The Universe Is Expanding and So Am I Read online

  BRAIN FARTS, COURTESY OF VIRGINIA SHREVES, AGE 16 ¼

  I hate that Byron saw me with Froggy. Ever since “the ordeal,” I’ve felt icky around my brother when it comes to anything having to do with sex or, in Froggy’s and my case, all the stuff leading up to the act.

  “The ordeal.” One evening last October, Dad got a call from the dean of students at Columbia explaining that a woman, who I later found out was a Canadian college junior named Annie Mills, had accused Byron of date rape. They’d gone to a party together. My brother got blackout drunk and says he doesn’t remember anything. A committee assembled by the Office of Sexual Misconduct voted to suspend him for the semester. Yes, my brother who, for the first decade and a half of my life, I considered a god to be worshiped and idolized.

  Byron’s nosedive from the pedestal made me reassess everything—how I’ve always compared myself to the rest of my family and haven’t measured up, how maybe that assessment was wrong, how I actually don’t need my brother’s approval, how maybe my family’s negative comments about my body were their problem and not mine. Somewhere along the way I started having fun with my body instead of hating it. I even had the confidence to turn Froggy from a secret hookup to a public and official boyfriend.

  Oh. Crap. Froggy.

  I’m angsting over item number four when I step into the crosswalk.

  “Cool hair,” a hipster guy says as he’s coming toward me.

  I catch his eye and smile. As I do, I notice him checking me out. I have on a tank top that reveals some cleavage. Recently I ditched my tan grandma bras and bought hot pinks and multicolored tie-dyes. Sometimes, like now, I even flaunt the bra straps through my tank top.

  Last year, I NEVER would have shown off my bra straps. Last year, I hated girls who did that. Or maybe I hated myself because I didn’t.

  As I reach the west side of Broadway, I run my fingers through my shoulder-length hair. I dyed it purple back in December, mostly to piss Mom off. Since then, I tried pink for a while but eventually returned to purple. I added streaks of green bangs last week, a process that involved bleach and tinfoil and a plastic bag over my head.

  “Hello, Virginia,” the doorman says when I come into my lobby. His name is Alberto, and he works most afternoons. “You have a package.”

  “From Walla Walla?”

  He nods and hands it to me. As I step into the elevator I sniff the parcel. It would be so like Shannon to send onions. She’s random that way. Shannon and I have been best friends since we started Brewster in sixth grade. She has a stutter and I was the fat girl, so it was a match made in outcast heaven. For this whole school year, Shannon has been in Washington State while her dad researches the Walla Walla onion for his latest oddball coffee-table book.

  As the elevator lifts, I think about how when Shannon left last August we both bawled. I doubted I would survive the first week. But I made it through the year and I even made new friends. In early July Shannon will be back and we’re going to rock our summer internship together.

  I tear open the package and pull out a homemade rainbow pot holder and an index card on which she’s written in green marker:

  V— Text as soon as you get this! I have big crazy news. xxS

  I pull out my phone and text Shannon, Big crazy news? And what’s up with the pot holder??

  Shannon doesn’t write back, so I walk down the hall and unlock the front door to the apartment. Mom and Byron are in the kitchen drinking iced tea and laughing. Panic creeps over me. What if Byron told her about Froggy and me, and now they’re having a hearty chuckle at my expense? I stuff Shannon’s pot holder in my pocket and slip my phone into my bag. I’m about to reverse back out the door when I hear my sister’s voice.

  Anaïs has been in the Peace Corps for the past two years, doing health-care work in a rural village in a country in western Africa called Burkina Faso. No cell phones, no Wi-Fi, just letters that take a month to arrive and rare crackly phone calls.

  “Virginia!” Mom says, gesturing me into the kitchen. “You’ve got to see Anaïs!”

  “Is Virginia home?” I hear my sister saying.

  I freeze in the doorway. I was fourteen the last time I saw Anaïs in person or on a screen. I hadn’t started high school yet. I hadn’t been kissed. I still worshiped Byron.

  “Come quick.” Mom points to the laptop on the counter. “She’s in a hotel lobby and only has a few minutes.”

  I tentatively approach the screen. There’s my sister, her eyes dark, her long brown hair hanging around her shoulders. Anaïs is brilliant and willowy and so beautiful that back when she was in New York City, people would come up to her on the street and ask if she was a model. She’s eight years older than me, which is a good thing because I’ve never felt competitive with her. Which is a good thing because I’d lose whatever competition we were in.

  “Oh my God … you’re so old!” Anaïs says to me. “And look at your hair. I love it!”

  I smile shyly. I’m not great at accepting compliments, especially when my family is four inches away. I glance behind my sister, at her hotel lobby, at the wall painted in bright blue and yellow.

  “What about that eyebrow ring you told me about?” Anaïs asks. “Is it still in?”

  I lean closer to the screen and show my sister. Mom clears her throat, no doubt remembering how last Thanksgiving I flew to Seattle to visit Shannon and we both got illegal underage piercings. Shannon pierced her tongue and I did my eyebrow. Mom flipped out and called it barbaric. Eventually, like with my hair, she got used to the eyebrow ring. She recently finished a book proposal about embracing your teenagers’ rebellions, and she’s calling it “Purple Hair and Piercings.” I’ve read the proposal. It explains how her book would be about teenage behavior in general, but she’s including stories about how she resisted her daughter’s purple hair and eyebrow piercing, but now she’s come to accept them. My secret hope is that her agent will sell the proposal and she will write the book and it will become a bestseller and Mom will go on a book tour and I’ll tag along and they’ll hire a stylist to color my hair instead of my mediocre home jobs.

  “Where are you, anyway?” I ask my sister.

  “I’m in Ouagadougou,” she says. “The capital. I finished the Peace Corps a few days ago.”

  “Then you’re flying home through London?” Mom asks.

  “I’m staying in London for a little bit.” Anaïs pauses and glances to one side, out of the frame of the screen. It looks like there’s something else she wants to say, but then she shrugs. “I land in New York City on June twenty-third.”

  “We’ll be there to pick you up,” Mom says. “I’ve already registered you for an MCAT course that starts in July. It’s time to start preparing for medical school.”

  My sister was premed at Brown, and someday she’s going to become a big-time doctor, like a heart surgeon or the surgeon general.

  “I’d better go,” Anaïs says after a second. “I love you guys.”

  When Byron says good-bye, I watch Anaïs’s face to see if her expression changes. I wonder how she feels about our brother. When “the ordeal” first happened, I couldn’t be in the same room as him without feeling nauseated. Nine months later, it’s still confusing. Being blackout drunk is no excuse, ever. I remain mad at him for what he did to Annie Mills. But every so often Byron mentions an inside joke or does something unexpectedly kind, like charge my phone when it’s dying. Then I forget to be mad. Then I feel guilty for not being mad.

  I’m frowning about this when my brother touches my arm and gestures me across the kitchen.

  “We’re cool about this afternoon,” he whispers. “You and Froggy. Let’s just say I didn’t see a thing. No one needs to know.”

  I give him a grateful smile. “Thanks.”

  As I said: totally confusing.

  “Hey, Gin,” Mom says when Byron goes into the living room and turns on the TV. “Wasn’t that great to see Anaïs? How was your day?”

  Before I can ans
wer, Mom flips her honey-colored hair over her shoulder and scrolls through restaurant menu options on her phone. While Dad and my siblings are tall with brown hair and brown eyes, Mom and I are shorter with light hair and grayish-blue eyes. Supposedly when Mom was younger she used to struggle with her weight, but for as long as I’ve been around she’s slim, she lives on leafy greens, and she works out seven days a week.

  “Did you eat yet?” Mom asks me. “Dad’s getting home in a half hour, so I’m about to order delivery.”

  My parents stopped cooking when my sister went to college six years ago. In our house, dinner is delivery or a restaurant.

  “No,” I say.

  “I’ll order us salads,” Mom says. “After dinner, Dad and Byron are watching the baseball game and I’m going to the gym. Want to join? Get some exercise?”

  “I’ve got a lot of homework. I have a final on Monday, two on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and a big Humanities essay to finish by Thursday. Can you proofread my essay before I turn it in?”

  I’ll admit that was a pivot. But I’d do anything to avoid her gym. Mom and Dad belong to a private gym around the corner called Whole Fitness. In my head I call it Whole Fakeness. I hate trudging along the treadmill while Mom attacks the machines like she’s doing battle with her bony thighs. When it comes to exercise, I used to believe the concept should be abolished. But then I discovered kickboxing. Or, more specifically, my kickboxing class with Tisha. My pediatrician gave me Tisha’s name over the winter when I was hating my body and doing too many things to hurt it. Even though I was skeptical about joining an exercise class, it’s turned out to be awesome. For an hour and a half every Friday afternoon, Tisha leads a bunch of girls as we kick and punch and groove to music. The other girls in the class are from different schools around the city so it’s a break from Brewster bitchiness. Also, unlike Whole Fakeness, the walls of the studio aren’t lined with mirrors, which makes the class more about feeling good than scowling at your cellulite.

  I lug my backpack into my room. We don’t have school tomorrow because the teachers have a clerical day, but we’re overloaded with review sheets due Friday. I come out for a quick dinner and then dive back into studying. I’m deep in my chemistry review when there’s a knock at my door.

  “Come in!” I shout.

  It’s Dad, which is weird. He rarely drops by my room for a chat. With Dad, it’s more like we have Things We Do Together: he brings me to see the Knicks or the Yankees, we eat Chinese food and watch games on TV, he takes me to driver’s ed. But as far as cozying up in my bedroom and having spontaneous chats, that never happens. When I was younger I thought it was because he was too busy being a chief operating officer and competing in golf tournaments. But as I got older I realized that Dad doesn’t have much to say to me. He can’t show me off to his friends like he did with gorgeous Anaïs, and he can’t male bond like he does with Byron. At least he’s not as critical of my body as he used to be. He finally chilled on that when I worked up the nerve to tell him that my body wasn’t his to discuss. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to win any father-daughter-relationship prizes.

  “Aren’t you watching the game?” I ask.

  “Commercial break. Yankees are up two.”

  I blink a few times. Did he really come here to tell me the Yankee score?

  “Mom mentioned there’s no school tomorrow,” Dad says. “I’m taking the afternoon off to head to Connecticut and meet with a tree guy at the house. You can come along, and we’ll get in some driving practice.”

  My heart drops into that place in my stomach that dreads and fears driving. I completed driver’s ed last weekend and even had to suffer through the required two-hour parent-teen safety class. Dad was so pumped about it he took notes and raised his hand in class and later had us both sign a contract about safe practices for once I have my license. I didn’t tell him that it’s optimistic to imagine I’ll actually get a license out of all this.

  “I have to study,” I say. “I have a bunch of things due Friday.”

  “Your road test is a month away, Gin. You can study in the morning, and even while I’m walking the property with the tree guy. Plus, as we talked about in the safety class, you need forty hours of practice before you’re allowed to take your road test. I would guess we’re only at thirty-one hours. And that’s being generous.”

  When Dad uses his chief-operating-officer voice, there’s no use arguing with him. I’m a lowly employee in his executive universe.

  “Meet me at the garage at noon,” Dad says. “Tomorrow will be our day of three-point turns.”

  In three-point-three seconds he’s going to remind me that no Shreves has ever failed their road test.

  “You know,” Dad says, clearing his throat. “No Shreves has ever failed their road test.”

  Boom.

  3

  I set my alarm for seven, a crime on clerical day. The teachers have to work, but we’re supposed to get the day off. It’s not like I was going to slack, not with finals coming up, but Dad’s driving lesson has thwarted my plan to half-ass it. The apartment is quiet all morning. I get a lot of studying done and even manage to take a shower and change my eyebrow ring from the gold one to a silver hoop. At eleven, a text from Dad comes in.

  I’m leaving the office in 15 minutes and taking the subway uptown. I’m craving bagels. Can you run up to Absolute and get us a few? Don’t tell Mom! #carbpolice

  Dad thinks his hashtags are funny, but they make me cringe. Especially this one. Like, is he saying that Mom is HIS carb police? Because Dad is thin and fit and has no reason to avoid carbs. Or is he saying that Mom shouldn’t know about the bagels because I need policing? Mom would love nothing more than to be the prison warden guarding me from tempting carbs. Whatever it is, I do see Dad’s point. If Mom discovers I bought him a bagel, then she’ll ask if I got myself a bagel, and then she’ll wonder if I scooped out the bready center like she’s suggested and she’ll inquire whether I ordered a thin layer of butter or cream cheese. And neither Dad nor I want to invite that line of inquisition.

  I’m also cringing about going all the way up to Absolute Bagels. It’s hot and humid today. Our air-conditioners are wheezing in their attempt to cool the apartment. Absolute makes the best bagels in the city, which I would never ruin by scooping out the bready center, but they’re nearly thirty blocks uptown, practically at Columbia. I suppose I could take a subway, but it will be stinky and crowded in this heat. I’d rather walk.

  I throw on shorts and a red-checkered tank top, stuff my notebooks and Fates and Furies into my backpack, and trek for a half hour until I get to the bagel store. As usual, there’s a line spilling onto the sidewalk. It smells incredible inside, which sucks because I’ve decided I’m not going to indulge in a bagel and risk getting busted by the #carbpolice. Also eating with Dad is weird. He’ll take me out to gorge on Shake Shack or General Tso’s Chicken, and then if a skinny woman walks by, he’ll praise her body like he doesn’t realize that, oops, this kind of caloric consumption will never earn me a praiseworthy body. Not that I want him to praise my body because that’s gross, but it still messes with my head. Better to enjoy bagels on my own time.

  I wipe the sweat off my forehead and get in line behind a woman standing with her son. She’s holding a rust-colored puppy on a purple leash. I fish my novel out of my bag. Maybe it’s dorky to read on the sidewalk, but whatever. It’s not like I know anyone who lives up here.

  “So these really are the best bagels in New York City?” someone behind me says.

  I turn around, and I’m face-to-face with the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. They’re blue-green like sea glass and garnished with long lashes. The eyes belong to a guy around my age, maybe a little older. He’s super tall with shoulder-length blond hair and a scar on his right jaw. He’s holding a battered white skateboard in one hand and a sketch pad in the other.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I love them.”

  More like I love you, you sea-glass-eyed,
long-haired artist/skater boy.

  “Which kind would you recommend?”

  I have to crack up. A New Yorker wouldn’t ask someone for a bagel recommendation. I’m guessing he’s not from here, like maybe he time-traveled from my imagination to appear behind me on the bagel line.

  “Are you laughing at me?” he asks, grinning.

  I smile back at him. “Sort of.”

  “I guess it’s obvious I’m not from New York.”

  “Really?” I say. He has an accent I can’t place. “I never would have guessed.”

  “Snob,” he teases.

  “Tourist,” I say.

  The woman in front of me hands the dog’s leash to her son, tells him to stay put, and then follows the line into Absolute. I tuck my book into my backpack, and we step in after her.

  “So … which one’s the best?” he asks.

  I survey the vats heaped with poppy, sesame, everything, cinnamon-raisin, onion.

  “Everything,” I say after a second.

  That’s what I would give you, I say to him in my mind. Of course once we properly fell in love, like Lotto and Mathilde in Fates and Furies.

  “An everything bagel,” he says, nodding.

  “Toasted with butter,” I add. Then I point to his skateboard. “Where do you skate around here?”

  He shakes his head. “Oh no! This isn’t mine. If I wanted to die I’d get on a skateboard. I’m way too uncoordinated.” He spins the wheel a few times. “It’s my sister’s. We were on our way over here, but she said the queue at this place drives her crazy. She ran to the bank machine and asked me to bring the skateboard home for her.”

  “Queue.” “Bank machine.” This guy might be the most adorable alien I’ve ever encountered. Also, I love that he has a sister he hangs out with. Byron and I used to be close when we were younger. We’d spend whole weekends in the apartment when our parents went to Connecticut, baking sugary concoctions and having movie marathons. All that changed the summer after his freshman year at Brewster when he got gorgeous and had girlfriends and parties to go to. And I was the chunky little sister who tarnished his image.