About a Girl

Book 3: The Metamorphoses Trilogy

by Sarah McCarry

Genres: YA LGBT & Pride; YA Paranormal

Synopsis

Eighteen-year-old Tally is absolutely sure of everything: her genius, the love of her adoptive family, the loyalty of her best friend, Shane, and her future career as a Nobel prize-winning astronomer. There's no room in her tidy world for heartbreak or uncertainty—or the charismatic, troubled mother who abandoned her soon after she was born. But when a sudden discovery upends her fiercely ordered world, Tally sets out on an unexpected quest to seek out the reclusive musician who may hold the key to her past—and instead finds Maddy, an enigmatic and beautiful girl who will unlock the door to her future. The deeper she falls in love with Maddy, the more Tally begins to realize that the universe is bigger—and more complicated—than she ever imagined. Can Tally face the truth about her family—and find her way home in time to save herself from its consequences?

About a Girl is the powerful and entrancing conclusion to Sarah McCarry's Metamorphoses trilogy.

Release date: July 14, 2015

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

THE BLACK SEA



Tonight is my eighteenth birthday party and the beginning of the rest of my life, which I have already ruined; but before I describe how I arrived at calamity I will have to explain to you something of my personal history, which is, as you might expect, complicated-

If you will excuse me for a moment, someone has just come into the bookstore-No, we do not carry the latest craze in diet cookbooks-and thus she has departed again, leaving me in peace upon my stool at the cash register, where I shall detail the particulars that have led me to this moment of crisis.

In 1969, the Caltech physicist Murray Gell-Mann-theorist and christener of the quark, bird-watcher, and famed perfectionist-was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the field of particle physics. In his acceptance speech, he referenced the ostensibly more modest remark by Isaac Newton that if he had seen farther than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants, commenting that if he, Murray Gell-Mann, was better able to view the horizon, it was because he was surrounded by dwarfs. (Newton himself was referring rather unkindly to his detested rival Robert Hooke, who was a person of uncommonly small stature, so it's possible Gell-Mann was making an elaborate joke.) While I am more inclined to a certain degree of humility in public, I find myself not unsympathetic to his position. I am considered precocious, for good reason. Some people might say insufferable, but I do not truck with fools. ("What you're doing is good," Murray Gell-Mann told his colleague Sheldon Glashow, "but people will be very stupid about it." Glashow went on to win the Nobel Prize himself.)

-What? Well, of course we have Lolita, although I don't think that's the sort of book high-school teachers are equipped to teach-No, it's not that it's dirty exactly, it's just-Yes, I did see the movie-Sixteen-eleven, thanks-Cards, sure. Okay, goodbye, enjoy your summer; there is nothing that makes me so glad to have escaped high school as teenagers-

My name is Atalanta, and I am going to be an astronomer, if one's inclination is toward the romantic and nonspecific. My own inclination is neither, as I am a scientist. I am interested in dark energy, but less so in theoretical physics; it is time at the telescope that calls to me most strongly-we have telescopes, now, that can see all the way to the earliest hours of the universe, when the cloud of plasma after the Big Bang cooled enough to let light stream out, and it is difficult to imagine anything more thrilling than studying the birth of everything we know to be real. Assuming it is real, but that, of course, is an abstract question, and somewhat tangential to my main points at present. And though much of astronomy is, and has always been, the management of data-the recognition of patterns in vast tables of observations, the ability to pick the secrets of the universe out of spreadsheets thousands of pages long-there are also the lovely sleepless nights in the observatory, the kinship of people driven and obsessed enough to stay up fourteen hours at a stretch in the freezing dark tracking the slow dance of distant stars across the sky; those are the people whose number I should like one day to count myself among.

I am aware that I am only one day shy of eighteen and that I will have time to decide more carefully in what I will specialize as I obtain my doctorate and subsequent research fellowships, and I will be obliged as well to consider the highly competitive nature of the field-which is not, of course, to say that I am unequipped to address its rigors, only that I prefer to do work that has not been done already, the better to make my mark upon the cosmos. At any rate I like telescopes and I like beginnings and I like unanswered questions, and the universe has got plenty of those yet.

I live in an apartment in a neighborhood of Brooklyn that has only recently become relatively wealthy, with my Aunt Beast, who is not my aunt, but my biological mother's childhood best friend; my uncle Raoul, who is not my uncle, but my aunt's childhood best friend; Henri, who presumably was once someone's best friend, but is now more notably my uncle's husband; and Dorian Gray, who is technically Raoul's cat but I am privately certain likes me best. Atalanta is a ridiculous name, which is why most people call me Tally, including Aunt Beast, who picked it. My situation would be confusing to the average person, but this is New York, where unorthodox familial arrangements are par for the course. In my graduating class there was a girl who was the literal bastard child of a literal Luxembourgian duke; a boy whose father was a movie director so famous the entire family traveled with a bodyguard; a lesser Culkin; and a girl whose mother had made her fortune as a cocaine dealer before successfully transitioning to a career as a full-time socialite and home decorator, and I didn't even go to private school. My household of two gay not-dads and a sometimes-gay not-mom doesn't even rate a raised eyebrow.

My biological mother, Aurora, ran off right after I was born, which is unfortunate, but I've had seventeen years and three hundred and sixty-four days to accustom myself to her untimely departure. More accurately, she ran off before I was born, ran back briefly to deliver me to the household I now inhabit, and then ran off again, but as I was too small for these technicalities to have any effect on me at the time, for all intents and purposes it is easiest to say simply that she ran away. I have gathered she was something of a flibbertigibbet and a woman of ill repute, although Aunt Beast is not so unkind as to say so outright. I can only imagine she was dreadfully irresponsible on top of her flightiness, as I think it extremely poor form to cast off the fruit of one's womb as though it is little more than a bundle of dirty laundry. No doubt this abandonment has left me with lingering psychological issues, but I prefer to dwell in the realm of the empirical. Aurora left me on Raoul and Aunt Beast's doorstep, which is a good origin story, if not very original. (That was a pun, in case you were not clever enough to catch it.) Aunt Beast is not a beast at all, but she did read me A Wrinkle in Time at an impressionable age, and I have since refused to call her anything else, even though I am very nearly an adult and a fine scientist and high-school graduate who has secured a full scholarship to an excellent university you have certainly heard of in order to absorb the finer points of astrophysics before I go on to alter the course of history in whichever way I see fit.

Other pertinent points: Aunt Beast is a painter, Raoul is a poet, and Henri used to be a dancer but isn't any longer. Raoul teaches English to young hooligans, and Henri, who was once a principal in one of the best ballet companies in New York, retired over a decade ago, his body shot and his knees ground to dust, and became a massage therapist. As you know already, I work in a bookstore. I do not technically need my job; my grandfather, who died long before I was born, was both a tremendously famous musician and tremendously rich. (I am no particular aficionado of rock music, but Shane-oh, Shane, more about him in a moment-who is, has informed me that my grandfather's band was seminal, if derivative. I prefer Bach, personally.) Had I wanted to, I could have gotten into his considerable estate, which slumbers quietly in a trust, increasing itself exponentially every year. But Aunt Beast is adamant about not touching any of his money, and we live instead off the now-tidy sums she makes selling her paintings to museums and ancient, embittered Upper East Siders fossilized in their own wealth. New York does not teach one to think highly of the rich, a class of persons so inept they are incapable of even the most basic of tasks, including cleaning their own homes, laundering their own garments, cooking their own food, raising their own offspring, and riding the subway. Money cannot buy much of anything that interests me other than a fine education, which I have already managed to obtain for myself, and an orbiting telescope of my own; but even my grandfather's legacy is not quite enough to fund the construction of a personal satellite or particle accelerator, and so I see no use for it.

I am told Aurora was a great beauty. The only evidence I have of this fact is an old Polaroid of her and Aunt Beast when they were teenagers, taken in the garden of my grandmother's old house in the city where they grew up, which has hung over our couch in a battered wooden frame for as long as I can remember. It's summer; you can tell because of the backdrop of lapis sky and jumbled wildflowers. Aurora is laughing, her chin tilted up; her sharp cheekbones cut the light and send clear-edged panes of shadow across her face. Her skin is a few shades darker than mine and her hair, straight as my own, is bleached white where mine falls down my back in a waterfall of coal. She is indeed beautiful by any objective measure, not that it has done either of us any good. Aunt Beast is in her shadow, dressed in the same black clothes she still wears, her habitual sullenness battling a reluctant smile. You can't quite make out the color of Aurora's eyes but Aunt Beast says they were brown, in contrast to the blue of my own, which I have apparently inherited from my grandfather. My father is a mystery, not in the sense that he is mysterious, but in the sense that I have no idea who he is at all. From what I have heard of Aurora, it is not unlikely that she had no idea, either. Oh bother, excuse me-

Dear lord, you shouldn't get that; I think books about children with cancer are invariably maudlin and that one is a wholly abysmal example of the genre-Yes, I know it's popular, but why don't you get a book with actual literary value-Yes, certainly, I'd be happy to recommend something, you might try Titus Groan. No, it's not that long, and anyway it's good, so that doesn't matter-Oh, fine, as you like. Fifteen ninety-nine. It's your funeral, ha ha ha ha. Yes, thank you, goodbye-

At any rate, I myself am not a great beauty, so it is lucky I am preternaturally clever, else I would have no assets whatsoever to recommend me. My person is overly bony; I have the ungainly locomotion of a giraffe; and while my face is not unattractive, it is certainly not the sort of symmetrical countenance that causes strangers to remark upon its loveliness. My nose is somewhat beaklike. My skin, at least, is quite smooth and a pleasing shade of brown, but not even a white person ever got cast as the lead of a romantic comedy because they had nice skin. Additionally, white people are not subject to the regular and exhausting lines of enquiry my skin and vaguely ethnic features occasion ("What are you? No, I mean where are you from? No, I mean where are you really from? No, I mean where are your parents from?"). These interviews have nothing to do, obviously, with my attractiveness, and everything to do with the troglodytic nature of my interrogators, but I find them inconvenient nonetheless. My eyes are striking, but they are not enough to distinguish me.

The apparatus of popular culture would have one believe that one's success with the opposite sex is irreparably hampered by a disinterest in, and lack of, conventional attractiveness, but I can attest from experiential evidence that this is not always the case. I have thrice engaged in penetrative intercourse. The first instance was at the age of fifteen, at science camp, with one of the graduate-student counselors. It was not a memorable experience. The second was after some dreadful dance my junior year, with a paramour Aunt Beast had dug up for me somewhere (double date with Shane; awkward, beery-breathed post-dance groping on the couch of Shane's date's absent parents; actual moment of entry so hasty and uninspired I was uncertain for several moments as to whether I was having sex at all; the next day, my temporary beau sent me flowers atschool, which I threw away immediately), and whom I elected not to contact subsequent to the occasion. I had thought, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, that I would repeat the experiment, in order to ascertain whether my own results would more closely match the ecstatic testimony of romantic poets and cinematic heroines upon a second trial, but I am sorry to report they did not. But the third time-the third-oh, god.

Which leads me to Shane. I don't know if there is any point in telling you about him, since I don't know if I will ever-oh, I am being melodramatic, and also getting ahead of myself. I have known Shane for so long that his name is as much a part of me as my own. As a small child, I'd opened the door to our apartment, alarmed by the thumping and cursing of a small army of movers carting furniture and various boxes down the hall, and caught a brief, tantalizing glimpse of a pigtailed urchin of about my age being towed along behind a set of parents in the movers' wake.

"They have a girl in there," I announced to Henri, "help me get her," and so Henri baked cookies and sent me out to bear them to our new neighbors. Shane answered the door and we ate all the cookies on the spot, and Shane and I have been best friends ever since. I stood next to him when he told his mom he was a boy ("Well," she wept, clutching him in a moist embrace while he gazed stoically at a point over her shoulder, "it's not like you ever wore dresses anyway, and you know your father and I will always love you, but can't you at least still come to church with us?"); I was there when Shane grew boobs, and assisted him in assessing the most efficient and low-cost mechanism for concealing them (both of us cursing the cruelty of genetics, which had bestowed upon me the spindly and uniformly flat physique of a teenage boy whilst endowing him with lush feminine curves I, vain though I am not, would happily have sported in his stead); in unison we suffered the depredations of middle-school socials; as an ensemble we pilfered Shane's parents' liquor cabinet for the first time, supplementing the significantly depleted bottles with water from the tap so that his parents would not notice our theft (I was sick afterward for days, and have not touched spirits since; Shane, on the other hand, immediately embraced a path of dissolution with a singular enthusiasm)-in short, every first step into the adult world has been one we have taken as a united front (him stoned, me bossy and admittedly overly loquacious). I was there the first day of our freshman year, when Aaron Liechty, senior, hulking sociopath, prom king, and national fencing star (this is New York; only the automotive high school, last refuge of miscreants, has a football team), cornered him in the hallway and sneered, "I don't know what to call you, a little faggot or a little bitch," and Shane said, cool as you please, "You can call me sir," and punched Aaron Liechty square in his freckle-smattered nose. Blood geysered forth, redder even than the flaming crown of Aaron Liechty's hair, Aaron reeled away moaning, and from that point onward, Shane was a legend and folk hero amongst our peers. Only I knew the truth: that Shane had never hit anyone before in his life, that breaking Aaron Liechty's nose was a stroke of sheer luck, and that afterward he had dragged me into the girls' bathroom, where we'd locked ourselves in a stall and he'd cried into my shirt for ten minutes. Hold on a moment-

Yes, it's cool in here, thank you-Yes, awfully hot for this time of year-No, I only read the first one and thought it was sort of badly done-Yes, children seem excited about them-No, I don't have a problem withwizards, I just prefer science fiction, and I think the rules of magic in her world-building are so arbitrary, it's clear she's just making things up as she goes along-why is it always a boy wizard, anyway, it's clear the girl wizard is significantly more intelligent; it's always the case, don't you think, that less-talented young men take credit for all the work done by women who are much cleverer than they-Fine then, go find a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, I'm sure no one will argue with you there-

As I was saying, Shane and I did not excel in high school so much as endure it; he, like me, is a genius, but his gifts lean in the direction of being able to play guitar riffs back perfectly after hearing them only once, unknotting the tangle of chords and distortion and tying the resultant bits back together again in flawless replicas of whatever he just listened to. And, of course, he writes his own songs, a skill that seems as elusive and astonishing to me as the ability to, say, walk cross-country on stilts. I have always been considerably more intelligent than people around me are comfortable with, and unskilled at concealing it, and I had in addition an unfortunate habit of reading science-fiction novels in public long after such a deeply isolating quirk was forgivable. Other students were disinterested in the finer points of celestial mechanics, and I, once I thought about it at any length, was disinterested in other students. I was not lonely (how could anyone be lonely, with the heavens overhead? All the motion of the stars, and the planets turning, and beyond our own humble solar system the majesty of the cosmos), but I was grateful to have my family, who were boundless in their affection for me, and of course I was grateful beyond measure for Shane. Only he-and thank god I had him, boon companion, coconspirator, confidant, and literally my only friend-would let me ramble on ad nauseam about Messier objects and telescope apertures. Only he never made me feel odd or untoward for my outsize and grandiose ambitions, my unwavering passion for Robert Silverberg, and my penchant for quoting particle physicists in moments of great strife or transcendent happiness. I had the sense sometimes that even my teachers were frightened of me, or at the least had no idea what to do with me. It was only Shane's friendship that insulated me from any greater miseries than being the person no one wanted to sit next to in AP calculus. People were afraid of me, but they all liked Shane, and I suppose they imagined that even such an easily ostracized specimen of humanity as myself must have had some redeeming qualities if he was willing to put up with my company. Shane, a stoner Caramon to my bitchy and superior Raistlin, acted as a generous and often oblivious buffer between me and the outside world. People gave me a wide berth, but they left me alone.

I do not blame Aunt Beast or Raoul for failing to educate me in the delicate task of disguising myself enough to make other people understand how to talk to me. Aunt Beast barely graduated high school herself, and although I have never asked Raoul about it I do not imagine growing up a poet and gentleman homosexual is a thrilling experience for teens of any era or clime. I am an only child-so far as I know, anyway-and never had friends my own age, save Shane. Even as a small child, I spent my evenings in the company of Aunt Beast, Raoul, and Henri's witty, funny, brilliant friends, who treated me as though I were a person in my own right with opinions of interest-which, obviously, I was. Aunt Beast and Raoul raised me to have a kind of fearless self-possession that is not considered seemly in a girl, and I cannot help being smarter than the vast majority of the persons who surround me. The prospect of college was the only thing aside from Shane that got me through the sheer unending drudgery of adolescence.

Shane has no plans to go to college, preferring to eschew the hallowed halls of higher education for the chance to make a career as a rock musician, and if anyone I know is capable of this feat it is indeed he. He is forever trying to get me to listen to better music. He was, anyway, before-oh, god. I am not accustomed to this sort of-anyway. I have ruined everything-but I can't-oh, god. He has an insatiable and catholic palate, his tastes ranging from obscure Nigerian jazz to obsessively collected seven-inches from long-forgotten eighties punk bands. He likes a lot of the same old stuff-goths weeping into synthesizers-that Aunt Beast and Raoul listen to; he likes hip-hop; he likes, although he would never admit to it in public, hair metal, a clandestine affection he shares with Raoul, to the extent that they sometimes swap records with as much furtiveness and stealth as if they were dealing narcotics. His record collection takes up an entire wall of his room and is sorted alphabetically and by genre, and if you let him he will discourse extensively about stereo equipment with the obsessive focus of-well, of an astronomer citing observational data. I am prone to frequent bouts of insomnia, and sometimes I will call him late at night and ask him about different kinds of speakers, and drift off to sleep at last with the murmur of his voice in my ear.

I used to do that, anyway. I have not for-well.

The problem, of course, is feelings. Of all the banal and pedestrian impediments! The florid indignity! Shane and I had marched along for years, platonically intertwined, inseparable as glass-jarred conjoined twins bobbing in a formaldehyde bath, until one day without warning I looked over at Shane as he played video games with the fixed intensity of the very stoned, and felt a sudden and astonishing ache in my loins. I was quite sure I had gotten a cramp, and went home and took several ibuprofen-and then I thought of the delicate beadwork of sweat along his upper lip, the burnished glow of his skin under his nearly worn-through white undershirt, his perfect mouth slightly opened in concentration-and the ache blazed forth into a fire, and I understood (belatedly, to be sure, but the landscape of the heart is a country I have with determination left untrespassed) that something awful had befallen me, and our friendship-our blissful, majestic, symbiotic bond-was under the most dreadful threat it had ever faced.

Matters only worsened from there. Where last summer I would have thought nothing of lounging about in my underwear, dozing in his bed in the hazy June heat and watching him play Super Mario Brothers on his old Nintendo, or practice the guitar, brows knitted together in concentration, thick dark hair falling over his high forehead, now the elegant line of his neck and the soft slope of his shoulders, his rounded back (his mother is forever trying to get him to sit up straight), summoned forth in me an all-pervasive nervousness that sent me pacing around his room until he snapped that I should calm down or leave. I could no longer look at the curve of his mouth without imagining it on my own, no longer punch him on the shoulder without wishing he would retaliate in turn by pinning me to the ground and ravishing me, no longer grab carelessly at his hand without willing the electricity I now felt at his touch to spark an answering flare of light.

All of this might have been bearable had my passions been gentle, but they were most emphatically no such thing; the dissatisfaction of my prior forays into the field notwithstanding, sex with my best friend now seemed the only possible resolution to the terrible forces that raged within me, and I was unable to think about anything else-electrons, stars, planetary orbits, the grocery list-in his presence. Watching the dirty parts of movies with him was an extended study in misery; I could be unexpectedly rendered speechless if the two of us wandered past a couple making out in the park; when he hugged me goodbye, careless and oblivious, I had to will myself not to lick his skin. His long, lovely hands, bitten-nailed, working the Nintendo controller or moving up and down the neck of the guitar, would come to my mind unbidden later, in the humming air-conditioned dark of my own room. I would think of those hands actively engaged in doing deeply unchaste things to my person, and bring myself nightly to new heights of lust before becoming overcome with terror that he could somehow see through walls and blankets and the thick pane of my skull to observe the pornographic spectacle of my thoughts-or, worse still, my own hand as it moved beneath the sheets-and then I would desperately attempt to turn my imagination to other, less salacious imagery.

I told myself at first that I was coming down with something, that I had been watching too much television and my formidable mind was going soft as a result, or that I had been reading too much Shakespeare and too little Wheeler (although Wheeler himself is prone to unscientifically poetic fits of exegesis), but finally even I had to admit that my feelings for my best friend in all the world had abruptly leapt the track from the blissfully platonic to the mundanely carnal. Oh, for god's sake-

Can I help you find anything? The red book that was on the third shelf down? Or the fourth one? No, I don't know what book that would-Well, how long ago? A month? I couldn't possibly tell you-Oh, you mean that stupid fake economist who writes for the Times-Well, you can't argue that his data is questionable-Yes, it's over there. Seventeen fifty-seven. Do you need a bag? No? Okay, have a nice day-

Shane had girlfriends in high school-not many, and none serious, and none remotely threatening to the umbilical bond that united us. I'd never been jealous because none of them ever registered: a short lineup of pretty, bland-faced girls with shiny hair whom Shane occasionally perambulated around school dances or took out for dim sum but who were nowhere near as smart as I was, did not know every word Shane would utter before it left his mouth, and were not invited to the womblike environs of our respective apartments, where we regularly holed up on his or my couch watching eighties slasher movies and eating microwave popcorn by the bagful, Shane occasionally and unsuccessfully trying to beguile me into smoking marijuana out of a soda can with a hole punched in its side.

Every morning this summer, since we graduated (me, naturally, with a 4.0, Shane by the skin of his teeth) and launched ourselves into the last months before the rest of our lives began, I told myself upon waking, firmly and with conviction, that I would spare myself the torture and stay home, go in to work on my days off and dust the bookshelves, insist Raoul accompany me to a museum, take up oil painting under the tutelage of Aunt Beast-anything but open the door of my apartment and walk, with bated breath, down the hall to his. Every afternoon I abandoned my resolve and capered, aquiver with anticipation, to his door, imagining that day would be the day he would at last fling it open, take me in his arms, and kiss me until our knees buckled; every day, instead, I curled up in a state of frenzied anguish in his bed while he, oblivious, lit another joint. As June wore on I stayed over later and later, hoping against hope that my patient, enduring presence in his house would evoke in him the same disgusting and inconvenient emotions that had taken hold of me-that he would be seized, as I was, by the overwhelming urge to bring our friendship out of the phenomenological world and into the sublime. But the forceful (and admittedly silent) messages I beamed at him continuously went entirely unheeded-and some part of me, the last bit of my brain still operating under the auspices of reason, was relieved.

When not distracted by lust, I existed in a more or less constant state of seething rage-I was furious with him for making me feel something that was outside of my control and even more furious with him for not, at the very least, reciprocating it; I was furious with myself for having feelings; and I was furious with biology in general, for wiring me so faultily-adolescence had been bad enough, without its sending a wrecking ball careening through the perfectly satisfying equilibrium I had enjoyed up until the moment oxytocin went riotous in my brain and turned me into a dithering idiot, ruining the last summer I would have with my favorite person in all the world.

This dreadful torment continued until a fateful afternoon a week ago. "I got something you have to hear," he said-me, freshly showered, hair brushed, even a dab of Aunt Beast's vanilla oil at my wrists and throat, as close to pretty as I could make myself; him, stoned and oblivious ("Something smells like cookies," he'd said, confused, when he hugged me hello)-both of us sprawled on his floor, gazing vacantly at the ceiling (his stupor drug-induced, mine a paralysis of lust). He sat up and fiddled with a pile of cassettes next to his record player. (Turntable, he always corrected me.) "Unbelievable," he said, "this album is unbelievable. I finally tracked it down. Hold on." He selected the cassette he'd been looking for, extracted it reverently from its plastic case, and inserted it gently into the tape deck. The soft click of the play button, a rustling hiss of static, and then, low and sweet, a honeyed drift of chords on an acoustic guitar, and a man began to sing. The sound was furry and muted, but the voice that came out of Shane's speakers was like something out of another world, deep and pain soaked and full of loss. We listened to the entire tape without speaking: one bittersweet, yearning song fading into another, weaving together a rich and gorgeous and strange tapestry that carried me out of my body and its perilous wants into some other, more transcendent place of sorrow and hope and waiting. At last the final, aching chord faded and I sat in stunned silence, slowly coming back to my body, the messy familiarity of Shane's room, the feel of cool air moving across my human skin. My heart was pounding as hard as if I'd just go