The Unseen World by Liz Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

to Ada’s needs, outweighed his resistance.
    In the cool hour before midnight she walked down to the base of their backyard, to where the pine trees lived, and she ran her hand along their branches to find her way, quietly, through the three backyards between theirs and Liston’s. Lately, Ada had been doing this regularly, perhaps once a week, while David was working at night. He had never pressed her for her whereabouts—or maybe he had not noticed. If he had, he approved, because he liked to foster independence in her, liked to imagine that his daughter could take care of herself. Certainly he did not know what drove Ada to conduct these nighttime walks, these missions, these compulsive marches in the dark. Certainly he would have been surprised to learn that it was William Liston, fifteen, the oldest of Diana Liston’s sons. Certainly he did not know that Ada believed she was in love with him.
    Since the Christmas party three months prior, Ada had thought about him almost unflaggingly, with a dedication singular to thirteen-year-old girls. For the first time, she also thought about herself, and her appearance. She stood in front of the mirrored vanity that David once told her had belonged to his mother, and she tilted her head first one way and then the other. Was she pretty? She could not say, and it had never before occurred to her to wonder. She was brown-haired and round-faced, with serious dark circles under her eyes and the beginning of several pimples on her chin. She had a widow’s peak that David told her he had had, too, when he had any hair to speak of. Like David, too, she wore glasses, which she had never before minded, but which now seemed like an unfair handicap.
    She fantasized often about what she would say, what she would do, the next time she was in the same room with William Liston—though this rarely happened. Although Diana Liston regularly cameover to their house for dinner when asked, the offer was rarely reciprocated; and although Ada saw her regularly at the lab, her three sons never came with her. Instead they lived what Ada considered to be normal lives: they attended a normal school, excelled or failed at various normal things like sports and English class. They had no cause to visit their mother at work, except when required. Therefore, the only time Ada found herself face-to-face with William Liston—or, truly, anyone her age—was at lab parties.
    There were two reasons she felt ashamed of her crush: the first was that her father would have thought it was ridiculous—Ada knew that she was certainly too young, in his mind, to be interested in boys—and the second was that William was Liston’s son, and in a strange way she felt it was a betrayal of Liston to worship so ardently the child she complained about at lunch. “So listen to William’s latest,” she often said to Hayato, in front of Ada, and then proceeded to detail his most recent bout of mischief and the subsequent discipline he had received at school. Often it was for cutting class or leaving early; once, for forging a note from Liston excusing him from some assignment or other. He was caught by the number of misspellings he had included in the text. At the end of each account, Liston sighed and looked at Ada, mystified, and said, “Why couldn’t I have had four girls just like you?” And it made Ada feel gratified and melancholy all at once, because she knew that of course Liston loved her own children better than Ada, no matter what she said. With some frequency, Liston crowed about her grandson, the child of her oldest daughter Joanie, casting upon him none of the judgment she reserved for her own children. The fact that, despite her complaints, she loved her brood so fiercely and protectively also made Ada feel ashamed—for it was clear to her that Liston, even Liston, would have laughed if she knew about Ada’s crush. Because even Liston knew how little