Lost Stars

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Selin Davis

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected]
or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

Cover photograph © 2016 by Buffy Cooper/Trevillion Images

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Names: Davis, Lisa Selin, author.

Title: Lost stars / Lisa Selin Davis.

Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017] | Summary: “A teenage girl grapples with her sister's death and her own place in the universe over the course of one fateful summer in upstate New York. With an epic '80s soundtrack blasting in the background, Lost Stars is a novel that encapsulates teenage-life and all its awkward longing, heady passion, and introspective questioning”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045412 | ISBN 9780544785069 (hardback)

Subjects: | CYAC: Grief—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Popular music—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Love & Romance. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Emotions & Feelings. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / General (see also headings under Social Issues). | JUVENILE FICTION / Performing Arts / Music. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Drugs, Alcohol, Substance Abuse.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D38 Lo 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2015045412

eISBN 978-0-544-86817-5
v1.0916

To Amy, Julie, Katie, Kristin, and Rachel.
My protective shield.

That night, I walked up the wobbly
footbridge-in-progress, rolling my bike next to me until I stood in front of the abandoned observatory, rain leaking from the yellow rain slicker into my slightly-too-small hiking boots. What a shame that this was my night to be solo beneath the stars: I could barely see them.

The observatory door was locked, but years ago Ginny had shown me how to prop open the window, stained glass framed with now-rotting wood. I squeezed inside, scraping my leg on the stone walls as I scaled them. My backpack landed with a thud on the hard stone floor.

It was ghostly, damp and echoey, its round shape, its dark stones looming over the flat green fields of the park. Two benches stood against the walls, each clad in dark red velvet, worn now and threadbare in spots, but good enough for a bed. I took off the wet boots, rolled the rain slicker into a makeshift pillow, and lay down. I was so weirdly calm. Not scared to be alone in the park at night. Not scared to be homeless-ish. Not scared to be in the very spot where, two years earlier, I had had my last glimpse of Ginny.

I looked up to the domed skylight, remembering the night it had opened when I was eight, Orion's belt gleaming and all that hope blinking in the stars. I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn't. I couldn't face all those things that had swallowed my hope.

I took out my notebook and traced my calculations, the careful pencil drawings, with my finger. That was one relief: it wouldn't be tonight. I wouldn't miss the comet, not yet. Maybe tomorrow, the beginning of the end of the summer, the beginning of the end, would be the night it arrived. Maybe, like the Paiute Indians used to think, the comet signified the collapse of this world and the start of the next.

No, I wasn't scared to be there. But once the tears came, there was no stopping them.

“That's the last time,” my father yelled,
pounding the arm of his flowered dusty-rose armchair. “I mean it—​I'm not gonna take this crap anymore. This is no way to start the summer.”

“What are you gonna do about it?” I yelled back, stomping up the stairs and slamming my door. The room buzzed with the electricity of our screams, and my hands shook as I placed the record on the turntable: the Replacements singing “Unsatisfied.” I let the sweet, sad sound of the guitar calm me down. The joint helped too.

“Carrie, put that out.” His voice rode the line between pleading and pissed. “I can smell it from down here.”

I flung open the door. “I stole it from
you,
” I yelled down the stairs. “You're such a hypocrite.”

“Caraway—”

“Don't call me that! It's Carrie!” I knew I was screaming so loud that the neighbors in the giant house next door could probably hear me, but that only made me scream louder, so loud my voice began to crack. “Why did you guys have to name me after a loaf of rye bread?” I stomped down the stairs and threw one of my jelly shoes at him, and he ducked. Then he stopped. He just stood there, stunned and irate, his whole face descended into blankness, as if he had sudden-onset Alzheimer's and didn't know anymore who he was or who I was or how we had gotten there. Which was probably the case.

I was still heaving with all that anger, breathing hard. It welled up in me sometimes, a fiery asteroid of it. It just took over in my bones. But when he froze, I did too. We stared at each other for a minute, and then it was as if he crumbled, his whole six-foot frame collapsing into that armchair, the one that had become his makeshift home since our family fell apart. I could hardly hear him, he was whispering so low. So I had to step closer. And then closer.

“We didn't name you after rye bread,” he was saying. “It's a spice.”

He looked up at me, and I thought for a second he was going to reach up and hug me, and a terrible pool of feeling, not one particular feeling but just a messy stew of everything, started flooding me, and I felt like I had to throw something or break something or cut something or smoke something, and I let out an enormous grunt, like a white dwarf star, collapsed and out of gas.

He put his head into his hands and started whispering again. He was saying, “I just don't know what to do with you. I don't know how to help you. It's getting worse, and I don't know what to do.”

What he did was ground me. I had arrived home reeking of cigarettes and pot, nearly falling into the house at six p.m. when I was supposed to be at work ringing up fingerless gloves and neon half shirts at Dot's Duds. I'd never shown up, and most likely Dot had called him. Most likely I'd been fired. Again. This was, as he'd said, no way to start the summer.

So he laid down the law: no going out with friends. No walking downtown to buy records. No going to Soo's, where I was supposed to be by nine o'clock. Worst of all: no going up to the roof to monitor the progress of the Vira comet, otherwise known as 11P/Alexandrov, which any day now would blast through the sky, this ball of ice and dust that grew a tail of gas when it neared the sun, as it would this summer for the first time since 1890. It only came around every ninety-seven years.

I was eleven when my parents first took me and my sisters up to the observatory to see Mars at opposition—​when the planet is closest to Earth and all lit up by the sun, a beautiful, almost orchestral eruption of light. Even then, before the accident, something about the laws of the universe made so much more sense to me than shop class and school dances and the elusive species known as boys. The story of how Earth hangs there in the sky, tied to the sun but always turning away, day after day, as if trying to escape: that was a story I understood. Unlike my family, which even then seemed to have some green patina of dysfunction—​translucent, but always there—​that pure, rule-bound vision I saw through my telescope made all the sense in the world.

The telescope, unfortunately, had disappeared about three months ago, just before my mom took off and things went from worse to worst. Punishment for another one of the terrible things I'd done, I assumed, but I still had the roof. Until now. “You have to at least let me up there,” I begged my father. “It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe twice if I live to be a hundred and thirteen. Or three times if I hit two ten.”

I thought I saw a smile creeping to the corners of his lips—the roof had been our spot, once upon a time, the telescope our shared obsession. But he just said, “Add it to the list of life's disappointments.”

I stomped back upstairs and blasted X's “Real Child of Hell,” collapsing on my bed, pulling the star sheets that my mom had bought me years ago up over my head. My mom wouldn't have punished me. My mom would have defended me, saying,
Paul, sweetie, lay off—​she's just a teenager. Let's let her be. Let's choose to trust her.
But maybe she'd learned not to say that kind of thing anymore.

Since there was no talking on the phone, I couldn't even tell Soo of this next level of injustice (she was the only one to whom I revealed my secret nerd-dom) or that I couldn't show up at her house that night. Impossible to sneak it, either, because we were a one-phone household, just our touchtone mounted to the wall in the kitchen, the beige plastic smudged from how often Rosie and I talked on it, and fought over it. My dad had had to replace it twice in the last year, after I ripped it from the wall in one of what he called my “fits.”

Now Rosie was standing outside my locked door, yelling, “Turn it down, please—​I'm trying to study!” Rosie was the only person I knew who went to summer school voluntarily.

“You should stop studying and have some fun,” I called, kind of meaning it. Every once in a while I liked Rosie. Now was not one of those times. “School's out, for crying out loud.”

“You should stop having so much fun and start studying,” she yelled back.

I put the Pixies EP on the turntable and used all of my concentration to place the needle on the record and pretend I couldn't hear her through the door.

“I wish you would just leave, Carrie!” Her footsteps receded down the hallway.

Why hadn't I thought of that?

“Great idea!” I called out. If my father caught me, I'd just tell him Rosie had told me to go. At some point in our family history, Rosie would have to do
something
wrong. My sneaking suspicion was that Rosie was normal because they had given her a normal name. It was still a spice—​Rosemary—​but it passed as regular. Ginny, too. Most people hadn't known that her real name was Ginger until they saw it on her gravestone, and even then, it wasn't that strange. But call your kid Caraway and bad shit is bound to happen.

My window screen clicked as I slid it open and did a perfunctory check for parental patrol. My father wasn't outside, and there was just enough cover from the pine trees next door to form a kind of protective canopy.

We lived on a narrow street of humble, and sometimes crumbling, little Victorian houses that hid behind a wide boulevard called Grand Street. Our town had once been a resort for fancy New Yorkers, but now it was mostly run-down except for the pockets of wealth, one of which happened to be right next to us. Grand was full of mansions, thus constantly reminding us of our station in life back here. Our little house—​four tiny bedrooms, low ceilings, asbestos siding—​was in the shadow of Mrs. Richmond's place, a big white house with huge columns, separated from us by a high picket fence. I almost never saw Mrs. Richmond herself—​she reportedly had a multitude of houses—​but that was a good thing; it meant she never caught me when I snuck out.

I slithered out the window and onto the roof of the porch, then scaled down the porch column and onto the bricked-over dirt we called a yard. Pretty amazing for someone whose only exercise was adjusting telescope lenses (before they were taken away) and playing guitar.

In the clear, I took out my Camel Lights and puffed all the way to Soo's. It was June and the perfect temperature, that velvety kind of early evening air, that fading golden light. It all made a weird hard ball in the center of my chest and I wished I had my guitar. Or another joint. Or that it was already late at night and I was heading to a bus stop somewhere on the outskirts of town with my guitar slung over my shoulder and it would turn out that my life was actually a movie, some small-town
Breakfast Club
kind of deal where there were happy endings all around. And boyfriends. My kingdom—​or really, my crappy house—​for a boyfriend.