TOWELING MY HAIR, I SCAN MY BEDROOM SHELVES again, nurturing the hope that I might have missed something. Of course not, though. I have every book counted: thirty-seven on the shelves by the door, eighteen on the shelf above my mirror, and another sixty-six in the bookcase under my loft bed. As of this afternoon, I've read every book twice, except Physics of the Impossible, which I never planned on rereading. Not my cup of tea; it's clearly targeted at people who like science fiction.
I don't know why people find sci-fi so fascinating. Some of it has a glaring lack of common sense. The inescapable trope of a future world where flying cars have replaced all other modes of transportation? Yes, excellent. Have these authors ever given a single thought to acrophobia? Just a thought, of course, but for the millions of people with a paralyzing fear of heights, flying cars might be a tiny bit absolutely terrifying. But no; authors never seem to care about the acrophobics of the world.
"Valentine?" calls my mother. "Are you still in the shower?"
"If I were, I wouldn't be able to hear you," I reply, hanging up my towel.
"Dinner, smart aleck."
I pull on a T-shirt and head to the kitchen. My mother places a plate before me, and as she settles at the other end of the table, I brace myself for the usual mindless onslaught of How was your day? Learn anything new? Make any friends? One of the many downsides of having a guidance counselor for a mother: her endless enthusiasm for small talk.
But the only thing she says is, "Your dad's still at the lab."
"Yes, I gathered that," I say blankly. "From his absence."
She says nothing else. Suspicious, I sip my water and peer at her over the edge of my glass. Her head is bowed, her honey-brown bangs drooping over her eyes. She stares at her fork, stirring the mashed potatoes rather than doing anything productive with them.
I'm not impressed. She's always telling me to eat my food instead of rearranging it.
"Something's wrong," I guess.
She looks up at me and smiles quickly. "No, nothing."
"Okay …"
"Just … the assembly."
"Ah. That." I take a bite and put down my fork. "What about it?"
"Something like this happening at Paloma." She shakes her head. "I hope they figure it all out soon. The presentation upset me a bit."
"Why?"
She leans an elbow on the table, giving me an unusually wry smile. "You'll understand when you have kids."
"Not happening," I mutter, returning to my food. "Anyway, I thought the whole presentation was straightforward. No use being preoccupied over it."
Hypocritical of me to say, maybe, given that I can't stop thinking about the assembly. But that's because my message triggered this whole ordeal.
Two weeks ago, I stayed after school, waiting for a ride home from my mother. At 6:00, long after the halls emptied, I passed the faculty break room in the new wing. A voice seeped through the closed door. I came just close enough to catch it.
"Nobody's going to find out." That phrase caught me mid-step. A girl's unfamiliar voice was speaking, carrying an undercurrent of anxiety. "Please—try not to worry. I'm not in your class, nobody sees us together, and I haven't told anyone at all. I promise." A pause. The sound of a kiss. "I love you."
I backed away from the door. As what I'd heard sunk in, I scurried away, my pulse quickening. I sent the message that evening through the anonymous submission form on the school's website: Teacher and student in romantic relationship. Overheard in faculty break room after school. Identities unknown.
It's strange, but now I almost feel as if I shouldn't have done anything, which is absurd. Wouldn't that make me an accessory to the crime?
What little appetite I had vanishes. I excuse myself, and for once, my mother doesn't say a word about my neglected food. I return to my room, but none of it offers any comfort: not the cracked spines of favorite books, not the cool glow of my laptop, not the frame of blackish night through the skylight. I spin the gyroscope I keep on my desk—once, twice—but its hypnotizing whir hardly calms me.
I grab the spare keys to my mother's car from a hook on the door. Bundling my coat on, I stride through the kitchen, where my mother still sits. "Where are you going?" she asks.
"Out," I say. I don't wait for a response.
DRIVING AROUND AT NIGHT ALWAYS HELPS CLEAR MY mind. I'm not sure why. It's certainly not the view; there isn't much to see in Paloma, Kansas, population 38,000. I suppose solitude just feels more excusable if you're in motion.
I pass the series of glorified strip malls that comprise our downtown, local businesses and antiques shops. After they peter out, a lonely-looking McDonald's stands on the left, the only evidence that corporate America acknowledges our existence. The rest of this small city is a maze of residential neighborhoods. Some are cookie-cutter suburbs with identical mini mansions; some are yuppie projects liberally adorned with round windows and organic gardens; some are tiny forgotten streets with chain-link fences and our meager police force lurking around.
I end up at Paloma High somehow, parked in the junior lot. Our school is a different building at night, an empty body with no light in its eyes. Staring out my windshield at the three-story mishmash of brick and modernism, I can only think about the tiny sound of those two people kissing. The remembered whisper, I love you.
Part of me wonders what it would feel like, a kiss. I've never felt compelled to try putting my mouth on somebody else's mouth. I refuse to believe it feels like a symphony of violins, or a ferociously panning camera, or an eruption of emotion in the center of my chest, or anything else it's supposed to be.
I look at my hands. I lift two fingers, close my eyes, and press my lips against them.
Nothing. It feels like nothing at all.
After a motionless second, I take my hand away. I exit the car and slam the door, embarrassed all of a sudden that I felt compelled to do that. Embarrassed that I even wondered. I clamber onto the hood of the car, lean back against the windshield, and stare upward, my hands deep in my pockets. The galaxy is spray-painted across the sky. Looking at it, I feel swallowed up. Infinitesimally small.
I know Earth is whirling on its axis at one thousand miles per hour. I know it is whipping around the sun at sixty-six thousand miles per hour. I know we're all hurtling around the center of the Milky Way at four hundred and eighty-three thousand miles per hour. But lying here, I feel motionless. I take a breath, hold it for a count of ten, and let it go. It billows out over my head and trails off into the black sky.
You've done your part, a voice says in the back of my mind. You have no more information to give the school. Worrying about this is pointless.
But the girl's voice lingers in my ears, low, husky, and sweet.