The Half-Life of Planets (8 page)

I shake my head. “No thanks,” I say to Jett. “I'm kind of. My…” I say again, but Jett's already moved on. He casts one look back to me—to us—and I realize he sees it all wrong. Me—the kissing bandit, with a bottle of who knows what, with an unknown and unnamed boy, on the beach at night. But it's not like that.

* * *

Later, Hank and I are balancing precariously on the edge of the pier. Barefooted and giddy from the sugary root beer, I make sure my notebook, full of notes about how many stars I can see tonight through my star finder, is safe from sea spray.

“A star is a point of light,” I say in my giving-a-science-speech voice. “It's so far away that even the largest telescope can't show the star's disk.” I wait for Hank to interrupt me. He just takes it all in like he's recording it for future reference. I tie my hair back with the black elastic I keep around my wrist. “The atmosphere changing between the star and your eye causes starlight to twinkle.”

“Twinkle, twinkle,” Hank repeats. His whole body is supported only by his heels. He leans over the water.

He looks like he might fall in. “Watch out!” I yell to him.

He seems to ignore me, playing chords on his thighs while watching me dangle my legs over the edge. “Don't ever put ‘Under the Boardwalk' on a mix for me.”

“Oh, because I was just about to make you a mix?” I grin up at him. His hair is blowing in many directions at once. “I don't like that song anyway. It's too cotton candy and sticky Popsicles and hiding out away from the sun. Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.” Hank shrugs. His balance is worrying. “Really, don't fall. I don't want to have to jump in and rescue you.”

He moves closer to me. “You know I actually can't swim?”

This sends a jolt of panic through me. Yet it also fits his image. Not so much the typical hero; he's the one off to the sidelines, maybe calling for help if someone's drowning. “Well, no one's drowning.”

“A girl at school nearly drowned last year,” he says, breaking the light mood we had going.

“That's awful.” Did he write songs about it? Did he never learn to swim because he's got some scar on his back I can't see? It's all very intense and unusual and appealing.

“Everyone at school was running around, crazy. Like that song ‘Hysteria.' But then she was fine.” Hank nods. “Her locker had, like, a thousand cards plastered on it. Flowers and stuff.”

I swallow this and the ocean air. The salty night and Hank's candor about everything make me feel like layers of paint are being pulled off of me. “Why is it that no one ever sends unsigned
good
notes?” I ask him. I stand up and go to where he is, balanced on the pier's corner. Behind us, the beach is coming alive with shouts of revelry; the summer bonfires flare up like comets. “I mean, no one ever sends a note your way that's all,
Hey you are so smart,
without trying to coerce you into doing something or getting something in return.” Then I remember that there are secret admirer notes, unsigned, but leaving you swooning. I scuff my feet against the sand on the pier.

“I don't get any notes,” Hank says, but he doesn't appear to mourn this. It's just a statement.

“Well, you're lucky, I guess.” I wait for him to ask me more, to query why, but he doesn't. So in the open dark air, with him avoiding eye contact, I explain, “I get them. Sometimes. Sometimes my friend Cat will ask if I did the assignment. Or if I want to go for pizza later. But then…” He turns to me, watching me. I look at the ocean below. It's high tide, so the water's close, rising up the pilings, maybe five feet below us. “Then I get this note, right? And it just says…” I consider jumping into the water to avoid this next word.

“‘Got a box full of letters, think you might like to read…'” Hank sings. “Jeff Tweedy. Wilco. Good song.”

“Hank, listen to me. I'm not talking about songs, here,” I say, and my voice is suddenly scratchy. “I'm saying…” Hank stops humming and forces himself to stop chording. “All my note said was
slut
, okay? Like that's supposed to sum up who I am.” I could cry. Or not. I could fling myself into the water. Or not. But I don't do either. I just wait to see what Hank the Intense, Funny, Odd has to say.

He thinks, turning his back to the wind so his shirt billows out. His head and legs look tiny, and his torso looks wide, like he's a sail. “But what if it's not everyone?” he wonders. “It could just be one person. Then you would only be a slut in
their
eyes.” He hums “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel.

Such a simple thing to say. The perfect thing. The only good response. I want to grab his hand and pull him into the water. Kiss him on the way down. “Good album,” I say, staying right where I am. “I like ‘Red Rain.'”

He nods and starts to walk back to the beach path. “‘Red Red Wine.'”

“‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,'” I add, grabbing my bag and following.

“Rufus Wainwright?” he guesses.

I nod at the guess and at his matter-of-fact way of assessing my note. We're side by side, walking on the sandy gritty pavement away from town toward the three-season cottages on numbered streets. “Here.” I hold the note out to him. It flaps in between my fingers and he takes it from me, and I can almost feel him sucking the word from me, like it's all his now, his to figure out or deal with, even though I know it's not. Hank holds it up in the dim streetlight, trying to read it with the help of the moon.

“Now, if only the moon twinkled”—he suggests and I laugh—“then it would be easier to read.”

“It's just the one word,” I say to him. I still can't believe I told him. That I showed him. It's like being naked in some ways. And that he didn't try to maul me or run away.

“So that's it?” He lowers himself down into one of the green benchs at the side of the pier. “That's your secret? The thing you couldn't say at the café?”

I shake my head. “Yeah, it's fine. That's it.” The lie doesn't show on my face because by now I've perfected a poker face that would rule Vegas.

“Good,” he says, falling for it. He plucks at one of my tank top straps and it snaps against my skin with a pinch. I wince but he doesn't care. He just says, “Come on.”

Hank's house is a Monopoly house come to life. A squat blue square on the corner of Second and Twenty-first. “‘Where the Streets Have No Name.'” He points to the number signs and kicks open the unlocked front door.

“‘Home Sweet Home…'” Hank croons a melody and mutters, “Mötley Crüe,” before shedding his footwear on a woven rug that looks like sunsets—all oranges and reds overlapping.

I cross my arms and hold on to my bag while checking out the place. It's your standard beach cottage, with a two-sided main room and a kitchen I can see way at the back of the house. Cat's family owns one and rents it out in the summer, so I can imagine the rest of the floor plan. One side of the main room is a living room filled with furniture that looks like it's seen better days. Or better years. “Have you lived here long?” I ask. Maybe they just stay here in the summer. Most of the cottages don't have heat, which would make winter more than a little cold.

“A while,” Hank says, not committing to any distinct time, and motioning for me to come into the kitchen.

The dining room, which is the other part of the main room, is more a tumble of clutter. The table is littered with books and piles of papers, receipts flutter like winged things, and even the floor has a few stray plates and a pair of glasses. I pick them up. “Here, someone could step on them.”

Hank nods. “Yeah, usually I'm that someone. They're my mom's. She always forgets them. Then she comes home and screams around the house looking for them.”

“In a million years my mother would never scream.”

Hank leans on the doorjamb between the clutter and the kitchen. “Too busy baking?” I grin. He gets it.

The kitchen is warm, glowing from a red light fixture that hangs too low over a Formica table. Cereal boxes are lined up on the windowsill—Wheaties, Cheerios, All-Bran, and Lucky Charms, which Hank snags before he leads me upstairs.

“So, you like sugary cereals?” I ask when what I want to do is inquire why he's taking me up to the bedroom level, if maybe now that he knows what my note said, he thinks I am what it said.

Hank stops on the stairs, his upper body hunched over because of the low ceiling. “I don't like cereal at all. It's too…boxed? That's not the right way to explain it, but it's flaky or little balls or things that dissolve.” He chords on the Lucky Charms box.

“And Lucky Charms escapes the cereal definition because…” We take the steps slowly. They creak underfoot, worn down in the middle from decades of different feet doing exactly the same thing.

We stop in the hallway. The walls are entirely covered in dark wood paneling. “I don't eat the cereal part. Only the marshmallows.” Hank slides his fingers under the box lid and rustles the plastic bag open. “Try them, seriously.”

“I've had them before.” I peer behind him into the biggest bedroom, his parents', probably. Queen-size bed, dresser, oval mirror. I can't see anything else from this angle. Hank sees me looking in there and immediately pulls me out of the hallway and into one of the other bedrooms.

“They're really good,” he says, still focused on the cereal. He reaches his hand in and pulls out some crumbles. “Try it.” He offers me miniature shapes in unnatural colors. “Ignore the cereal and just pick out the marshmallows. You'll see. They're crunchy, but they don't grate on your gums.” He gives me a big smile. “Freak show?” He points to himself.

“Gimme the box. I'm not going to eat out of your hand—literally or figuratively,” I say, for his benefit and mine. “Is this your room?”

Hanks nods. The space is exactly the right size for a nursery. In Cat's house, that's what the room is for, a toddler or baby. The twin bed takes up one entire wall, and the few feet that are left contain a bedside table on which CDs are stacked, and another wall of built-ins are filled—entirely—with CDs. I pluck out a diamond marshmallow and then a clover, munching them. “Good thing you don't like music.”

“I do like music.” Hank points to the wall.

“I was kidding.”

“It's good, right? Without the cereal part?”

I nod. “Yeah, only, what do you do with the leftovers?”

“Feed them to the turtle.” Hank gestures to another room, and I gesture with my full hand of marshmallow-empty cereal, and we leave the world of music.

“Is this Chase's room? I never would have thought Chase would have a turtle. He doesn't seem like…like the pet kind of guy.”

Hank opens the door to Chase's room. “He's not. Turtle is mine. Pets are, um, important. Having the turtle was supposed to teach me…” He stops. “I just don't have space for it in my room, so Chase lets me keep it here. Besides, he's away most of the year now.” Hank lifts the mesh top of the turtle's glass cage and chucks the leftover cereal into it. “Here. Give me yours.” I drop mine into his open palm, and our fingers touch lightly. I back away. “Take a seat if you want. Chase's bed is bigger than mine anyway.”

I'm sure it is, I think when I see evidence of Chase's player-boy mentality. A sign over the bed reads,
LINE FORMS HERE
with an arrow pointing down. The bottom part of the walls is wood-paneled in here too, but the top half is dark green, and unlike the blank walls in Hank's room, they are dotted with old posters and faux military signs. All the debris of eighth grade and high school. Hank stands underneath a poster of a girl splayed on top of a red corvette, her cleavage threatening to break out of her black tube top. “You like Chase's room?” He watches my eyes scan the walls.

“Nice sign,” I say with extreme sarcasm. I read aloud from the sign on the green wall. “‘No one admitted without prior written approval of the manager.'” Underneath the word “manager” is a small photo of Chase.

“He lets me in without that,” Hank sighs. “It is a cool room, though, I guess.”

It doesn't seem that cool to me, all the outdated sports glory—players who have long since retired—and girl booty on display. Hank allows us to sit in silence as he flicks the tin sign on the open bedroom door that reads
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
. “How come your room's so bare?”

He takes a few steps closer to me. “Because I like it like that. Open air and music.”

“Yeah, but why?” Maybe he needs to balance the clutter downstairs or the stuff in his head with his own tiny space. Maybe his musical inspiration and deep poetic soul depend on a lack of girly calendars and eschew bands that people end up liking for five minutes.

Hank plops down on the double bed. Not next to me, exactly, but near. He shrugs. “It's better than this, I guess.” He uses his elbow to gesture to the signs and posters.

Hank works the chords of some song I can't name, and I wish he'd tell me which one. That he'd tell me each time his brain flicks to another tune, and how his fingers know to respond.

“Maybe it's an older-brother thing,” I say, thinking of other older brothers I've hung out with, and their rooms, the smell of sheets that need washing, the feel of an unmade bed.

Hank sighs. “Or just a Chase thing. You'd see what I mean if you had one.”

“I don't have a Chase,” I say with my eyebrows raised and a half-smile. I laugh.

“No—I meant an older brother. Or a Chase.”

Words catch in my throat. Explanations, too.

“An older brother. But you don't.” Hank stares right at me.

“No,” I say, and it's the truth. Now's not the time to go into it. Or maybe it's never the right time.