Mirror in the Sky Read online

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  Penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 Aditi Khorana

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  eBook ISBN: 9781101999028

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  “Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.”

  —Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

  For my grandparents

  This first one is for you

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  THE news broke sometime after midnight on a Friday evening—the last Friday before school started. I was already beginning to feel that mixture of melancholy and restlessness that strikes toward the end of the season, those few days of languor and light, left behind like the trashy novels at the community pool. I felt it every year before the start of the school, but even more so this year—an acute awareness of time slipping through my fingers, and the slight but persistent fear that I was wasting my hours with petty thoughts. I always dreaded the first day of school, but it was so much worse on this day than I ever remembered it. It was my junior year, and my best friend, my only friend, Meg Stevens, was leaving to spend a year abroad in Argentina.

  A better version of me might have been happy for Meg; after all, there was nothing I could do to change the fact that Meg herself was happy about leaving—thrilled, even. But all I could focus on was my own fate as the loner of Brierly, the length and span of an entire junior year awaiting me—a year with no friends. I wanted to be the kind of person who was hopeful, not brooding. I wanted to be more like my mother, who hid her anxieties and frustrations beneath a veneer of charisma and magical thinking. But I couldn’t. I was stuck being me, and this meant I couldn’t hide my worst fears from myself, or from anyone else.

  I had only half been paying attention to the static hum of tense voices coming from the TV when my father’s Honda pulled into the driveway that night, my cue to do what I did every Friday night when my father returned home: venture into the kitchen to collect three plates, three napkins, and three glasses of water and bring them to the living room, where we ate dinner on Fridays, and always after midnight.

  My mother acted as though this was somehow very cosmopolitan of us, telling us this is how they did things in Ibiza. But southwestern Connecticut wasn’t Ibiza. And the blue-and-white Corningware plates that we balanced on our knees as we sat before the TV didn’t make any of us feel particularly worldly. I think it was her way of reminding us that she had once been to Ibiza, that she had sipped countless glasses of tempranillo at Café del Mar and waded in a white string bikini in the Mediterranean sea. But that was a long time ago.

  “You know, whenever I was sad when I was young, I’d just remind myself: There’s always cake,” my mother said to me now.

  “Cake isn’t going to change things,” I grumbled.

  “Cake for breakfast,” she said. “We’ll do it tomorrow morning. It’s one of the few great pleasures of life. Sometimes an indulgence makes everything better.”

  “Cake isn’t going to make Meg change her mind.”

  My mother sighed. “I think you should take Meg’s departure as an opportunity,” she said authoritatively. “You should see it as a chance to explore a new world.”

  “Is that what you would do?”

  I could see her considering my question for a moment. “No. I’d be miserable,” she finally said. “What’s so great about Argentina anyway?”

  “A lot, apparently.”

  “Who goes away for their junior year of high school, for God’s sake? You have a whole lifetime to get away from your real life.”

  “It’s good for college apps. And she hates Brierly. Almost as much as I do.”

  My mother didn’t respond to this. After all, what was there to say? Nothing could change the fact that I had never quite fit in, that I always felt like I was on the fringes at school.

  “I bet she’ll land, hate it, and be on a flight back within the week.” My mother smiled. “Then you can tell her ‘I told you so.’” This sounded like my mother, whose rules for living included magical solutions and unconventional behavior. This had always been the case, for as long as I could remember. Sometimes when she saw me studying too hard, she would sit down on the kitchen table across from me and gently close whatever book was in front of me.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” she’d whisper. Or “Come meditate with me,” or sometimes, “Let’s go out for Chinese food. I’ll let you have my fortune cookie,” she’d plead, making a pitiful frown face. I don’t think I ever once refused. My mother had a particular charm, an allure that was magnetic. She was the most interesting person I knew. I had never learned how to say no to her.

  “We should do a tarot reading for you for the year. There’s some opportunity in everything that’s happening. I bet it’s going to be a really awesome year. I can totally just tell!” She began to rifle through the dining room cabinet, where she kept an odd collection of candles and tarot cards and memorabilia, when something caught her attention. I watched her as she turned toward the TV.

  “What the . . .” She walked before the screen, as though in a trance, and turned up the volume.

  Over the sound of the news, I heard my father’s car pull into the driveway. “Dad’s here,” I said. But my mother didn’t respond.

  My father had just closed the restaurant for the night. I remember that he lingered in the mudroom longer than usual that evening, slowly untying the laces on his shoes and removing his jacket, the slight trace of coriander that always bound itself to his clothes, stalking him wher
ever he went, mingling with the scent of his aftershave.

  Finally, my mother noticed him. “You have to see this!” she called out from the living room sofa, shattering the anticipatory silence, as she often did. Her eyes were caught in the hypnotic glare of the screen as a crimson banner of breaking news cascaded across it, the zealous flag of manufactured alarm.

  “I heard something about it on the radio,” my father mumbled in his soft voice, always a few decibels below my mother’s. He was holding a cardboard box of Pomodoro’s pizza in his hand, a grease stain soaking the corner. “Turn on the BBC,” he told my mother. “I can’t watch this CNN nonsense.”

  My father reserved a very particular disdain for American news outlets, which was understandable, given what the news had become in his lifetime—the fourth estate had been reduced to a decayed Satis house, its once glimmering surfaces now rotting beyond boarded windows.

  I was too distracted that night to be thinking about global concerns. In fewer than sixty short hours, the new school year would start. I thought about Meg again. About the day she told me she was leaving Brierly for the duration of our entire junior year, the most important year of high school. We had been sitting in the sand at Tod’s Point, watching seagulls spurtively dive toward cautious mollusks, lifting them into their beaks and lobbing them on the jagged rocks by the shore. That morning, Meg had urged me to squeeze lemon into my hair to lighten it; by early evening her chai-colored locks developed streaks of gold, while my black hair turned the color of mud and the texture of straw, alarming my father when he saw it that night.

  I dug my toes into the sand as Meg excitedly told me how nervous and eager she was to meet all the boys she would kiss, how much she would improve her Spanish, how good this would be for her college applications. I closed my eyes to the harsh glare of the sun and wished that I wasn’t me. I was already at the bottom of a food chain of upperclassmen, but to be without Meg meant that I would be laid bare, adrift in a sea of virtual strangers I had known since the fifth grade but who had nothing to do with me, nor I with them.

  To make matters worse, junior year was the year of academic reckoning that guidance counselors couldn’t speak of without the use of verbal grenades like “stress,” “breakdowns,” and “the year that really counts,” in between complaining about the air quality in the building and then returning to their dank offices filled with piles of transcripts. I didn’t know how I would get through it without Meg.

  “I can’t believe it!” My mother clapped her hands together, causing me to jump. “Another world, can you even imagine?” She was speaking to no one in particular, and I continued to set the coffee table, placing plastic containers of parmesan and crushed red pepper next to the mason jar full of dahlias and lilies that my mother had brought in from the garden that morning. “It’s amazing!” she exclaimed, shaking her head in delight.

  “It hardly changes anything for us,” my father told her, slipping down on the far end of the sofa. His button-down shirt, crisp and starched when he left home this afternoon, was by now crumpled, a yellow stain on his wrist.

  “It changes everything!” she exclaimed. “We’re not alone. I always suspected it, didn’t you? But now . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. On other parts of the globe, wars were being fought, bombs were being detonated, children languished in refugee camps. But here, in this tiny strip of real estate known as Greenwich, Connecticut, best friends left for Argentina, mothers gave in to their temptations, guidance counselors continued to file away transcripts, contributing what they referred to as “cautious optimism,” the lowest-grade variety.

  But for once, the story wasn’t about our world but another, lingering just beyond the edges of our very own solar system, an entire sphere that, till now, we had somehow managed to miss. And yet, on this day, a small turn of the hand on the cosmic kaleidoscope had revealed a different sight.

  It had always been there, all this while, when we looked out into the night sky, a lone planet lingering in the “Goldilocks zone,” they called it, that congenial slip of space where the improbable became probable.

  What we couldn’t have realized then was that the difference between knowing and not knowing about something light-years away would change us all in the year to come.

  TWO

  IT could have been the kind of story that came and went, eclipsed by another news cycle. But what my mother experienced as a transcendent moment of amazement at the idea of another world like ours so far, far away turned out to be only the exterior of a package labeled, stamped, and sent to us with a kind of precision and foresight we might have expected from the cosmos had we been the sort to believe in things like symmetry and order. And yet its contents still remained a mystery.

  I went to buy school supplies with my father the next day. We parked in front of a newsstand on Lewis Street, the trashier rags filled with large-font declarations like “ALIEN PLANET DISCOVERED!” while the New York Times furnished a complex diagram of the Milky Way on its front page. My father picked up a copy of the Times, and I watched him as he shook open the oversize leaves of paper, smoothing out the center crease with his fingertip as we walked.

  “Tara, I know you’re sad about Meg leaving,” he said without looking up.

  I shrugged. Every year since the sixth grade, I had gone back-to-school shopping with Meg. We’d buy outfits together at Rags, pencils and notebooks at the stationery shop at the bottom of the Ave, even order our backpacks together months in advance of the first day of school. It made the experience of returning far less dreadful, maybe even fun.

  But Meg was shopping for different supplies this year—Spanish-English dictionaries, voltage converters, sunscreen, and racy lingerie. When I thought about this shopping list, I felt a pang of betrayal.

  We walked past the Starbucks on the corner of Havemeyer Place, and through the plate glass, I could see a cluster of Brierly kids hanging out over their iced lattes and laughing—Nick Osterman, Sarah Hoffstedt, Alexa Vanderclift, and Halle Lightfoot. I couldn’t hear their laughter, but I could tell it was loud and raucous from the expressions on the faces around them, just as it always was in the student center of Brierly. They didn’t seem to care. Halle, standing over a seated Nick, grabbed something from his pocket—a paperback—and held it high over his head, just before he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her onto his lap.

  I carefully studied Halle, something I had often caught myself doing in class. She had an effortless ease about her, and it seemed to filter into every area of her life, whether it involved flirting with the cutest Brierly boys or knowing exactly what to say when a teacher picked on her in class. She knew how to make people laugh, but there was always insight to whatever came from her mouth. I was both awed by her and resented her for making it all look so easy, for being beautiful and brilliant.

  “Do you want to go in and say hello?” my father asked, observing the eerily approximate rendering of a scene from the J.Crew summer catalogue unfold before us.

  “God, Dad, no. Of course not!” I don’t know why my father assumed that just because I went to school with these people, just because we were the same age, and in the same grade, we had something to say to one another.

  I wondered, for a moment, what it must feel like to be them—it was unlikely that they were walking around with brick-sized pits in their stomachs, dreading the first day of school. Why would they? They would arrive at Brierly on Monday morning like telluric gods and take over the best table in the student center, where they would reign for yet another year.

  At the stationery store on Greenwich Avenue, I walked past the handmade cards and carbon-colored stacks of Moleskines, each sealed with a fluorescent lime-colored scrap of authentication. My father followed me into the pen section.

  “I know how difficult it can be to make new friends,” he said tentatively. “It was difficult for me when I first came to the United States.”

>   “I know, Dad.” I didn’t want to discuss it with him, any of it. I didn’t want to tell him how hard it was, how I felt as though I would never fit in. I never had, not since we had arrived in Connecticut in the fifth grade. For one thing, I looked different. My father was Indian, and my mother white. We had moved here so my father could open his own restaurant after years of working in the kitchen at someone else’s, and also so I could attend Brierly.

  “We’re both making a new start,” he had told me as we packed the last of our belongings into oversized cardboard cartons, our entire history as a family fitting neatly into the back of a small Penske truck. “We’ll have a much better life in Connecticut. You’ll be able to ride a bike to school, and we’ll even have a backyard.”

  This was how the suburbs had always been sold to city kids, even though I couldn’t care less about being able to ride a bike. And what could I have needed a backyard for? I was a bookworm even then, my nose perpetually buried in some new subject or another. This was another reason my parents wanted to move to Connecticut. I would do well in middle school and eventually be able to attend Brierly. I would have more opportunities to flourish academically in Connecticut.

  But I had always liked our two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side. I liked my friends at the UN School. I didn’t mind city living, the fact that brick and cement seemed constantly to be exercising a strategy of encirclement over every green, forcing an occupation of Central Park. I liked the fact that we shared a building with twenty-four other people. Our neighbors felt like extended family. They had all known me since I was two, and were always there to offer help or advice at a moment’s notice. When I got sick, Mrs. Hirshbloom would bring me chicken soup, and when my mother broke her ankle trying to carry a TV she had found at the Goodwill up the stairs, Kelly Loffman, a recent college graduate in a Teach For America program, had stayed with me, helping me build a helicopter with my Legos while my father took my mother to the ER.