Lost Stars (7 page)

I had felt in my chest something I couldn't quite identify: maybe some kind of betrayal. Maybe some kind of fear.

“It's so we know how you're doing,” my father said.

“How am I doing?” I asked. I put my shitkickers neatly against the wall and set the hardhat on top.

My father adjusted his glasses and made his way toward the screen door, holding it open for me as I slowly followed behind. “Not completely terrible,” he said. “At least you're showing up.”

Thus I was able to negotiate a furlough, another night of freedom as long as I came home by midnight.

“What happened to your hands?” Soo asked when she saw me. I had covered them with thin cotton gloves that my father kept in his box of dissection tools.

“What? It's a look. Michael Jackson.” I twirled my fingers, trying only to look at Soo's face while I talked to her. But I was scanning the basement. Who was here? That jerk Tyler with the Mohawk and studded leather jacket, the one I once went to third base with. And the captain of the football team, Julio Germaine. And one of Greta's cheerleader friends. And of course Tommy and Tiger and Justin. Greta. The whole gang. And me. That was it.

The Ramones' “Pinhead” was on the stereo, and suddenly we were all chanting,
we accept you, one of us,
the whole room erupting in some mixture of anger and joy that felt familiar and comforting and dangerous all at once. The boys were pounding their fists into the air. And then the record skipped and Tommy went, “Screw the Ramones,” and replaced it with Flock of Seagulls.

“Tommy, why are we friends with you?” Tiger called, throwing a pillow at his head.

I adjusted the straps of my bra, the little bit of lace that was poking out from beneath the spaghetti straps of my shirt. After a week of crisp canvas pants and flannel shirts and hardhats and work boots, normal clothes almost felt almost indecent: the glittery jelly shoes and the probably way-too-skimpy tank top. I had brought the flannel shirt with me, that worn memory of cloth that had been somehow folded into my daily routine.

Someone handed me a joint and there was a beer ball full of Genesee and, what the hell, I had some of that too, and I sat back in the center seat of the couch and listened to the music because no one was talking to me. Everyone was having fun, and I forced my lips into a smile, and I drank until the familiar ache began to recede. I drowned it. I smoked it out.

And then, a voice. A voice I had heard through the fence. It said, “Hey, man.” And then a voice, another male voice, responded, “Hey, man, what's up?”

I looked out of the corner of my eye. There was the boy, the boy named Dean, clasping Tiger's hand and nodding toward Justin, all of them jutting their chins toward one another as if they'd met months, years ago, were already comfortable in some kind of man intimacy—​sports and music, blah blah blah, what a bunch of baloney, didn't they talk about anything real, how boring, this guy must be a total a-hole, not a speck of brain tissue in his head, his beautiful head with the beautiful hair and the little wisps of stubble on his chin and, crap, he had green eyes and I really loved green eyes, no, they were hazel and hazel was even better. Hazel was the best. They were hazel.

Then he nodded at me. At me. I sat up a little straighter as he sat down next to me. He was talking to Tiger about the new Neil Young record and he settled back into the couch and his arm touched mine and I wasn't talking to anyone so I closed my eyes because I was so into the music. I pretended I was so into the music. Black Flag. Not my favorite.

“I fucking love this song,” he said.

Black Flag: okay, I'd give them a chance. My brain was swimming. Giant gulp of disgusting Genesee.

“Me too,” I said, but he didn't seem to hear me. At least, he didn't turn around. He turned his head a degree or two, seemed to see me, or at least a slice of me, the outline of my face—​oh, my hair was a mess and I had those gloves on my hands and I was so stoned my eyes must have been totally red and I probably looked terrible. He ignored me. Good. Fine. He should ignore me. I was ignorable. I hated myself. Drink drink drink. I really just hated myself. And then it seemed like I was going to cry and there Greta was, sinking into the couch next to me. I loved Greta, but she was also beautiful as a Barbizon model in her shirt with the giant shoulder pads and the balloon pants with suspenders and the high heels, and all other girls within a fifty-foot radius immediately vaporized in her presence.

“What's happening, Carrie?” she asked, and she reached for my hand, and I said, “Youch!” and then I felt like a jerk for the six-hundredth time since I'd arrived thirty-seven minutes before.

The boy, Dean, turned around now. He nodded toward me. One of the guys. That's right. He'd seen my hardhat and my work boots, and he probably thought I was a lesbian.

“Dean, this is Carrie,” Greta said.

And Dean said, so quietly I almost couldn't hear him, looking at his lap when he said it, “I know.”

I died a little bit. I drank, huge gulps, to keep myself alive. The music pounded, and I could barely hear Greta and Dean. Soo's mom opened the basement door and called, “Turn it down!” but we ignored her.

“I'd tell you to shake hands,” Greta was saying to Dean, “but I don't think she can.”

“I'm not contagious,” I said, twirling my fingers in front of his face and then hating myself for that, too.

“I didn't think so,” he said. “It's national Michael Jackson Day, right?” And he smiled, and the whole world cracked open, and then he seemed to think better of the smile and took it back and sat up a little straighter on the couch and looked at his own, gloveless, hands. He was turning on and off like a variable star, its brightness increasing and fading. And then the smile leaked out again and he put his hand up to his hair, his glorious stringy hair, all a mess and tangled and beautiful, and then he put it down again. He had pale freckles all over his arms and a light dust of soft-looking dark hair and he had a little bit of bike grease wedged under his fingernails, and if he could see beneath the thin cotton of my gloves he would see the same smiles of dirt caked under mine, too. Dirty fingernail twins. We had so much in common. I took another huge gulp of beer. My body was full of beer, so full I could just float away.

“Do you want a drink?” Greta asked him. She was making her exit. She was leaving me alone with him. I loved her and I hated her. Go away. Don't leave.

“Nah,” he said. “I don't drink. Anymore.”

“Okay,” Greta said, unaffected by this announcement. “Carrie, you want another one?” she asked as she stood up.

The beer in my hand suddenly seemed like it was on fire. He didn't drink. He was hanging out with these people and not drinking. How was such a thing possible? I put the beer on the table and it spilled a little bit. It was on my hands. My hands would smell like beer. I shook my head. Greta left. It was Dean. And me. Alone. Alone-ish, anyway. Tommy was swaying, offbeat, to the rhythm, watching us.

“I have a question,” I said, immediately regretting my announcement.

“You're in luck,” he said. “I have an answer.”

“Oh, well, right. So . . . How come you don't drink?” The music was so loud—​the Replacements' “Sixteen Blue”—​that I could barely hear myself.

“Um,” he said, looking at his hands again. “Stuff. Things.”

“Oh.” Okay, he wasn't going to tell me. That was fine. Tightlipped. Who was I, anyway? He didn't know me.

He shifted his body toward me now, just a little bit, and I squirmed and adjusted my shirt, I pulled it down a little bit and the lacy top of my bra peeked out and I didn't fix it. I crossed my right leg over my left and bounced it a little on there. No drink, no protection, but my body was leaning toward his, involuntarily.

“I kind of screwed some shit up when I drank.”

“Oh.” What was wrong with me? Was “Oh” all I could say? What did “screw shit up” mean? What was he talking about? How could he have a good time without drinking? I hated drinking. Why couldn't I not drink?

“Don't worry,” he said, and now it was he who put his hands in the air, like I was sticking him up. “I'm not contagious.” And he smiled again. And then the shyness overtook him again and he put his hands down and opened his mouth like he was going to say something and then thought better of it, and the same thing was happening to me. We were opening and closing our mouths like fish in water, like fish out of water. It was so uncomfortable and it was so alluring and it was too much. It was almost as bad as the poison, the anger. I felt like I was going to vomit.

“Oh shit,” I said, and ran to the bathroom and slammed the door shut and the whole Genesee beer ball came tumbling out of me. I sat by the toilet, defeated, deflated, empty. Soo came in and quickly shut the door behind her.

“Don't say it,” I told her. “I know I drink too much.” I had that headache I always got from alcohol and I had just ruined my chances and that boy would probably never talk to me again. I laid my whole body down on the cold tile floor and kicked my legs and shook my head back and forth with enough velocity to give me whiplash and I let out some kind of crazy curdled sound that even I could barely hear over the music. I let the fit take over me.

Soo said, “Shhh, it's okay.” She took a lock of my hair and put it behind my ear and that was probably the nicest thing that had happened to me in my life since my mom took off. She kept her hands on me until my body calmed down, until I could release the crying.

I stood up and looked in the mirror, cringing at what I saw. Whenever we went around and played the what-movie-star-do-you-look-like game, no one could ever name someone for me. I wanted to be Ally Sheedy, but I wasn't. My eyes were red, drunk-looking, and even with the alcohol out of my system, I felt tipsy and poisoned and poisonous.

I walked out of the bathroom, hanging my head in shame. A familiar beat was pounding. Dean was standing next to the turntable, holding the sleeve of
Thriller.
Dean had put Michael Jackson on. But he didn't look up. Or at least, if he did, I didn't see him, because I walked out without saying goodbye to anyone and went home. I'd be back long before my curfew, riding my bike in the misty night.

My father, perpetually the science teacher even during summer break, was reading a book by the physicist who used to consult on
Star Trek
and
Doctor Who
called
Black Holes and Other Mysteries of the Universe.
I loved that book. He sat in the living room, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He'd aged a thousand years since Ginny died.

“This came for you,” he said, handing me an envelope that smelled sharply of caraway seeds, as had the others in the last three months. His face bore no reaction.

“Oh,” I said. Beside him sat the other envelope, addressed to Rosie and, I knew, filled with rosemary seeds. I could imagine the garden my mother had harvested them from out there on the chilly mountaintop monastery. There was never enough sun here for her to grow her herbs. The wild ginger fared okay in the shade, and her pots of mint sort of limped along, but the rosemary she tried to cultivate failed to prosper, and I supposed she just couldn't look at those wilting, browning needles anymore after Ginny was gone. What was left of her attempts were a few unruly bushes at the front of the house.

“You're not going to open it?” he asked.

That sharp, nutty smell made me recall the whole thing over again: the day Ginny died, the way she died, the subsequent implosion of my family, my mother fleeing to her “temporary meditative retreat” so she could hide among the herbs and vegetables and flowers and cold stone walls instead of people. “I hate people,” she'd said to me once, when I found her crying on the floor of her closet. She, like my father, loved stars, the sky, the immutable sun and all its nuclear power. She loved plants and the science of cooking. Since our first family trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City when I was five and I had flipped out (in a good way—​
We're on a ball hurtling through space and forever circling a ball of fire while a giant rock is forever circling us
), they had plied me with all this information about the universe and its workings. Then they had dumped me here on Earth. I shook my head and started up the stairs.

“Nah,” I said. “I know what's in it. And I don't actually like the way they taste. Maybe you guys should have named me cinnamon. Now, there's a spice.”

This totally weird and foreign thing called a smile crept onto my father's face. “Thank you,” he said.

I scrunched up my nose at him, skeptical. “For what?”

He lifted his book back up, done looking at me, done trying for the night. “For coming home.”

For a treat, we were having tool lessons.
Lynn, of course, really saw this as a gift as he strewed warped pine boards, screws, drills, screwdrivers, and hammers over the lawn in front of the park offices. He held the items up one by one, asking if we knew what they were. I, unsurprisingly, did not know the name of an unwieldy-looking piece of equipment with a round blade and terrifying-looking curved teeth.

“It's a circular saw,” Tonya called out gleefully.

Well, I couldn't judge Tonya for knowing this. My idea of a good time used to be similarly nerdy, involving peering into a telescope for an embarrassingly long time.

Lynn passed out screws to each of us so we could feel them, hold their weight in our hand, he said. “There's not going to be a test, but I'd like you to familiarize yourself with the different sorts of screws.” The drywall ones were thin and had flat heads, larger than the others. There was a wood screw, a deck screw, and what he called a self-countersinking screw. Whatever that was, I probably needed it. Or maybe I
was
it.