“I mean he’s hiding something from me,” I said, sitting down on the ledge beside her. “There’s always this silence between us, this weird kind of . . . gap. Like we’re never on the same page.”
The corner of Rachel’s mouth lifted. “And what page are you supposed to be on?”
I felt my cheeks heat. “Well, you know. We’re intended. It wouldn’t kill him to kiss me. Stop smiling like that! It’s not like you weren’t making out with Silvan Rafferty in the cornfields all last year.”
My words were a misstep. Something twisted beneath the surface of Rachel’s expression and nearly broke.
“Sorry.”
She took a pin from her mouth and stabbed it into the fabric. “It’s okay,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. “You’re right. It’s okay to want to kiss him.”
“Not if he doesn’t want to kiss me.”
She smoothed the material straight with her palm. “I don’t understand why he wouldn’t want to. He asked for your hand, didn’t he? I mean, I saw him kiss you that night.”
“It wasn’t a real kiss,” I said, scrunching up my nose. “It was so fast. Like a kiss your brother might give you.”
Rachel turned to me, frowning. I went on.
“Maybe he asked for my hand because of my job. Because I’ll be making a lot of gelt. Even better once we get to the planet and Mara retires. Two specialists will earn a decent wage.” I was speaking without thinking, and my words were beginning to tumble over themselves. If I’d stopped to consider it, I would have known how ridiculous my words were. What care did Koen, a specialist himself, have about gelt? But I just rambled on. “That would make sense. He’s marrying me for my money. And he doesn’t want to kiss me because I’m ugly, of course. But I really can’t blame him.”
Rachel stared at me.
“What?”
“Terra,” she said; her voice was a little soft, and for a moment I worried she was still offended by what I’d said about Silvan. But then she said something that surprised me. “You’re not ugly.”
I let out a laugh. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be nice about it. I’m used to it. It’s how things have always been. You’re the pretty one that the boys like to kiss. I’m the . . . well, the other one. The smart one. Or whatever.”
“Terra!”
“What?”
Rachel let out an exasperated sound. She hopped down from the window, then reached out and took both my hands in hers. She led me to the dressing rooms. Between the two half-open doors hung a mirror, gleaming in the dim track lighting. The last time I’d been here, I’d avoided looking at it. But now she shoved me in front of it.
“Look!” she said, laughing, though her laughter had an edge of disbelief that I didn’t quite like. I glanced at my reflection. My usual self stared back. I shrugged at Rachel.
For a moment she looked me up and down. Then she gathered the fine strands of my hair in her fist and piled them up near the crown of my head.
“You always hide behind your hair,” she said. “But this should help you see a bit.” Lifting an eyebrow, I turned to the mirror.
My first thought was: Momma. But of course that was ridiculous. My mother’s eyes had been a mossy green—mine were merely hazel. Still, the shadow of her was there. Over the past few months my face had changed. My neck was longer, my jaw just a hint less square. My cheeks had filled out, and my lips, too. I’d grown into my nose. And there were other changes: beneath my holey cardigan and stained shirt and the fabric of my lab coat, I could see the slight swelling of my breasts, which I’d done my best to ignore these past few months, and how my hips had widened. I’d probably never be curvy, not like Rachel was—instead I was lean and brawny, strong. But I no longer had the stick-straight figure of a boy. I had, apparently, grown up.
“Oh,” was all I said. And then I watched the woman in the mirror smile at herself. “When did that happen?”
“Don’t ask me,” Rachel said, dropping my hair down against my shoulders. Her mouth was twisted into a cockeyed smile. “You just showed up one day in my shop looking all womanly and stuff.”
I angled my chin up, doing my best to look proud and, I don’t know, regal. Like someone who knew she was pretty. But I couldn’t hold up the illusion for long. I exhaled hard, my posture deflating.
“If I’m so good-looking,” I said, turning to Rachel, “then why won’t he kiss me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s never been kissed before. Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s waiting for you to make your move.” She grinned at me. “Maybe it’s time you asked him.”
It’s not like we didn’t have time enough to talk. Abba had been nudging us together for several weeks now. One night after supper my father pushed himself away from the table with both hands, giving a wink to Koen.
“I’d better get the dishes done,” he said, and then added, entirely too loudly, “Why don’t you go up to Terra’s room? And don’t mind me. I promise I’ll give you kids your privacy.”
Koen and I looked at each other, our complexions blazing bright red, both. It was weird, what my father was suggesting. Crass. I didn’t know anyone who rutted around under their parents’ roof. But what was I supposed to do, fight with him about it? I rose and made my way up the stairwell. I felt my father’s satisfied gaze follow us up the stairs.
“I can’t believe him. I’m so, so sorry,” I said as I sat in my chair and cradled my head in my hands. I heard Koen’s soft chuckle as he closed the door behind me.
“It’s okay.”
Of course it was. For Koen it seemed like everything was always okay, as long as I didn’t look at him for too long or too intently. I dropped my hands, watching as he settled in on the thin throw rug. He held out his hand for Pepper, who was crouched inside the shadows of my desk. The cat sniffed at the air, then came trotting out.
“Attaboy,” he said. “Good boy.”
I watched as Koen’s long fingers scratched the space between my cat’s shoulder blades. I could almost feel the words on my tongue, pooling there, taking shape. But it was difficult to make my vocal cords move. When I finally did speak, I was surprised to find that my question had nothing to do with kissing—nothing to do with Rachel’s suggestions to be direct.
“Did you always want to be a clock keeper, Koen?” I asked, then winced. Small talk—I was making small talk. With my intended.
“Actually, yeah.” He gave a breathy laugh. “I was curious about that kind of stuff as a kid. Not the clock tower. I didn’t care about that. But the seasons. And our sleep cycles. I thought that stuff was pretty interesting.”
“Really?” I watched as Pepper climbed up into his lap, kneading his paws against Koen’s trousers.
“Yeah. Do you remember our seventh year of school, when I always used to fall asleep in class?”
I cocked my head to the side. My memories of Koen were hazy. I sat near the middle, passing notes back and forth to Rachel. He must have been somewhere with his friends in the rows behind us. I knew he wasn’t one of the mean boys, who’d thrown stuff at us and called us names. But other than that I couldn’t remember him at all.
“Sure, I remember,” I lied. Koen lifted an eyebrow but went on anyway.
“I decided to stop taking my pills. I just wanted to see what would happen, really. It was weird. No matter what the light looked like in the dome, it was like the day inside me was getting shorter and shorter. Eventually, I was conking out around nineteen o’clock every day, right in the middle of supper. My parents got freaked out. They thought something was wrong with me. They dragged me to the doctors, even though I kept trying to tell them that I’d just been palming my pills.”