Tell Me a Secret (8 page)

After Ty Belkin’s moment of truth, questions and answers blurred together until Delaney elbowed me merrily and said, “Hey, Rand, yooou’ve been dumped, haven’t you? Drink!”

Huh? Was she talking about middle school? Did everyone else know something I didn’t? Kamran raised an eyebrow.

Essence caught my eye from across the circle. An image of her ex–Siamese twin (Eli, attached at the tonsils) flashed before me: drama geek, smartier than thou, whose sole fashion statement consisted of badly fitted khakis and rugby shirts faded from washing out his pungent body odor. I couldn’t believe Essence didn’t notice. But I guess you could forgive a lot of things when you’re the center of somebody’s universe. As if Delaney would want to steal
him
.

As the game rippled around the circle and each person spoke their clever I Nevers, I stared at Essence, the contempt building in my throat. She didn’t drink once, even though I knew she should.

The game stopped with her. She raised her head, eyes searing across the circle. For a moment, they flickered toward me with something else. Regret. Or sympathy. Then she looked straight at Delaney.

“I never tried to steal someone’s boyfriend,” she intoned, like a prophet of doom. The crowd burst out laughing, most of all Delaney. She looked stunning—hair caught up in two messy pigtails, gray eyes, movie-star cheekbones. She turned to me, inviting me to share in the joke, and for a moment I basked in the glow of her reassurance. Her gaze slipped past mine. I turned to see Kamran staring back, grinning. Then Delaney took a drink. A long drink. I had to get out of there. I had to pee.

Next stop: ultrasound, a room shrouded in warm darkness. I thought I was going to die, I had to go so badly—more and more the state of affairs these days, now that the baby was bigger. “Sorry, but we need a full bladder to see the baby,” explained the ob-gyn.

The technician squirted some warm goo on my tummy and plopped the scanner right in the middle of it. She rolled it around, casting light and shadows into the connecting monitor. The white and black form mesmerized me, constantly
morphing and completely foreign, like shadows and faces in a charcoal drawing. Finally a row of lines came into focus, a web of five long pips splaying into a recognizable shape.

“That’s a hand,” said the tech.

It was as though the hand unlocked the door. Suddenly I was able to make out an arm, then two arms. She showed me feet and legs, then back up to investigate a face emerging from the shadows.

“Do you want to know what you’re having?” asked the tech.

“You can tell already?”

She laughed. “Do you have a sense of whether it’s a boy or a girl?”

“No,” I said, though I had a hope.

She rolled the scanner up to my belly button, and a U-shaped blob appeared on the screen. My heart slowed at the sight of the round shapes.

After Essence’s I Never, I stumbled through the trees toward the cabin. Nettles snaked up and made itchy marks on my bare skin. My white shorts and tee, which looked so hot when I put them on, were now dusted with a layer of soot and the telltale imprint of my butt cheeks on the ground. So much for trying to keep Kamran’s attention.

Well, what would Xanda do? For one thing, she would make the most of being dirty. She would be dirrrty. Grrr. “Grrr,” I said aloud, then laughed at myself, as if Xanda were right there
listening. “Okay,” I panted, standing up straighter and putting my hand on my hip. “Let’s try this again. Grrrrr!”

“Grrr, yourself,” a low voice said out of the darkness. I could see Kamran’s shape, lit up from behind by the moon through the forest canopy. His dark hair, grungy red tee, and worn jeans, just as dirty as mine and looking all the more delectable because of it, made me want to tattoo myself into his heart. We were alone. The campfire crowd hummed down the hill, laughter stretching out into blurry hoots.

So what if they were laughing at me, or if they weren’t? Kamran had come.

“What happened back there?” he asked softly. Softly enough for me to wonder if I was imagining everything.

The choice spread out before me like threads in a labyrinth, here in this black forest. I could tell him the truth, my fears and insecurities laid out for him to dissect and dismiss. That road was well-traveled, and I knew exactly where it would lead. He could deny it all he liked, but I could see it clearly, even in the firelight.

Worse, he could confirm my fear—that in one moment, she’d captured his heart and stolen him away.

Or I could take another path, traveled by others but undiscovered by us. Delaney would have done it long ago, and she would have him wrapped around her finger. Here, with him looking at me like that, my “Grrr” still echoing in the moist heat and making me feel dirrrty and sexy and maybe even confident. Here we could discover a new path, past this
present uncertainty and into a certain future. I could do that. I could take the chance. I could be more like Delaney in order to be more like me. In order not to lose him, I could take the first step.

A Roman candle went off in the distance. I took a step toward him, drawing his hands onto my hips where the skin touched my shorts.

I put my lips to his lips and sealed our trajectory: the undiscovered it was.

“Well, it looks like you’re having a girl,” the tech said, peering into the white shadows.

“A girl? How can you tell?”

She pointed to the screen. “Here is the bottom, where the legs come up, and then the three little lines in the middle. The three lines indicate girl parts.”

I was in shock. “What would it look like if it was a boy?”

“A couple of big, round blobs,” she laughed. “I don’t know how people can mistake it.”

I asked her to check again, just to be sure. But I knew already. I knew it all along.

“Do you have a name picked out yet?” asked the tech.

“Yes. Her name is Alexandra. But I’m going to call her Lexi.”

Mom usually puttered around in the morning with Dad already gone, escaping the knot of our family tie. I came down starving, famished from an entire nine hours of producing another being. Even a fresh wave of condemnation wasn’t enough to keep me from breakfast.

But the house was already empty. At least it seemed to be, when I came into the kitchen for my new obsession: grapefruit with oatmeal.
Meat for boys, fruit for girls
, the old wives’ tales said. The BabyCenter women divided into two camps: those who were finding out and those who wanted a surprise.

When I posted Lexi’s picture on the boards, Nik said, “You think you and Kamran are happy now, wait until that baby comes.”

That’s when she told us about her miscarriage. It was a year ago September. “She was my baby girl,” Nik told us, even though it was too early to tell, only twelve weeks. “Her name would have been Lashaya.”

Now that I had seen Lexi, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose her. Xanda was a preemie, but no one in my family had ever had a miscarriage that I knew of. I
did
know that if happiness was still possible, it would be because of her.

“What would you do if you lost Micah James?” I asked Nik.

“Faith manages” was all she would say.

A thud came from behind the basement door, and seconds later my dad came up into the kitchen. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

“Oh, Rand. Sorry, I didn’t realize you were still here.” He held a toolbox awkwardly, as if trying to hide behind it.

I held up the oatmeal canister. “How come you’re still here?”

Dad shrugged. “Half the crew called in sick, we’re behind schedule on the Cumberland project…” He ran a hand through his hair, releasing particles into the air as if we were bathed in spotlights. “Hey,” he said. “Why don’t I make us some pancakes?”

Pancakes were Xanda’s favorite. As he mixed the batter and I got out the griddle, memories surrounded me—of how Dad used to make a big breakfast every Saturday with Mom and Xanda and me. Before he brought Andre into our lives
and changed everything.

“So,” he said as I carefully poured a syrup path through my pancake. “I’m starting to think about a design for the montage set. Your mom said you’d be painting this year.”

“Yeah.” He took a huge bite and waited for me to say more. He’d spread the batter thin, the way Xanda liked them. I wondered if he was trying to communicate in some special language for the grieving and forgotten. I wanted to ask him about Xanda, about Andre. I wanted to tell him about the girl. Lexi. Now was my chance to pour out my heart.

A shrill ring shattered the silence—his cell phone, with a call from his crew, the Cumberlands, Mom, it didn’t matter. He stepped out of the room to answer while I scarfed down the rest of the pancake and folded up a second one to take with me. I had to get to school.

These days I avoided Kamran at all costs, even though I couldn’t avoid him in English. I had no hope of focusing on the racial implications in
To Kill a Mockingbird
or illusions and reality in
Hamlet
with the back of his head in front of me. From that vantage, it was impossible to tell what he might be thinking—only that he darted out of the room the moment the bell rang, leaving the scent of figs and terror in his wake. Sooner or later, we would have to talk.

While I worked in the art room during lunch, my crazy art teacher stopped in now and then to check on my Baird application—due December 1, a little over a month away.

I had everything ready except for my final six slides, four of
them freestyle pieces meant to reflect my personal aesthetic, the theme I would pursue if accepted into their art program. It wouldn’t take a critic to see that every piece explored the same question: Could I retrace the turns of my sister’s life and get to the very heart? Now there was a new question: Was keeping Lexi a terrible mistake?

And then there were the portraits. “You need at least two in there,” Mrs. Crooker harped. “What is it about faces that sends you spiraling into those labyrinths?” I didn’t tell her there would be only one person to draw. And that was impossible. Her face was always changing in my mind. The only photograph I knew of her was on Dylan’s refrigerator—my mom must have destroyed all the rest.

The piece I worked on now was a charcoal drawing, since I’d been banned from toxic-fumed paint. I was starting to like charcoal, the graininess of it and the stark contrasts, for its similarity to the picture I now had of Lexi. The darks and lights emerged as I sketched lines, weaving in and out less like the sharp angles of my previous work and more like the curves and knots of how I imagined wormholes would be. Trails through time and space. Ways to capture the past.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Kamran had said when he first explained hyperspace to me, when I barely knew him. We had just spent three hours in the Sci-Fi Museum, where admiring Captain Kirk’s chair and Robert Heinlein’s original manuscripts was like sharing a religious experience. I could see exactly why my art spoke to him.

“You can’t relive the past, because time is always splitting out from events—like infinite branches of a tree. Whatever choices you make affect the future.”

I nodded my head like I understood, but he already knew me too well. Maybe that was one reason why I liked him—my masks didn’t work. He only wanted the real thing.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “If time is like a tree branch, why can’t you go back to a specific point and change things?” I hadn’t yet told him about Xanda. “Wouldn’t it be possible, I mean, if you found the precise moment time shifted, the exact moment? Like the butterfly—”

“Right, right, like the butterfly and the tsunami—and if you could only trace back to the butterfly, you could—”

“Exactly!”

“No. You can’t.” His words stopped me, bumping into the fears I’d had since the beginning. He would think I was stupid. Unworthy. One day he would trade me in for a better model—someone more exciting, more clever. Like Delaney. “You can’t do that,” he was saying, “because it’s impossible to go back to the same moment. You can’t delete the time in between. It’s like a branch trying to grow back into itself.”

“Like a loop,” I said.

“Yes! So I guess,
theoretically,
you could go to the same moment in time and space, but you would have experienced all of the time in between.”

I could live with that—going back to the moment everything changed for Xanda, the point in time that would send her
crashing to her death. I could trace back through the shards of memories, each scratching the surface of Xanda until she walked out the door forever.

“Nice,” Mrs. Crooker commented over my shoulder. “Trying to break out of the labyrinth, I see.”

As I worked with the charcoal, smudging it into a shadow of sky, a white shape had emerged—a bird taking flight. I abandoned the lines and focused on the bird, shaping it into a creature flying free, like the day Xanda tried to fly with Andre. Like I still hoped to with Kamran.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was possible to change the present, if only I could pinpoint the exact moment everything had spun out of control.

That night, I sketched a picture of Xanda—what she might look like now, if she had lived to her twenty-second birthday. It didn’t take long to start drawing labyrinths again. The curls of her hair spread out like Medusa’s snakes—into her forehead, winding all the way into her mind and places I couldn’t follow.

Unless all of this was some cosmic accident, I knew what that bird meant.

Somehow, through time and space and maybe even death, Xanda had reached across and offered me an escape.

The last weeks of October found everyone at school humming with party plans. Most of the jocks would be at Meghan McCaullay’s house, sacrificing their brain cells to the great beer god and playing mix-’n’-match macking. The Goths would try to sneak into the Capitol Hill club Chains for a night of clove smoking and cauldronlike cocktails. There would be smaller parties, and parties too minor to make the radar, where people like Essence and the drama crowd would spend the evening bobbing for apples and wishing they had been invited to something better.

And then there was Dylan’s bash.

“We
have
to go to Dylan’s Halloween party next year,” Delaney had told me last spring. “It’s an Elna Mead legend.
He’s been throwing them since, like,
his
junior year. You have to know him or one of his housemates to get in—but you’ll be with me.”

When I asked her about the party before class, she shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think he’s having one this year—I was thinking about going to visit my mom in L.A. What are you doing?”

Apparently Milo didn’t get the top secret memo, because now he stood in the hall with a stack of party flyers, handing them out with a lazy smile to any reasonably attractive female. “Heeeey, see you there?”

A pack of sophomore girls took the flyer, not realizing they had received one of the school’s most coveted invitations. They giggled, rolling their eyes as they bustled by and let the paper flutter to the ground. I snatched it up, slipping it into one of my folders, completely unnoticed. It was like I no longer existed.

Or worse, too much of me existed, trying to negotiate the halls looking anything but sexy in my stretchiest jeans, worn low around my hips and under the small bump that had emerged, and a long tee getting shorter by the day.

I deliberately avoided looking at myself in the mirror, afraid of the unstoppable new me. Even my face, once taut and oval, puffed with what Nik had politely termed “water weight gain.”

“It started out under my chin and took over,” she complained on the chat board. “Water weight doesn’t capture it—I
think I’m carrying around a spare hot water heater.”

It made me feel better to chat with the girls, hearing all of their pregnancy complaints. My stories were becoming increasingly outrageous as I tried to give the impression of a married college student. Kamran rubbed my back when it ached and went on cherry-chunk ice cream runs whenever I needed it. My parents were thrilled about the pregnancy and had offered to watch the baby while I finished school. I told them I was at the University of Washington instead of Baird, since the last thing I needed was to get caught by someone who actually lived there. Nik lived in the Northwest, too, and gave me her cell number, but I didn’t call. I could imagine what she would sound like, though. Funny, matter-of-fact, never scared to tell the truth. Maybe she wouldn’t hate me because I was.

“What are you doing for Halloween?” was the Question of the Day when I logged on.

Stacy+one was going to a party as a Mummy-to-be. Soon2Bmom and her husband would be Homer and Marge—only she would be Homer, compete with doughnuts and Duff while her husband teetered around in a green dress and blue wig. Babyfairy was sewing a knocked-up Maid Marian costume to go with her husband’s Robin Hood, and Starr69 was hosting a party at her place and dressing up as Earth Mother.
Nik, what are you going to wear?
I posted.

F
EMME
N
IKITA
: Surely you jest, XandasAngel. If I went as
anything, it would be as The Blob. Or I could go as a Killer Tomato.

X
ANDAS
A
NGEL
: A killer tomato would be cool.

F
EMME
N
IKITA
: I should post a reminder to myself to never leave home dressed as a Gigantic Red Fruit. Mother-in-law already tried that when she gave me the most hideous red maternity shirt, size XXL. Do you think she was trying to tell me something?

I thought it was best to be diplomatic, not having any idea what Nik looked like.

X
ANDAS
A
NGEL
: Maybe it would look cute.

F
EMME
N
IKITA
: That’s easy for you to say. You’re probably one of those obnoxiously pixielike college girls that look completely normal until you turn sideways.

Which was mostly true, I had to admit, except for the ubiquitous layer of water transforming me from Barbie to the Pillsbury Dough Girl. And the college part.

F
EMME
N
IKITA
: Maybe I should go as Where’s Waldo, only instead of Waldo, it will be Where’s Micah James? Can you find him under all my junk in the trunk? LOL. So what are you and Husband-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong doing?

A party of course, like any other college student. It didn’t
occur to me that this lie would be the one to get me into trouble.

F
EMME
N
IKITA
: You owe us pictures. No more of this phantom college student stuff. Everyone at that party is going to have a cell phone with a camera. We’re not speaking to you again unless you give us a picture. No excuses.

X
ANDAS
A
NGEL
: I’ll try.

I kept telling myself I wanted to go to that party because I needed to get a picture for Nik. But it was more than that.

In art class, I pulled Milo’s flyer out for a closer inspection. Delaney’s initials were scrawled in the corner with a red pen—the key to opening Dylan’s door.

Underneath the address and time, the scrabbled shape of a black crow stood out in relief against the white half sheet, an inversion of the white bird in my drawing.

Like a sign left by Xanda, bidding me to follow.