in short, tight little gasps, although I am not quite crying, and I try to catch oxygen into my lungs, to get a three-part breath going, to find my shanti.
It isn't working.
Part of me wishes I could call Trow, but he doesn't have a cell phone. Or so he says. And I can't even be bothered to tease out whether or not he's telling me the truth, because the other part of me—the larger part of me at the moment—is thinking that I would gladly never see Trow again if it would help my mom not do that again.