Lost Stars (12 page)

“To be honest, I have a little bit of a thing for Judas Priest,” he said.

“Grody.” I picked up the cassette case to see what else was on his mix tape: A little on the punk side for me—​Minutemen and Black Flag, but also Hüsker Dü and Blondie and the Replacements and the Knack and Bob Dylan and Neil Young and the Beatles (of course) and one Grateful Dead song, “Uncle John's Band.” A song so familiar from my childhood, the real childhood when my parents were together and my sister was alive. “There's no Judas Priest on here,” I said.

“No,” he admitted. “AC/DC, though.”

“Of course AC/DC. You can't make a mix tape without AC/DC.” He pressed the fast-forward button, stopping it occasionally to check until he came to “You Shook Me All Night Long.” As he turned onto Broadway, the grumbling Jeep drifting down the wide street, we started singing along, both of us softly at first—​kind of sacrilege to sing AC/DC softly—​and then louder and louder, until we were screaming the words, the windows open, laughing, both of us staring straight ahead but letting go.

We had listened to Jimmy Cliff and the Modern Lovers and were discussing the merits of Lou Reed solo versus with the Velvet Underground when we saw Tiger walking along the road toward Soo's. To my tremendous disappointment, we pulled over.

“Where's your car?” Dean asked, ducking his head out the window.

“In the shop,” he said. “Greta got a ride with Tommy.”

“Well, get in,” Dean said. I forced a smile. Yeah, get in.

“Hey, Carrie.” Tiger climbed into the back. I could barely muster a “Hey” back. Did this make it not a date? It wasn't a date, no, of course, because who would ever date me? Dean probably opened the car door for every girl. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Of course,” I said, as if it were my car and as if I weren't desperately wishing it had an eject button.

Dean and Tiger talked about electric guitars (I had almost never used an amp and didn't really get the fascination with the Marshall Stack) and cool towns in Oregon (now my least favorite state), and they smoked Marlboros, and Dean handed his to me and I took a puff and handed it back. This, the tiniest act of intimacy, made me warm all over. Or maybe it was just the smoke.

When we walked into Soo's, Tommy called out to me, “Rye Bread, I saw you on your bike with a
hardhat!
” He put on “Le Freak” and started singing
geek out
instead of
freak out.
“I didn't know you were auditioning for the Village People.”

I froze, wishing Dean wasn't there to see or hear this.

“Well, yeah, some of us have to work for a living” was my only retort. It was hard to make someone feel bad about driving a BMW, even a vintage one with a tapestry staple-gunned to the ceiling. I knew his parents had spent a bunch of money getting it restored and that the tapestry was just for show.

The truth was, none of them, except for Soo and Greta, had been inside my house, and only Soo really knew me, knew the star-loving nerd I was in, well, in my real life. Somewhere in this world, on the other side of the universe, my real life was taking place.

Dean went over to the stereo and put on the Village People's “YMCA.”

The evening passed by much in the way it had for months, years: records and singing and playing music and drinking and drugs and boyfriends and girlfriends making out, with me occasionally taking my notebook from my worn leather backpack and jotting down lyrics or song ideas or recalculating to find the distance of Vira, now approaching some twenty-six million miles away. I was still in love with the way Lynn's pen felt in my hand—​so what if he'd told me to give it back? But this time I didn't do the drinking or the drugs, and I didn't do the making out, even though Tommy made a loose attempt at a proposition in his intoxicated rubbery way—“Rye Bread, come over here,” patting the pleather with a droopy, come-hither look.

No, this time I watched. I picked out a couple of records—​R.E.M.'s “Don't Go Back to Rockville” and the B-52's—​and sat down with a cup of tonic water (the basement had a fully stocked bar with all the accoutrements) and saw how Dean was comfortable, in that awkward way he had, hanging out with a bunch of kids he hadn't known a month ago. They had taken him in the way they had me: the Lost Souls Club.

“You know, I've been thinking about a band name,” Dean said, sliding next to me on the couch.

“What, you don't like Piece of Toast?”

He smiled and said, “We should have a band called Supernova.”

“Not bad,” I said. “What kind of music do we play?”

“Oh, glam rock, I would think. We're going to have to wear glitter and rainbow wigs.”

Dean had on that same striped rugby shirt and cutoffs like mine. “I can't imagine you in glitter.”

“Oh, I don't know. I might surprise you,” he said. He looked right at me and smiled, and I melted into the red pleather. When? When was he going to surprise me?

I really hadn't planned it that way,
but in the morning, Dean pulled out of his driveway in the Jeep just as I hopped on my bike.

“Hey,” he said, with the familiar nod of his head. I had known him for a whole month now, 1/192 of my life, and I had memorized the way his cheeks got all mottled when he blushed and how he cleared his throat before he sang and the exact angle of his chin when he jutted it forward to say hey.

“Hey,” I said back, as if I were his buddy. I was beginning to lose hope. Or maybe I'd lost it. Nothing was ever going to happen. He just wanted to be friends. Okay, we'd be friends. I would constantly be in pain, it was true, but we could be friends.

He didn't get out of the car. The driver's-side window was open, and he rested his arm on it. “We're going to play at Soo's tonight. Test the soundproofing.”

“You are? Cool.” It was sort of like he was inviting me and also sort of like he was just telling me for informational purposes.

“No, we are. You are too.”

“I am?”

“Yes. I was hoping you were too. You are.”

I steadied myself on the bike, gripping and releasing the brakes. “Oh, okay.”

“I'd drive you, but I'm going straight from work.”

“That's okay. I'll ride my bike. It works great, by the way. Thanks for fixing it.”

He pretended to tip his hat. “At your service.” And then his cheeks got all mottled. “That was dumb,” he said, and I wanted to go right up close to him and say,
No, it's not dumb. It's my favorite thing in the world.
But I just said, “Okay, then,” and he said, “Okay,” and then he put his car in gear and started to drive away.

I stood there like an idiot watching him and then he stopped the car and leaned over toward the passenger-side window and said, “See you tonight.” And I was either really happy or I felt sick. Weird that they could feel so much like the same thing.

Tonya was at our section of the bridge-to-be, drilling half-inch holes into the planks. “You're late, nunchucks,” she said.

“I don't think you're using that word right,” I said. “That's some kind of ancient Japanese weapon.”

“Close enough,” she said. “You're supposed to be following behind me, filling the holes with silicone.” She motioned to a caulk gun, itself somewhat resembling an ancient Japanese weapon.

“I don't really know how to use it.”

She let out an exasperated grunt. “Carrie, for crying out loud.” She took the thick tube of silicone and inserted it into the gun, pressing the trigger until the white paste came out. “Now all you have to do is press.”

“Got it,” I said, saluting her, which she seemed to like. I apparently was also not a whiz in siliconing; I kept putting too much in, so it spurted out the top of the hole.

“Just confirming Newton's First Law of Motion,” I told her as she peered disapprovingly at my work.

“Right,” she said. “An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force. Hence the comet,” she said. “And the silicone explosion.”

“Right,” I said.

It didn't seem weird to us back in eighth grade that a couple of thirteen-year-old girls would sit around leafing through astronomy textbooks the way other girls flipped through
Tiger Beat
looking for centerfolds of Rick Springfield. Now it was hard to believe that she and I had ever done anything together. But I did remember Tonya sitting a few rows ahead of me in class, her arm shooting up to answer questions about the color of light that a retreating star emits—​she knew all about the Doppler shift. Before I started arriving at class stoned every day, I had sat in the front too, my pen furiously scribbling notes.

“Hey, Carrie, off your butt, you idiot.”

I had paused for a minute to check my cigarette supply, but I didn't think that warranted that particular word. I liked
nunchucks
better.

“Okay, Tonya, that's a little bit much.”

“What? My dad was in the navy, you may recall.”

As if that explained it, as if that excused her. I went back to my silicone, this time injecting it slower, making sure it didn't burst from the hole.

“What's he up to now, your dad?”

Tonya looked at me, a glaze hardening over her face. “He's in a rehab in Texas,” she said.

“Oh god. What happened?”

“Last year. He was on a ship in the Persian Gulf that was struck by missiles,” she said. “Apparently there's a civil war over there that he failed to mention when he shipped out last time. One leg, one eye, gone.”

“Oh,” I said. “Jeez. I didn't know. I'm really sorry, Tonya. I didn't know.”

“Luckily he wasn't one of the thirty-seven soldiers who were killed. And in other great news, my grandmother is still alive and in diapers at home.”

“Oh.”

“She sits in front of the TV all day drinking peppermint schnapps.”

“Well, at least it's peppermint,” I said. “Maybe she has decent breath?”

“She does not have decent breath,” Tonya said. “I assure you.”

I wanted to tell her that my parents, too, had turned into serious disappointments. Not deceased or maimed, but gone or mean. But I knew it was better to have alive and healthy parents than dead or injured ones, no matter how screwed up they were. I took a chance that I'd be called an idiot yet again and sat down on the planks where the glue had already dried, lighting a cigarette.

Tonya came and sat down next to me, waving her hand in front of my face as I smoked.

“I'm sorry about your sister,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? I appreciate your sympathy. Rosie really is a pain in the ass.”

“No, not Rosie,” she said. “You know.”

I really wanted to shrug, but my shoulders wouldn't move. Luckily my mouth was also frozen shut. She seemed to be waiting for me to respond, but suddenly I was fascinated with the silicone gun, the amazing machine with a steel trigger that could transverse different-sized cylindrical openings thanks to the beautiful laws of physics.

“I'm sorry,” she said again. “I liked Ginny.”

I wondered what happened to our old car. Where did it go? It was probably crushed and turned into scrap metal. It might be in this trigger right now.

“We have four more that we're supposed to do by the end of the day,” I said, getting up and stubbing my cigarette out.

“Right. Let's do it, soldier.”

I started to sand the places where the bubbles of silicone had hardened, whistling the tune to Sam Cooke's “Chain Gang.”

“Not funny,” Tonya said.

“A little bit funny?”

“Okay, a little bit funny,” she said, and softly whistled along, the sounds flat and off-key.

“You suck at whistling,” I said to her. “You know this, right?”

“It's not like I was planning to make it my career,” she said. And she whistled anyway.

That night, I arrived first at Soo's, as Tommy and Tiger were setting up. Certain other human beings had not yet shown up.

“We are cleared for noise making?” I asked Soo.

“I guess we'll see. I think my mom has already reached the state where she can't make it to the top of the stairs.”

We laughed at this, but the corners of her mouth turned quickly down. A drunk mom was becoming less and less funny. “Speaking of altered states—​you want a beer?” She went to the bar and pulled out a can of Bud Light.

I shook my head, trying to be nonchalant. “Nah,” I said, and I felt strangely powerful. I could, as Nancy Reagan's TV ads had urged, “just say no.” Soo tilted her head back and took a huge gulp, just as her mom had done. Her smile, when she was finished, was almost apologetic. Something was off. It had to be me, something I'd done or not done, but before I could descend into a hole of self-doubt and defensiveness, Dean got there, and suddenly my shoes required my full attention. I heard him greet the guys, and I heard him adjust the snare drum and the cymbals and then I heard him say, “Carrie—​you with us?” And I heard myself force the word out: “Yes.”

And that is how I came to be strumming along to “Knocking on Heaven's Door” and “Fourth of July” and “New Day Rising” and “Oh Sweet Nuthin'.” I sang harmony, and Tiger sang lead on everything except a Violent Femmes song that Dean sang because the Violent Femmes did not necessarily require perfect pitch, and Dean made a cute dumb face while he played the drums with his tongue sticking out to one side. I loved the electricity, the beautiful friction of harmony, and I loved when I went low, below Tiger's sturdy voice.

And then Dean called out “My War,” and they all went into Black Flag, Justin whaling on his Flying V.