I lean my head against the plastic windowpane and look out at our tiny, tight world.
My father also said this: It’s probably best not to go back in your own life.
But if I could, I would go back in my own life to three years ago, before my father was really gone. I would go back to the day when Elio Morrow and I were with the rest of the class at the weather center for a field trip, and they chose the two of us to stay inside and make it rain. The weather center director showed us which buttons to push. We sat side by side with our arms brushing each other as we took turns. Elio didn’t flinch away. This was before I was Untouchable, of course, but I still noticed.
“What color should we make it rain?” the director asked, and Elio and I answered at the same time. We both said, “Orange,” and we looked at each other in surprise, and the director was surprised too. “We don’t do that often,” he said. “Everyone likes clear, or blue.”
Elio and I stood inside. We watched our classmates looking up to see what we would do. When the drops started to fall, everyone started to laugh, including Mia Turner. And Elio and I ran out together to join them, and everyone acted like we were kids, not thirteen and mostly grown, and it was one of the last times and one of the first times and certainly one of the best times.
But. Even if I could go back in my own life, I would still arrive, eventually, back at today.
In my apartment—a two-room—now that I live alone, I take off my shoes and sit down on the rug from the old apartment, right in the spot where my father vanished.
I know I’m leaving tonight, but it’s not time now. Instead, I place the glass sphere on the patterned rug. Its reds and oranges and browns are as familiar to me as the backs of my own hands. Soon, one of the other single females who live in this block of apartments will come to make sure I’m all right. I have to wait until after that visit before I start to leave.
My father vanished so completely that they think he must have left the Globe and died out there in the Middle. That’s why I was an Untouchable: I vowed that I’d seen him go, that we’d stolen a transport and gone out of the Globe, where he climbed out and died. It took two weeks before all the tests were finished and they were sure I was clean. Two weeks of being an Untouchable. It wasn’t long, in some ways.
But it was long enough.
When I think of their version of how he left, I picture him stepping out of the transport and into the black, dead landscape and then sizzling up, just like that.
When really he left so much more carefully. When really it took so long.
“I’m going to go find one of the Beautiful People,” he said. He pointed to a picture of a woman with huge eyes and red lips and long, luscious hair. In the picture, she reached down to a child of another color. The child reached up, smiling. “That one, if I can. It might be a long time, but I’m going to try to bring her back.”
I nodded.
“We can’t keep living like this,” he said.
What he meant was, “I can’t keep living like this.” Without my mother, he meant. She died when I was born. I don’t remember her at all.
But my father did.
I think he stayed as long as he could.
“Don’t touch me when I leave,” he warned me. “I don’t know what could happen.”
So I didn’t.
He sat down and I watched him go.
He got darker, and darker, and more solid, more real. He didn’t fade; he condensed. Smaller, smaller, sharper, sharper, until I realized with surprise that he was tiny, that I’d been watching him for hours. My vision had narrowed until all I saw was him. There he was, and then he wasn’t. And he was gone and his glass sphere sat alone in the center of the rug.
I knew right away that if I could focus as long and as well as he did, that I might be able to do it too. But for those first shocked days and weeks, I didn’t want to think about leaving.
And then, after I realized that I would forever be Untouchable, it became the only thing I wanted to think about.
There’s a knock on the door.
Laura from upstairs stands there, smiling, an excited look on her face. “How are you doing today?” she asks, stepping inside. She’s much older than I am, probably thirty. She lives alone.
“I’m doing well,” I say. Laura is kind. She stays at arm’s length, always, but I hear genuine warmth in her voice.
Laura beams at me, and for a moment, I think she’s going to hug me. But of course she doesn’t. I’m imagining things. “I got a message from your school,” she says.
“You did?” My heart races a little. Since I don’t have parents, Laura is the one who gets any news from the school about me, but usually there is no news to receive because I don’t cause any trouble.
“About the dance,” she says, waiting for me to say something.
“I didn’t go to the assembly,” I admit, worried. Could that really matter? Suddenly I feel nervous. No. No complications. I have to leave tonight. “But it’s not mandatory.”
“They voted you as one of the stars!” Laura says, beaming.
“That can’t be right,” I say.
“It is,” she tells me. “You have to go to the dance. They’re saving your crown for you.”
A joke. It has to be. The opening line is perfect: What happens when an Untouchable comes to a dance?
I can see myself now, standing in the middle of the room, burning too hot to touch, a star with nothing in orbit and black empty space around her.
“Come on,” Laura says excitedly. “We have to find you something to wear.”
It’s all right, I tell myself. Just go through with this. Don’t cause trouble. Do what’s expected. Go to the dance and let them laugh at you and then come home right away. There will still be time to leave.
I find a dress in my closet and put it on but I can’t zip it up. I go back outside to the front room. “Can you help me?” I ask Laura.
She doesn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she says, and she zips it right up, but her hands never touch me at all.
The transport drops me off in front of the gymnasium built above our classrooms. The doors stand open wide, and inside I can see figures moving.
I don’t want to admit it to myself, but I am curious. Last year, I didn’t come because I wasn’t asked to the dance, but I didn’t know that I never would be. Even with my father getting more and more quiet, I didn’t realize how much his absence would change things. How it would change me.
I pause in the empty doorway to watch.
People dance in couples, so close, so tight against each other. The air smells like flowers and tastes like strawberry. A spring flavor. If it were fall, we’d smell spices and taste apples.
Traditions from long ago. There’s a wedding scene in the films from the Beautiful Time. In the scene, the woman wears white. The man wears a dark suit. In front of the couple is a lovely cake, flowers, a pile of sumptuous gifts. But it’s what is behind them that makes you breathless.
It’s the sunset.
And it is bigger than our whole world.
“There you are,” says a girl whose name I don’t know. “Every-one’s waiting. Come on.” I look where she’s pointing and see the sun and moon and the other stars standing together at the front of the gymnasium. I’m supposed to join them. I follow the girl along the side of the room.
Twentieth century, only two hundred and fifty years ago, but different in so many ways. Slow, sluggish cars instead of light-fast transports. Girls with skirts with silly little dogs on them and boys with slick black jackets.
This could happen then. They had dances and they crowned kings and queens too.
No. That’s not the right time.
Mia is the moon, of course. I can tell by the crown on her head, made of large silver circles. The other girls who are stars have smaller crowns, and the girl ahead of me turns and hands me one, the silver points of each star sharp and precise in my hand. “Put it on,” she whispers. “It’s time for the
star dance.” Something like pity flashes across her face. “You can leave after this song. The next dance is for the sun and the moon.”
I’m lifting it to my head when I see him.
Elio.
He’s the sun.
I know it even though the boys don’t wear crowns like the girls do.
And I don’t know if my crown caught some of the light from some part of the room and reflected it at him, or if he heard the girl talking to me, or if he just happened to move at that moment, but he looks at me just as I settle the stars in my hair.
I drop my hands down and look back.
If anyone were to tie me here, it would be him.
But I have to go. And now I know where and when.
There’s never really been any question.
The Time of the Beautiful People.
Two hundred years ago. The early two thousands.
The best years.
The kind years.
The years where my father has gone.
When the music starts for the star dance, two of the boys reach out their hands to two of the girls. The other boy, the last star, doesn’t even glance my way. He asks Mia to dance.
She turns toward me, her face a pale flash in the pretend starlight filtering down from the ceiling. I don’t wait to see her smile. I turn back out to look at the watching crowd. Some people laugh. Some people just look. Some turn away. I don’t know who is more cruel: those who watch, or those who pretend they see nothing.
I lift my chin. After this dance, I can leave. It won’t be long.
I feel their breath in this crowded place and smell their sweat. I’m in the middle of them and I can’t get away.
I don’t want them to matter. They haven’t, for so long. But I don’t know if I can do this.
Someone else laughs, and I close my eyes, trying to block it out, for practice. I think of my father and I remember him making animals for me out of bits of folded paper. Small. Smaller, until the paper became a tiny frog, or a little winged bird. But then he stopped making things. He started bending inward, and I was left with nothing to hold.
Someone says my name, and my eyes fly open.
Elio. He walks toward me. In the artificial starlight, his hair is no color at all, but I know his face.
He stops in front of me.
He puts his hand out for mine. “Will you dance with me?”
“Look,” someone behind me whispers. Across the floor, Mia dances on, oblivious for now. The circles in her crown flash in and out of the lights.
I look back at Elio but I don’t take his hand.
“Sora,” he says. He runs his other hand through his hair, an impatient gesture I remember. “This isn’t right. You’re supposed to be dancing.”
The music behind us from the musicians sounds like everything does here. Like everything looks here. Bright, shiny, hard, with no place for anything deep.
I look down and so I see the moment when his fingers close around mine. I’m glad I’m not looking at him because I gasp, just barely, when our fingers touch.
I didn’t remember this. I didn’t expect this.
He is so warm. It feels so good.
I look back up. People still watch us, and I watch him. He smiles at me, the way he did when we made it rain, and then he pulls me close.
People behind us gasp in surprise. “What?” Elio says, over my head. “She hasn’t been Untouchable for months. It doesn’t matter.”
But it does.
The music suddenly seems so full and beautiful. I look up at Elio. He reaches for the crown. “Do you want this?” he asks, and I shake my head. He pulls back long enough to give it to me and I take it and drop it behind me. I don’t look to see where it falls. He pulls me back where I was, and this time he rests his cheek on my head. I feel the warmth through my hair, all the way down to my toes.
Maybe all the Beautiful People aren’t gone. Maybe Elio is one of them. And I never knew. All I had to do was show the pain.
Could it be that easy?
I wish they’d do a weather pattern; that they’d let it rain or snow above us to explain the drops on my cheeks and those I must be leaving on his shirt. But no—because this is the stars’ dance, the weather in the room is black sky and showery silver light. When it’s Mia’s turn, the room will be bright and white. Everyone will see her dance and everyone will want to look, but for a completely different reason than they wanted to look and laugh at me.
He runs his hand down my back just as the music ends and the silver lights dim.
And suddenly I think he might kiss me. He whispers, “Sora. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I say, and I think he holds me a little tighter.
Please kiss me, a voice in my head whispers, and though I’m hearing my own thoughts, I almost don’t recognize them. There has to be a reason to stay here.
He leans just a little closer; I feel it in his breath on my cheek and in every piece of me that’s touching any part of him.
The lights begin to come back on, slowly. I’m still holding on, holding on, my face tipped back, looking up at Elio.
“Sora,” he says, gently, and then when I don’t let go, he looks around. People are watching again. And starting to laugh. He lets go and I step back.
Mercifully, the room plunges back into darkness. Someone yells at someone else to fix the lights. It’s common, the power shorting out inside the Globe.
I have to leave.
I didn’t think one touch would undo me.
I think I might hear Elio behind me but I don’t stop. I hurt too much. I feel too much. This is dangerous. My father succeeded because he shut himself off before he left. I have to do that too. Though he doesn’t know it, Elio has put everything at risk.
The auxiliary power has come back on by the time I reach the transports, so I can get home. The night sky of the Globe throbs dull gray. We’ve never seen a real sky. I slam the door of the transport shut and it begins to move.
And I let myself look at other truths as I slide along in the dark.
My father lied to me. He never intended to come back to me. He never went back to the time of the Beautiful People. He didn’t believe in them. He had no faith. He went back to when he first met her. My mother. Just to be with her, even if it was for only a handful of moments.
Someone might say that was beautiful.
I don’t think so at all.
I don’t know what he planned to do. To stop her from having me, perhaps. I wondered for a long time if I would someday vanish, if he could change the future when he walked back into the past. But I didn’t go anywhere.
I’m here, but I’ve forgotten how to take up space. How to think about anything except going away.
I couldn’t change his mind. So I didn’t try to change anyone else’s mind, either. I let them think I’d been Outside too, and when they looked at me, I gave them the hard, flat stare of someone who has seen too much. When Elio or any of the others tried to talk to me, I didn’t answer back, or I said words that meant nothing at all.
What has happened to me is my fault too.
I can’t stand to be touched anymore. It breaks me.
I have to be healed. I have to be loved.
And the Beautiful People can do it.
The transport stops.
It’s dark inside my apartment, but that doesn’t matter. I walk to the little table, open the drawer, unlock the box with the key I wear around my neck. I don’t need light to do any of it. The sphere rolls perfectly into the hollow of my hand.
I know I can leave. It’s all I know how to do.
I think of the year: 2011. That will be the one. I look at an image from that time. Not the one of the wedding; I’m worried that if I choose that one, I’ll fly straight past the cake and the people and into that sky full of sunset and burn up before I’ve seen anything. Instead, I look at a picture of one of the Beautiful People. She walks across a red carpet and everyone stands near her, stretching out their ha
nds, screaming, calling to her, while she turns a beatific smile upon them.
I pick up the little glass world that my father gave me before he took what was left of my own.
This is how you leave.
You sit. You are quiet. You close your eyes. You think. You put the stone in your hand and hold it. There is no short way to this, no magical spell. Rushing will do you no good at all.
And not many people can do this. There is always something that holds them back and ties them down.
Not me.
I’m gone.
I didn’t expect to like it so much in here, in the in-between. So dark, so quiet. Maybe there is no sense in trying to find any time. Any place. Just leaving might be enough.
If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you.
I like lost.
Wherever I am, in the corners of my mind, in the edges of space, wherever it is, I lie down to rest.
There is no time.
There is no me.
And then something happens. A light here, another there.
Is it them? Are the Beautiful People coming to find me?
No.
I’m alone.
I’m standing in the stars. I’m standing on top of the Globe, I think, and then I look down and see it’s the moon under my feet. Or maybe the sphere. I can’t tell if I am tiny or enormous, and it doesn’t matter because I’m really outside, under the stars.
I stand there for a long time, trying to find the right words for what I see. Spending minutes, hours, years perhaps, choosing each one.
Infinite.
Bright.
Beautiful.
And I remember: I should think of the Beautiful People, if I want to find their time and escape my own.
Their time. My time.
The real gift is to have any time at all.
And suddenly, in the clarity of the starlight, I can see how things really are. The Beautiful People are real and they are not real. They lived, but they are not who we have made them out to be. The Beautiful People were not beautiful. Not any more or less than any other people throughout time and space. They reached out their hands sometimes and not others. They were kind like Laura and Elio and cruel like Mia. We made them beautiful because we needed to believe in them. And we wanted to believe they would heal us. We—I—wanted to believe they would love us.