After the Moment (7 page)

"The cake's partly for you, as a welcome," Millie said, "and partly for my birthday."

"Your birthday's not for another couple of weeks," Leigh said, panicked, in case he'd missed it and sunk to an all-new low by becoming Brother Who Forgets Sister's Birthday.

"That's why it's only partly for me," she said. "Come on, let's go downstairs."

In the kitchen, Maia and Franklin's brother were talking to Janet and Lillian. Leigh watched with interest as Maia shook Pete's hand. He almost missed the other boy's name (Kevin) because he was wondering about her sudden ability to touch a stranger.

Kevin was also going to be a senior and, like Leigh, had once played soccer but now swam.

"Allergies did me in," Kevin said. "No pollen's been invented that doesn't make me wheeze, but chlorine is no problem."

"Kevin and Maia get shots from the same doctor," Millie said.

"I get them too," Franklin said.

"You have seasonal allergies?" Lillian asked Maia, who was cutting up the cake and putting it on plates.

"Dust mites and cats," Maia said. "My mom has a cat that's almost as old as I am, so I get the shots."

"I have asthma," Franklin said.

"I did too," Pete said, taking some cake. "But I outgrew it."

Leigh, handing a plate to Franklin, saw the boy's eyes, behind his glasses, get very big, and his mouth open a little, as if Pete had just revealed one of the world's most protected secrets. It was clear no one had ever told Franklin that his asthma might one day end, as if by magic.

It was crowded in the kitchen, so Janet shunted people out toward the dining room. She sent Kevin and Millie into the sun porch for more chairs and got everyone iced tea, putting ice cubes and mint leaves into each glass. Leigh found himself between Maia and Kevin. His mother, across the table from him and next to Pete, smiled, but her eyes looked tired. She scraped the icing off of her cake and put it on Pete's plate. Lillian had always disliked the way icing felt in her mouth, and this old habit of hers made Leigh look from his mother's plate to his own. On his right sat Kevin's empty plate, and on his left Maia's full one.

"Not hungry?" he whispered to her as around them Millie, Franklin, Janet, Kevin, and Pete talked about allergy shots and swimming events.

"It's hard in crowds," she said. "It makes me nervous."

Leigh thought that he could understand that. If eating was hard for her, then she'd need to concentrate. The way he did when reading about the war. And it
was
hard to concentrate when other people were around.

"Pretend it's just me," he said. "And pretend I'm Millie and it's only us sitting here."

Maia smiled at him, and all of her odd features, the ones that had struck him as pretty but not attractive, took on a glow. Her brown eyes, lit by her smile, had an almost golden hue, and he felt as if he had transformed her into someone worth looking at.

"It's really good cake," he said. "And I'm not just saying that because you made it."

She took a bite, and then another. He could see, watching her throat, how much effort was involved in swallowing. He thought it might help her to think of something else while eating, the way some people fell asleep by counting sheep.

There was nothing about his job at the publishing house that was interesting enough to repeat. So instead, Leigh pointed to the glare coming through the dining room window and told her about how at the art gallery two summers before, he'd heard his boss talk about light having three purposes: as a symbol of the divine, as a response to the natural world, and as a vehicle for color. He had loved listening to this guy hold forth about art, and Leigh could see Maia calming down as he talked, and so he didn't stop, not for so much as a pause, until her cake was finished.

Before Millie's birthday arrived, Leigh had painted his room and made an appointment to take his driver's test. By badgering both Janet and Clayton, he'd finished up his remaining hours in the evenings, when he was too tired to paint. Janet let him drive her over to Frederick on Saturday, which took care of his lingering hesitation at freeway exits.

Kevin, whose job at a lumberyard kept him from joining Millie and Franklin in their efforts to help Leigh paint, had taken his driving test two months before. He told Leigh that it was nerve-racking, but easy.

"A left turn, a broken U-turn, parking, and not killing anyone—that's kind of it," he said.

"Except for buying a car," Leigh said.

He had money saved in the bank (half of which had been a gift from Clayton and Lillian when Leigh turned sixteen) and was hoping he could get a used car with less than eighty thousand miles on it.

"That's the easy part," Kevin said. "I have enough for a car, but not the insurance."

"Your father won't pay for it?" Leigh asked.

The question just slipped out, sounding spoiled and rude only after it was spoken. Clayton had offered, as soon as driving lessons began, to cover Leigh's insurance. It had been done with such ease (none of Clayton's usual hesitations or stilted phrases) that Leigh had simply assumed that's how it was done. You paid for the car and your father picked up the insurance.

"I think he would if he could," Kevin said. "But my mom quit working when Franklin started having trouble at school."

Franklin, who had gotten a ladder, a small brush, and a roll of paper tape and done a perfect job on the crown molding in Leigh's room, seemed the least likely of candidates to be a kid having trouble at school.

"She'll probably go back," Kevin said. "But not until they think things have calmed down."

"Franklin's pretty calm," Leigh said.

"It's not him; it's how he's treated," Kevin said. "He's skipped like two grades, you know—I mean, he's younger than Millie and he's always getting himself in the center of trouble."

Leigh waited since Kevin had stopped looking at him, as if the distance held the words needed to explain his brother.

"Older kids pick on him," Kevin said. "Seniors, mostly, but, you know, he's little, and he just ... he's a target."

"Well, we'll be seniors," Leigh said. "So, we can protect him."

"Yeah," Kevin said. "Sure."

~~~

The school where Franklin was picked on and where Leigh, come September, would go was five miles from Clayton's house. Leigh took one of his first testing-the-foot runs over to it. The place was huge, more like the campus of a small college than a high school. Leigh's school in New York was crammed into three shabby townhouses, with the pool and gym buried deep in the basement. At Calvert Park Preparatory School, however, there was an entire building for athletics. An arts building with a theater, as well as studios (which Leigh knew about from both Millie and from the school's Web page). There was an outdoor track and a lacrosse field with bleachers all around it. Manicured lawns sprawled between all the buildings and on either side of the brick pathways, where, he guessed, students walked from class to class.

Tuition here was not cheap, but it was one of the reasons that people lived in Calvert Park. The suburb was on the east side of D.C. and not nearly as nice as its famous cousin, Bethesda, on the west side. But houses were cheaper here, and the school, while expensive, was supposed to be the best in the county. Leigh, walking around his new school, realized that he had never thought before about how much of his life was shaped by his tuition and his parents' belief that paying that tuition was the best thing they could do for him.

Up until this year, Clayton and Lillian had split the cost of Leigh's school. It was why Lillian wrote three romance novels a year for two different publishers. It was part of why Clayton worked so hard. Their willingness to do this, as well as their fierce hopes for his future, were part of the same fathomless good fortune that would keep him out of the war. It made him, as he stood next to a building full of science labs and computer terminals, aware and guilty of his shortcomings.

He had entirely too many vague thoughts and uncertain conclusions for the path his parents were trying to help him build. They had a clear end in mind, and until recently, Leigh had thought he had it too. But as his last year in high school began to look like the first major steppingstone to that end, he realized he didn't have a clue.

Anyone who had had this much money and effort sunk into him ought to be turning out a little more definite. He hadn't nearly enough of the accomplished, polished sheen he felt he should. It had occurred to him that he should take a year off before going to college, but he didn't know if that was what he wanted. Leigh could barely tell himself what he thought, let alone convey it to anyone else.

Although, right at that particular moment, two things were very clear: he was worried (actually, more like scared) about going to this new school, and his foot hurt. He walked the five miles back, relieved that while running might be out, he could still get himself home.

~~~

Millie, who had spent her previous birthdays with her father in a rented cabin on the Eastern Shore, had not wanted a party this year. In spite of it being, as she pointed out, her "first year as an official teenager."

Franklin came over at lunch and gave her three squirrels of varying sizes, made of glass.

"If you put them near your window, the light will make them look like squirrel sunshine," he said.

He could only stay for a little bit, as he had to go home and get ready for his piano lesson. Millie said he had skipped his practice all last week so that he could help paint Leigh's room.

"I think he likes you pretty much," Millie said. "He mostly never skips practice."

That Franklin liked Millie was so obvious, Leigh didn't think he should need to point it out. He also thought it should remain none of his business. If Franklin wanted to tell Millie he liked her, then he would, and without any unsolicited help from Leigh. Millie was too young for boys anyway, he told himself, neatly ignoring that the first girl he'd ever kissed had been in seventh grade and not yet thirteen.

As a present, he had taken Millie out the previous night to a restaurant in D.C. that his mother had told him about. It was near Dupont Circle; Millie was thrilled to put on a dress and endure the Metro's endless escalators. Leigh never got tired of noticing how clean the subways were compared to New York's. He had yet to see a rat on any of the tracks here.

Millie did what she always did in restaurants and ordered three appetizers, one dessert, and a virgin piña colada. Leigh, not the most adventuresome eater in the world, had steak and a Coke. Then they went to a movie about some pirates, which was pretty great and ridiculous in the way only movies could be. The actress in it reminded him of Maia, which made him uncomfortable, as he did
not
want to be thinking of Maia Morland as anything but a train wreck.

Leigh forgot about it, though, when Millie told him that her night out with him was the best way to transition into thirteen. Best birthday ever. This seemed unlikely, given that her father had been dead for only four months, but Leigh was trying to respect all the ways that Millie was choosing to cope, and if one of them was telling herself that she was having a great birthday, then he wasn't going to contradict her.

~~~

But it gave him something to ask Astra about when he called her. She didn't like to e-mail, saying that a communication originally devised as a way for scientists to exchange data was not appropriate for romance. Astra was full of theories like this, and for the most part, Leigh didn't mind. He never touched her without remembering that they were only sleeping together because of her theories on love, sex, trust, and college.

Last fall, she had told him she didn't want to go to college a virgin. And she didn't want to have sex with someone she didn't know well. She didn't want to be afraid. She didn't want to sleep with someone who might be mean to her, and she knew, she had said, that Leigh would never be like that. But, she did think that people should love each other, and before he had a chance to rush in and assure her, she said that what she liked best about him was how levelheaded he was.

"Falling in love in high school is ridiculous," she said. "It's only for people who aren't serious about the future."

She was of the firm opinion that true love was impossible until after one had accomplished more important goals. It was hard to disagree with her, but it was also hard not to make fun of her, if only in private. Did she think that only people who developed a cure for cancer were allowed to fall in love?

Leigh, who wanted to have sex in the way that the sky "wants" to be blue, let her talk it out, aware that one wrong word from him might lead her to take this conversation to another candidate. He knew that what he felt for her—and by
her
he meant the part of Astra that was not her body, which he was close to worshiping—was a hopeless combination of gratitude and admiration. He didn't love her. She was too forbidding for that.

But he did care about her, and outside of the guys on the soccer team, she was one of the best friends he had. Astra Grein wasn't just the girl he was sleeping with—she was smart, and someone he trusted to come up with a worthwhile answer if he asked her about the way Millie was handling her father's death.

"You know, grief is so weird," Astra said. "My cousin died when she was four and my aunt never mentions her at all. She couldn't even go to the funeral, which made a lot of people mad."

"Mad?" Leigh asked. He wasn't mad at Millie for anything. He was just worried about her.

"My mom said that it made perfect sense if you knew my aunt," Astra told him, trying to explain. "But my uncle keeps a picture of my cousin in his wallet and talks about her a lot."

Leigh thought of all the different positions on a soccer team and how each involved its own strengths and skills. Everyone might have a different purpose out on the field, but they were all playing soccer. It also occurred to him that the person with whom he should discuss Millie was Maia. Not Astra. He thought it would be nice to talk to Maia. Maybe not useful or smart, but definitely something he wanted.