“Whatever, Dad,” he said, and he turned to me. I looked at him and he looked right back, eyes steady, without a canvas or a purpose between us. “You know, you can say it doesn’t matter to you all you want. But I’m not the one calling every night, Dad. That’s you.”
Then he stood there, listening. I couldn’t hear anything. And after a minute, he hung up the phone.
“Norman,” I said softly. He looked down at his arm, flaking off some paint with one finger. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t—”
“Forget it,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s okay.”
He walked back to the easel and stepped behind the canvas. He looked tired, and I remembered when I’d caught him dreaming. I wondered if it had been his father’s face he’d seen then, too.
I sat back down, sliding on my sunglasses. Neither of us spoke.
“It’s like,” he said suddenly, “I’m the only one of us kids who isn’t doing exactly what Dad planned. The whole art thing makes him nuts, always has. His idea of art is one of those velvet paintings of dogs playing poker.”
I smiled. A breeze blew through from the open door, sending the protractors spinning. They clinked against each other and the rulers as Norman watched, just shaking his head.
“I really like this,” I said quietly, pointing at the mobile.
“Yeah?” he said. “Geometry was the only subject I ever liked in school, you know, besides art. There’s something so even and nice about it. All those theorems and givens. No doubts.”
“I know,” I said.
“I liked that you could just depend on it to be the same, forever,” he said, holding the paintbrush loosely, his eyes on the mobile as it turned and turned overhead. “You could come back to it in a million years and find it just the way you left it.” And he looked at me and smiled, and I felt it, all the way to my toes.
“I like that,” he said.
It was quiet for a minute, with only the leaves rustling outside. I felt responsible for what had just happened; I wanted things to be even. It wasn’t just smiles that you sometimes had to earn.
“Norman.”
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his hands over his eyes. It was late. But I had to do something. So I touched my lip ring with my tongue and took a deep breath.
“Remember, when we started, and you asked me if I had anything I didn’t want to talk about?”
He wiped off the brush with his shirttail. “Yep.”
“Well, I do.” I pulled my legs up, sliding off my sunglasses. “What you’ve seen of me, this summer? It’s not really who I am. I mean, it’s not who I was.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“The thing is,” I went on slowly, rubbing my fingers over the worn blue of the chair, “everyone at home hates me.”
I expected him to stop me, but he didn’t. It was almost scarier that way. I wanted Mira to appear at my elbow, carefully guiding me away just as she had at the bazaar, saving me from whatever would tumble next from my mouth. But I was on my own.
I swallowed. “I used to be really fat,” I said, “and we were always moving from place to place until we ended up in Charlotte. And there, someone started a rumor that I slept with this guy when I didn’t. I didn’t even know him. We were just talking, and—”
“Colie.”
“No,” I said firmly.
Outside, a breeze was blowing again: I could hear Mira’s wind chimes. I had to keep going.
“Nothing even happened, but the next day they all called me names and have ever since. That’s why I was so mean when you came to pick me up that first day. I wasn’t used to anyone being nice to me.”
“You don’t have to tell me this,” he said, very quietly.
“I want to,” I said, and my voice was cracking. “You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted to tell.”
I still wasn’t able to look at him, even as he stepped out from behind the canvas.
“Colie.”
I shook my head. “That’s the real me, Norman. I mean, not that I did those things, because I didn’t. But to them I was always a slut, still a slut.”
I choked on this last word. It almost scratched my throat as I forced it out.
“Colie,” he said softly. I could feel him watching me; he was that close.
“They didn’t care about what it did to me,” I said. “It almost killed me.”
“But it didn’t,” he said, and then he reached over and lifted my chin, so I was looking at him. “You knew the truth all along, Colie. That’s all that matters. You knew.”
Now the last year was flooding my mind, all the taunts and terrible things, every ounce of me that had been taken.
Chase Mercer’s face, framed in the sweeping arc of a flashlight, already pulling away from me.
Caroline Dawes huddled with her friends across a gym locker room, laughing, mouths open, as I tried to turn my back to change clothes.
The man at the tattoo place leaning in close with the needle toward my lip—this will hurt—as I closed my eyes.
My mother sitting across from me at the dinner table in a brand-new house, pleading for me to tell her what was wrong.
My own angry face reflected back at me as I stared out the train window, pulling into Colby, the last place I wanted to be.
Sitting in Norman’s universe, it all began to swirl, faster and faster, and I felt my fingers tightening, holding on.
Let it go, I heard Isabel say in my head. Let it go.
The whirling seemed to get louder, and louder, carrying everything with it. And in the center the two of us, sitting so still, rode it out like a storm.
I gripped the chair harder, closing my eyes. Norman was right: I had known it all along. And I’d carried that truth near my heart, shielding the most tender part of me.
Let it go, I heard a voice whisper in my head. Maybe it was Isabel again, still teaching. Or my mother, willing her miracles. Mira or Morgan, urging me on. Or Norman, taking that truth like the gift it was. Or maybe it was my own voice, silent all this time, but no longer.
Let it go.
And just like that, I did.
In that instant the swirling seemed to stop, each element falling back into place. I took a deep breath, steadying myself, and opened my eyes, as Norman suddenly stood up and took a step back, as if he’d felt it too.