The Unseen World: A Novel by Liz Moore

Author:Liz Moore [Moore, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Contemporary Women, Family Life
ISBN: 9780393245004
Google: BRmZCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0393241688
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, at Queen of Angels, speculation over whom William’s next girlfriend would be was increasing in pitch. Karen Driscoll had, unexpectedly, linked up with a different boy immediately following the breakup, disrupting the natural order of things (William was supposed to have moved on first), and prompting speculation that Karen, well liked before, might in fact be a slut—a word that was lobbed back and forth between ninth-grade girls with a frequency that alarmed and fascinated Ada.

Melanie McCarthy and her friends now regularly sat at her table, not entirely displacing Lisa Grady, but moving her to the end of it, where she sat quietly and consumed her meal with small, quick movements, as if embarrassed to be eating in public at all. The girls between her and Ada often sat angled toward the latter, their backs to Lisa Grady, so that an onlooker might have thought she was an interloper, someone unknown to them all.

At lunch, topics of conversation varied, but at some point William Liston generally came up. The latest sightings were exchanged, and the latest rumors, which they all turned to Ada to confirm or deny. In order to avoid having to reveal the depth of her ignorance when it came to William, she feigned a sort of modest reluctance to share his secrets (which, of course, implied that she knew them). She was noncommittal; she nodded slightly at some lines of thinking, shrugged at others. Her classmates trod carefully, respectfully, with deference to what they presumed to be both Ada’s superior knowledge and her loyalty to William.

On Ada’s own time, she speculated about William more fervently than ever. To her he had recently seemed quieter, more subdued. When she first moved in with the Listons, he had had dinner with them all on the infrequent occasions when his mother prepared it; now he never did. Matty missed him and tried to conceal it.

“William’s at work,” he said to Ada some afternoons, though both of them knew it wasn’t true; he only worked at the video store on weekends. She had seen his work schedule, handwritten and posted to a bulletin board in his room (into which Ada snuck on the rare occasions when she was certain no one else was home, her heart beating in her throat). It was strange, knowing so much about a person without that person knowing her. Sometimes Ada felt as if she were looking at William from the safe dark of a mezzanine as he stood, spotlit, on a stage.

Still, she parlayed her observations and deductions about him, her insider knowledge, into an ever-increasing popularity. Melanie and her friends asked Ada now to walk home with them from school, to come over on weekends, but she always declined, saying only that she had to visit her father. His diagnosis was a topic of conversation that she had not broached with them, and she did not anticipate doing so anytime soon. There were various rumors about Ada’s residency in the Liston household that she did not dispel.

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