“You could even wear that, if you wanted,” said William unexpectedly. “You look nice.”
Ada looked down at herself. She was still wearing her blue ski parka and, under that, a pair of new jeans that Liston had bought her. Ordinarily, she would have floated on this praise for weeks. But her mind was hazy with thoughts of David.
“I don’t feel well,” said Ada. “I think I’ll stay home.”
Liston looked pained.
“Are you sure, baby?” she asked. “You sure you don’t want to go out and have fun with your friends?”
Ada nodded. The boys looked indifferent; the girls looked relieved. Now that Melanie and her friends had achieved their aim—now that Melanie was safely on the arm of William, her rightful partner—their use for Ada had lessened. She still sat with them at lunch, but her role was secondary. She mainly stayed quiet around them, and she had a vague idea that she was specifically not invited to go into town with them on the occasions that they went, or to hang out with them in the Woods, several small groves of trees that provided meager cover for the hill the neighborhood was named for, and for the drinking and carousing that went on at the flat top of it.
Quickly, the group put on their jackets and said goodbye. Then they filed out the front door, laughing, giddy, leaving Ada and Liston alone in the kitchen.
Liston looked at her brightly, held her hands out, palms up.
“Well!” she said. “Looks like it’s just us chickens for the evening.”
Ada nodded.
“Can I get you anything, honey?” Liston asked. “What kind of sick are you feeling?”
“Just a headache,” she mumbled, and told Liston that she would get herself a glass of water and go to bed.
“How’s David doing?” she asked.
“Okay,” said Ada.
On her way out of the room she looked once, over her shoulder, at Liston, who was looking through the windows in the kitchen door at the group of teenagers as they disappeared down the street. She was holding in her hand a tall glass of the Crystal Light she drank compulsively, trying to lose weight for indeterminate reasons. She was only the slightest bit plump. Did Liston want a boyfriend? Ada wondered suddenly. She had never before considered the question. Standing at the door, holding her glass to her chest, she looked lonely. Ada felt a flutter of remorse. She could go back to her; they could watch a movie together, make the low-fat popcorn that Liston loved. But there were too many secrets between them, now; Ada’s reticence about her father made conversations with Liston difficult. Later she would attribute her hesitancy to embrace Liston completely to superstition: she thought somehow, irrationally, that David would sense it. She imagined that, in order to accept Liston’s outstretched hand, she would have to first release David’s. And that doing so would send him plummeting downward into whatever maw was opening beneath him.
Upstairs, Ada knocked softly at Gregory’s door, listening first to make sure that Liston hadn’t followed her. Matty was at a friend’s house for a sleepover.
Gregory opened it. He was in need of a haircut, as Liston often reminded him, and his brown hair was matted wildly on one side of his head, as if he had been lying on it.
“Did they leave you behind?” he whispered, and Ada told him that it had been her choice to stay home.
“I’m sick,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”
“Oh,” he whispered. “Okay.” He still lacked any sense of tact, and he continued to be persecuted for this at school—recently she had seen him being pursued hotly down a sidewalk by two seventh--graders, the laces of his shoes flapping wildly—but she had grown to like him, or at least tolerate him. In certain ways he even reminded her of David, in his bluntness, his matter-of-factness. Perhaps he was what David had been like as a child. Things will be better for you later, she often wanted to tell him. When you’re an adult. (Ada hoped she could apply this logic to herself as well, but she was less certain; she often felt as if there was something fundamentally incorrect about her, as if she were caught between two worlds, a citizen of neither.)
Gregory retreated to his bed, where he lay down and crossed one knee over the other in the air. “Are you gonna come in?” he asked her.
She was going to tell him about her day at the lab. The one-time pad theory proposed by Hayato. But she changed her mind. It all felt ridiculous to her, suddenly: the code and the research that they had been doing and the many, many lies her father had told. For the first time, she allowed herself to articulate a terrible thought: What if David, simply, was a fraud? What if he was just a con man, a huckster, a liar? What if he had deceived all of them, everyone he was ever close to, even Ada, without compunction?
She felt abruptly tired.
“I think I’ll read in my room,” she said, and left.
Instead, in her room, she lay awake, staring into the dark, listening to the sounds from the street outside. From Liston’s house she could often hear the voices of local teenagers drifting back to her from the Woods or the tennis courts nearby. When they got loud enough she went to her window and looked out.
It was 11:00 at night. On the street below the house, streams of teenagers were walking back from the dance. She recognized some of them; others she thought she had never seen. All of them were headed eastward, toward the Woods.
“Shhhhhhhh,” said one to her friends, holding a gloved finger to her lips. They were carrying in their arms the jackets that their parents had made them bring. They should have been wearing them. In the light from the streetlamps on the block, their neon dresses looked incandescent. One of the girls tripped over the curb and caught herself with the gracefulness of an athlete. She doubled over, her hands covering her mouth, laughing. It was cold outside, and the old windows in Liston’s house let in the chill air through their seams. She held a hand up to the draft. She had the sudden urge to walk outside.
Everyone in Liston’s household was asleep by then: she could tell by the stillness. The television was still on, which meant that Liston had probably fallen asleep in front of it while waiting for William to return—a problem she often had. And William was very good at sneaking in unnoticed and then claiming he had simply forgotten to wake her up.
Quietly, Ada opened the closet in the hallway and pulled a knit black hat down over her ears, and then put on her parka. David had bought it for her, for skiing, two years ago. She had grown taller recently, she realized, and her wrists now stuck out of it. She zipped it up and held her hands out from her sides to prevent the material from swishing as she walked.