Starry Night

  “Nolan, hello.” She blanched and looked at all of us like What the—? Nolan was supposed to be on a flight to Pittsburgh that very moment, not that my mother knew that, but I did. That morning I had been daydreaming about him at the airport. Would he have breakfast there? Would he be reading a book? Would he be thinking about me? I hadn’t seen him in fifteen days, but we had spoken on the telephone for an hour the night before.

  “Oh my god,” I barely said.

  “Oh my god!” Vati pretty much screamed.

  “Oh my god,” Dinah said, like the fun had just begun.

  Nolan was dressed up in a tweed blazer with a checked-blue collared shirt, an orange tie, brown cords, and on top of it all was a thick houndstooth overcoat, hanging open, that looked like it must have been his grandfather’s. He was holding a weekend bag. His guitar, as ever, was strapped to his back.

  “Nolan.” I slid off the island and wished no one were around so I could run into his arms.

  “Come in, come in, Nolan. May! Down!” My mother got it together. My punishment had ended that very day. I was waiting for her to give me back my phone and then I would have texted him, but there he was, ten feet away from me. “It’s freezing out there,” she said, making a wide circle around him to shut the door as if he were a wet, muddy dog. May plopped down at Nolan’s feet, panting with her tongue flopping out of her mouth like he was about to give her a piece of bacon.

  “Hey, man!” Oliver went and gave him a man hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hi, everyone. Sorry, Mrs. Noorlander, for just showing up here unannounced.” He looked helpless and embarrassed. “I, well, I just found out that my stepmom’s mom died.”

  “Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry, Nolan. Here, Oliver, take his bag. Take your coat off.” Mom wrapped her bathrobe around herself again, while at the same time trying to signal to Nolan that he should walk farther into the room.

  “She had been sick for a while. I guess they weren’t expecting that she would die today, and she did, so now my father and stepmother have to go to where she was in Florida.”

  “So you’re not going to Pittsburgh?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He held out his phone in his hand. “My dad just called and said that I shouldn’t come. He has to go with Elaine and Bruno. They left the house already. I was on my way to the airport.” He looked confused and like a four-year-old teenager.

  “And my mother left to go to my aunt’s house in Vermont yesterday, so.” He looked at me. “I have no place to have Thanksgiving.”

  And then I walked over fast and hugged him. Right in front of my mother. He smelled like trees.

  “Nolan,” my mother said eventually. “You must stay here and have lunch with us. Please, you are welcome.” She said that very nicely.

  I let go of him and looked into his eyes, which were pooling.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Noorlander. I am so sorry to barge in like this.” He wiped the tears away before they fell. “I just, I, well, I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Here, let me get this,” Oliver said and took his bag.

  The shrill, clamorous ring of the timer went off.

  “Wrenny! The TURKEY!!!!” Dinah screamed from a footstool where she was hovering over the steaming poaching liquid for the pears. Nothing, not even Nolan showing up unannounced on Thanksgiving Day, would distract that girl from her dessert.

  * * *

  Mom immediately put us to work peeling sweet potatoes. The garbage can was placed in the middle of Vati, Oliver, Nolan, and me. There was a brown paper bag of potatoes next to us on the island. Each of us had a peeler. The amount of cooking shit we have in our house because of the show is unreal.

  “You guys were incredible the other night,” Vati said, scraping away. She had gone to see the Shoppe Boys with Oliver.

  “No kidding, man. It was so fun,” Oliver said, and looked at Vati goofily.

  “Thanks, guys. I wish you could have been there, Wren,” Nolan said. I was still getting used to him standing right there in the middle of my kitchen. Just so you know, I could not have been in a less attractive outfit. I was wearing my worst dark gray sweats that make me feel like an elephant and a dumb, ill-fitting white T-shirt, that I wear to sleep only if everything else is dirty.

  “Yeah, me too. But I’ll go to another one soon, I hope,” I said.

  “Oh, you will.” He elbowed me with the arm his sweet potato was in and bumped me with his hip.

  “Hey, watch it! My peel just went on the floor!” I squealed in my most attractive, flirtatious way.

  “Didn’t Reagan send you the video?” Vati said.

  “Huh? Reagan went?” All the squeal drained out of my voice. They nodded or said yeah. “No, my phone was confiscated. I didn’t know she was there.” Grrrr.

  “What? How did she not tell you at school?” Vati stopped peeling.

  “I don’t know, I’ve been in the art studio a lot and I don’t know, I go home right after school.” Now I was annoyed. Peel, peel. I thought to myself while peeling the living daylights out of the sweet potato, That is exactly what parents have in mind when they ground you. They separate you from the herd—peel, peel—make you have a wicked-bad case of FOMO [fear of missing out—school shrinks talk to us about it all the time.] All of them were there, all of them saw Nolan, all of them are now ahead of me and closer to each other. They knew it too—they couldn’t even tell me at school. Reagan totally should have told me and she didn’t. That is weird and wrong. Then I thought I was being paranoid. I looked at Nolan.

  “Yeah, she was there, so was Farah. Didn’t I say that on the phone?” He looked so sincere.

  “No,” I said softly, and looked to see if Dinah was listening, which she totally was. Mom and Dad were upstairs. “Whatever, Farah has been so weird lately,” I said.

  “I know! She’s a total sketch train!” Vati was now madly peeling her sweet potato.

  “Did she go to London yet or is she still at that guy Cy’s house?” Nolan said, finishing one potato and reaching into the bag for another.

  We all stopped peeling.

  “Excuse me?” I whispered. Nolan looked like he’d said something he shouldn’t have.

  “That guy she is seeing? From the museum? The artist?”

  “Are you guys done?” Dinah said, with her hands over her head like she was way at the end of her rope. “Can someone baste the turkey? Gosh! Am I the only one focusing on the fact we have like one hundred people coming to lunch in three hours?”

  “Oliver, you deal with the turkey.” I signaled with my potato for Vati and Nolan to come over to the stairs out of Dinah’s earshot.

  “What are you talking about?” Vati and I were looking at Nolan like a team of detectives interrogating the perp on Law & Order.

  “Okay, hold on.” Nolan got really mellow and cool. “We were just talking at the gig.”

  “Who was talking? You and Farah?” Vati was almost hysterical.

  “Yes.” He continued speaking to us like you would talk to a crazy person—slowly and calmly. No sudden moves. “She said she had been seeing that guy, Cy Dowd, since the party and they were having a thing.” Vati and I looked at each other with that eyes-wide-open-mouth-open-shut-the-front-door face. Like Scooby-Doo and Shaggy when they see the ghost. I hadn’t heard a word about Cy since that day at lunch. I had hoped it was a one-night-weird-Farah thing and we would never hear of it again. But then again, I had been in brownstone prison. We looked at Nolan to keep going.

  “Did she not tell you guys this?” he asked in his girl/guy way.

  “No!” we shout-whispered.

  “She told me that she was going to spend the night with him the night before Thanksgiving, last night. Then wake up there today, before she flew to London to go see her dad. You didn’t know that?”

  “No, no, we didn’t. Or I didn’t,” I said. Vati looked at me like, Me neither.

  “Oh my god, I have to tell Oliver.” Vati bolted to the kitchen. I sat down on the bottom
step. Nolan sat down next to me.

  “How could you not talk to me about that on the phone?”

  “I don’t know, Wren. I … I guess we were talking about other stuff. I wasn’t thinking about your friend.”

  I could sort of see Farah confiding in Nolan, because A) he is the kind of guy that you confide in because he sort of has girl mojo, and B) he’s older than us and Farah was doing something out of our sophomore-girl league. I scraped at some gunk in the crevice where the banister met the stair, and we sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “And, Wren, you never even brought Farah up.” That made me scrape the gunk faster.

  “I didn’t?”

  “No, if anything, I thought we were talking about, I don’t know, that school in France? Your parents? Not your friends.” He took my hand that was scraping and put it in his.

  “You want to come up to my room, just for a second?” I said. I looked at him and then, in a paranoid way, up the stairs, in case my mother heard me through the ceiling. “I want to show you something.”

  “Yeah. I totally want to come up to your room.”

  36

  We stealthily climbed up the stairs, very quickly and smoothly passing my parents’ open door. They must have been getting dressed in the bathroom because I didn’t see signs of either one of them when I looked in before we beelined past it. I led Nolan up the last flight of stairs to my room and down the hall lined with the artwork from when I was little.

  “Hey!” he whispered. I turned around and shushed him with my finger to my lips. “Did you do these?” He pointed at the frames. I nodded and smiled. He mouthed, “Wow!”

  The door to my room was open and there, as big as lights, was my unmade bed. What if there was underwear from the night before thrown on the floor, or a box of tampons out in the open? Or a slobbish pile of clothes, an errant apple core…? But before I could worry too much about it, Nolan tumbled into the sheets and duvet and put his arms under his head like he was a sultan on an inflatable pool raft. I closed the door nervously.

  “God, I never close the door up here.”

  “This is an awesome room!” he said, a bit too loudly. “Look at your great windows!” He turned around, pointing at them. “Where are we looking, west? It’s like a tree house up here!”

  “I always think of it like a greenhouse.” I stood between the bed and bathroom, hoping I had remembered to flush the toilet. “I, um.” I darted in there for a second to make sure. All clear. “Totally lucked out.” I came back in. “I used to share Oliver’s room with him, then Mom said one of us could have this room and for some weird reason he didn’t want it, so.”

  “He’s an idiot not to take this place.”

  “He wanted to be closer to the kitchen.”

  “So did you really have something you wanted to show me or was that just an excuse to get me in your bed?” He laughed. I almost threw up.

  “No! God!” Suddenly I was blushing and bolting for the door. I had never had a boy in my room before. Charlie had been there, of course, but not a boy like Nolan.

  “Sorry, come here.” He jumped up and got me. “I am so happy to be up here with you, in your place.” He led me back to the bed.

  “I didn’t bring you up here to—oh, I feel so stupid!”

  “Nah.” His voice got soft. “That was a dumb thing I said.” We sat on the bed.

  “What did you want to show me?” he asked. I looked at him and scrunched up my nose. “Come on. Please show me.”

  “Okay, well.” I stood up, slid my hand behind my desk, and got my drawing pad.

  “Can I look?” he asked, reaching out. I nodded. “Come down here next to me.” He patted the bed then moved over and leaned against the wall, propping himself up with his knee. It was funny seeing him all dressed up for Thanksgiving, in my room, in my bed, in my sheets that I had just gotten out of.

  I took a deep breath and nestled myself beside him. He lifted the cover of my drawing pad and started to look at drawing after drawing of my foot.

  I burst into giggles, putting my hand over my face. “Oh my god.” I tilted over onto him and buried my head in his neck and hair, which smelled like our kitchen.

  “Wren,” he started, kind of laughing too. “What’s making you laugh?” He looked at me. “These are freaking amazing, Wrenny—they are. Shhh. Look at this.” I held my breath as he slowly took his thumb and traced along the dusty charcoal line where I had drawn my arch. “Who can do that?” he said in awe. And then he took my hand in his and traced the same line of the arch with my thumb, slowly dragging it down the page. “It’s perfect,” he whispered. “It looks just like your foot. It even has the personality of your foot.” He rubbed his socked foot on mine, pressing with the ball. I pressed back. We pressed our feet together hard until we both pulled back at the same time.

  “These are beautiful, Wren,” he said, still looking. “You drew all of these when you were held in captivity?”

  “Yeah, every afternoon, I would draw until the sun went down. Pathetically, I got obsessed with my foot. I haven’t done my self-portrait yet and it’s due on December 15!”

  “You will. Shit, if you can draw a foot that looks like this, just think what you can do with that face.”

  He pulled me onto his body and kissed me. My whole self lifted. Not up, but into him. It made me want to bite him, but I didn’t.

  “Hey, wanna know something?” he asked, kissing me. “Yeah,” I said, breathless. I really was breathless.

  “You drew those in the afternoon, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s this Van Morrison song [kiss] about [kiss] the afternoon.” He stopped kissing me and looked into my eyes. I practically wanted to cry out or bite my own lip. Everything was so quiet and slow, there was only the sound of our breath and the sound of his whispering voice. “It’s a really good song.” He smiled. I could tell he was hearing it in his head. “I kind of wish it were the afternoon.” His other hand moved under me and shifted me down, until I was lying underneath him.

  “Me too.” I didn’t know why, but if he wanted it to be the afternoon, that sounded good to me.

  “You got me reelin’,” he half sang into my ear and kissed me on my neck and shoulders and slid his hand under my plain old white T-shirt until it touched the very edge of my bra.

  We made out for as long as I could take it without freaking that my parents were right downstairs and it was Thanksgiving. I sat up, feeling a sense of impending urgency, like the intercom was about to ring.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said, looking scuffed up with painfully adorable boy hair. I took a breath to try to organize my thoughts.

  “What is happening?” I let the breath out.

  “With us?” he said. That made me punch him on the arm.

  “No—with, I don’t know, Farah!” I paused and took in his boy hair and cow eyes again.

  “Well, Farah, I guess, is in some adventure with that guy.” Of course Nolan would see it as an adventure.

  “But why would she tell you about it—and not me, or Vati or Reagan?”

  “Reagan?” he said.

  “Yeah. Reagan.”

  “I didn’t think Reagan was so close to you guys.”

  “Why, because she totally screwed Vati over until Oliver decided to have a come-to-Jesus moment because of, well, because of you?”

  “Yeah, and, well, you never talk about her so much. I thought you and Vati were the duo.”

  “Well, Reagan’s tricky,” I said, and looked him in the eye.

  “Is she nice?”

  “Yes. On the outside, she’s tough, but inside, she is, well, I think she’s lonely a lot of the time. He mother is difficult and not really momlike. I think Reagan spends a lot of time in places with her mother that are too grown up, like they are forever in trendy restaurants.”

  “That are too grown up?” he asked.

  “Well, sort of. I eat with everyone in my famil
y at seven and then have to do my homework. Reagan has tasting menus on school nights. Or she’s just alone while her mother is out. So, anyway, I think she’s kind of cold on the outside.”

  “I spend a lot of time alone.”

  “You do?” He looked like that four-year-old again. “Are you so bummed not to be with your dad?”

  “Yeah, I am, but his wife’s mother died. What are you going to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I guess come here?”

  He smiled kind of sadly at me. “Do you get how lucky you are?”

  I must have looked confused.

  “Of course you don’t get what Farah is doing, or Reagan even, because basically you are good and you don’t understand screwed-up behavior. You have a charmed life, you know?”

  “Charmed? I am so screwed up!”

  “How?”

  “I can’t do anything right. I get the worst grades in my class, I couldn’t read until I was nine, and usually I can’t get work done unless Mom is standing there holding a club over my head.”

  “Yeah, but she does stand over you. And you do get work done. Look at all those beautiful drawings.”

  “But that’s not real work,” I said, looking at the drawings of my foot.

  “No, man, this”—he pointed to the drawing—“is the most real kind of work.” He nodded at me like, Get it? “And you have Oliver, and cute little Dinah.”

  “Dinah is pretty cute.”

  “She’s frigging adorable. I watched her on TV before I knew you.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “And your dad,” he said. I thought about Dad. He always calls my drawings “work.” He believes art can be work just like Nolan does. I guess it’s the only thing that feels easy to me, so “work” is not the word I would use—“play” maybe.

  “But what about Farah? I am so freaked out by her. I know she feels like she’s playing house with this guy, but the guy is a man, an old one.”