Starry Night

  Think of any girl who has gotten kissed in any movie you have ever seen by any dream of a boy. I was that girl. I was the girl in the movie.

  “I think you should come downtown with me.”

  20

  My phone was still on the table under the roses and hydrangeas, which was where I left it when I sat down.

  “But I don’t have my phone—or my bag,” I said, keeping up with him as we scooted down the staircase that we had just run up.

  He turned around and caught me by the waist.

  “You totally don’t have to come if you think you’ll get in trouble.” I was sort of suspended over him, still on the stairs, but leaning into him like I was a ballerina and he was going to lift me into the air.

  “Well, I mean, I will get in trouble, right? How could I not?”

  “You won’t. You won’t because—because, don’t you think one of your friends will get your bag? Or, here”—he let go of me so I had to make sure I wouldn’t tumble down the rest of the stairs—“text one of them from my phone. Tell them to get your bag and phone and tell them you are going with me for an hour.”

  “But—”

  “Then, leave a message for your parents at home saying that you went with me to see a friend play music, just for an hour, and I’ll have you back before you would have been home from this party anyway.”

  “Why don’t I just go tell them now?”

  He looked at me like, No, don’t do that, dummy.

  “They are hosting a huge party! Not only will they say no, but they are busy and probably don’t want to be bothered, and it doesn’t matter because I will have you home before midnight.” He took my hand and looked at his phone that I was holding. “That is in more than two hours.”

  He had a huge this-is-a-good-plan smile on. He handed me his phone.

  “Text one of those girls.”

  This felt like the universe of someone else. Other people do things like this. Or maybe this is like the teenage version of doing something sort of bad, but not really bad, like licking a subway pole, which I did all the time as a little kid. Or like touching the light. Maybe my teenage self reaches out of her father’s arms by going downtown to dance with a bunch of kids from Pittsburgh.

  “I only know Charlie’s number by heart.”

  “So text him.”

  Lots of voices inside me were screaming, “Nooooo, don’t dooo thaaaaattttt … baaaadddd ideeeaaaaa.” But a much louder one screamed, “Do it!”

  Hi, it’s Wren. Nolan is taking me to a dance thing, but I will be back home by midnight. Could you please get my bag and my phone on the table and give them to Oliver?

  “Now call your home and leave a message for your parents. They will be cool if they know where you are. Parents only freak out when they don’t know where you are.”

  That felt true to me. In fact, I could clearly recall at that moment my mother saying something like “I don’t care where you are as long as I know where you are.” Or it was something like that.

  I called home. Rachel-the-hair-person answered.

  “Oh, hi, Rachel. It’s Wren.”

  “Hey, Wrenny. How’s it going?”

  “Good, it’s good. But will you leave a message for my parents?”

  “Sure.” No big deal, no big deal, no big deal. Sound like this is no big deal.

  “Okay, so will you tell them that I am going with Oliver’s friend to a dance and I will be back before they get home. I am just calling to say where I am, so they don’t worry. Okay?”

  “Sure.” She sounded like what I was saying was no big deal, so I must have pulled it off.

  “Oh, great! So, thanks, Rachel!”

  “Sure. Have fun!” And we hung up.

  “What about Oliver?” I said.

  “What about Oliver? He’s cool, I think he would rather stay here with Reagan,” he said, like he knew everything.

  “What?” I kind of punched him in the arm when I said this.

  “I think he and Reagan were maybe going to hook up. That’s what it looked like before.” He held on to his arm and laughed at me.

  “Where? In the temple?” I said, still flabbergasted.

  “Yeah, before dinner. Does that not seem right to you? It looked like they were into each other.”

  Reagan and Oliver?

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I have to get you downtown and home before you turn into a pumpkin.”

  21

  Kissing.

  Frankly, I didn’t think you could kiss someone for such a long time. Nolan hailed a cab in front of the museum, and from the second we finished piling my dress into it we kissed with him on top and me leaning against the hard door of the taxi until we got to Houston Street, which is almost a hundred blocks away. Here is the thing about all that kissing. Since I had never kissed someone for so long, I didn’t know what happened to the rest of your body when you kiss. It’s really not a mouth thing. It’s a body thing.

  I’m not going to gross you out with details about what happened to my body, or Nolan’s body, but I will say that it felt like nothing else feels in your life. It doesn’t feel like running really fast or falling asleep when you’re extremely tired, or dancing, or doing yoga, or eating a spoonful of Nutella. When you kiss a seventeen-year-old boy, who has clearly kissed other girls in his life because he is very confident about it, in a cab zooming down Fifth Avenue, and during all the red lights and while stuck in the traffic that comes around the New York Public Library, your body goes into a state of sensory overload. You kind of feel like a lion.

  We talked a little during this extended playlist of a kiss (so if you can bear it, picture this conversation while we are kissing).

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Noooo.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I haven’t had a boyfriend since eighth grade.”

  “What was that guy’s name?”

  “Thomas Friedman.”

  “Do you know that is the name of a New York Times columnist?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My parents thought it was funny that I was going out with a mini Thomas Friedman. He was even on his school paper.”

  “I will never be able to read that guy’s column again. The real Thomas Friedman, I mean.”

  “Do you read it a lot?”

  “Yeah, for current events. He’s a genius.”

  “I don’t think my Thomas Friedman was a genius.”

  “I think you’re a genius.” Giggling, kissing, giggling, tugging, squeezing, breathing, giggling, kissing.

  22

  The club was really a loft space on the third floor of a walk-up on Houston and Varick Street. The building was run-down and scary-looking, like maybe it looked like a crack house (or what a crack house looks like in my imagination, which I am sure is not really what one looks like), but I figured it wasn’t actually dangerous because there was a very trendy barbecue restaurant right next door and the 1 train was right on the corner. During the day, this neighborhood is as normal as toothpaste, but to me it felt like I was in a Chinatown in another city, like I was in Paris or in a P!nk video. I felt out of my league.

  “Here we go!” Nolan said, not like a mom starting a long drive; it was like hip-hop talk.

  “Wait.” I suddenly felt super self-conscious in my big red dress. “I am fairly certain I am not wearing the right thing for this.” I pointed to the dingy, banged-up door with chipped paint.

  “Oh, you never know what people will be wearing at these things. Who cares, you look like Guinevere.”

  “I can’t believe I don’t have my phone. Did Charlie text back yet?”

  “Ummmmm.” As Nolan scrolled his messages, I thought that he sure had a lot of messages. I get the same four people texting me all day, but it never adds up to as many as Nolan seemed to be scrolling through. I wondered how many friends he had.

  “Yup.” He held out his phone so I could read it: br />
  You left?

  I looked up at Nolan like, Yikes.

  “Wait, there’s more.” He continued to scroll, then:

  I’ll get bag/phone but you are insane

  “Oh golly.” Everything about the small groups of hip-looking, downtown kids going into the club was making me think I had done something stupid. I should be sitting at my table with Earl and my brother and my friends at the Met. I wasn’t one of these people. But I was standing there with them, so maybe I was cool and hip and exactly where I was supposed to be.

  “I wonder if Charlie told the girls, or, oh god, my parents,” I said, still looking at the nose ring of a kid talking to his friends about skateboarding.

  “We do not know.” He stuck the phone in his inside pocket. “All we know is we have an hour to dance before I am going to take you home. Nothing bad is going to happen in an hour.”

  He smiled and went to grab the door. “In fact, I think a whole lotta good is going to happen in the next hour. Come on, this is my museum.”

  There were two flights of narrow, steep stairs that went directly up. If you went to the left on the first floor, there was a record store. A handmade sign in the shape of an arrow pointing in its direction said LUCKY LOUIS’S VINYL.

  “This,” said Nolan, pointing into the shop, “is the only place in the Village you can buy vinyl anymore. The guys who own that place have thousands of records. We’ll come back here. It’s its own universe and you have to have, like, three hours to dig around.”

  “Why is it still open so late? It’s like ten-something.” The steep stairs were a challenge in the dress and I was starting to speak loudly because the music coming from where we were headed was becoming louder and throbbier.

  “Oh, they just opened. They’ll be open for the rest of the night.”

  “Has Oliver ever been here?” I was starting to shout.

  “This is where I met Oliver!”

  “Are you sure about this whole Reagan, Oliver thing?” I didn’t even like saying that out loud, much less screaming it.

  “I can only report on what I saw. And it was a vibe thing. I pick up on shit like that, so yeah, I’m pretty sure.” I had a pit in my stomach for Vati.

  I nodded, as it was getting too loud to talk. We were almost in front of a biker guy sitting on a stool on the next landing up from Lucky Louis’s. This mammoth, hairy man was wearing a leather vest with no shirt on under it. His wide, beefy arms crossed over his middle on top of a long, mouse-colored beard. He had a classic worn-in blue bandanna on his head. On one of his upper arms he had a tattoo of the outline of a state. I am not quite sure, but I think it was Indiana.

  “Nick!” Nolan shouted. The biker guy stood up and man-hugged Nolan. They slapped each other’s backs.

  “Nick, this is Wren!” I tried to make a neutral face so I didn’t look frightened.

  “Pleased to meet you, Wren.” Nick stuck out his hand and I shook it enthusiastically, just as if he were one of my parents’ friends. I made sure to look him square in the eye.

  “Hi!”

  “That is some kind of dress,” said Nick, like maybe he knew what he was talking about, like maybe behind all that bikerness was a couturier.

  “Oh, yeah, thanks!” And then I noticed that Nick had a round yellow pin with a light blue squirrel attached to his vest. This was weird because Reagan has a little obsession with squirrels. She’s all badass and then she’ll see a squirrel in the park and take a picture of it. She must have five hundred pictures of squirrels on her phone. Farah once said they were like rats, and it made Reagan cry.

  “Did Mikey start?” asked Nolan.

  “Yup, go on in.” Nick heaved open a door that had to have been made of iron. A tsunami of sound and heat rushed at us. Nolan led me into it, full-on.

  “Mikey is a genius!” Nolan shouted, pointing at the bent-over boy at a turntable in the front of the room. I could only see Mikey’s ski hat and earphones. Nolan took off his coat and tie at the same time and threw his stuff near the mixing table as he pulled me into a mass of sweaty bodies. His movements were fluid, like his body had already, instantly, adapted to his surroundings. He seamlessly and quickly fit in. I don’t feel like my body does that. I am like the fish in the bag. You know that rule? When you bring a fish home from the pet store to put it in an aquarium with other fish, you can’t just dump the new fish in. You have to gradually replace the water in the bag with water from your aquarium so the fish can acclimate. The fish needs an adjustment time. Nolan didn’t seem to require any time to adjust to any new circumstance. He just fit in.

  “Mikey’s a madman! Listen to this!” Nolan jumped up and down with everyone else.

  I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when she gets to that first Technicolor other-universe, where the flowers are as big as houses and everyone sings in unison. Except, my dress was ridiculous in that place. I should have been in mini-shorts and a tank top but instead I looked like the chick from Enchanted. I’m sure hipsters were looking for my wand. Thank god it was dark in there. I was oblivious that a mysterious club sludge was seeping into the bottom of my dress.

  “Oh ye-ah!” Nolan saw a dancing girl who clearly was his friend, and pushed her shoulder. She looked up and was all “Yo Yo!” From the crouched dancing position she was in, she jumped like a poison dart frog into his arms, wrapping her legs around him.

  “Nolan!” she screamed. Then she catapulted off him and the two of them jammed out like J-Lo and one of her dancers.

  A little too much, you say? It turned out to be Emme, one of his best girlfriends from Pittsburgh.

  He stopped her mid–jam out and turned her in my direction.

  “This is Wren!” he shouted.

  “Gwen?”

  “Wren!” we both shouted.

  She waved to me, pointed to herself. “Emme!” She smiled and kept dancing. She was in really short shorts, a tank top, and Doc Martens. When I tell you she was dancing, I mean she was on fire. She was doing the Dougie and this crisscross thing with her legs, her arms tucked up around her ears. And then I realized there were ten or so cool dancing girls all in a pack. Heads down, glistening, tight and really kind of crazy-looking, but not chaotic. It was more military than that. I didn’t know from this kind of pack dancing.

  If you are worried that Nolan left me out and danced with his Pitt friends and I stood on the side like a loser, don’t be. He totally didn’t. He did the opposite—he pulled me in.

  “Are these your friends? How come they are such good dancers?” I had to shout. It was hard to say anything, especially because I was trying to do the Dougie in an Oscar de la Renta.

  “It’s a Pittsburgh thing! They grow up dancing like that!”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just what it’s like there! Look at you! You are a good dancer!” Oh, what? But you know, that music sort of does make you feel you are a good dancer. I would hate to have seen myself in a mirror, but it felt good. I felt cool.

  The music changed from some kind of Skrillex dubstep to a Rolling Stones song, something my parents got all excited about when they heard it on classic rock radio stations in the car. It was “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” But all funked up with other mixes of things. Everyone freaked out. I did, too. It was the most fun I had ever had, and I forgot about absolutely everything.

  23

  Nolan did what he said he would do—he got me home before midnight. We rode the 1 train up Broadway and he told me about his parents’ divorce as the train rocked and screeched into station after station all the way to Eighty-Sixth Street.

  “I can’t believe we were born in the same hospital,” I said, with my leg over his leg.

  “But we missed each other by two years and 138 days, I think, if my math is right.” He mentally counted. “Yeah, 138.”

  “You really are crazy good at math.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. “By the time you were born, I was living in Louisville, Kentucky.”

  “
Why?” I had pictured him growing up in New York like me.

  “When I was born, my dad was getting his PhD at Columbia, but then he had to get a teaching job and it took him a while until he landed a good one, so we moved around a lot.”

  “Oh.” I felt bad about that the way you do when you hear about Army kids having to go to a bunch of different schools.

  “Yeah, so before I was seven we lived in New York, Kentucky, and Santa Barbara.”

  “How come? Did he keep getting fired?”

  “No, no, just the only academic jobs that came up in his field were non-tenure-track, so they only lasted a year or two and then we had to move again. It stank—I think. I don’t really remember.”

  He looked so sweet, and I did something I had never done before. I kissed a boy because I wanted to show that I felt for his experience of having to do something hard, like move around. Up until that point, kissing was about Truth or Dare or it just came with the territory of going out with someone. Kissing was an awkward part of what you thought you were supposed to do, even if you didn’t know why. This kiss was different. I kissed Nolan because it felt like the only response to what he was saying. It felt more appropriate than words. He smiled sweetly, blinking his eyes slowly. He was touched. At least I think he was.

  “How did you end up living back here?” We were so close to each other, all snuggled in one of the two-seaters on the train. Nolan had given me his suit jacket when we left the dance/rave thing. I felt like I was his girl.

  “Well, so when I was seven, my dad finally got an assistant professorship at the University of Pittsburgh in biology. We lived in this little brown house on Tremont Street, where my dad still lives now. It’s right next to campus. He used to walk me to the elementary school where lots of the professors’ kids go, which was next to his office in this gigantic gray cinder-block building. I remember I thought it was NASA, the center of the scientific world. There were so many labs and computers. Sometimes, he would do experiments with me there, little stuff, like make electricity with paper clips. And my mom could take psych classes at the university too, for free I think, or for half, I’m not quite sure, but the psychology department was in the next building, so we were all close.”