I reached up to brush my hair out of my eyes and realized I still had on Norman’s sunglasses. When I took them off the moon seemed even brighter.
“Those are nice,” Isabel said.
“Thanks.”
“Norman must like you.”
“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “He just found them at some flea market.”
“I don’t mean he likes you,” she said, drawing the word out. “He’s just very picky about people.” She reached around for another beer. “You should be flattered.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.” Now I wished I’d taken the ride, or thanked him more.
Isabel popped the top off the bottle, running her finger around the neck. “Who was that girl, yesterday?” she asked. “The one who said those things about you.”
I looked up at Mira’s room. She’d moved back to the end of the bed and had Cat Norman in her arms. As she petted him his tail twitched back and forth, back and forth.
“Just this girl from school.”
“She thought she knew you pretty well.”
“She hates me,” I said.
“Why?”
I looked down at the grass, brushing my fingers across it. I could feel her waiting for me to answer. “I don’t know.”
“Must be a reason.”
“No,” I said. “There isn’t.” She might have wanted more, but that was all she was getting, for now.
She sighed. “High school sucks,” she said finally. “It gets better.”
I looked at her: perfect figure, perfect hair, gorgeous and self-confident. If I looked like Isabel, no one could touch me. “Yeah, right,” I said. “Like you know about that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Girls like you,” I said, “don’t even know how bad it is.”
“Girls like me,” she repeated. And she kind of half smiled, as if I’d said something funny. “What kind of girl am I, Colie?’
I shook my head. In the little house, Morgan sat down on the couch again. Morgan would understand this. She’d been like me, once, I knew it.
“Tell me,” Isabel said, leaning closer. “Go ahead.”
“A pretty one. Smart,” I said. “Popular. You were probably even a cheerleader, for God’s sake.” I felt stupid now, but it was too late to stop. “You were the kind of girl that never knew what it was like to have someone treat you the way that girl treated me. You have no idea.”
She watched me as I said this, her face smooth and calm. I could see her in high school, with a boyfriend in a varsity jacket, wearing little skirts that swirled around her perfect legs. I could see her at the prom, with a tiara and an armful of flowers. And I could see her in the gym locker room, taunting a girl who was fat and dorky with no friends. A girl like me.
“You’re wrong,” she said quietly, leaning back again.
“Yeah, right,” I said. She could have been Caroline Dawes then, for all the anger I felt simmering in me. “Then what were you?”
“I was afraid,” she said. And she turned her head away, looking back at the bright lights of the little house. “Just like you.”
We sat there for a moment, watching Morgan move through the living room.
“It’s so, so stupid,” she added softly, “what we do to ourselves because we’re afraid. It’s so stupid.” And she kept her head turned, as if I wasn’t even there.
But she was wrong. She wasn’t anything like me, and I was so close, again, to telling her why. To telling her everything. But just as I started, she turned back and I lost my nerve.
I thought of my mother, suddenly, of all those caterpillars waiting to Become. Of Mira, pretending to ignore the taunts that followed her. Of Morgan with her square face and lover’s grin. And me and Isabel, under a big yellow moon.
Isabel didn’t move when the car passed Mira’s driveway and pulled up in front of the little house. She didn’t turn around as someone got out of the car and strode up those stairs, Morgan running to meet him halfway. And she didn’t say a word as they went inside, the lights clicking off behind them and leaving us in the dark, with only that moon and the light from Mira’s window to see our way back.
Chapter nine
The next morning, the real Fourth of July, I woke up early to go for a run, leaving Isabel crashed on the sofa. I could hear the floor creaking overhead as Mira got dressed and collected Cat Norman.
On my way down the path I passed by Norman’s door. It was ajar and I decided to stop in and thank him for the sunglasses after all. When I knocked, the door fell open. The room was packed: canvases lined the walls, stacked against each other, and hanging from the ceiling were at least ten mobiles, all of them shifting in the breeze coming in behind me. They were made of odds and ends, bits and pieces: bicycle gears, old Superballs, tiny framed pictures cut out of magazines. One was just made up of old metal rulers and protractors, clinking against each other. The mannequins he’d carried in on my first day were leaning against the wall, their midsections painted wild colors, arms stretched out, fingers Day-Glo and cheerful. The bazaar was tomorrow; I couldn’t imagine where he could fit anything else.
I found Norman in the corner on a futon, asleep under a mobile of different-colored sunglasses parts. The room was cold and he was murmuring, shirtless, the sheets tangled around him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him: his face was flushed, one arm thrown over a pillow, fingers brushing the wall. He looked different to me somehow, like some other guy, one I’d never met. And I felt strange, as if he might at any moment open his eyes and I’d have to explain myself, standing there without the food window or a shared purpose safely between us. I backed away quickly, bumping against a mannequin on the way out. But I wondered for my entire run what he’d been dreaming.