Connect the Stars (19 page)

“I hereby proclaim the orange,” said Kate, “the official fruit of the Fearless Four!”

While the taste of tropical Florida trickled down my throat, I inked another X on the map in my head, marking the spot where we'd found Daphne's hair. It was smack on the path she'd been supposed to follow. Which meant that wherever she'd run into trouble, it was still ahead of us. A breeze kicked up from the direction of the western hills, and I felt, at that moment, like the Fearless Four were unbeatable. We were smart. We were on the right track. And we had oranges.

The breeze died and heat began shimmering from the desert floor as we stowed our water bottles and
reshouldered our packs. Louis wound Daphne's hair around his finger. It looked too red. It tried too hard, just like Daphne, and it was impossible not to think of her and wonder, even though she seemed as hard-shelled as a fossilized trilobite, how many things could have happened to her out here under a sky as wide, blue, and unconcerned as the one above our heads. If her water bottle had cracked . . . if she'd wandered off course . . . if she'd slipped, or stumbled, or fallen, or gotten bitten by a rattler . . .

Even the terrible Daphne, when you got down to it, was just a teenage girl alone in an immensity that didn't care whether she lived or died.

We found one of her giant boot prints in a swath of dust blown across the trail.

After another hour, I still had total faith in the Fearless Four, but a certain fact had become too plain to ignore.

“We've drunk half our water,” said Louis as we took a breather under a lonely cottonwood tree in a patch of shade we shared with the bones of a longhorn steer. “So if we want to get back to camp, we should turn around here.”

“Except there's hardly any water in camp,” I reminded him.

“And we haven't found Daphne yet,” Audrey added.

“So we're not turning around,” Kate decreed. “Remember, I'm the queen.”

“How could we forget, Your Majesty?” said Louis.

“Straighten up, or no more oranges,” ordered Kate.

It was hotter than it'd ever been on el Viaje, so hot that my eyes refused to focus on objects in the distance, objects like mountains and clouds. I checked my watch. Turned out my eyes wouldn't focus on things that
weren't
in the distance, either. “What time is it?” I asked Louis, holding up my wrist.

“Nearly noon,” he said.

As he spoke, the heat grew so strong I could hear it thrumming like a freight train in my ears.

“Should we stop?” I asked.

“We can't. Daphne is out in this,” said Kate.

“The river is only a few hours away,” I said, squinting at the map in my head. “On the other side of those cliffs,” I added, pointing ahead to where the hills converged to form a rock wall smack in our path.

“Then we'll keep going,” said Louis resolutely. “To the river. We'll find Daphne on the way and have all the water we need.”

We pushed on. My mouth felt like I'd eaten the cotton batting out of my mom's sofa. My eyes glued themselves into their sockets. My muscles began to feel fluffy with exhaustion, and every individual one of my bones ached.

I saw Kate stumble over a pebble no bigger than a pea, and I knew she felt the same way. We all did.

“What's that!” hissed Louis fifteen minutes later.

“What's what?” I asked, slowing down to let him catch up.

“That smell! It's horrible! Is it a javelina? A skunk? A composting facility, tucked away in the desert?” he said, frantically glancing around.

“I don't smell anything,” I said. “Oh. Wait. I do. Hold on. I think it's—”

“Hatchet aftershave,” said Kate from a few feet ahead, rolling her eyes. “Spectacular.”

Crashing through the yucca and the creosote came Randolph, wild-eyed and delirious, oblivious to the desert spines and spears. How he'd caught up with us I did not know. He'd probably run the whole way, visions of Daphne dancing in his lime-sized brain.

“Hey, everybody!” Randolph yodeled. “I'm here!” He staggered in three small circles like a drunk, bodybuilding ballerina, and collapsed in a heap.

“Dizzy,” I observed. As hot as it was, I noticed that his skin was perfectly dry. “Unable to perspire.” I pinched Randolph's forearm. I was taking a chance, I knew, because
ordinarily, he'd have dealt me a black eye for touching him, but Randolph just giggled. “Ha ha ha! That tickles!” The skin stayed pinched after I let go, like he was made of Play-Doh.

“Inelastic skin,” I recited from the Splashview first-aid manual. “Symptomatic of severe dehydration.”

“What do we do?” asked Kate in a voice more tinged with pity than disgust.

“Pour water down him,” I said. “Right now.”

“We don't have a lot,” said Audrey.

“Then we have to give him what we've got,” I said. “At least most of it. Because if we don't, he might die.”

And of course, when it came down to it, no matter what we might've said back at camp when he was acting like the world's biggest jackass, nobody wanted Randolph to die.

“What are
we
going to drink?” asked Audrey.

“Whatever is left,” I said. “Bottoms up, Randolph,” I said, carefully emptying my bottle down his gullet. I didn't want him to chuck it right back up. That would've been a waste.

“MMMMM!” cried Randolph happily. Kate handed over her bottle next. He slurped it down, and almost immediately he seemed a little less befuddled, which was
only a relative improvement, since this was Randolph.

“Now what do we do with him?” asked Louis. “We can't leave him here. Can we?” Louis sounded slightly hopeful.

But I was afraid that as soon as our water revived him, Randolph would hop up and do something else stupid. When I mentioned this, everybody agreed. Especially Randolph. “Got that right, Memory Boy!” he cried cheerfully. “So whatcha gonna do?”

“Bring you,” I said. “Can you drink a little? And walk a little? Until you feel better?”

“Drink a little. Walk a little. Drink a little. Walk a little. Cheep, cheep, cheep! I'm a creep, I'm an ishkabibble,” sang Randolph, doing a pretty good job riffing on the classic musical, for a delirious dehydration victim with almost no singing ability to begin with.

“Ishkabibble?'” said Kate.

“Ish Kabibble was a comedian and cornet player, born Merwyn Bogue in North East, Pennsylvania, in 1908,” I said.

“Exactly!” cried Randolph.

“If we didn't have so much else to worry about,” commented Audrey, “I'd be very concerned that you both know that.”

“See ya!” cried Randolph. With that, he stood up and
took off running for Mexico. And fell flat on his face.

Audrey, Kate, and I all three turned to Louis at exactly the same time.

Louis took a deep breath, grabbed Randolph's ankles with one hand, snatched his wrists with the other, and slung the poor bonehead over his shoulders. For a second, it looked like Louis might pass out from the trauma of Randolph's entire skeevy body draped across him.

But Louis squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth, and started walking.

“Is he heavy?” asked Kate.

“Yes,” wheezed Louis. “But I'll make it.”

“You're strong,” Kate observed.

“I used to think the universe was playing a joke on me,” said Louis, “making me as big as a truck driver but scared of my own shadow.” He hefted Randolph to a more comfortable position and glanced to see, beside his ear, Randolph, suddenly wide-awake, grinning at him like a maniac. “And now I'm
sure
the universe is playing a joke on me.”

The Desert

WE HIKED AND HIKED. MY throat was coated with sandpaper, and whenever I opened my mouth to speak, the corners of it felt like they were cracking, but apart from the occasional cloud passing in front of the sun, conversation was our only relief.

We talked about everything and nothing. I told them about my woods. Louis discussed his lifelong hatred of sandboxes. Kate told us a funny story about her grandmother yelling at the mailman, threatening to sic her dog on him because he knocked on the door during her favorite soap opera, even though she didn't have a dog, and we all croaked with laughter like a group of frogs. We weren't finding any signs of Daphne, but things were going pretty well otherwise, when Aaron said, “After this is over, we have to get together.”

I felt a flutter of nervousness start in my chest.

“A Fearless Four reunion!” said Louis. “Only instead of life-threatening heat, insane ex-jocks, and lost campers, how about if we have lemonade, Popsicles, ice cream, watermelon, a tree-shaded swimming pool, and an aerial trapeze? Everybody can come to my house!”

The flutter intensified.

“Wait,” said Kate. “
You
have an aerial trapeze?”

“Are you crazy?” replied Louis. “Of course not. Those things are terrifying. I just threw it in to make sure everyone was paying attention.”

“Or everyone could come to my house,” said Aaron. “I have super-high-speed internet and a prime subscription to the Library of Congress online special collections.”

“Yeah, right,” said Kate. “Another trick to be sure we're really listening.”

“No,” said Aaron. “I really do.”

The flutter became a whole flock of birds, startled ones, flapping their wings in a frenzy. I felt like I did once in New York City, when I almost walked out in front of a taxi—that rush of air, the streak of yellow just inches away, the blast of a horn—before my father, at the very last second, tugged me back by the hood of my coat. Because as soon as Aaron said that about “after this is over,” I realized I'd almost done it: I'd almost forgotten my vow. In the
tumble of events, the search, the conversation, the
teamwork
, I'd come
this
close to letting myself get sucked into friendship. As the other three bantered about our potential get-together, I pulled back. I reminded myself that for me, there could be no “after this.” But, wow, it was hard. I liked Kate, Aaron, and Louis so much, and they seemed different from other people, truer. I'd trusted them enough to tell them about my gift; it was tempting to trust them all the way. But I forced my mind back to Janie's porch, the icy-wave slap of her lie in my face.

“No,” I mumbled. “I can't.”

No one heard me. And the reason that no one heard me was that Kate was saying this: “Well, I
would
invite you to my house, but my mom is having our kitchen, um, totally remodeled, and, when I left, there was sawdust everywhere, and I'm sure it's only going to get worse, so you know, Aaron's or Louis's would probably be better. . . .” She trailed off.

I didn't look up to see her scratch her elbow. I didn't have to. I knew she'd done it, Poison Ivy Liar that she was. And unlike the last time she'd lied—about how long her mom stayed sad after her grandmother died—Kate didn't jump in right away to tell the truth, so that her lie hardly even counted. She let the lie stand. The funny thing is that I should have felt happy. Right when I most needed
reminding that everyone you trust eventually lies, she'd gone and done just that. But for some reason, I felt sad instead.

In a low voice, I said, “Count me out.”

“What?” said Aaron. “You have to come!”

“Yeah,” said Louis, stopping in his tracks. “What's the Fearless Four without, you know,
four
?”

“I can't,” I said.

“Why not?” asked Aaron.

I felt so weighed down with sadness that I stopped walking. Maybe because it looked like this conversation might take a while, Louis carefully laid Randolph down on the ground. He, Kate, and Aaron stared at me expectantly. I tried to take a deep breath, but all it did was parch my throat more. I wanted to look up, to meet the three pairs of eyes that were staring at me, but somehow, that was more than I could stand. I kept my gaze on the stony, chalk-dusty path at my feet.

“Because getting together after this is over is what friends do, and we—” I drew in another chestful of hot air. “We aren't friends.”

A smothering, smoke-thick silence swallowed us. Finally Aaron said, in a voice so confused it hurt my heart, “Audrey?”

“It's nothing personal,” I said softly.

“What does that mean?” said Louis. “Because it feels pretty personal to me.” It was the closest I'd ever heard him come to sounding mad.

“I just promised myself that I wouldn't have friends. At least not for a really long time.”

“But why?” asked Kate.

With effort, I lifted my head and looked into her black eyes. “Because if you don't have any friends, then your friends can't lie to you the way my former best friend Janie did a few weeks ago. And the way you did, just now.”

Kate stared at me, stunned, and I realized that when she'd said what she'd said about the kitchen renovation, she'd forgotten that I would know she was lying. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh!” she said, and pressed her hand to her mouth. Then, with short, quick, stiff-legged steps, she charged far ahead of us, her head down, her hands clenched into fists. We all watched her go.

“Audrey,” said Aaron, “Kate's been having a hard time, remember? Did you really have to say that to her?”

I stared at him. “But—”

“Even if you don't want her to be a friend to
you
,” Louis hissed, “you might have considered being a friend to
her
!”
There was no mistaking his anger now. 

“But why did she have to say her house was full of sawdust?” I said. “Why?”

Louis leaned in and spoke to me slowly, like I was either incredibly dense or about five years old. “Maybe because it's not about
sawdust
. Maybe it's about grief and anger and arguments with her parents. Maybe she didn't want us to see
that
in her house.”

“She still didn't have to lie!” I said.

“Remember Randolph?” said Aaron. “How he lied about knowing where Daphne was because of how he was feeling?”

“But that was Randolph. This is Kate!”

“Well, at least you know that much,” said Louis coldly. “For a second there, it seemed a lot like you forgot who she was.”

Aaron and Louis exchanged a look; then Louis bent over and heaved Randolph onto his shoulders, and the two of them turned around and started after Kate.

I was right. I
was
.
Lying was wrong, and lying to a friend was doubly wrong. I
knew
I was right. Nothing could be more obvious: it was better not to have friends, because nothing felt worse than the moment—and it always came—when the person you trusted lied.

Except that now, something
did
feel worse. As I was walking alone, far behind Aaron, Kate, and Louis (and Randolph, who, being mostly unconscious and also being Randolph, didn't count), I felt worse than I ever had.

I remembered the night Aaron had handed me his flashlight and I'd played connect the dots with the stars. As I trudged through the desert, I thought and thought about that moment, and everything became so clear: how the four of us had been a constellation, shining, connected, complete. How had I not seen it before? Even today, marching over the stony, stinging land, the sun pounding on us like a hammer, thirsty, tired, looking for a girl none of us even liked and probably wouldn't find, had been good, true, and right because we were doing it together. And I had ruined it. Aaron, Kate, and Louis were a three-star constellation now, Orion's belt, and I was all alone, a lost star, falling and sputtering and about to flicker out entirely.

I thought about how, before I'd come to camp, I had wanted to leave civilization and live alone with nature, like Henry David Thoreau. But what I understood now was that even though nature was pure and never lied, it never laughed at your jokes or listened to your stories either. It didn't pull cactus spines out of your hand or watch sunsets with you or laugh at itself for being scared of dodgeball. And it didn't spin around and run headfirst into a giant,
angry man to try to stop him from chasing you across a desert mesa. Nature could be beautiful and harsh and inspiring, but one thing it never did was love you back. Or love you anyway.

I wanted to flop down on the desert floor and cry.

But instead, after several false starts, I scraped together every bit of courage I could find, sucked some breath into my chest, and ran to catch up with them. When they heard my footsteps, they didn't turn around, just stopped, waited for me to step into place,
my
place, and then we started walking again. For a long time, no one said much of anything, although Louis did a fair amount of grunting, as he shifted Randolph around like the sack of wormy potatoes he was, and every now and then, we stopped to scour the ground for Daphne's footprints or to eye places where the scrub might have been disturbed, searching for anything that might show where Daphne had left the trail, gone astray. But we never found a single clue. I could tell that everything wasn't really okay between me and the others, but every time I opened my mouth to speak, it was like all the words I could think of to say turned to dust on my tongue. But at least I was there.

Finally Aaron said, in a creepily accurate imitation of Jare, “‘Unruly sharks. Caused him to turn over a new leaf. Felt bad about how he'd given up custody of Daphne
all those years ago without a fight, regretted the way he'd neglected her ever since. Wanted to make amends, treat her to a summer of adventure.'”

“Sharks'll do that, I guess,” said Louis, managing to shudder at the thought of sharks, despite the dead weight of Randolph on his shoulders.

“It's weird, though, right, Audrey?” asked Aaron.

I was so startled and grateful to hear him say my name that it took me a second to realize what else he'd said.

“Weird?” I asked.

“Remember the night we spied on them? By the fire?”

I flashed back to Daphne's and Randolph's faces in the orange glow, to their voices shot through with the usual anger. But not just anger—hope, a clear bell tone of hope rising up out of Daphne's usual growl.

“She said she was going to live with her dad in Montana, just as soon as he could get custody of her,” I said.

“Right,” said Aaron, “but think about what she said right before that.”

“Why? Why can't you just tell me?”

“Come on, Audrey,” said Aaron gently. “Just try.”

I sighed. “Okay, fine.”

The landscape around me blurred as I tried to send myself backward, further into the moment when we crouched in the bushes, listening. Then I had it.

“She said her mom had hired fancy lawyers who tricked her dad into giving up custody!” I said triumphantly.

“But Jare said he gave it up without a fight,” said Kate, speaking for the first time since I'd rejoined them. “And why would Pepin have told him that, if it wasn't true? I mean, giving up your kid, that's not exactly something to brag about.”

“No, it's not,” said Aaron. “Audrey, when Daphne said that about the lawyer, was she lying to Randolph?”

“Definitely not,” I said. “She believed it.”

“Probably that's what her dad told her,” said Louis, “to save face.”

“Maybe,” said Aaron. “But Audrey, remember what Jare said when I brought up the fact that what they were plotting was kidnapping? A felony?”

The other two didn't answer, as if they were leaving it to me. Slowly I said, “He said her mother would never press charges because if her dad went to prison, it would break Daphne's heart. He said her mom knows Daphne loves her dad.”

For at least two minutes, there was no sound but the
crunch, crunch, crunch
of the dirt under our boots. I pondered Daphne, her mom, her dad, trying as hard as I'd ever tried to connect the dots.
Daphne's mom doesn't want to hurt Daphne. Daphne's mom knows Daphne loves her dad. Daphne's
mom wouldn't tell on Daphne's dad, even if he did something really bad, because she wants Daphne to have her dad in her life.
Dot, dot, dot, dot.

“I bet her mom lied too, about the custody thing,” I said in a breathless rush. “Or at least she went along with the story about the fancy lawyers tricking Daphne's dad. Her mom could have told her the truth, probably could have proven to her that her dad didn't want her, but she didn't do that because she didn't want Daphne to know that her dad didn't want her.”

“Imagine thinking that your own dad didn't want you,” said Louis quietly. “I drive my parents up the wall, as you can probably imagine, but they still like me. They still want me around.”

“Mine too,” said Kate.

“And mine,” said Aaron.

“Same here,” I said. “But now Daphne hates her mom and thinks her dad is the greatest thing in the world. Why would her mom lie if it made Daphne hate her?”

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“I don't know about you,” said Aaron, “but I can only think of one reason.”

After a few seconds, so could I.

“Because she loves her,” I said. I considered that: lying out of love. Lying even if it made the person you loved
resent you forever. Could lying be noble? Generous? Right?

“No,” I said.

“No, what?” asked Aaron.

“I just don't think lying is ever the right choice.”

“Probably not,” said Kate glumly.

“But maybe,” I said carefully, “maybe sometimes it's an understandable choice. Maybe sometimes it doesn't mean the person telling the lie is bad. Maybe not all lies are created equal.”