Starry Night

  And that is probably why I blurted out, “Mom, how does Oliver know that guy in his room?”

  My mother, who had taken down the dress and was looking at it as if she was remembering herself wearing it, turned to me and said, “He is quite something, right? Did you meet him? He just came home with Oliver today, just walked right in as if he had been here all his life. I’ve never seen him before. I guess they met at a party or something? He goes to Bronx Science—which is impressive, sort of the Harvard of high schools. His name is … wait, it’s like a girl’s name.”

  “Nolan!” Farah and Padmavati hooted in unison.

  “Shhh! Oh my lord, what if he hears you!” I said, blushing like crazy. My mother looked at the girls and me like she was in on something. She sort of giggled and put her hand over her mouth, which she then uncovered to whisper, “He’s coming to the party tonight!”

  “Oh my god.” Now I felt out-of-control-dumb, standing there talking with my mother about boys in my leggings, which you should never really be in without a long shirt on unless you are in a yoga class.

  “Mom, just—”

  “Did you meet him, Wrenny?”

  “Yes, Vati and I did. It’s no big deal, we just saw him for a second.” (God, why did I even say anything?)

  “Who is he?” Mom said, like she was asking the universe.

  “He’s in a band!” Padmavati said, as Rachel wove a braid in the front of her head that looked very fashion forward.

  “Oh my god—why are we all freaking out about a freaky band boy upstairs in greasy Oliver’s room? Yuck,” Farah said, and hoisted herself up from the bed. “I’m going downstairs to get some almonds, I have low blood sugar.”

  “I’m sure the crew has left already,” I said, totally catching her drift that she was going to see if Tom-the-camera-guy was still around.

  Farah winked at me—“We’ll see”—and flounced out of the room.

  Mom looked at me like, Huh? She had no clue about Farah’s burning desire for Tom-the-camera-guy. She turned her attention to the dress, which was getting too heavy for her to hold up off the floor. “Well, let’s get this going—oh my goodness, look how great this thing is.”

  Mom laid it down like it was my wedding dress and took it off the quilted hanger. Then she unzipped it on the bed. “Come and help me, Vati.” Rachel quickly tucked a bobby pin into Padmavati’s braid, fastening it to her head, and released her to help my mother. Vati and Mom maneuvered the dress around to the foot of the bed where I was standing and I took the camisole off. I am trying to get relaxed about being naked in front of my mother—post-puberty—but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. It’s like, in growing, I did something without her and she’s dying to know about it. Sometimes I can feel her checking out my development. I guess she grew me in the first place, so she’s interested, but yuck! I left my leggings on. Like ladies in waiting, my Mom and Vati crouched down before me, protectively holding the bodice so I could step into the dress that was pooled on the floor like an enormous fallen parachute. I put my feet carefully through the top and steadied myself on Padmavati’s and Mom’s shoulders so I wouldn’t fall. Slowly they stood up, lifting and fitting around my waist, up and over my breasts. Then Mom zipped up the back. I could feel she was being careful not to catch my skin in the zipper’s teeth. The dress fit perfectly. I picked up the skirt and went over to the full-length mirror. My hair, even though the wind had made it look like I’d slept in a barn, was almost to my waist and was doing something good that made me reconsider the shower. My mother stepped into the mirror’s reflection.

  “Oh, Wren. I feel like I’m going to cry. Look at you.” She came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. “You look like a dream, Wren. It fits you so beautifully.” She slowly spun me around and inhaled as if she had just seen Christmas tree lights being turned on. “Let me get my phone. Dad will want to see you. He gave me that dress, you know, picked it out himself.” She left the frame of the mirror and Vati came in. “Wow, Wren. You look amazing. You look like a princess or a Southern belle or something—like Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “It’s so pretty, right?” My hand drifted down and felt the fine weave of the silk that I had touched so many times before, sitting on the floor of my mother’s closet.

  “I think tonight’s going to be particularly amazing, Wren.” Vati’s eyes shone as much as her smile. “And think about it”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“he’s going to see you in this.”

  12

  Farah was still downstairs or somewhere else in the house when Vati and I took the dress and her new hairstyle back up to my room.

  “Vati.” I was holding the dress in my arms like I was carrying a wounded soldier, but I managed to reach out and grab her sweater with a few fingers before she went up the last three stairs to my door. “I’m having a weird fantasy.”

  “Oh yeah? That’s okay.”

  “You know when you said,” I whispered, even though I could hear Reagan and Charlie doing some kind of rap from my bedroom, “he will see me in it?”

  “Yeah, totally. He will, like, soon,” Vati said, standing up on her tiptoes and lifting her eyebrows at the same time.

  “I know, but here’s what I’m imagining. I am imagining myself walking up the Met steps like Lady Diana Spencer walked up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral before she got married to Prince Charles.”

  “You mean Kate Middleton and William?”

  “No, noooo. His mother.”

  “I didn’t see that wedding.”

  “I know—nobody did, it was like thirty years ago, but Mom made us watch it the night before Kate and William got married. She said you couldn’t watch one without the other.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, like she had missed that day in class.

  “Yeah, well, personally, I liked Lady Diana’s dress better than Kate’s,” I said. Vati’s eyes widened.

  “Because it had such a big skirt and she wore a big time tiara,” I said.

  “I don’t remember Kate Middleton’s tiara.”

  “Right—it was like a sparkly headband. She was trying to be understated, but if you are going to marry the future king of England, let it rip, right? Diana’s was like six inches high.”

  “Kate is so cool.” Vati sighed.

  “I know, but the point is, I’m thinking, what if Oliver and Nolan leave for the party before we do?”

  “Have they?”

  “I don’t know, but what if they do and when we get there, they are there waiting at the top of the steps because they are too cool to go into the party right away,” I said.

  Vati sucked in air through her nose, squeezed her shoulders up to her ears, and squinched her face in sheer excitement.

  “Nolan would see me in my red dress getting out of the car and then watch me walk up the steps, holding my dress, so I wouldn’t trip on it, I guess. That is what you have to do in this kind of dress.”

  “Yes, you totally do,” Vati confirmed. I nodded.

  “And maybe that big wind would be making my hair fly wildly around so I would have to gather it coyly to the side of my head, laughing because it was out of control.”

  “And I will be right next to you but my hair won’t be flying around ’cause of this.” She pointed to her braid.

  “Right. Oliver will see you too.” We were not on the stairs of my house anymore but in a full-blown fantasyland of love.

  “What if—” I felt like I was going to jinx something, but I couldn’t help it. “Because we are all dressed up, they fall in love with us?”

  Vati’s shoulders relaxed, her eyes looked up to the heavens, and she shook her head gently back and forth.

  “That would be so great,” she said.

  “I know … Is it stupid that I am thinking that?”

  “Uh-uh. I think about stuff like that all the time.”

  * * *

  It took less time than you would think for us to get into our dresses and do our makeup. Regan w
as still in her underwear. By six o’clock we were sitting in my room not wanting to move too much so we didn’t smudge or wrinkle. We had so much time to kill that Charlie started doing his homework again.

  “So, anyway, Tom said that he would definitely be shooting the next episode here, and he told me it would be on November 18!” Farah said.

  “So?” I said.

  “So? So, he obviously wants me to be here or he wouldn’t have been so specific about the date. That was a not-so-subtle flirtation and invitation!”

  “Invitation to what? Farah, yuck, he’s so old, he’s out of college.”

  “Vati, like that matters—attraction is attraction,” Farah scolded, like an older sister.

  “Another term for attraction is statutory rape, Farah. He’s a sicko to flirt with you,” Charlie said, as he erased the shit out of a wrong answer to a math question.

  “Where is Bronx Science?” I asked.

  “In the Bronx,” Charlie said. He looked up at me and laughed and I stuck my tongue out at him.

  The only thing my parents didn’t change when they renovated the house was the intercom system. Dad thought it was stupid and that we’d never use it. But of course we use it all day long, even though it’s so old that it’s almost impossible to hear what anyone is saying. The boxes look like the equipment from old Star Trek TV shows from the 1960s. The loud, scratchy noise it makes before someone speaks into it interrupted our discussion about Tom-the-camera-guy’s age.

  “Girls”—static hissing, beeping, and scratching—“the car is here! Oliver, Nolan, turn the music off! We are leaving!” More lost signal sounds and static.

  “Oh my god—are we going to run into them on the stairs?” I asked everyone.

  “Oh my god, are we?” Vati repeated.

  “Jesus, you guys,” said Reagan, finally wriggling into her ace bandage of a dress that she left off until the last second. “Let’s just go. I want to see if this guy is who I think he is. Where’s my clutch?”

  As cool as she sounded, she made sure to look in the mirror and check her makeup with the meticulousness of a Renaissance art restorer.

  “How am I going to get down the stairs?” I felt like I had only been dressed in shorts and a T-shirt my whole life and suddenly I was rocking a red-carpet ball gown. Everyone else had a short dress and teetered ahead in their high heels.

  “Here, Wrenny, I’ll take your purse and walk in front of you so you don’t fall. Can you even see your feet?” Charlie said. He had his backpack on.

  I looked down at the hem of the dress that reached the floor. “No!”

  “I’m having a hard time seeing you as a lady,” Charlie said, holding my hand to guide me.

  “What? Shut up, Charlie!” It embarrassed me that he called me a lady. At least he didn’t call me a woman.

  “No, you look different. You look like a, well, like a woman.”

  “Oh, yuck, Charlie! That sounds frumpy and weird and wrong and I don’t even want to go now!”

  “No way. You don’t look frumpy, you look…” Charlie patted his hair down and to the side, to no avail—it still stuck straight up. “I don’t know, you look ripe—like an apple.”

  I winced. “Oh man, just go,” I said, and pushed him in the direction of the stairs.

  “Don’t fall, that dress would pancake me,” he said.

  “Shut up,” I said as Charlie slowly walked down the stairs.

  “You shut up,” he said, looking behind him to see that I was okay.

  “You shut up.” I laughed and put my hand on his shoulder so I wouldn’t fall.

  13

  There were not one, but two sleek black sedans humming outside our door on Eighty-Fourth Street. Rachel-the-hair-lady was going to babysit for Dinah and the two of them bade all of us goodbye, with Rachel making last-minute fixes to our hair and Dinah taking pictures with her phone.

  Yes, it’s weird for a ten-year-old to have a full-on iPhone 12 or whatever model it is, but she is a TV star, and somehow it got justified as part of her “work.” As annoying as it is that she gets to throw the “work” word around and get a souped-up phone, she has already paid for a hunk of her college, so.

  “Oh, doesn’t everyone look nice!” My mother was decked in a tight-fitting, floor-length brown dress with very long sleeves—they went to her mid-hand. She wore chunky sage-green tourmaline earrings that hung to her shoulders and a bracelet made of the same green stones, coiled around and around her wrist like an Amazonian snake. Her nails were short and painted a dark cocoa brown. “Wren, you and…” She looked around at who was ready to go. Reagan was almost out the door. “Reagan, go ahead and get in the car with Oliver and his friend, and Charlie and Vati, you come with me. Oh, Vati, look at you! You girls have gotten so grown up, I’m telling you.” The disappointment that she didn’t get to ride in the car with Oliver was all over Vati’s face. She did look really pretty in Farah’s mother’s pink halter dress and her braided raven hair. I hate to say it, but she sort of looked like one of the younger Kardashian sisters—the taller one. I hoped that sometime during the party Oliver would notice too.

  “We’ll get there at the same time,” I assured her, heading for the door. “We’ll all go in together.” The enormous red dress thing was feeling very wrong as I watched Reagan slink and sway her way down the stoop stairs and click over to the first car.

  “Can you manage the stairs, Wren?” I heard my mother call from inside.

  “Yes!” I hissed. “Yes, sorry, Mom. Yes, I can do it.” I wasn’t convinced. I was worried that, even though it was a strapless dress and it was freezing out, I was going to make sweat stains on the silk under my armpits. My unruly hair, which I previously imagined I would elegantly twist to the side and hold in place, was at the mercy of all that wind and was sweeping violently across my eyes, plus I was holding my clutch and a shawl my mother lent me, making the risk of a total wipeout closer to a terrifying reality. To make matters very, very much worse, I looked ahead and saw Nolan by the car. He took Reagan’s hand and guided her into it. She gave him a big smile and did the suave ass-first-get-in-the-car move that you see people like Angelina Jolie do on Access Hollywood.

  By the time he looked up at me, I had gotten onto the sidewalk in one piece and had quickly been able to get ahold of some of my hair.

  “Ho—ly!” Nolan, who was way out of his floppy T-shirt and Chuck Taylors and way into a dark blue full-on suit, called to me over the wind and city street sounds. “That is one serious dress!” And then he didn’t walk, he ran—a cool run, not a teenager mad dash, it was an English-gentleman-coming-to-get-his-girl-out-of-the-rain run—over to the stoop where I was standing holding my breath.

  “Here, let me help you.” He took my hand.

  “Oh thanks, no, I’m fine. It’s okay, I just had to get down the stairs, but I’m totally fine now.” But he didn’t let go of my hand until we got to the car.

  “Here, I’ll get in first and sit on the bump in the middle.” He opened the car door and did a head-first-guy-get-in-the-car move. I turned to see my mother watching me get in the car, as she was getting into hers. “See you there!” she called, and waved her brown satin evening purse in the air. I copied Reagan and turned around, trying to elegantly seat myself in the car, gathering my dress and making sure it didn’t touch the leafy gutter between the curb and the street. I felt like one of those practical-joke snakes getting shoved back into the peanut tin.

  Oliver was in the front seat with the driver.

  “To the museum?” the driver guy said.

  “Yes, sir!” said Oliver. I was staring at his hair, which between sophomore and senior year had morphed from an out-of-control ringlety blond mop to dreadlocks. He turned around and smiled in an I’m-about-to-make-fun-of-you way.

  “Is that Mom’s dress?”

  I flushed. Jeez, Oliver.

  “Yes.” I smoothed it down, trying not to touch Nolan’s leg that was one centimeter away from mine, but he didn’t know it becau
se he couldn’t see my leg. He could sure see Reagan’s legs, which were toned and comfortably crossed on his other side.

  “It’s really pretty,” Nolan said.

  “Oh thanks.” I looked up briefly but with enough time to see the same smile he’d given me in the doorway. I shot my head back down as casually as I could. “Um, yeah, she wanted me to wear it, so.” The car turned into Central Park and accelerated through the winding transverse to the East Side.

  “I love these parties,” Reagan said, looking out the window at the trees rushing by.

  Huh? I thought. What is she talking about? I had never been to one of these parties and I was fairly certain she hadn’t been to any either, let alone many.

  “Yeah, they must jump off. I’ve seen pictures of them in the Times,” Nolan said, seeming to believe that Reagan knew what she was talking about.

  “Yeah, this isn’t the Fashion Institute thing, but it will still be cool. Cy Dowd will be there,” Oliver said. He had been to a few of these parties with Mom and Dad, but what was he doing dropping Cy Dowd’s name?

  “I’ve never been to a party like this, but the museum is like my second home, sort of,” I said. Then, sotto voce to Nolan, “And I really don’t think Cy Dowd, the most famous living contemporary artist in the world, will be hanging at the kiddie table with us, but whatever.”

  “Who is Cy Dowd?” Nolan said, kind of to me.

  “The Met is one of my favorite places on earth,” Reagan pronounced before I could answer.

  What? What was Reagan doing? And so loud? I bet the last time she went to the Met was in third grade when her class took a trip to see the Chinese Garden Court with Ms. Rios.

  “What do you love about it?” Nolan asked in a real, curious way. Oh, okay, he’s going to love Reagan.