I supposed that was the best way to look at it. If I anticipated an interesting—if odd—semester with Celeste, someone so different from me and my friends, and saw it as a chance to get to know her better, then I wouldn’t be disappointed. Still, I held on to the hope that didn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t also be easy.
Chapter 7
MY MOTHER CALLED WHEN I WAS on my way back to Frost House after lunch. I wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation, but picked up anyway because I knew she’d keep calling until she reached me. I hadn’t talked to her since arriving at school, had only sent her and my father brief messages saying I’d gotten here safely. My father had written back: “Remember to get car inspected. Visit soon. Dad.” My mother was higher maintenance.
I walked down Highland Street, giving her a brief summary of the weekend.
“What kind of interesting?” she said when I used the word to describe Celeste again. “Medieval castle? Skyscraper?”
Matching up people with architecture: our family version of “If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”
The perfect answer came as I turned into the Frost House driveway.
“Casa Batlló,” I said. Casa Batlló—an outrageous apartment building in Barcelona with colorful, mosaic walls that seem to ripple, balconies that look like enormous skulls, a ceiling that swirls like a whirlpool. Disconcerting, but beautiful.
“You were scared to death of Casa Batlló,” my mother said. “Do you need me to call that Dean of Students woman, honey? I don’t want you living with some girl you’re scared—”
“Mom,” I interrupted. “I was only six when we went to Barcelona.” Gravel pressed into the thin soles of my sandals. “Everything is fine here. I have to go, okay?” It bothered me when she tried to get involved in things about my life she didn’t understand, things I could take care of myself.
If she wanted to be a part of it all, she shouldn’t have moved across the country.
Ignoring my comment about needing to go, she began to tell me about an article on a new kind of yoga that she was going to email me. “Apparently, it’s much better for managing stress than the kind I’ve been doing,” she said. “If there’s a studio near Barcroft that offers it, I’d be happy to pay for you to take classes.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, heading down the hall to my room. “Sounds great.”
As I set my bag on the floor in the bedroom, I registered something strange on my bed. My mother’s voice chirped on as I moved closer. Sheets of newspaper covered with rows of small, dark … what? I moved closer. Bugs?
“Sorry, have to go,” I said. I hung up without waiting for her response and stared.
Cockroaches. Dead. At least a hundred. Shiny brown with spindly legs. On my bed.
A roar filled my ears.
“Celeste!”
There were dead cockroaches.
On my bed.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the carcasses. Some as big as two inches long. Legs and antennae and slippery-looking abdomens. A battlefield. I shivered violently, as if all those tiny legs were crawling on my skin, scrabbling up my arms and my spine and my neck.
This was not interesting. It was repulsive.
“Celeste!” I yelled again.
I heard the flush of the toilet. Celeste came thumping in.
“I know, I know. Sorry,” she said in a blasé voice. “I needed to see if they all arrived okay.”
“Take them off,” I said. The angry roar in my ears was so loud I was sure she could hear it, too. “Take them off my bed. Now!”
“Okay. Let me just get their box.” She hopped over and grabbed a shoe box off her dresser.
“Why do you even … why do you even have them? This is so disgusting.”
“For a photo project. It’s taken me a really long time to get enough of them. You can’t just buy them anywhere.”
“Really, really disgusting,” I said. “And why didn’t you put them on your bed?”
She gave me a look as if I were the crazy person. “No room.”
I glanced over. Celeste’s bed was covered with ten or so small birds’ nests and what appeared to be an assortment of little bones. God, I wished Dean Shepherd were here to see this—what she was asking of me. David, too, for that matter.
“I’m going to go out for a little while,” I said, not knowing where I’d go, just knowing that I couldn’t be here with her. “When I get back, there will be no dead things in the bedroom. I don’t care what you do with them. I just don’t want them in my bedroom.”
“Fine. Sorry, I didn’t know you had a phobia.”
“It’s not a phobia!” I said. “It’s perfectly normal! This is not the sort of stuff that should be in my bedroom! Especially not on my bed!”
Celeste’s eyes narrowed. “Okay,” she said. “I get the point. But it’s not like you haven’t touched my stuff, too.”
I looked at her blankly.
“Unless David tried on my skirt,” she said.
Her skirt? My heart started thumping. How could she … ?
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” She put the shoe box down again and hopped over to the closet. She tugged at the doorknob, jiggled it, pulled. “This stupid door won’t let me in. It keeps sticking.”
“The wood’s probably swollen.” I went over and turned the knob. The door opened easily.
As Celeste reached inside, I had the irrational hope that she was going to bring out a skirt I’d never seen before, a skirt I hadn’t touched. But her hand emerged with the pink, bustled one. She held it out so I could see that down one side, on the seam, was a long rip—three or so inches.
I stared at it, momentarily speechless. That rip had not been there after I tried it on. I was sure. And it didn’t even look like it could have happened accidentally. Still, a guilty feeling wrapped around me, as tight as the skirt had been.
“Celeste,” I finally said, “I didn’t rip your skirt. I mean, I did try it on for a minute, but—”
“You could have at least hung it back up.”
“Hung it … ? I did hang it up.”
“Funny. I found it on the floor.”
“But I did hang it up. I promise.” I had hung it up well, hadn’t I? And I’d checked the fabric so thoroughly.
“I can fix the rip,” she said, putting the skirt back in the closet. “That’s not a big deal. But is this how it’s going to be? You punishing me for living here? Because if it is, we should forget about it right now. I can tell the dean this isn’t going to work, that I need a room somewhere else.”
I imagined the scene. “No,” I said. “No, you don’t have to do that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. Why don’t we … start fresh?”
“Like, forget this stuff happened?” She gestured at the skirt and the bed.
I nodded.
Celeste seemed to consider this for a moment. She hopped over, delicately picked up one of the roaches, and held it up to her face. “What do you think, little guy?” she said. “Forgive and forget?”
She turned the roach so his head faced me, turned him back, and wiggled him so he appeared to be nodding at her.
“Okay,” she said. Then she smiled. “Leena! I’m so happy to be living with you.”
When I reached the end of the driveway—still not knowing where I was headed, or what exactly had happened back there, only knowing that there was a great big lump of unpleasantness in my throat—I ran into Abby and Viv, carrying grocery bags.