After a while, my head got heavy, and I sat down on the couch in front of the TV. I didn’t really have the energy to turn it on, so I just stared at the blank screen.
The oblong pill made me feel exceptionally groggy, but only from the bridge of my nose up. My body felt like its standard self, broken and insufficient in the usual ways, but my brain felt sloppy and exhausted, like the noodle legs of a runner post-marathon. Mom came home and plopped down next to me. “Long day,” she said. “I don’t mind students, Aza. It’s the parents that make my job hard.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“How was your day?”
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t have a fever, do I?”
She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. “I don’t think so. Do you feel sick?”
“Just tired, I think.” Mom turned on the TV, and I told her I was going to lie down and do some homework.
—
I read my history textbook for a while, but my consciousness felt like a camera with a dirty lens, so I decided to text Davis.
Me: Hi.
Him: Hi.
Me: How are you?
Him: Pretty good, you?
Me: Pretty good.
Him: Let’s continue this awkward silence in person.
Me: When?
Him: There is a meteor shower Thursday night. Should be a good one if it’s not cloudy.
Me: Sounds great. See you then. I have to go my mom is here.
She had, in fact, peeked her head in through the door. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Want to make dinner together?”
“I need to read.”
She came in, sat down on the edge of my bed, and said, “You feeling scared?”
“Kinda.”
“Of what?”
“It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”
“I don’t know what to say, Aza. I see the pain on your face and I want to take it from you.”
I hated hurting her. I hated making her feel helpless. I hated it. She was running her fingers through my hair. “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re all right. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” I felt myself stiffen a little as she kept playing with my hair. “Maybe you just need a good night’s sleep,” she said at last—the same lie I’d fed to Noah.
TWELVE
THE MORNING OF THE METEOR SHOWER, I arrived at school with Harold and discovered a bright orange Volkswagen Beetle parked in my usual spot. As I pulled in next to the car, I saw that Daisy was in the driver’s seat. I rolled down my window and said, “Didn’t Josephine the banker tell us not to make any purchases for six months?”
“I know, I know,” she said. “But I talked the car sales dude down to eighty-four hundred dollars from ten thousand, so in a way I actually saved money. You know what the color’s called?” She snapped. “Snap orange! Because it’s snappy.”
“Don’t waste the money, okay?”
“Don’t worry, Holmesy. This car is only going to appreciate in value. Liam is a future collector’s item. I’ve named him Liam, by the way.” I smiled—it was an inside joke that literally no one else would get.
As we walked across the parking lot, Daisy handed me a thick book, Fiske Guide to Colleges. “I also picked this up, but it turns out I don’t need it because I’m definitely going to IU. I always knew that college was expensive, but some of these places cost almost a hundred grand per year. What do they do there? Are the classes on yachts? Do you get to live in a castle and get served by house-elves? Even Rich Me can’t afford fancy college.”
Certainly not if you’re buying cars, I wanted to say, but instead I asked her about the Pickett disappearance. “You ever figure out what ‘the jogger’s mouth’ was?”
“Holmesy,” she said. “We got the reward. It’s over.”
“Right, I know,” I said, and before I could say anything else, she spotted Mychal across the parking lot and ran off to hug him.
—
All morning, I lost myself in Daisy’s college book. Every now and again, a bell would sound, and I’d move to a different room, sitting at a different desk, and then I’d go back to reading the college guide, holding it on my lap under the desk. I’d never really thought about going to college anywhere but Indiana University or Purdue—my mom had gone to Indiana and my dad to Purdue—and they were both cheap compared with going to school out of state.
But reading through the hundreds of colleges in this book, which were rated on everything from academics to cafeteria quality, I couldn’t help but imagine myself at some small college somewhere on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere with two-hundred-year-old buildings. I read about one school where you could use the same library study carrel that Alice Walker had. Admittedly, fifty thousand would hardly make a dent in the tuition, but maybe I could get a scholarship. My grades were good, and I was a competent standardized test taker.
I let myself imagine it—taking classes like Politicized Geography and Nineteenth-Century British Women in Literature in small classrooms, everyone seated in a circle. I imagined the crunch of gravel paths under my feet as I walked from class to the library, where I’d study with friends, and then before dinner at a cafeteria that served everything from cereal to sushi, we’d stop at the college coffee shop and talk about philosophy or power systems or whatever you talk about in college.
It was so fun to imagine the possibilities—West Coast or East Coast? City or country? I felt like I might end up anywhere, and imagining all the futures I might have, all the Azas I might become, was a glorious and welcome vacation from living with the me I currently was.
I broke away from the college guide only for lunch. Across the table from me, Mychal was working on a new art project—meticulously tracing the waveforms of some song onto a sheet of thin, translucent paper—while Daisy regaled our lunch table with the story of her car purchase, without ever quite revealing how she came across the necessary funds. After I’d eaten a few bites of my sandwich, I took out my phone and texted Davis. What time tonight?
Him: Looks like it’s going to be overcast tonight so no meteor shower.
Me: My primary interest is not the meteor shower.
Him: Oh. Then after school?
Me: I’ve got a homework date with Daisy. Seven?
Him: Seven works.
—
After school, Daisy and I locked ourselves in my room to study for a couple hours. “It’s only been three days since I retired from Chuck E. Cheese, but it’s already shocking how much easier school is,” she said as she unzipped her backpack. She pulled out a brand-new laptop and set it up on my desk.
“Jesus, Daisy, don’t spend it all at once,” I said quietly, so Mom wouldn’t hear. Daisy shot me a look. “What?”
“You already had a car and a computer,” she said.
“I’m just saying you don’t want to spend all of it.”
She rolled her eyes a little, and I said what again, but she disappeared into her online world. I could see her screen from the bed—she was scrolling through comments on her stories as I read one of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist essays for history. I kept reading the words but not understanding them, then circling back, reading the same paragraph over and over again.
Daisy was quiet for a few minutes, but at last said, “I try really hard not to judge you, Holmesy, and it’s slightly infuriating when you judge me.”
“I’m not judging—”
“I know you think you’re poor or whatever, but you know nothing about being actually poor.”
“Okay, I’ll shut up about it,” I said.
“You’re so stuck in your head,” she continued. “It’s like you genuinely can’t think about anyone else.” I felt like I was getting smaller. “I’m sorry, Holmesy, I shouldn’t say that. It’s just frustrating sometimes.” When I didn’t respond, she kept talking. “I don’t mean that you’re a bad friend or anything. But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you.”
“Message received,” I said.
“I don’t mean to sound like a bitch.”
“You don’t,” I said.
“Do you know what I mean, though?” she asked.