Picture Us In The Light(24)
“Hey, thanks.” I slide into my seat. I’m wearing my gray Vans, which are now covered in fine-tipped Sharpie miniature portraits, a tiny ground-level entourage. “You’re on them.”
“Wait, are you serious?” She tucks her hair behind her ears and peers down to look more closely. “Where?”
I’d always kind of wondered if school would matter less once you knew where you were headed next year, but it’s the opposite, actually; it feels scarce now. Even small things feel heightened and sentimental, like these potlucks, or how in PE when we run laps I always run with Mike Narvin and he tells me all his obscure and generally X-rated facts about Shakespeare, or how in AP Lit the other day Chris Kum raised his hand in the middle of our discussion on revenge and its limits and said, very seriously, “What do you call a plagiarized version of Hamlet?” Mrs. Hogan pressed her lips together—she knew this wasn’t going anywhere especially academic—and said, “What?” and Chris said, “Spamlet.” It wasn’t original or even funny—it seriously wasn’t—but how often in your life do you get to be in a room full of people you’ve known since you were six years old all doubled over laughing at the same stupid joke? All that period whenever she tried to get us back on track someone’d whisper “Spamlet,” and it was over. Mrs. Hogan laughed, too; she likes us. I spent all of Journalism trying to draw the moment somehow on my Vans, trying (aggressively failing, although apparently not according to Noga) to get down in ink what it felt like to look around and see a variant of the same expression on everyone’s face, what it felt like to all be part guardians of a shared joke. I’ll miss all this.
I find Noga’s face near my left ankle, her shining hair and the dark lipstick she always wears, watch her light up. “It’s like I’m famous now,” she teases. “Maybe someday they’ll auction off those shoes in a museum and I can tell everyone I’m on them.”
I laugh. “Noga, if that’s your claim to fame, we’re going to have to have a long talk about where your life went wrong.” To class today I brought trail mix from my parents’ Costco expedition, and I put down a paper towel and divide it into four piles. “Wait, is Teri allergic to almonds? Am I remembering that right?”
“Cashews.”
“Oh, right.” Damn. “I should’ve brought dried fruit mix instead.”
“We should make stricter rules,” she says, smiling, neatly distributing the cereal into four portions. She brought, like she always does, four plastic spoons. I love Noga. “Hey, I heard you got into RISD! Congratulations!”
“Yeah, I was really lucky. Still can’t believe it. You wanted to go to UCLA, right?”
“You remember that?”
I collect details about people; it’s part of how you form the shape of them. “In, um, the least creepy way imaginable, I remember everything.”
She laughs, then pauses pouring cereal to put her hand on my forearm. “You can remember it for that long talk we have scheduled.”
Harry’s told me a couple of times he thinks Noga likes me. She’s a dancer with sharp, structured features, probably pretty up there if you’re into girls, and for the hell of it I wait to see if anything in me ignites. Nothing does. For a minute there, though, I forgot about my dad getting fired. So there’s that.
But it’s only a matter of minutes before it all settles back over me. All day, and then all week, it follows me around—my dad at home when I get back from school, avoiding me; my mom darting her eyes around the house like she’s expecting some other harbinger of bad news to emerge from the cabinets. My parents have been not quite fighting, exactly, but the form of it’s there, if not the substance: the raised voices, tight jaws, that same feeling you need to move carefully around them like waiting for paint to dry.
“He still hasn’t said what happened?” Harry asks me Thursday as we’re going up the stairs to the Journalism Lab after lunch.
“No, he won’t talk about it. And it’s definitely not the kind of thing I’m supposed to bring up, either.”
“Weird. If it were me I think I’d be trying to tell my side of things, you know?”
“You would literally never shut up about how you were wronged.” He wouldn’t. “But maybe he knows he deserved it. I don’t know.”
My dad’s car is there when I get home that afternoon but the house is empty, which, if I’m being honest, is always kind of a relief. The laptop’s open on the kitchen table, where my dad must’ve been using it, and he’s still logged in to his email. Neither of my parents is particularly great with technology—my mom once leaned over my shoulder when I was on my Facebook page and said, concerned, How does it know all that about you?—and I don’t think it’s ever occurred to either of them to do things like delete their search history or log out of their accounts. But, anyway—obviously I look.
He gets a ton of junk mail. But buried in it I find a message from Laura Yim, one of his colleagues from his lab:
Hi Joseph, I am very sorry to hear you won’t be with us going forward. I found your ideas about entanglement very worthy of exploration and I’m sorry about the way things concluded. I hope you can pursue them at your next position. Stay in touch.
Is this—I read it twice more—is this about that experiment he brought me and my mom to see all those years ago? But what would that even mean? He was done with it—he promised my mom. He’d stopped talking about it at home. And he’d never told anyone in his lab, either, because his PI thought it was pseudoscience. And that was so long ago.